Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The haze was so thick that it seemed the ocean began only fifty yards out from the shore, the waves appearing to form from the substance of an opaque white wall. It was an unsettling effect for Huck, who had never stood before an actual ocean, who had never in fact left the borders of the city of Punktown in his life.

  It was high tide, and people had waded out far into the waves, which buoyed them briefly. But it was the people on the shore who commanded Huck’s interest. Actually, his focus had narrowed to one person in particular.

  This great room of the Paxton Center Casino was circular, enclosing a dense collection of vid poker tables and other card games (physical or virtual). The circular wall was an unbroken vidscreen, showing a live feed of a tourist spot on the shore of the Duplam Ocean, elsewhere here on Oasis. As one looked fully around the room, there was no inland to be found – no view of what lay behind the camera’s perspective, the tourist shops that surely must line the street opposite the beach. What he was seeing was a wraparound view, as if the ends of a long strip of paper had been joined together. Though this was meant to be clever, exciting, to Huck it was another unsettling effect. There was no way to escape this ocean; it surrounded you. You were on an island in its center. Its waves buffeted and pushed the puny swimmers back to shore. Even the sea birds swooped round and round the perimeter of the room, as if unable to break free of an invisible cage. Huck followed a few of them by swiveling in his chair, and the movement made him queasy as if he were seasick. What made him even more nauseous was looking at the place where the two ends of the long stretch of seascape were joined, because of course they did not match up. Waves there were misaligned. On the beach, people walked toward the seam and vanished, seeming to change into different people on the other side. Huck found he had to look away from it, his stomach churning as if it too were buoyed on the waves. But when he spotted a waitress threading her way through the tables, he still motioned her over to order a ninth beer.

  His waitress, a statuesque black woman with a gleaming bald head, wore a skimpy bikini with a shimmering blue-green fish scales pattern. He thought this whole ocean motif was simply an excuse for these roving bar girls -- and the female dealers (physical or virtual) at the tables -- to wear such revealing attire. He was cynical about it, but he didn’t object.

  Yet these women were sexy for business, undressed for success, not like the girl he had focused on in the surrounding vidscreen. Her sexuality was a kind of purity.

  He watched her as he took the first swig of his fresh Zub. Watched her as the sea birds wheeled and cried out, as the children frolicking in the sand or surf cried out, as the waves roared and broke, as even a fabricated smell of the ocean came to him. “Like a million dead women rotting on the ocean floor,” he described this unfamiliar scent aloud to himself, as if this one girl he admired furthered by contrast his contempt for so many others. For all others, at that moment.

  The funny thing was, this magic mirror into that distant scene worked both ways. He had no idea what the exact arrangement was on the other side, but there must be some sizable vidscreen on the beach advertising the new Paxton Center Casino. This was apparent from the way a small group of people, always changing, was always gathered in one spot of the circular vidscreen, gazing with curiosity in at the gamblers. Some of these spectators were parents who looked like they’d rather be sitting at one of those card tables, themselves, than sweating on a beach for the benefit of their kids. Often they craned their necks to get a look at the players’ hands of cards, but the tables were positioned in such a way that this was not possible.

  So who were the zoo goers, he wondered, and who were the animals on display?

  If any of these distant gawkers should single him out in the crowd, Huck would appear to them as a human of Earth ancestry in his late thirties, a bit out of shape, with an unruly burst of black hair and a full beard that could use a trimming. With his pasty skin, it would be obvious he seldom saw the sun, for all the shadows that flooded the streets of Punktown, and because his activities often called for him to work by night, or in the extensive subterranean sector of the city nicknamed Subtown – a neighborhood he also happened to live in. This part troglodyte, part nocturnal creature wore a cloned leather jacket over a rumpled white dress shirt, and the same pair of jeans for the second day in a row. His nondescript, unremarkable appearance was not a ruse; he’d never been one for gangster chic, despite his being one of the top triggermen for the Neptune Teeb syndy.

  Another glance at the time display on his wrist comp. Salocin should have arrived in the gaming room ninety minutes ago. At least, that was the intelligence Huck’s bosses had paid for. Huck, at least, had been punctual, but he had expected to walk in a minute after Salocin, do his thing, then promptly leave. No time for even one beer. Well, here it was ninety minutes and nine beers later. He did the math, and snorted. Fuck it; he was here -- might as well make the best of it. At least he was sitting here at the little bar and watching the games instead of joining in one of them. That is, he had been watching the games until the vidscreen had absorbed his attention.

  One of the roaming security people was throwing him fretful, disapproving glances. Several of them, including this one, had also been paid off by Huck’s bosses, but they weren’t happy about Huck lingering in the open like this, all this time. Well, fuck them – Salocin’s tardiness was hardly his fault, was it?

  Huck raised his beer in salute to the gorilla in his snappy tuxedo, and the man flicked his stern eyes away and scowled.

  She was still there, as if waiting for him to continue his admiration. She was far enough removed from him (that is, from the camera) that he couldn’t see her face, but surely it had to be in keeping with the rest of her immaculate beauty. She stood in profile, gazing out at the waves…maybe watching over a younger sibling? A young boy played on a blanket a few paces from her, and were those her parents set back in the general clutter of strewn and basking bodies, partly sheltered by their umbrellas and coolers?

  Her hair was a long, thick mass of curls, a kind of coppery blond. Not a natural tint, of course, but that was okay. She had to be -- what? -- fifteen or sixteen? Her hips flared with a tease of precocious voluptuousness, and her bottom in profile was rounded in a way that made the floor of Huck’s chest drop away. Her breasts had not filled out, but it was okay if they didn’t; their slightness helped maintain that precarious girl/woman balance. She wore a white bikini, to display these artless charms. No…she was not business. She was a thing of pure nature, like a nymph that had wandered out of the sea and now wistfully contemplated what she had left behind and could never return to.

  Of course there were other attractive females within his view. Those who didn’t come by beauty naturally could often attain it artificially. One of Huck’s past girlfriends, met in another casino, had been a gorgeous blond who could have been a professional model, and he’d been stunned to learn well into their fling that she was seventy-two years old. That hadn’t dissuaded him, however, and the inevitable break-up had been due to the usual dramas instead.

  Not everyone could afford such treatments, however. A woman crossed Huck’s field of vision, momentarily obstructing his view of the fresh little teenager, and she too wore a revealing swimsuit. It revealed a blocky, sagging body, a dangling string of fake gems swinging from the navel of her pendulous belly, across her back an animated tattoo of a cartoon dolphin plunging into water, submerging from view, erupting from the surface again, on and on. Huck was disgusted. “Buy a mirror, you painted pig,” he muttered. To be fair, everyone aged. His teenage angel would age. Maybe she’d lose her charms within a decade. But one had to have a sense of dignity, of decorum. Hell, even he understood that – and he wasn’t all that much on dignity or decorum himself.

  Following a gulp of his Zub, Huck happened to swivel a fraction in his chair at the bar and there at a vid poker table across the room sat Salocin, top captain of a rival crime syndy, and his little entourage: his good friend, Nibor --
who had sold him out -- two bodyguards, and Salocin’s and Nibor’s mates. They were all of the Torgessi race, and though the colors of the scales that covered their naked bodies could vary widely, these specimens must have been of the same tribe or family – being a metallic orange color with varied splashes of black, like Chinese koi fish, except for the two females who were metallic black with splashes of orange. This source of beauty was offset by their more intimidating features: even the females were muscular and a head taller than the tallest human, and all six of them possessed a head like a cattle skull without horns, but with lidless human eyes set back in their deep sockets of bone.

  Fuck – how long had they been there, while he had been distracted? Well, it couldn’t have been too long. He saw the hulking Nibor (that was Nibor, wasn’t it? – these Torgessi all looked the same to him) glancing all around the room, pretending to be checking out the vidscreen but obviously wondering who amongst these casino patrons would be the assassin on Neptune Teeb’s payroll.

  The black waitress was near. Huck considered ordering a tenth beer. He had become so relaxed, so enticed by the vision in the vidscreen, that now all his readiness was dulled by a haze similar to that which masked the Duplam Ocean.

  “Fuck it,” he said with something like the weary sigh of a man rising from bed to get ready for work. A sigh that sounded almost fatalistic. He rose from his chair, and in the same motion reached into both sides of his open jacket. As he started forward, he drew two handguns. One was a Thor .93, the other a Panzer, both semiautomatics equipped with a built-in silencing feature. Both guns were loaded with AE gel capsules. He had only taken several steps before he opened fire with both guns, held out at the ends of his extended arms, and he kept firing as he kept walking toward the poker table at which sat the party of six Torgessi.

  Though they were all unclothed, as this was Punktown they were not unarmed. The males wore leather harnesses, crisscrossing their immense chests, which openly supported holstered side arms. (Given the number of citizens who carried firearms, the casino had decided it was too daunting a task scanning guests and assigning their guns to storage – and it might dissuade a percentage of customers, too.) Salocin and the bodyguards were up from their seats immediately and reaching for their own weapons. Nibor bolted up, too – he obviously had to act convincingly for the sake of appearances.

  But already the gel projectiles were striking the rising Torgessi. The capsules did not penetrate their tough scales, but merely breaking against them was sufficient to release the autolytic enzymes they carried. These were a mutant strain of the same enzymes that caused a body to decompose upon death. Instantaneously, the enzymes started the Torgessi’s cells, where they were contacted, to disintegrate in a process called autodigestion. And the enzymes’ effect spread rapidly from the site of the initial wound.

  Huck fired wildly, unafraid of accidentally striking other casino patrons seated at the table or behind his victims. The enzymes in AE bullets were tailored to react upon one race only. A human or other alien race might be injured, and a gel cap might even penetrate them, but the enzymes would be harmless against their systems.

  One of the bodyguards, struck several times in the head, had already sunk down out of sight behind the long lozenge-shaped table. The other had managed to draw his gun – it looked to Huck like a shotgun sawed off at barrel and stock -- from its holster, but he was making an ungodly sound like a bull being tortured, a number of huge holes in his upper body widening rapidly, and then becoming one gaping pit.

  So far, no one had got a shot off at him in return, but even if they did he had at least a measure of defense: lining his leather jacket was a bulletproof gel padding that could disperse blunt trauma and also prevent most ray beams from piercing him. It would even withstand weak plasma rounds.

  But a human man came rushing at Huck from the side. An off-duty forcer, without his gun? A patron trying to impress a casino whore? A good Samaritan – in Punktown? Whatever he was, without facing him Huck turned the Panzer toward him, shot him once in the belly, and then trained the Panzer on the Torgessi again. Peripherally, he saw the human go down clutching his middle. Whether or not the bullet had entered him, that should hopefully discourage any further acts of bravado.

  Huck had not stopped advancing on the Torgessi’s table. Both his magazines were already almost empty, though they carried sixty capsules each. Without weapons of their own, stunned to inaction at first, the black-scaled females had surged out of their seats at last. One threw herself to the floor behind the table (Nibor’s woman?), but the other (Salocin’s mate?) vaulted up onto the table and bunched her body in a prelude to springing at him. The Teeb family held to certain rules of etiquette, and one was that harming the wives and children of enemies was not allowed. But what was he to do when a seven-foot monster was seconds from crashing down upon him? Huck didn’t hesitate – fired the Thor right in her face. She went crashing backwards instead, and fell off the table to buck and thrash on the floor, making that tortured bull cry. It tapered off to a gargling noise, and then ended altogether, in mere seconds.

  Only several paces from the table now, Huck stopped advancing but continued pulling the triggers of his pistols. Struck repeatedly and having dropped his own gun, the syndy captain Salocin had begun wandering away, shuffling like a zombie, one arm hanging by a few cords and all of his cattle skull face missing below his glassy eyes. Huck shot him a couple times in the back of his head, and he collapsed in a heap.

  Now, all the Torgessi except the woman who had dived for cover were dead.

  All…

  Huck moved around the table and peered at the sprawled bodies. “Momfuck,” he muttered to himself. Sure enough, Nibor was dead too, his deep-set eyes bulging in surprise. “Fucking things all look the same,” Huck grumbled. There was another directive of the Teeb syndy blown to bits: don’t kill the other clan’s turncoats, or in the future no one will trust the Teeb family enough to turn to them again. Not to mention that Nibor was to have merged the Torgessi crew into the Neptune Teeb family.

  But Huck could not delay for self rebuke -- it was time to find the exit. The room’s security men couldn’t look like they weren’t doing their jobs forever.

  As he turned away from the foul-smelling carnage, his eyes slid dizzily across a smear of commotion; women screaming, men shouting, ducked behind or cowering under the varied gaming tables. A holographic card dealer attired like a scintillating mermaid stared at Huck blankly, which somehow annoyed him. But something annoyed him more. His bleary gaze had fallen on that spot of the surrounding vidscreen wall where beachgoers had stopped to peer in at the casino, via its own vidscreen advertisement. Because of the shooting, the knot of people there was quickly swelling to a crowd. And among those gathered gawkers, Huck recognized a familiar figure. A young girl in a white bikini, short but prematurely voluptuous through the hips and bottom, with a head of coppery blond curls. Up close, his nymph’s face was just as cute as he’d imagined it would be. That is, if she hadn’t been scrunching up her face in an expression of profound revulsion.

  Huck did not take this as disgust for the gruesome killing she had witnessed, and the ongoing swift decay of his victims. He took it as disgust for himself.

  Before he continued on toward the exit, he lifted his Panzer one last time and fired a few shots at that part of the vidscreen. To his amusement, the crowd of beachgoers scattered immediately, shrieking and shouting just like the casino patrons.

  But it was the girl in particular he’d been aiming at.

  HANAKO

  2

  Hanako was relieved that the elevator was working; she could tell by watching the indicator by the keypad that it had just begun descending from the top floor, which was the ninth. She was pulling her suitcase by its handle, on the way to the shuttleport for another short trip to Miniosis, and so the elevator was more convenient than the stairs -- though by now she was used to dragging Sabina’s grocery cart down the stairs empty and back up th
em full.

  She was not lacking in strength. She worked for a Kalian-owned company, because they had not looked closely into her personal history. (She never traveled to Earth on business, or offworld at all – kept strictly to Oasis -- afraid for her ID to be scrutinized.) They were progressive Kalians, because she knew how they traditionally treated their women as lesser beings who must remain modest, and generally remain home with their children. Nevertheless, alone with her immediate manager in his office, early on, he had impulsively embraced her and kissed her on the neck, murmuring how he could help her further her career if she was “sweet” to him. Hanako had gripped his wrist and twisted it in such a way that the man went down on his knees with a startled cry of pain. With her other hand, she had hooked her fingers into his eye sockets just above the eyeballs and bent his head back to look up at her. Calmly, she had told him that she would not kill him if he forgot this incident – she would do likewise – and they could continue with an amicable professional relationship. Her manager had gushed that he was sorry, he’d forgotten himself, and she let him up.

  She had been prepared to kill him if he’d come at her then, but he didn’t. Her original programming would never have allowed her to act in such a way, but even by that time she had undergone some intense upgrades. When her only role had been to pleasure amorous men like her manager (and she had pleasured Kalians before – they tended to be abusive, bullying, even sadistic), she would not have reacted in self-preservation. She could not feel pain, but she had been programmed to cry and whimper or even scream, as if in fear or agony, if a client acted in a way that seemed injurious to her body. After all, what good was tormenting or torturing a young girl if you couldn’t savor her terror? Before her enhancements, she would have endured such treatment without struggle.