Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Wisps of this vapor curled out of the giant’s gaping mouth like its last dying breath being expelled.

  The statue’s flesh was scaled in blue tiles. The eyes were almond-shaped. The way he looked at this moment, Stake himself might have been its model. Before embarking from his unit’s position, he had stared long and hard at a photo of a Ha Jiin that he kept on file in his palm comp. His fellow soldiers had helped him spray-dye his skin blue, and he had changed into a Ha Jiin uniform. One of his comrades had pointed a pistol at him and joked, “I don’t know, Stake...I think you’re one of them pretending to be one of us pretending to be one of them.”

  The face on his computer screen had no scars on its high cheekbones. No family members lost yet. But aside from the lack of a metallic red sheen to his dark pupils and hair, Stake had been thoroughly convincing as one of the enemy when he had set off alone into the lush blue forest.

  He waited, watching the head of the buried colossus, until he felt fairly safe in approaching it. Stake emerged from the undergrowth, and a moment later was ducking into the head’s dark maw, with its blended scents of earth and dampness and incense, and the subtle taint of the precious blue gas itself. But all of this barely masked the strongest, underlying note: the smell of countless dead bodies secreted deep beneath the forest.

  He descended the rust-scabbed metal staircase. In his right fist he carried a Ha Jiin pistol but it had been modified to fire silently, with Earth’s more advanced technology.

  At the bottom, copper pipes stained green with verdigris ran across the walls to glass globes, in which gas was burned to give off light. Three passages branched off from this chamber, but their entrances were covered by thick yellow curtains. Stake was very much on edge. Sometimes these caverns were utterly empty, except for the bodies of the dead – slotted into the honeycombs chiseled into the walls, slathered with a yellow mineral that crudely mummified their forms. Other times, members of the Ha Jiin clerical order would be down in the tunnels; maybe a solitary monk, or maybe an entire group. And then other times, the tunnels might have been converted into a base camp for a unit of Ha Jiin soldiers. It was frowned upon by their own kind, to take their battle into these places where only the dead were meant to be sheltered, but the Ha Jiin fighters knew that they were not the first to have desecrated the sacred netherworld. That the only way to protect it sometimes was to desecrate it themselves.

  Stake strained his ears beyond the soft hissing of gas through the pipes. A ghostly distant voice. A chant? So...he would not be alone this time.

  From his backpack he withdrew two narrow black devices speckled with faux rust, which he clipped to the railings at the base of the staircase. He activated an invisible field that ran across the bottom stair. It was a frequency that would not disrupt the anatomy of Earth humans, but would prove fatal to a Ha Jiin passing through it...either descending into the catacombs after him, or pursuing him should he need to make a quick retreat.

  Now Stake moved to the central curtain. A glance at his wrist scanner had told him there was only one person in the vicinity, down this passage. This person would have to be neutralized before he could assemble the teleportation apparatus stored in his backpack, which would allow the gases to be siphoned to the collection and processing station in the allied city of Di Noon. If it were a cleric, he’d flip a toggle on his gun and simply hit him with a gel capsule filled with a paralyzing drug. But if it were an armed fighter...

  Just beyond the curtain as he shifted it aside, the tunnel was full of the bluish mist. These days Stake was no longer queasy about inhaling it. At first, it had been thought that the gas had inorganic origins...until it had been determined that it was a byproduct of decomposition. In a way, the Ha Jiin were correct in deeming it the spirits of their ancestors. It was a trace of themselves, surviving them, lingering in the air.

  More glowing spheres set into the walls. Stake followed the chant, which wavered as if the person uttering it were underwater. He followed the blip of light on his wrist scanner.

  He turned down another branching hallway, ducking through a latticework of tree roots that had grown through cracks in the low ceiling. Peripherally, he kept aware of the holes dug into the walls to either side of him. Men, women, children. Dead for centuries, many of them. But it wasn’t the dead he feared. Some Ha Jiin soldiers wore a wrist device that deflected the probing of scans such as the one Stake used. And Ha Jiin soldiers, lying on their bellies in these honeycombs, had been known to fire rifles at scouts such as himself.

  A circular chamber opened beyond, the terminus of this particular passageway. From the threshold, Stake saw a man in a Ha Jiin soldier’s uniform squatting over a body on a wooden slab. His hands were working, working, back and forth with a moist sound. He mostly blocked the body before him, but Stake glimpsed the man’s hands and saw they were yellow. Stained with a mineral solution.

  Stake took his first stealthy steps into the room. His thumb paused on the toggle of his pistol. Life or death, at a simple flip of a switch.

  The hunkered soldier was not chanting so much as he was sobbing. And it was his heavy accent that had prevented Stake from understanding the word he sobbed, before.

  “Sorry,” the man was croaking in English, over and over as he slathered on the preserving mixture. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry...”

  Now Stake could better see the body that lay on the slab. Even partially covered in yellow pigment, he could tell that its flesh was not blue. The body was that of a dead Earth female. She had short hair like a boy’s, her features looked Asian, and she must have been about nineteen. Her Colonial Forces uniform lay folded nearby, where the man had removed it. He had undressed her. And in that moment, that was all Stake could think of. With gritted teeth, he stepped closer and pointed the gun.

  A pebble crunched under his boot. The Ha Jiin whirled around, his black eyes flashing laser red, and Stake shot him through the front of his throat.

  The man pitched back, eyes wide, across the bare legs of the yellow-painted Earth woman. He stared up at Stake, trying to mouth words, but only blood bubbled up over his lips. Stake didn’t need to read lips to understand the word he was mouthing. Over and over.

  The man had scars on his face – two horizontal raised bars on his right cheek, and three on his left cheek – to indicate the number of family members he had lost in the war. Family members he might have carried down into this very sepulcher, and coated with yellow mineral as he had been doing to this teenage girl he had killed.

  “Sorry,” the man mouthed, dying. “Sorry...”

  Stake shot him several times in the face, to erase that haunting visage.

  But he had only transferred it to his own. As if the man’s ghost had fled his body in that instant, to possess him.

  4

  He was well, they assured him. The skin of his chest was not too tight. Was he sleeping all right? Did he need some meds for that?

  Cal Williams had looked away from the doctor’s face, unable to meet his eyes. The man’s skin tone suggested some African ancestry in his mix, but his eyes had something of a slanted look, too. It seemed all the eyes of the city were Ha Jiin eyes, watching him, no matter what face they glared out of. Sometimes Cal thought he was still a prisoner, still being tortured, but this time just psychologically. Perhaps he had never been freed, but right now sat in a cell instead of an examination room of the VA Hospital. Maybe this doctor wore makeup to change his skin color. Or maybe they had drugged him, or implanted a computer chip in his brain. Played around inside his mind...

  “Do you think you’d benefit from talking with one of our counselors?” the doctor asked him.

  Cal stepped down from the examination table, resealing his shirt. “No,” he grunted. “I’m fine. Just like you say.”

  He didn’t have a car yet, so he figured he’d buy a coffee from a vending machine in the little cafeteria, and sip it while he waited for the next shuttle to Blue Station. Blue Station, he thought with a smirk. Yeah. How appropria
te.

  In a nexus of hallways where elevators were situated, Cal paused to look at directional plaques on a wall. Arrows pointed one way for the CAFETERIA. And in another direction, toward PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES. He found himself, almost against his will, drifting down that corridor. Maybe it was the sobbing voice he heard from one of the rooms that compelled him. As it turned out, it was a man sitting in the little waiting room, his face in his hands and his elbows on his knees. The receptionist behind the counter could have been a robot for all the concern she showed him. Another vet was strapped into a cybernetic “pony” with insect-like arms and legs, as his own four limbs were missing, making him look like a swaddled overgrown infant. He met Cal’s eyes with a dazed, or maybe just fatalistic, expression.

  The nurse looked up, finally noticing Cal. “Can I help you?” she asked blandly.

  “No – I’m...just looking for a friend,” Cal stammered, and then he ducked back into the hall.

  * * *

  Stake left the counselor’s office without his mask on, as the man had suggested. “As long as you wear it, you fortify your need for it. And you fortify your identification with the Ha Jiin soldier. Every time you put it on again, you reestablish that identity. This is a wound that needs its bandage off in order to heal, Jeremy. Don’t look in the mirror. Don’t fret about it. You have to ignore it, which is not the same thing as the hiding you’re doing now. Go about your life. Your mutation aside, there is no physiological reason for you to maintain this appearance.”

  Stake had nodded, listening to these words. Normally he wouldn’t have looked too long at the counselor’s face, but he had stared at him intensely, hoping, hoping to see the man’s expression change to surprise as his patient began to mimic him. Yet it did not come.

  “But you know,” the counselor had gone on, “the surest way to deal with this is to treat your brain itself with a surgical procedure, in such a way that your ability will be forever inhibited. No more shape-shifting at all. Do you think you’d be interested in that?”

  “Maybe later,” Stake had murmured. “Not...not yet.” His ability had served him well during his military stint. Might he make use of it in some future career? And then there was the matter of his heritage. He was a Tin Town mutant, like his mother. He was almost defiantly defensive about that. He didn’t need to be...corrected, like some freak, some abomination.

  But as he left the counselor’s office, he couldn’t help but wonder if there were something more masochistic in his choice not to have his mutation treated. Something like punishment involved in that decision.

  * * *

  Cal Williams was waiting for one of the elevator doors to open when he looked to his right and saw the man walking toward him from the psychiatric wing. He wasn’t the only one who’d noticed him. A few other people were muttering. “Is that a Ha Jiin?” a woman said.

  “His skin isn’t blue,” her male companion hissed, as if afraid they’d be overheard.

  The man with the scarred face stopped behind the whispering couple, waiting for another of the elevators. Cal kept staring at him. He was trembling. If this were all some elaborate facade created by his Ha Jiin captors to trick him, then this one had let his mask slip. Had overlooked a critical detail: those ritualistic scars on his cheeks.

  Even though the line he was in was a little shorter, Cal shifted over behind the man with the scars. He stared at the back of his head, so close he could reach out and take his neck in his hands. And as if he could feel those imaginary hands, the man turned around to meet Cal’s gaze. Without being asked, he said, “Yeah – I know. I did this to myself, like they do. I lost five good buddies over there, so I...” He made a slashing movement with his hand.

  Why lie about it? Jeremy Stake wondered. But it was easier this way, wasn’t it? Not having to explain his mutation. Or that scene in the necropolis below the jungle floor. This way it seemed he was a good, loyal soldier, grieving only for his own dead. Not conflicted about some enemy who had murdered a teenage girl.

  Cal Williams said nothing. But there was more than just the scars. This man’s cheekbones were high and pronounced, his lips full, his eyes slanted, his pupils obsidian black, all like a Ha Jiin. His face wasn’t robin’s egg blue, but it had a bluish pallor.

  Seeing that the man behind him wasn’t going to respond, Stake faced around forward again. He felt the eyes of others on him, as well. Yes, easy for the counselor to tell him to go without the mask. And maybe it wasn’t a bad idea, really, to rid himself of that crutch. But he felt it was premature to have removed it here and now.

  The elevator arrived, disgorging one group of people and admitting the next. Cal watched the cabin fill up. The scarred man entered, then turned around to face outward. Cal was desperate to plunge inside so as not to lose track of him, but when the man faced him again he could not bring himself to move. The elevator door slid shut between them.

  But a moment later, Cal was racing toward the emergency stairwell.

  5

  Stake’s new flat was on Judas Street, in a brick tenement meant to look like native Choom architecture but merely looking mass produced and cheap. At least the gang graffiti gave all the buildings on Judas Street, whatever their style, a homogenous feel. His bed was narrow, his bathroom tiny, his kitchen little more than a counter, but there was a table near the window where he set up his new computer. It would serve as his phone, his VT, and his means by which to try to find out what had become of his former prisoner. The female Ha Jiin sniper named Thi Gonh, whom her own people had dubbed with admiration the “Earth Killer.”

  He recalled her face better than he recalled his own. Yearned for it more, too. He could still smell the scent of her long hair, and of her blue flesh. He remembered the taste of it.

  What would all the vets at the VA think if they knew how he had lain with her? Not that many of them hadn’t slept with prostitutes among their allies, the Jin Haa. But this was the enemy. A killer who had trained her sniper rifle on men and women just like them, and pulled the trigger again and again.

  And what would her people think, if they knew the same about her? If they knew how she had become...confused, as he had?

  Stake had his computer on now, running in VT mode, and the news station he was tuned to reported a seemingly endless list of recent crimes. A Dacvibese had been murdered by a gang right here on Judas Street and they showed a picture of the alien in life, resembling an albino bipedal greyhound. Stake turned to look at it. Had the kids, maybe adolescents, who had ended that life for drug money felt any hesitation, any remorse? He doubted it. Were they more hardened killers, then, in their way, than he was? He thought that the difference between them was that his killings had been sanctioned, encouraged. He had been told that it was right, whereas they did not have to suffer such a moral dichotomy. They knew they were wrong, were evil, and were comfortable wearing that skin.

  Stake had bought more than just a computer with the first of his pension money. From the table, he picked up a black market handgun, a big and ugly Wolff .45. He hefted it as he paced his little flat. It wasn’t too light. Lightweight guns were good in the field, when you were laden with gear, but something with more weight definitely felt better at the end of your arm. It was more...there. He would start carrying it when he ventured from his apartment from now on. This was, after all, Judas Street. This was, after all, Punktown.

  Well, he hadn’t been able to find out anything about Thi Gonh today. Everything was in upheaval now with most of the troops coming home, except for a security force that would remain stationed in the city of Di Noon. As a returnee, he was not privy to such information. But he would keep trying. Whether she would go on trial as an enemy or be returned to her own people, he would track her down one of these days. If nothing more, it was something to occupy his mind. A mission, now that there was no further need for his services. No more battles to fight.

  In that distant dimension, at any rate.

  * * *

  Cal Williams
stood across the street from the brick tenement, running his gaze across its windows. He didn’t know which floor the man lived on, but he knew he was there; he had seen him come and go several times by now. That day when he first met the man in the VA Hospital, he had managed to catch sight of him again down the street and follow him to the subway station, and then trail him here to Judas Street. Cal had altered his appearance along the way, by at first going bare-headed, then wearing the hood of his sweatshirt for a while, then removing the cloned leather jacket he wore over the sweatshirt and stuffing it in a balled-up shopping bag he plucked out of the gutter. Luckily, he was a nondescript person. His hair cropped close to his head, like just another soldier.

  Yes, the war was over. The Jin Haa had established their small, independent nation within the body of the resentful Ha Jiin’s land, like a tumor they must accept and live with. And in return for the help of the Earth Colonies, the Jin Haa would unthinkably allow them to extract gases from the tombs of their own dead. Now that there was a bitter peace, Earth was working to sway the Ha Jiin to become friendly, too. They had so much more gas than the Jin Haa, after all.