Her only act of self-defense, back then, had been to escape – and seek out those first illegal upgrades that would make her more capable of existing as a free entity.
Did she feel rewarded, even proud, to have carved out a successful career for herself without having to pleasure men with her body? Well, she felt a kind of satisfaction. Hanako was not sure she was happy that she existed, but as long as she existed her aim was simply to make that existence as…comfortable…as she could. Wasn’t that a primal instinct shared by even the lowliest animal forms? So she didn’t contemplate the question much.
The elevator was close now to reaching her floor, the fifth.
She had checked in with Sabina before readying herself for her trip, just to be sure the old woman didn’t need anything. Hanako had told her she would be back in three days. Sabina had touched her cheek and said, “You’re so sweet.” Sweet. Hanako felt okay being “sweet” for Sabina. Sabina asked nothing of her but her company. Their interactions gave Hanako a kind of satisfaction, as well. Might she even consider their relationship pleasing, she who had given so much pleasure but never understood such feelings before?
The elevator made a little “ping” sound to indicate it had reached her floor, and its doors parted open. Peripherally, Hanako noted there was one other occupant inside as she pulled her suitcase into the cabin, and turned to face the doors as they once again closed.
That is, the doors started to close, but suddenly froze in their tracks about halfway there. Their mechanism emitted a strained humming sound.
Behind her, a voice slurred, “I’ve seen you around before.”
Hanako did not turn around, but in the jammed elevator doors she saw a blurry reflection of the man behind her. Bearded, scruffy, wearing a leather jacket. She thought she’d seen him in the apartment building before, as well. She could not smell his breath, having no olfactory sensors, but she could tell by his voice that he’d been drinking. Cradled under one arm was a fresh six-pack of beer, too.
She reached out, tapped at the key to close the doors. They didn’t respond.
Leaning against the back wall, as if afraid to fall if it didn’t support him, the man made no effort to come forward to examine the problem. Instead, he went on, “You’re a Little Gravure model, aren’t you? Which one? Meiki?” With a grunt he finally pushed himself away from the back wall, stepped up closer behind her and bent around her a little to study Hanako’s profile. “Hm…no, I’d say you’re a Saaya.” He took a deep inhalation, close to the back of her neck. Hanako stabbed at the key again, as much to prevent herself from turning around and crushing the man’s throat in her hand as to attempt to close the faulty doors. The man said, “Mmm…love that silicon smell. You’re all toy, not a cyborg. Definitely a Saaya. That’s okay – why do you think they didn’t try to make your skin smell like flesh? Connoisseurs of good toys, like me, like that smell.”
“You’ve been drinking,” Hanako observed coldly, keeping her back to him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I’m afraid I do. Among my other responsibilities for the, ah, company I work for, I used to be a bouncer at an android whorehouse. I became very familiar with the staff. Very fond of the staff indeed.”
“I don’t know of such things,” Hanako barely murmured. She held her finger on the OPEN button for a prolonged time.
“I might believe you come here to service a favorite customer…but I don’t think so. Look at you, dressed so respectable and all, with your cute little suitcase matching your tailor-made suit. You really live here. You’re a rogue, huh? You might even have run away from the same whorehouse I used to work at.”
Hanako let her arm lower to her side. She stood motionless and silent. The doors still hummed.
“But you’re probably too young to be one of the girls I used to know. They tend not to live too many years. All that wear and tear. If ‘live’ is the right word, huh?” He spat an ugly little laugh.
“I shouldn’t like to have to find a new apartment,” Hanako said in a chilly, even voice. “I hope you will not bother me again.” With that, she reached out both hands, took hold of the jammed elevator doors, and forced them all the way open again. The humming turned to a buzzing protest, but she ignored it as she stepped back out into the hall, with the intention of finding the stairs.
The man made no move to follow her, as if he were content to remain inside the cabin until such time as a service technician might come, but he said, “Oh-ho-ho! Sorry if I hurt your feelings…except you don’t have feelings.”
Hanako paused, looked back over her shoulder a little and replied, “You’re the one with no feelings.”
HUCK
2
He was roused from nebulous dreams by the tip of a steel-toed boot striking his shin.
Huck had dozed off on a park bench, six empty bottles of Zub strewn around his feet in the grass like victims of a multiple killing he couldn’t remember committing. He sat up with a start. Somehow, he expected to see an open sky above him – whitely overcast, with sea birds wheeling and dipping – but instead he confronted a high ceiling along which ran conduits, pipes, networks of cables, with lamps to simulate sunlight. And, closer to him, a cluster of young, grinning faces.
The face of the youth who had just kicked him was speaking. “Just checking if you’re still alive, Mr. Derelict sir.” The speaker was maybe twenty, thickset and shortish, with his head shaved bald except for a patch of hair in the shape of a lightning bolt.
Behind the young men were more young men – a group of maybe thirty altogether. Most of the tribe looked Latino, but they were hardly exclusive. There were whites, blacks, a few Asians and Chooms, one Tikkihotto and even a number of mutants. What they all had in common, however, was that they were clearly imbued with the essence of their city. They were its multitude of faces. They were its absence of a soul. They might be homeless and living in the park they called the Jungle, or they might come from good homes. Maybe a combination of both. Huck had found that such details didn’t really make much of a difference.
They did share one physical characteristic: they were all shirtless, so as to show off the large identical tattoo each wore on his chest. It was a vid loop, playing on the fine invisible mesh that had been imprinted into their skin. The vid showed a stocky young Latino man bound to a chair (his own body covered in more traditional tattoos, perhaps collected in prison), in the process of being murdered by men in black hoods. Presumably, these very boys, executing a traitor or rival gang member. Huck watched, mildly engaged, as one man sliced open just the front of the prisoner’s neck to let out a controlled profusion of blood down the front of his chest. Then, his head was tilted back and the man with the knife started sawing, in an effort to behead him. Huck had seen some very adept beheadings in his time – in vids and once even in person – by butchers who could work the blade between the vertebrae and get the head off with an ease that spoke of terrible familiarity. These were no such butchers. When sawing hit resistance, a second knife-wielder stepped in to chop at the victim’s neck bones. All the while, even with his head half off, the prisoner’s chest heaved as he sucked down his own blood instead of air (Huck could imagine the inevitable wheezing-gurgling). At last they got the head off, and rested it in the man’s lap. It toppled to the floor. They picked it up and set it on his thighs again. Huck had to smirk.
The boy with the black lightning bolt atop his head like a jagged crack in his skull followed Huck’s eyes down to his chest. “Enjoying the show, old-timer? Pretty, ain’t it?”
All the tattoo vids were in sync except on one boy’s shaven chest, where some glitch had caused the image to stall with flickering lines streaked through it, the victim seemingly damned to gasp for air with his head half off for all eternity.
“Ain’t ain’t in the dictionary, my friend,” Huck mumbled, looking around at others to the sides of him.
Though bared to the waist they surely could not be without weapons. Most of
them favored baggy fatigue pants, in the blue camouflage pattern that had been used in the Blue War, with an abundance of roomy pockets that bulged with handguns, maybe even grenades. Some of them openly carried machetes, though that might be more for hacking their way through the most thickly overgrown areas of the Jungle than for battling enemies – or threatening potential victims.
“You know,” slurred Huck, returning his attention to the boy who had kicked him awake, and gesturing at his chest, “a beam cutter knife would’ve been a lot easier. You can get ‘em in any hardware store.”
“Hey, thanks, I’ll remember that next time -- you ugly momfuck waste product. But a real blade is more sporting, don’t you think? More honorable.”
“Sporting? Honorable?” Huck chuckled. He looked down and poked at his collection of Zub bottles with his toe, to see if any might have one last swallow overlooked inside.
The boy with the lightning bolt, who must be the pack’s leader, swept the bottles away with the side of his foot. He missed one, but stooped down, picked it up and swung his arm back as if to smash the bottle down on Huck’s head. Huck did not duck, bury his head in his shoulders, dive to the side, or even blink. He just stared up at the boy…waiting to see how this would go.
The chieftain barked a laugh, tossed the bottle away. The others all burst into roars and whoops and guffaws as well, lunging at Huck and shouting, “Boo!” and less comprehensible exclamations.
“You know,” he said to them when their noise had settled down a little, “you guys don’t have to hit me or anything. Just gather around a little closer and your body odor should do the trick.”
The leader wagged his head in disbelief. “You must be absolutely blasting crazy, you smelly old loser.”
Huck let a slow smile spread within his beard. “My fine young punk, you can learn one thing from this smelly old loser. The last person you ever want to dick with is the person who doesn’t give a shit about a goddamn thing in this world.”
The kid snorted. “Heh. You obviously don’t, from the look of you.” But was there something in Huck’s unblinking eyes, or the smile he still held, that made the leader start to turn away – and motion for his comrades to do the same? Over his shoulder the boy laughed, “I like you, you crazy fuck. You’re my hero. I want to be just like you when I grow up.”
“If you’re not careful,” Huck said after him, still smiling that smile, “you won’t grow up.”
The tribe’s chieftain paused, held Huck’s gaze for several beats, then continued leading his boisterous pack away.
Huck leaned back against the bench and spread both his arms along the backrest, with a groan that spoke of cramped muscles. This action caused his leather jacket to open, revealing the guns holstered against his ribs. The retreating pack did not witness this.
“Old-timer,” he murmured, but he felt it. Rolling his head to work a kink out of his neck, he glanced over at his apartment building, visible from here. Its back wall was almost pressed right up against the high fence that bordered the park. He scrunched his face as he noticed for the first time – at least consciously – that a thick growth of vine like ivy, but of a deep color that might be purple or even black, had grown down the side of the building, partly obscuring some of the windows. It reached all the way to the ground. Well, at least it didn’t extend up to the ninth floor, where he lived, to obstruct his own view.
He thought of the poor little android he had met in the building’s elevator, so smartly dressed and on her way to somewhere else. He half-wished that, for the first time ever, he was on his way out of Punktown with her.
“Fuck it,” he said.
Huck had turned back around to continue watching the tribe saunter and swagger off to another section of the Jungle, still distantly hooting and hollering like lunatics, when his wrist comp beeped. He didn’t need to look at its screen to know it was the call – and the summons -- he had been expecting.
* * *
When Phlone had called saying he wanted to meet with him, Huck had told the Choom he could find him at the restaurant Pho Paxton, which served Vietnamese fare. A public place…not that Neptune Teeb’s people, including Huck, hadn’t hit people in public places before. And that was the reason for the meeting in the first place.
Like Huck, Phlone worked directly under the man they called Wild Bill, right hand and heir apparent to the Neptune Teeb crime syndy. Wild Bill in turn had always called Huck -- half-jokingly – Mad-Dog Huck. “Wild Bill and Mad-Dog,” he would tell Huck. “We should be a movie.”
Phlone, on the other hand, was known on the streets less romantically as Squash, which as a mutant his head vaguely resembled with its elongated form and yellowish color. A partly rotten and wrinkling squash at that. As both a Choom and a mutant Phlone was one of the least nondescript gangsters in Punktown, but then again there wasn’t exactly a shortage of nonhumans or mutants in the city.
With Phlone never having tried Vietnamese food before, Huck helped him order. Their waitress was a slim woman wearing a white blouse and tight black slacks that clung to a small spherical bottom, her long hair shimmering black and face severely beautiful. Her manner was chilly, however, all business; when Huck had said, “Hello, Hien,” the woman had acted as though she hadn’t heard him. As she began walking away from the table Huck shook his head and remarked loudly to Phlone, “I used to date Hien, and now she won’t give me the time of day. You see that? A woman sucks every last drop of blood out of your bank account and then she flicks you away like a snot. I’m not saying every Vietnamese girl is a low-class childish whore who’d sell her mother’s soul for enough money to buy a designer handbag – just every one that I’ve known.”
As she passed into the kitchen, Hien threw an even more severe glance back at their table, and Phlone warned, “Man, she heard that, you know. You want her to spit in your food?”
“I’ve traded spit with the bitch before,” Huck said casually, stirring his thick, super-sweet coffee. “I’m sure she did worse to my food when I was fucking her.”
“Same old Huck,” Phlone said. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “And good old Huck got the job done at the casino…but what a mess, man, what a mess.”
Huck sucked a film of sweetened condensed milk off his spoon, and meeting the mutant’s eyes said, “I know what this is about, Squash, so you don’t have to draw it out. You’re giving me the axe.”
“Not me, Huck. Wild Bill.”
“Right, right. So now you’re going to give me a severance package.”
“Yes. And a generous one.”
“Of course. And then, a month from now, or six months from now, I get my head severed as an extra bonus.”
“Huck.” Phlone leaned toward him across the table. “You know Wild Bill. He’s not disloyal, and he’s not ungrateful.”
“But he’s not stupid. He sees me as a loose cannon. A risk.”
“He just sees you as a good worker who’s reached the end of his useful employment. He doesn’t forget what you’ve done for the family. Teeb himself won’t forget what you’ve done for the family.”
“Why am I so special?” Huck sipped his ca phe sua. “Mad-dog psycho killers are a dime a dozen in this town.”
“You’re a king among psycho killers, Huck.” Phlone tried to make a joke of it to change the other man’s brooding, distrustful mood. “What was your secret, anyway?”
“Part of my secret is never get personal, but seeing as this is my retirement party and all, I’ll tell you my life story.” Huck set down his cup, sat back and smiled crookedly. “I don’t give a mutant’s last shit about anything, Squash. I spent most my childhood in ‘care centers’ that were glorified kennels, tended by robots. I spent my teens on the streets, and you could go gang or lone wolf and I went lone wolf ‘cause it made me less dependent. So I have no love for anybody. As far as I’m concerned, I had no parents. I have no siblings. I have no friends. I’ll sell myself to the highest bidder, and that was always Neptune Teeb. If it h
ad been someone else, I’d be taking my severance package from them, now. I guess you could say I like you, Squash, as much as I’ve ever liked anybody, but if our pretty waitress comes back here now and hands me ten thousand munits to kill you…well, you won’t leave this restaurant alive.”
Phlone chuckled uneasily. “You’d do me for just ten thousand munits, buddy?”
“Five thousand,” Huck reconsidered, not blinking as he held his colleague’s stare. “I’m lowering my rates, now that I’m unemployed and all.” Now it was his turn to lean across the table with emphasis. “Tell me, Squash…Wild Bill could have gone two ways with this. He could have killed me, because he’s afraid of me, or he could have let me live because he’s afraid of me. But he is afraid of me, isn’t he?”
Ghosts of Punktown Page 21
