Punktown: Shades of Grey (30 page)

“What’s that vest made of?” Mag asked. She noticed the strange rows of tusks beneath his sheepskin coat.

His manner was sluggish. At times he seemed to be on downers. “Klu-Koza tusks.”

“Really?”

“We were in the Klu-Koza war.”

“War? That wasn’t a war. Not much of one.”

Murphy’s eyes remained dead, on the outside. His monotone remained stable.

“What do you call it when men run around with guns, killing each other…a tea party?”

She smiled and shrugged her caped shoulders.

“Klu-Koza was a quickie war,” Dennison said, turning with a compact machine gun in his hand. “They don’t even call it a war; they call it things like confrontation or conflict.”

Murphy dismissed the conversation and turned to face the assembly of guns.

“I’ll take these two F.A.R.s”

The fully automatic assault rifles were accurate, light, and powerful. The particular models he’d chosen were special compact versions with long clips and muzzle-flash reducers.

“Hey, check this one.” Dennison held up a bulky pistol-like
machine which
resembled the vaccine gun they’d been inoculated with back at B.T.

“An Implode-Injector,” Mag said.

“We used ’em on the grapes,” Murphy said, taking the heavy thing from his friend. “We’ll take this too.”

««—»»

Demons, warlocks, vampires…elfin drug magicians, shadowy specters of ill repute; the Canberra Mall served a feast of fiends.

Sequin-stamped clowns slick with shadow
grease-paint
waited for throats to slit. Sly teenage succubi swirled around on oily ogre rides while others gelled at some stands to spend money.

Carnival nightmare, smells, colors.
Thickness and sickness.
Vomit streamed down chipped paint while balloons bobbed like polished ectoplasmic teardrops.

The weekend crowd was thick. Fallen ice cream cones creaked beneath the slow motion stampede of feet. Mad music box tunes sprang from the large bulb-dyed merry-go-round where screams of joy and horror became inseparable.

The three vets moved through the crowd like a dense cloud. Murphy towered over the spunky Choom teenyboppers, who bounced off his body like insignificant waves futilely challenging some great ship. He blinked down on them with tolerance.

“There,” Kloud’s voice called in the orgy of noise. Murphy followed his extended finger.

Casper sat on a majestic plastic dragon going up and down on the merry-go-round.

He spotted them on his next revolution; they were standing at the ticket stand. Apparently they had decided to join him.

The great canopy-topped disk slowed to a standstill. Some riders climbed on, others off; armed guards monitored who did what, “ticket enforcing.” Murphy led Dennison and Kloud to where Casper sat waving a roll of tickets at one of the gunmen.

“Hey Casper, havin’ fun?” Kloud asked sarcastically, plopping onto a stiff black stallion, its glossy chest impaled on a metal pole.

Casper, the most intelligent of the four, tossed Kloud a chilled smile.

Murphy reached out his hand, leaning like a lazy lion against a bullet-chipped white horse. Casper handed him an elastic-bound tube of papers.

“Good man.”

Casper wore his mustard-colored cloth jacket with a marksmanship medal pinned to one lapel. His eyes of intense scrutiny hid behind tinted disks.

“Good,” Murphy commented, examining the floor plan as the horse he leaned on began moving upwards and the disk began to turn.

“Giddyup,” Kloud said with mock enthusiasm.

“Hey,” Dennison said from his chariot. “Hey, Kloud, I think this is where Casper must go every Sunday. He likes watchin’ all the kiddies. Ten-year-olds are his style.”

“No, Casper’s a church man. He’s hopin’ he’ll live to be a hundred so he can spend a day prayin’ for each guy he’s killed. Right, Casper?”

Casper turned his head with a deliberate lack of speed.

Instantly Kloud and Dennison refrained.

««—»»

Murphy’s apartment was cell-like in its size. There was a couch, a folding director’s chair, a vid-tank, and a stereo. A large flag was nailed across the ceiling; the boar face emblem of Tusk Company stared down.

“We’ll go in two teams.” Murphy held a stumpy hand-rolled iodine cigarette between thumb and forefinger as he spoke. “Me and Kloud, Casper and Dennison. I’m A Team; we’ll go in after
Five
and take the front. I don’t want any guns used until we’ve taken out the two guards outside…”

He paused to puff on the joint; his deep, sluggish voice strained as he continued, holding the smoke in his lungs. “So…B Team won’t move ’til the shit hits the fan. Once it does, just blow the back door in.”

Murphy let streams of blue leak from his nostrils; they swam in the darkness like Ouija board serpents.

“Team A will take this route.” He traced his finger across Casper’s floor plan. “Team B will go this way.”

The sun was nearly set. Its final rays slid through the blinds and glazed their weapons. Murphy fed bullets into the extra clips of his assault rifle. Peripherally he saw orange paper bats twirling toward the street. Crunchy leaves scurried like crustaceans in the twilight-flavored breeze.

The tight chamber echoed the crisp sounds of heavy magazines being shoved into their respective slots. Dennison tucked his new .9 mm auto-pistol into his waistband so that his dark brown coat obscured it. He stuffed his pockets with extra assault rifle clips.

Kloud jammed a seven-shot clip into his .45, which was then placed in his old belt holster. He put his compact black machine-gun into an overnight bag. The menacing little weapon was chunky, short, barely two feet long. A banana magazine extended from its tubular belly. He wore his leather jacket, a red T-shirt, camouflage pants and issue boots.

Casper inspected his weapons with surgeon intensity. He had the other .45
semi-auto
, which had seven shots in the clip, one in the chamber. He clicked the hammer back halfway, then flicked on the safety. He, like Kloud, had a compact banana-fed fully automatic small arm. He placed it in a grocery bag. Beneath his tan coat he wore a bulky plastic vest to ward off enemy projectiles. He hid his receding hairline beneath his old Tusk Company helmet.

Murphy stabbed the fourteen-shot auto-pistol into his waistline,
then
wrapped his lightweight fully automatic rifle in a bath towel. He’d fashioned a holster that nestled against the lining of his sheepskin coat, to accommodate the heavy and bulky Injection-Imploder. A long-bladed bayonet hung against one thigh.
The Captain had wrapped his belly with strips of cloth, so that if an enemy cut or blew his guts open
,
they wouldn’t slide out
. He, like Casper, wore a war-weathered green helmet.

Each man stood erect, weapons weighing heavily as Murphy looked them over.

“All set?” he asked.

No one needed to answer.

««—»»

The Post was dream-like. Sickish phosphorescent green mixed with cigarette mist and supercharged heartbeats. The glasses of beer felt like air in tense hands, the chatter of library war stories was a blurred slow-motion insect buzz. Murphy’s beer tasted like blood.

“When we raided Cumala Island—” the old vet’s words were chilled dreams in Kloud’s ears. A highway roared in his skull.

“When that cannon backfired I just—”

Casper was aware of
a tightness
, a crackling static rejuvenation in his limbs. The air was full of life, so close to death. His beer had never tasted better.

Murphy, bulky and bear-like, leaned his heavy arms on the bar. Kloud followed his Captain’s steady zombie gaze to an ancient mummy of a man.

His skin was pale, more wrinkled than bark. He wore a light gray military cap and a faded dress jacket. Near-blind eyes looked hopelessly into the foam of his beer mug, which he clung to with skin-wrapped wires that shook. His toothless Choom mouth was a saliva-dangling cavern.

Kloud looked back to his commanding officer; the dense smoke had brought a liquid shine to Murphy’s eyes.

Murphy downed the rest of his drink, pushing the empty container away with distaste.

“You know,” Murphy said, turning to Kloud, “I betcha if we told these guys where we were goin’, half of ’em would want to come with us.”

Kloud frowned doubtfully. “Think so?”

“A soldier’s death is better than living death.”

««—»»

Autumn
eve,
shadows and chill. Murphy’s car slithered up to the curb across the street from the tall stone block. They climbed out in unison. Murphy and Casper put on their helmets. The black dog
Five
scrambled out of its back seat and stood dutifully at its master’s side.

Casper unlocked the trunk and began passing out guns.

Kloud stood on the curb, staring up at the purple and black flaming fist, the Klu-Koza flag.

“Here, boy.” Murphy’s fingers clicked as he joined Casper behind the car. He reached into the trunk and pulled out a thick leather harness. He knelt by the patient mammal and wrapped the belt around its chest. His face vacant of all human qualities, Murphy proceeded to strap fifteen pounds of explosives onto Number Five.

The street was relatively quiet. Soon the Klu-Koza embassy would close for the night. Team B stole across the street and worked its way down to the big structure. They crept carefully, guerrilla-style behind it, positioning
themselves
outside the back door.

Typical Klu-Koza men, short, bald, layered in fat. They resembled hairless purple orangutans. The two door guards stood in their boredom—one glancing through a newspaper, while the other daydreamed up at the camouflaged moon hiding in the treetops.

Sov, the elder guard, shifted the weight of his rifle over his left shoulder and reached into his uniform for a cigar. He suddenly noticed a dark-haired human man carrying an overnight bag. The man paid them no attention and appeared to be passing. Sov, for some reason, flicked his heavily lidded black eyes to the human’s belt buckle. The insignia struck a chord; that yellow boar face. Tusk Company.

“Holy shit!”

Kloud wrenched his boot knife from his pocket and drove it deeply into Sov’s blubbery neck. With savage devotion he tugged the blade sideways, causing thick magenta gelatin to spew between meaty folds.

The other guard barely had time to drop his newspaper before Murphy stepped out of the shadows, driving a long bayonet into the fathoms of his throat. The big human snarled as he gave the weapon a firm twist, knotting the contents of the ogre’s throat about the cold razor steel.

Murphy jerked the blade free and with a single sudden motion rammed it in and across the beast’s dome-belly. The sound was wet, as the big gut yawned wide to vomit pink blobs of stringy pulp, steamy bucketfuls of blackish mashed potato. The jolly demon slumped into the doorway where Kloud had dragged his prize.
Nice and silent.

Murphy stooped over the unctuous corpse and sliced off the tusk-like horn protruding from its forehead; he pocketed the trophy.