Punktown: Shades of Grey (32 page)

The Klu-Koza shrieked, releasing Casper’s head as he carved a wide wet smile across its bullet-plagued stomach. A thick black tongue slurped across the gash’s edge. Casper rammed his hand wrist-deep into the glistening valley and yanked out the meaty obsidian tongue.

Tortured howls shook the room. The sticky, blubbery Klu-Koza collapsed; it resembled an opened spread-eagle frog in mid-dissection. The desecrated alien thrashed like an electrocuted marionette. Yes, quick death was a vid-program myth; death, as Casper knew it, was often a process of suffering.

««—»»

Murphy’s eyes were lost in sweaty shadows. He surveyed the third floor lobby. There were two large stone buckets containing Klu-Koza jungle ferns on each side of the elevator doors. Instantly recognizing the shiny
bald head
of an enemy as it ducked down behind the vegetation, Murphy pulled free the large tubular Implode-Injector and stepped out into the open. His question of whether or not the hidden plum-purple ape was armed was answered by the absence of flying bullets. He marched across the short lobby area and shoved his arm into the
thick fringed
leaves. The barrel pressed against the polished scalp and the weapon hissed sharply; the explosive was embedded inside the creature’s head before detonating.

Chunks of skull and brain pulp flew in all directions as the massive headless body slammed up against the elevator doors. Its arms flailed in the air. Gelatinous rodents scurried from the neck pit. A muffled voice bellowed through the wall of the monster’s belly, “Bastard!”

The corpse smeared to the floor, dead.

The spattered elevator slid open. Two enraged Klu-Koza women charged out, eating utensils clutched offensively.

The human whirled to face the attack. He crammed the imploder into the nearest gut. The powerful blast littered the room with wild wet entrails. The next blast blew the other animal nearly in half.

Kloud came upon this scene on the back of a burly opponent. His boot knife was firmly implanted in its nearly nonexistent neck, and he was twisting it like a motorcycle throttle.

The fleshy face contorted with its horrific distress. In a frantic attempt at survival, the Klu-Koza rammed itself back-first against a wall, sandwiching the human man.

“Cocksucker!” scolded Kloud, giving the knife another passionate twist.

“Golm-ba!”

“Suck!”

Kloud withdrew his knife and carefully injected it into the spot directly between the enemy’s shoulder blades. Green steam gushed from a punctured organ, filling Kloud’s face with a repulsive stench. The Klu-Koza sank to its knees and Kloud leapt free.

The creature remained in its kneeling position even after death had made a hive of its body.

««—»»

The two teams met in the central office room of the third floor after killing everything in between their separate entrance routes. Bleeding and jam-splashed, they stood in sweaty exhaustion.

Murphy adjusted his helmet and wiped some putrid enemy debris from his face. An empty pistol hung like a weight in one hand.

“The forcers are coming, Captain,” Kloud panted, listening.

“I know. Let’s move out.”

««—»»

The hazy green lighting of the Post appeared to be permanent. A melancholy bass line vibrated thickly from the standard barroom jukebox. Beer mugs clinked, adding periods to the ends of
great war
tales. Wrinkled veterans sat in surrender.

A corner vid-tank cast a bluish light on the accumulation of creased faces. The blue tint made them look like ghosts.

The door opened suddenly as four men entered. The first, a tall sturdy man with a stoic face and long dark hair, stared back at the audience of elders. The three others stood back in the shadows respectfully, almost like bodyguards. Murphy walked to the bar and plopped two large
money bags
onto the counter.
Two thirds of the contents of the captured safe.

“This is for you,” he addressed the old veterans. He gave a rigid salute before turning and leading his men back into the night.

Whispered awe filled the smoky chamber as the age-worn soldiers crowded around the two plump sacks. Suddenly one of the Choom bartenders disrupted the commotion.

“Hey, look at this!”

He pointed up at the vid-screen. It was a long shot of a large burning building. Police and fire vehicles surrounded the Klu-Koza embassy. The news camera zoomed in on the curious flag flapping defiantly above the smoldering castle—the flag of Tusk Company.

— | — | —

THE MERCIFUL UNIVERSE

1. Company in Wherever

The Park, sardonically nicknamed by the locals, was a rubble-strewn lot where a tenement had once loomed. Some fool necromancer on an obscure spiritual quest had attempted to open a doorway to a distant dimension and in the process, blown the building to smithereens. Whether or not he was successful is open to speculation, but forty-two of his neighbors unwillingly accompanied him to wherever. Silvia imagined their soft grey voices whispering up from the shadowy pockets and blackberry-colored puddles between jagged slabs of concrete.

All the parents in the neighborhood warned their children to avoid The Park; all the children either played there or, as in Silvia’s case, cut through. It was the broken heart of the neighborhood, bordered on one side by bland rows of middle class apartment boxes, by Little Manila on another and by the glossy fortress of Nex-Tech Labs to the west. Residents dwelling in Punktown could do much worse, of course—there were neighborhoods in the city that would have made Hell blush. Each weekday Silvia would depart the school bus and make her way across the flattened corpse of the tenement, climbing over beds of brick like giant rusty teeth and half buried cables like calcified tree roots.

The voices always came to her, small and thin, spider web voices like breezes, stealing out from the horrible texture of that micro-landscape. One afternoon she heard a voice that actually belonged to a living creature. It was not a human voice. It was following the accident over at Nex-Tech. The lab, associated with the medical school at Mercy Hospital, conducted research on animals, some of which had escaped following the blast that tore open the left wing of the complex. Explosions, it seems, were becoming a tradition in that section of town.

A light snow was falling and the rows of apartment houses were grey in the grey light. Ten-year-old brunette Silvia, a plain-faced twig of a girl, got off the bus, cut through The Park and went to the second-floor flat she shared with her mother. In the dark of her mother’s room, she reached into a cluttered bureau drawer and felt around for the small black laser-camera. Her hand bumped another small black object and her dead father’s voice came rasping from the drawer.

He was reading from a guide booklet, listing vid-programs that might have been worth watching. Movies mostly. He could enjoy little else in his final days as he lay there in that room, his disease progressed, his voice a gritty hiss, the wreath of pain in his throat squeezing off the blood required by his memory so that he had to resort to the palm recorder to remind him what shows to tune in to.

Silvia listened for several moments, refused to let
herself
cry, then grabbed the recorder and shut it off.

It was not supposed to snow in January, but the workers from the weather control plants were on strike. Snow softened the broken splay of The Park, where Silvia returned with her mother’s camera. She had toyed with the device and found that by adjusting some of its controls, she could take pictures that were more dreamy than realistic, the colors and focus distorted. Punktown looked less threatening portrayed in luminous crayon.

She took a picture of the skyline with snow coming down, then the distant buildings of Little Manila with its terrible sounds of
cock fights
and cheering. The glossy monstrosity of Nex-Tech with one
side blown
open, a great ghostly tarp of clear plastic rustling over the wound. That’s when she heard the voice.

It was a faint, uncertain sound from a jumble of twisted metal and broken wall. The wreckage formed a cave-like opening. Silvia crouched and moved stealthily closer. The voice sounded again and something moved in the darkness.

“Come out,” Silvia offered. “I won’t hurt you.”

The girl got too close and the animal started, scurried out from its cover and sprang away. While it did not move with the grace of a cat, it certainly looked like one and it managed enough speed to elude the girl as it scrabbled off into the increasing snow.

Back at the flat, Silvia printed out her photos. The last one showed the cat, thin and grey, a ghost in the white air as it made its escape. With her father dead, no siblings, and her mother working two jobs, Silvia thought it might be nice to have a pet. She could use a little company.

2. The Winter Mission

One of the older boys from the neighborhood tripped Silvia after the bus hissed away. The boy’s friends sniggered and the lot of them swaggered off and the girl, refusing to cry, picked up her books. The photo of the cat had fallen out of her math book and lay forgotten in the snow as she headed home.

The Park was surreal in the snow. It was a stranger place still, since the lab explosion. An emaciated dog with a shaved head, a small silvery box fitted with tangled wires embedded in the top of its skull, lay half buried, a froth of ice caked about its open mouth. Further along, dead and broken on a heap of frosted bricks, an intentionally crippled kitten with scorched robot hind limbs gazed with foggy green eyes as Silvia paused and stared. Her heart, at ten, was only now learning to hate. Still, she could hurt nothing and even now did not imagine doing violence to the men of science who had violated these animals.

After leaving her books at the flat, she went downstairs to visit the strange, nice Mrs. Waterfall. The woman, her own quarters full of books and incense and violin music, gave the girl a can of dog food. Back in the cold, bundled in her winter garments, Silvia set out for The Park.

Someone had fashioned a grinning snowman and fitted it with a beer bottle phallus.

“Come out. Come out, come out.”

Grey wind came stinging from the west and the shrieks of fighting birds put banshees in her ears. She found that jumble of wreckage where the cat had sheltered the previous afternoon, bent and saw its small huddled form.

“Hi,” Silvia whispered.

The scrawny figure receded deeper into its shadows.

“You must be hungry… I brought you something.”

Silvia set a plate on the snow, scooped out some of the dog food and moved back several yards. Dusk was turning the snow blue and the Nex-Tech buildings were a great sterile tomb in the distance, forbidding behind a high fence of
razor-wire
.

Eventually the cat ventured out, sniffing the air. In their enthusiasm to eliminate blindness in Tikkihotto people (those humanoid beings whose eyes were wispy translucent filaments) the researchers at Nex-Tech had removed the cat’s native eyes and given it synthetic ghostly wires, like misplaced whiskers, to see with. The projections on the left side of its face were crumpled and blackened, probably from the explosion, and were likely accountable for the creature’s uncharacteristic awkwardness.