Punktown: Shades of Grey (34 page)

Finished drinking, Sweetie came over and lay at her feet, his chin resting on one paw.

“We need a new home, Sweetie,” Adele said, reaching down, her
fingers like trembling birch twigs
.

8. The Move

The sun was a monster of Icarus heat, a clotted burning wound above the rows of grey boxes. Heat was everywhere, in the exhaust of passing cars, in the red paint of obscene graffiti, in the collective buzz of flies, like winged bullet holes on the hot grey walls.

Adele stood sweating on the sidewalk where she had brought Sweetie; the activity of the movers bustling about the cramped flat, dismantling his familiar domain, had made him nervous. She had secured another apartment five miles to the south. While the new building was in a less savory area, the landlord was agreeable to tenants owning pets and kept several himself, so he professed. The heat was weighing heavily on the aging dog and he lay panting in a merciful pool of shadow. Afraid that he might suffer dehydration, Adele squeezed past the movers as they lugged out boxes of her books to shove into the moving truck; she had to fetch his water bowl.

Two Choom teens came around the corner of the building just then, a jug of wine swinging from its sticky neck, their metallic tattoos gleaming. A wheeled car screeched suddenly on the street, a figure leaning out a window with a compact .9mm submachine-gun. The weapon coughed its thunder and the movers dropped down, boxes of books spilling on the sidewalk as bullets chewed the wall of the building and one of the tattooed boys—the target of the attack—went down screaming. The wine bottle broke like blood.

Sweetie leapt up and, darting in terror, charged across the street and down an alley as the gun spat and banged. Adele rushed out of the apartment and saw as her dog vanished between two of the opposite buildings. The car sped away and the Choom teen lay in a pool of wine, a superficial wound in his upper arm bleeding through the silver tattoo of a skull.

“Sweetie!” Adele called. “Sweetie!”

9. Into the Alley

Hearing the gunfire outside, Silvia ducked down, away from the window in her mother’s flat until she heard the car roar away, and the pathetic cries of the wounded teen rising up in the heat. It was the crying of Adele Waterfall that caused her to grab her Stun-Beam 20-20 and rush down the stairs and out to the sidewalk.

The old woman was crumpled, her face in her hands, sobbing.

“My God, are you hit, Mrs. Waterfall?” Silvia panted.

“No, no—it’s Sweetie—he’s gone!”

Silvia swivelled, took in the scene, the stunned movers checking themselves for holes, the bleeding punk, the wall pocked where bullets had danced. No sign of the dog.

“Where’d he go?”

Adele pointed to the dark alley across the way,
heat rippling up in front of it like
a veil of watery ghosts.

“I’ll find him,” Silvia said, helping the woman to her feet. “I promise l’ll find him, Mrs. Waterfall.”

The young woman walked her friend over to the steps of the apartment house, sat her down and then, stuffing her compact pistol into the pocket of her blue jean shorts, jogged across the street and entered the alley. She was swallowed by its shadows.

««—»»

The alley took Silvia out to The Park with its clutter of cement and weeds. Skinny’s cairn was there, like a hunched thing in the clumps of drought-faded goldenrod. The sterile white of the Nex-Tech complex gleamed in the late day sun and the rooftops of Little Manila poked up just north of that. She hoped Sweetie hadn’t gone there.

10. Luzon

In some ways, the Luzon Market was the heart of Little Manila. For one it was the central spot amidst the crowded buildings of the area, the other consideration had to do with cultural activity. In Silvia’s assessment of things, the quickest way to know a people is to witness their food and music. The Luzon market offered both. It was an open-aired food market where fast staccato music blared readily from open windows and doors at either side of the street. While some of the music had a manic celebratory quality, the food was something else all together.

There were vendor tables and open shacks, bins heaped with exotic vegetables, slippery piles of squid and fish and, of course,
the
dogs. Silvia had seen this part of the city once and had sworn she would never return. We can only imagine her horror as she moved slowly down the avenue.

There were dogs everywhere. To the right: ten or more dogs were lying on the sidewalk with their forelegs wrenched painfully behind their backs, tied with wire, their muzzles wound shut with duct tape. Watery eyes pleaded. To the left: an old woman kicked at a whimpering dog which was sprawled in trash, legs trussed as with the others, a can with poked breathing holes strapped over its snout. It looked hungry. Dogs in cages crammed so tightly they seemed one great and pitiful mass. One tied outside the cages—which could hold no more—wagged its tail shyly at the passing young woman, despite the reddish wire that held its mouth closed.

Silvia bent by one of the cages and peered in, looking for Sweetie. The apparent proprietor, a substantial shirtless man with cigar smoke for teeth, studied her hungrily. “Cheap,” he offered, waving his cigar at the cage.

“No thanks,” Silvia said, moving along.

Bang!

A man had slammed a mid-sized dog onto the top of another cage and was slitting its throat. The blood rained on the other beasts in the cage, awaiting similar treatment. A pleasant-looking older woman stood waiting for her selection to be butchered, a bag of fruit tucked under one arm.

Silvia could hear the commotion of cock-fighting coming from the smoky doorways of several buildings.
Birds screeching, men laughing, women cheering.
Outside of these establishments, the non-victorious birds were tossed unceremoniously into open trash bins, their lush and trailing plumage spattered and torn.
Some, barely alive, twitched and rasped pitifully.

Another doorway—the blackness beyond throbbing with frenetic music and the sounds of dogs screaming. Silvia had never heard dogs scream before. Young shirtless men chatted nonchalantly outside and paused only to eye a corpulent, bikini-clad prostitute as she bent to adjust a heel. The smell of roasting dog came smokily from within.

A rich blond woman with a glossy black heli-sedan stood humming to the music at a nearby stand as her two armed bodyguards loaded several trussed dogs into the trunk of her vehicle. Silvia noted that tying a dog’s forelegs back not only immobilized it, but also offered a convenient handle. The men slammed the trunk shut, paid the pleased vendor and opened the door as the blond slipped inside. Silvia had heard that dog was becoming a popular cocktail snack with the wealthy.

The sun—but not its heat—was lowering. Silvia’s T-shirt felt like a paste of sweat as she reached the end of the market, the squarish weight of her small stun-pistol pressed uncomfortably to her hip. Thank God, she thought—no sign of Sweetie. Still, her stomach was a fire of bile, and tears joined the sweat beaded on her cheeks. Leaving the Luzon Market and the cramped, darkening heat of Little Manila, she thought of Skinny, how the boys that killed him, like the scientists and technicians back at Nex-tech, and the men making those dogs scream, would all probably go on to live long and relatively happy lives.

11. The Ancestor Masks

Punktown, with its more than varied ethnic subdivisions, was an uncomfortable quilt of colors.
An awkward puzzle of pieces and peoples, traditions and religions.
Dusk came on and Silvia found herself on another planet, so to speak. It was the Kalian sector, the Sarik Duul neighborhood, more specifically, reflecting a somewhat obscure island culture from the planet Kali. There, set against the black of monolithic buildings and pointed baroque temples, was a carnival of twanging, chiming music and air hot with spices and incense. Neons twisted in graceful alien
letters,
bled into the humid sky and the scene made Silvia think of the pictures she used to take with her mother’s intentionally distorted laser-camera—a dream of radiant crayon.

A small child in a glistening grey mask trotted up to the girl, splashed her with some spiced water from a bowl and sang, “Happy Death Day!”

Blinking, Silvia remembered hearing something on the news about the upcoming festival. It was the day when the people of Sarik Duul offered up their bodies to house the spirits of all who had died within the year. Each wore a mask that represented a dead friend or loved one—as they would have appeared at the time of death. Each of the Sarikians was a walking Nirvana containing generations of deceased spirits.

Silvia made her way awkwardly through the hot crowd of bodies. The Sarikians seemed to float in their long shimmering robes, their strange beauty—shining grey skin, glossy black hair, plush lips and thin eyes the solid black of onyx—obscured behind masks that represented these same exotic qualities in slightly elongated stylization.

The young woman felt like a trespasser in these people’s communal ritual and was glad to see other humans and other races, tourists perhaps, partaking of the festivities. Children shrieked from wheeling neon-embossed rides like robot octopi and bought drippy globes of warm spiced fruit on sticks—like mutant lollipops. She could not tell who was who, for all wore the masks and a woman might wear the face of a father or dead husband, an old person might wear the face of someone young. One massive figure, obviously a man, had the strange peaceful face of an infant. He bellowed, “Happy Death Day,” as he passed, towing a flock of bright balloons.

Seeing as this was Punktown, there was a quantity of masks representing those who had died violently over the past year. These came swimming out of dark and neon air like figures from a terrible dream. Here a woman, uncompromisingly depicted, with half her face chewed by bullets; there, an old man blackened with the craggy scarring from fire; another, apparently the victim of a low-grade plasma bullet, with its mock flesh like bubbled pumice. They must have needed fingerprints or DNA to identify that one.

Silvia sought out puddles where a dog might go to drink,
trash cans
where a dog might smell food. She ducked behind concession tents, squinted into spice and garbage-scented darkness. Behind one of the food booths, a grey naked man had a grey naked woman against a wall and was thrusting into her from behind. They turned to look at her with those too big glossy masks and laughed. Silvia rushed away, around a corner and tripped over something.

Sweetie.
He was lying on his side, his eyes open
,
mouth slightly ajar
. Silvia gasped and bent to touch him. He felt cool in the hot air, soft and grey beneath the trembling stroking of her hand.

“Oh, Sweetie,” she whispered.

This was better than seeing him butchered in the Luzon Market, she consoled herself. It was his age and the heat…but still she imagined his terror and confusion, his being lost in the noise and color of a strange place and mostly, his being separated from Adele. Sweetie had died alone.

««—»»

Trucks rumbled out onto the thoroughfare; the Sarikian dead of the year, having been stored in a great warehouse pumped full of preservative gases, were being delivered to the festival. The crowd stood by quietly as the bodies, glistening in cocoons of green silk, were heaped in a great pyramid and splashed with bucketfuls of strange oil and spices. A figure in a red turban spoke a soft prayer through a microphone and then tossed a torch on the mounded dead. There was a rush of greenish flame and soon the air was horrible and beautiful with the smoke of the dead and spices.