Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Stupid wankers,” Huck grumbled. Such were the amusements of Punktown. As a boy playing in a vacant lot he’d once found two human hands severed at the wrists, pressed together and bound with wire in an attitude of prayer. Punks playing with a body part didn’t surprise him much. But as he stared at the little limb lying there on the sidewalk like a dead fish, he noted that it appeared devoid of blood…even its torn end. So not a real body part, then? Maybe the limb of a mannequin?

  As he continued watching, a human leg emerged from between the bars, small enough to complement the disembodied arm. Its bare sole slapped the sidewalk, perhaps in imitation of dance though its audience had already fled. It was then withdrawn back into the bushes, to another mad burst of laughter.

  He was too removed to have seen it clearly, but the leg had appeared pristine, also apparently not bloodied. Had to be a mannequin, then. Or…

  Having turned back toward his bed, he squatted and drew a case out from under it. From this case he lifted a black, Kalian-made sniper rifle called a Whistler, and he carried it back to the window, lifted it and cradled its butt against his shoulder. He thumbed on its little magnifying screen and sighted on the arm on the sidewalk. Now he could clearly see that the smooth limb not only wasn’t bloody, but bore no bruising or discolorations from decomposition. From the chopped stump protruded the ends of some tubing and a glinting nub of metal, not bone.

  “No,” Huck hissed to himself. “Don’t tell me that’s her.” Her – the little rogue pleasure machine who’d berated him for his rudeness as she’d left the elevator they’d been trapped in together. She was of the right size and coloring. And she was pretty much a mannequin.

  A mannequin whose feelings he’d hurt.

  Huck shifted the barrel of the Whistler toward the bushes from which the leg had been extended, thumbed filter keys beside the display screen to cancel out the green hues of the leaves. With the clusters of leaves now rendered ghostly and translucent, behind them were revealed some sheets of gray plastic laid on the ground, but whoever had crouched there upon them had already withdrawn and taken the leg along with them. Too bad. Huck had considered giving the prankster some of his own brand of amusement. He lowered the rifle, returned it to its case and nudged this back under the bed with his foot.

  He glanced back at the window over his shoulder.

  Huck had killed men and women, humans and nonhumans. He’d killed robots, too – members of the rival Nuts gang. He’d once boasted to Phlone that he’d killed half of the alien races Punktown had to offer, and that was a lot, and that his goal was to kill at least one each of the other half before he retired – or died. Ha. They were really the same thing, weren’t they? Retirement and death?

  So with his score of kills, the murder of some pint-sized synthetic whore who’d insulted him should hardly matter much to him, should it? He’d done worse, seen worse, and right now worse was happening all over the city. And tomorrow was another day in Punktown.

  “Hang up the guns,” Phlone had told him. Huck snorted. Hang up your life, he might as well have said.

  Huck let out a long sigh, and a bitter smile formed in the underbrush of his beard. “Ah, why the hell not?” he said, and reached for his clothing draped over the back of a chair.

  * * *

  Evening was descending in Subtown, but regularly spaced lights came on in the park to offer security to lovers and families who hadn’t dared stroll there for a long time. As he entered it, Huck at first felt like he had the park all to himself.

  But gradually the sounds of other beings drifted to him – laughter, boisterous conversations – and he went off the paved pathway to follow them. He was a child of the city, unused to stealth in the forest, but he soon gave up trying to lessen the snapping of twigs and rustling of branches. He entered into a field of grass grown taller than himself, and from there passed into a dense growth of tubular stalks with crowns of fronds. He paused for a few moments when he realized these clear tubes were filled with some ambery-colored fluid in which were suspended the tiny carcasses of various insect species. How long it would take for these plants to digest their prey he couldn’t guess – these bugs might have been caught minutes or days ago for all he knew. A native species, or something from another world seeded in the park? Maybe even a mutant species? Huck smiled to himself when he noted that even the plants in Punktown were killers.

  Pushing on through the stalks, shouldering his way between them, he ultimately came to a circular area where the ground looked scorched black, to prevent cleared tubes from growing anew. Here were gathered fifteen people (his experienced eyes had taken a fast head count); thirteen males and two females. All shirtless, all with the film loop tattoo of the prisoner having his throat cut and his head hacked off. Huck parted the last stalks with his arms as if passing through a stage curtain, and stepped into the clearing. Fifteen heads turned his way.

  They looked wary; hands went to the deep pockets of their fatigue pants or machetes lying on the ground beside them. A boy sitting cross-legged retrieved a shotgun he had set down by his knee. A boy who was standing hooked his thumb under the strap of an assault rifle he wore slung over his shoulder. But another boy pointed at Huck, split into a grin, and exclaimed drunkenly, “Hey, I know that guy!”

  A kind of hookah served as the nucleus of the gathering, its central clear globe containing gurgling fluid in which a live jellyfish floated. Discarded beer cans and the crumpled wrappings of fast food littered the area. And on the ground not far from the hookah, like another piece of trash, lay a small female torso, nude and without head or limbs. The places where head and limbs had once been attached looked messily hacked, where a tough inner support structure had resisted dismantling. Despite its impressive breasts and the indent of its navel – dark and wrinkled like a closed eye -- the little torso was not human. The fact that it was riddled with bullet holes, none of which leaked blood, further attested to this – though a watery liquid, a lubricant or circulatory fluid as green as sap, had trickled from several of the wounds.

  Where the limbs had ended up Huck couldn’t tell, but one standing boy with lowered trousers had impaled a girl’s head on his erect penis. He had been laughing uproariously before Huck entered the clearing, moving the head forward and back along the length of his shaft. Another boy with lowered trousers stood beside him, holding out his hands and wiggling his fingers like a child eager for his turn with a toy. This second boy was in the early stages of addiction to the drug called “fish,” as evidenced by his bulging eyes, fixed grin and most telling, the purple pigmentation of his skeletal body. Huck couldn’t see the face of the detached head, but long black hair hung toward the ground.

  The grinning boy exclaimed further, “It’s that drunken bum we talked to, Renaldo!”

  One seated figure rose to his feet, and Huck recognized him: maybe twenty, thickset and shortish, with his head shaved bald except for a patch of hair in the shape of a lightning bolt. Renaldo stepped forward, chuckling. “Hey hey, it’s my role model! I didn’t recognize you, man -- you look different today.” The clan’s leader cocked his head, narrowed his eyes. “I know why…it’s because you’re sober.”

  “Yeah,” joked another gang member, who held the nozzle of the hose connected to the hookah. “That’s why he’s here – he wants to puff our bender!”

  “That’s not what I want,” Huck said in a low, even voice. He motioned toward the torso on the ground. “I came here to get my friend.”

  Renaldo glanced toward the pathetic object, then back to Huck with a grin that reflected amusement, surprise, and wariness. The wariness was more in the eyes than the grin. “Your friend?”

  “Yes. I want her…and I’ll go.”

  “You got an interesting friend, there. She can’t be much fun…she’s got no fuck holes.”

  “She does now,” interjected another of the clan, pointing at the wounds that peppered the tiny carcass. “Renaldo, you missed it – Carny was fucking her in one of the bullet
holes before!”

  “This is all the hole I need,” said the boy holding the long-haired head.

  No fuck holes? Huck didn’t want to distract himself by pondering that statement just now.

  “Do you know what your friend did today, amigo?” Renaldo asked, his grin twitching at the corners as if its moorings might give way. “She walked into our camp here and tore the faces off two of my friends. I had to shoot them myself to put them out of their misery. Yeah…I buried two of my friends right here in the park today, because of your friend.”

  “I’m sure her actions were totally unprovoked.”

  “They were!” insisted a mutant with the fang-filled face of a piranha, moving up beside Renaldo. “We didn’t do anything to that bitch – she just came up to us and starting tearing us apart! If I hadn’t emptied two mags in her she would’ve got me, next!”

  “Seems like your friend might have blown a circuit or two,” Renaldo said.

  “I don’t know anything about all that. All I know is I’m taking her with me.”

  Renaldo shook his head in disbelief, just as he had when he’d talked with Huck that first time. “Crazy. Drunk or sober, you’re just as momfuck crazy, aren’t you?” He waved his arm toward the corpse, which looked more like something ready to be placed on a pan and slid into an oven. “Hey, take her – she’s yours.”

  Huck hadn’t taken his eyes off Renaldo’s since the gang’s chief had come forward. “Thanks,” he muttered, then turned and walked to the body, bent down and scooped it up in his left arm. Having done so, he turned toward the boy who carried the severed head, held out his hand for it.

  “I’m not finished, old man,” the boy protested. He wore his hair in a knotted French braid, and if there was a look Huck disliked more than a lightning bolt shaved on your skull it was a male with his hair knotted in a French braid.

  Renaldo walked over to the boy, wrapped his fist in the disembodied head’s long black hair and jerked it off his friend’s jutting penis. “Give me that.”

  “Ow!” the boy cried. “Teeth, man!”

  Now holding the dangling head, its features still obscured by tangled strands, Renaldo turned around to face Huck again. He advanced a few paces to where someone had jammed the tip of a machete into the carbonized ground, so that it stood upright like a poor man’s Excalibur. In fact, it was more a sword than a machete; Huck recognized it as a replica of a classical Tikkihotto weapon, with a cruel spike jutting out of the pommel.

  “Here she is, my crazy friend,” Renaldo said, and in extending the head, he brought its stump down on the spike of that Tikkihotto sword – impaling it like a trophy of war. “come and get it,” he said, gesturing magnanimously.

  Huck hesitated a moment, then walked toward the head, his eyes remaining on Renaldo, though peripherally he saw one dark eye glinting through the black curtain of hair, and the head’s slack little mouth. He reached out, lifted the head off the spike, and transferred it to his left hand, holding it by the hair while still cradling the body against his side with his left arm. His right hand remained free.

  “Thanks,” he said, and he turned his back to Renaldo slowly.

  “Hey,” the gang leader said, when Huck had taken a single step.

  Huck froze, but did not turn around.

  Renaldo came closer to him. His tone was more menacing than amicable now. “I told you – two of my friends are dead because of your little doll.”

  “And now she’s dead,” Huck replied. “I’d say you’re even.”

  “Even?” Renaldo took another step nearer. “I said two.”

  Huck smiled, his gaze for a moment drifting beyond the bushy tops of the stalks that enclosed the crude camp. From here, he could see the face of his apartment building, partly covered in dark vines. As if to himself, he answered, “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

  A half twist of his body and he had the handle of the Tikkihotto sword in his right hand. A little further in his twist and the point of the sword came free of the ground. A full twist, and the sword whooshed through the air, and through the front of Renaldo’s throat. The young man’s eyes bulged, and even his blood seemed stunned in surprise for a moment before it burst down the front of his chest and across his tattoo in a dark waterfall, splashing upon his feet. As Renaldo stumbled backwards, his head tipped far back and came half uncapped from his body. His open neck sucked and wheezed, and then he toppled. But Huck hadn’t waited to see any of this. He had already let go of the sword – and the remnants of the little robot’s body. Instead, both hands were slipping under the flaps of his open leather jacket.

  When his guns were out – the Thor .93 in his left hand and the Panzer in his right – he swiveled and fired first at two boys in particular, whose positions he had fixed in his head. Before the boy seated cross-legged could raise his shotgun, he took a double tap of metal projectiles from the Panzer, the combined effect splitting his head down to the nose in a gaping V. The Thor was loaded with gel capsules containing green plasma, the strongest variety, and one of these burst against the forehead of the boy with the assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He started to scream, but it degraded into a sputtering mewl as the top of his head liquefied and collapsed in on itself. Within moments, his entire head had dissolved, like a candle melting in time lapse photography. He was still on his feet for another moment more before finally crumpling to the ground, where the green-glowing blanket of hungry plasma continued to spread down his chest.

  Huck whirled with arms extended, firing both pistols simultaneously at the standing gang members first – they being in a better position to draw guns from their trousers, or rush him with their machetes. Spent shell casings spewed from the Panzer’s ejector port, and plasma gel caps raced from the muzzle of the Thor as fast as he could pull the semiautomatic’s trigger -- and there were sixty of the latter in a single magazine. Not that he didn’t have more magazines for both pistols in his pockets. Both handguns possessed an internal silencing feature, so they made no loud reports, but there was noise enough from the gang members as they shouted and bellowed in surprise and rage, and wailed and shrieked as they were hit and died.

  The others hadn’t been as fixed in his mind’s sights as had the boys with the shotgun and assault rifle, so he only wounded some of them – but in the case of the plasma, even a hit to the shoulder or leg would prove fatal soon enough as it rapidly advanced like luminous green lava. One of the women lay on her back shrilling and staring down at her own body, or where her own body had once been – it was completely gone below the hips.

  Three bullets struck Huck in the back. His leather jacket was torn, but its gel lining absorbed the impacts so that it only felt like someone had slapped him several times with an open hand. Huck spun, fired three quick shots of his own. It was the boy who had been violating the android’s decapitated head. One bullet smashed through his front teeth and came out the back of his neck, sending chunks of vertebrae scattering like a handful of bloody dice. Another bullet, also passing through his mouth, even flicked the tail of his knotted French braid. This caused Huck to laugh wildly. He was still laughing when he snapped his head around to confront a boy who was racing at him with an upraised machete. The boy was only several feet away when Huck shot him in the eye with a gel cap, and then he stepped aside to avoid the boy as he went howling face-first into the ground. The boy managed to get to his knees and bring his hands up to catch the hot, drooling gunk that had been his face, but it only caused his hands to swiftly start dissolving, too. Huck kicked him out of his way, as he continued pivoting and triggering both pistols.

  A boy making a dash for the encircling weeds took one bullet from the Panzer – Huck wasn’t even sure where it hit him, maybe in the spine or through the heart from behind – and instantly plunged onto his belly. He couldn’t be faking death to avoid further injury…not the way his face impacted with the ground. Huck had seen men punched full of holes take a long time to die, had seen men survive even serious head w
ounds, while others like this kid died before they hit the ground. Died like a light switch had been thrown. It had partly to do with a killer’s skill, but much more to do with the vagaries of bodies and bullets. It was one of the elements of the unexpected that had kept this game intriguing for so long.

  A number of the gang members made it successfully into the towering weeds, some wounded and a lucky few unscathed, but others were appearing from the weeds, having been drawn by the sounds of combat. Huck was not surprised, had been expecting this – he had counted fifteen youths in the clearing, but on his last visit to the park had seen more like twice that number. Some of them may have gone home for the night, if they had homes outside the park, but Huck suspected this was not their only camp within the Jungle’s borders.