Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  He shot one kid in the stomach just as he parted the stalks to enter the clearing, and when the boy dropped screaming Huck noted an interesting thing. The boy was writhing and babbling in Spanish from the agony in his guts, but not only that -- he was also shielding his face from sap that poured from some of the stalks, which had been broken by Huck’s bullets. Again, how long it took to break down the body of a submerged insect he couldn’t say, but the plant’s digestive juice had an effect like hydrochloric acid on human skin. Huck began to laugh again. What kind of idiots made their shelter in the middle of a field of plants that bled acid? If it weren’t for their numbers, it wouldn’t be sporting killing them at all. Huck stepped closer to the boy, and instead of shooting him fired the Panzer into the stalks clustered around him. More digestive fluid spilled and spattered, and the kid’s jabbering turned into incomprehensible howls.

  Stupid…he’d let his fun distract him…a hammer blow in the back of his right thigh, followed quickly by a deep hot pain, and he knew that a bullet had pierced him. He turned and crouched at the same time, but several more solid projectiles smacked him in the right side of the chest, and although his jacket’s gel padding protected him it was just enough of a push to send him onto his back. So not all these kids were totally dumb after all – one of them, at least, had been smart enough to hide in the tall weeds and shoot at him from there. As the shooter adjusted his aim to follow Huck to the ground, the hookah was hit and shattered.

  Huck had fallen beside the boy with the assault rifle, but now all that remained of him was a puddle of liquefied matter and two legs melted down to the calves. Huck dropped his Thor, reached to the assault rifle and dragged it to him. It was a nice model, actually, a coilgun using electromagnetic acceleration to fire ferromagnetic bullets at a high rate without the need for explosive cartridges. It had an automatic feature, and this was what Huck used as he opened fire toward the concealed shooter. Several more shots from the weeds kicked up dirt near Huck’s head, and he squinted and averted his face but depressed the coilgun’s trigger and strafed it back and forth blindly. The gun hummed, without recoil, fed magnetic bullets from a big box magazine. Huck cut down the weeds all around the shooter, and cut down the shooter, too.

  He rose to his feet, grimacing at the burning in his leg. Leveling the assault rifle from his hip, he once again turned in a circle -- firing around the perimeter of the clearing until the box magazine ran empty. He stopped just short of strafing the complete border of the clearing.

  Huck discarded the coilgun and retrieved the Thor, but he tucked this back in its holster and instead walked over to the boy who’d been sitting cross-legged, helping himself to the fallen shotgun. A primitive but classic pump model. He lifted it, racked the slide to feed in the first shell, then took a quick survey of the clearing.

  Ten dead bodies, and probably a few more in the weeds. Two kids were badly wounded and moaning. Huck walked to one, and then the other, and discharged the shotgun at their heads at point-blank range. Between killing the two of them he passed beside the shattered hookah and noticed the freed jellyfish pulsing in a pool of fluid. He experienced a marginal stirring of sympathy that he hadn’t felt for the wounded boys, and squished the creature under his foot to put it out of its suffering.

  Twelve dead bodies now, a few more in the weeds -- and Huck remembered Renaldo saying he himself had had to kill two that the girl had maimed. Some wounded escapees, maybe some kids at home or out on the streets, but there might still be a dozen or more gang members out there in the Jungle somewhere.

  Huck limped to that small section of weeds he hadn’t strafed with the coilgun – safely free of dripping acid – and pushed his way into them. So, hide and go seek, was it? Kids will be kids.

  An afterthought, overlooked in all the gunplay and pain: Huck glanced back over his shoulder and saw the dismembered remnants of the android’s body there amidst the carnage. He considered going back for at least the head, but to do what with it? There was nothing he could do for his little “friend” now. That is, other than continue with what he had started.

  * * *

  Not far from the clearing – but past the growth of acid-filled stalks – Huck came upon several swing sets and slides, and a large jungle gym, all of which were so encased in vines and lost in bushes that he didn’t realize they were there until he started to trip over a leg of the jungle gym. The jolt to his leg caused him to wince and lean against the metal framework for support. Lucky for him the bullet hadn’t exited, or it might have severed his femoral artery and he’d have bled out in minutes. As it was, though, he was still bleeding heavily: his right shoe was filled, his sock soaked. He had briefly considered bringing some medicated adhesive patches to seal wounds and numb pain -- but had decided not to bother.

  Rustling bushes on the other side of the trellis that was the jungle gym. Huck sank down to hands and knees, and pushed his head through the underbrush, crawled between the jungle gym’s supports like a child at play. A little further, and he was inside the metal structure, which was like the framework of a primitive house. But he wasn’t the first to have considered using the climbing frame as shelter: the bushes had been cleared from its center, a thick plastic tarp laid down. The inevitable trash was strewn around, plus a soggy pair of men’s underwear. Huck waited here, listening as the rustling grew closer, and along with it urgent whispered voices.

  Peering intently through the leaves, in elusive fragments he glimpsed a pair of dark figures passing the jungle gym. A mother walking with her child? Two boys come to play catch? Not in this park, unless they were strangers to Punktown. With no further need for identification, Huck lifted the shotgun and fired two jolting blasts. Short cries of surprise, bodies crashing to the ground, and then he was scrambling out from his little tribal hut and forcing himself fast to his feet despite the pain in his leg. Two boys with film loop tattoos, of course, one stone dead and the other flailing in the leaves and yelping and whimpering like a panic-stricken dog. When he saw Huck loom up over him the boy tried to raise his pistol, but one ball of buckshot had shattered his elbow. Huck leaned over him, blew his head apart, and then loped away down the overgrown and nearly obscured paved path the gang kids had been taking when they’d come to investigate the sounds of battle – though Huck traveled in the opposite direction.

  He’d only covered several yards when a red spear of light sizzled the air by his head; he actually saw it burn a hole through a leaf the size of a dinner plate on a bush that overhung the walkway. He wheeled around, just as two more streaking red bolts contacted him in the arm and shoulder. They seemed to disappear into his body, but in fact his jacket’s protective lining had shielded him once again. Someone had leaned out from behind a tree, pointing a ray blaster. It was a tall black kid Huck remembered from the clearing, a mutant with just one eye: a shocking white orb like a cue ball jammed in the center of his forehead. One of those who’d escaped the massacre unharmed.

  Huck was triggering the shotgun the moment he turned -- two jarring booms. The magazine extension under the gun’s barrel had held seven shells, and now the gun clicked empty. Huck dropped it and drew his pistols again, but he saw that the boy had fallen, sobbing as he rolled in the grass cupping his face in one hand. The shotgun blasts, as it turned out, hadn’t struck the boy fatally -- one had simply gouged up the tree he’d hidden behind, while the other had made a tattered rag out of his gun hand. Not only that, though; the ray blaster had been damaged by the buckshot, and a shard of metal had punctured the mutant’s single eye. Realizing this as he came closer, Huck told the kid, “You see, this is what we artists call a ‘happy accident.’” He then drilled two rounds from the Panzer into the mutant’s heart, through the body of the man being executed in his tattoo. The boy quit moving, though the tattoo went on playing its grisly film loop…as though the man in the chair were Prometheus tied to his rock, having his liver torn out by an eagle only to have it regenerate to be eaten again, and again. Huck supposed his suff
ering would end only when the electrical impulses of the boy’s body ceased altogether, cutting the tattoo’s power source.

  As Huck continued, setting out to further explore the Jungle, another path joined the one he was on. Along it, oblivious to him, a person – presumably a male – crawled on hands and knees with agonizing slowness, leaving a swath of blood behind. The flesh was sloughing away from the individual like meat from the bones of a boiled chicken, and at first Huck thought the person might have been spattered with plasma, but then understood it was acid from the bug-catching stalks – no doubt one of those gang kids who had fled into the weeds, but hadn’t gotten far enough when Huck started spraying the coilgun. The crawling burn victim remained unaware of Huck even when he walked right up and put a bullet through the crown of the hairless, peeling head.

  He hadn’t even broken stride when he’d shot the acid-burned kid, walked right on past the body along the main path. Ahead, through a fringe of coniferous trees, he could see the area opened up in a much larger clearing than the camp where he’d killed Renaldo – this spot having been planned as such by the park’s designers, perhaps to serve as a playing field. Huck passed through its border of trees, strode crookedly toward its center. It was quite an open field, this species of grass not grown as wild as the grass in other parts of the park, tramped down yellowish-brown and mostly dead instead. To Huck, the field had the feel of an arena.

  At the very center of the field he stopped, and exchanged the handguns’ magazines for fresh ones. He zipped up the front of his jacket – though he hated to wear it that way, since it made him feel too stiff. Then, his arms hanging by his sides, guns in both hands, his leg throbbing with a molten ache but still supporting him, he stood there in the wide circular arena…and waited.

  He might have fired his guns in the air, had they not been silenced. Instead he shouted once, “Come on! I haven’t got all day!”

  He heard a dog barking somewhere, maybe a feral one living in the Jungle. Above him, he felt the weight of the high solid ceiling of this great sepulcher dubbed Subtown. He watched helicars in the distance, flying above the level of the park’s trees like scavenging sea birds over the vast rotten carcass that was Punktown. And over there he could see his apartment building, his own windows on its top floor. Was a lingering vestige of himself, a trace of him like a ghost, standing at a window even now, watching him and waiting, too? As perhaps a part of him had watched and waited for this day for several decades now?

  The dog wouldn’t stop barking. Mad-Dog Huck, his boss Wild Bill would jokingly call him. He smiled. Yeah, sure. And a mad dog didn’t go out lying on a porch getting gray in the muzzle and milky-eyed. A mad dog went out biting.

  Then, the bullets started coming. He was far enough from the ring of trees hemming the field that the first ones – directed from his right -- missed, but he felt impacts across his upper back from another shooter behind him. As he whipped around, firing toward both shooters at once, a projectile from a third direction smashed him on the jaw. His mind blacked, though his hands kept firing as if running on their own programs. He shot toward the hidden shooters specifically, but kept turning dizzily, turning, firing, and the green plasma from the Thor – plasma which in its brief flickering life fed on any matter, not only human flesh and bone – seemed to catch the ring of evergreen trees on fire. The green, phosphorescent substance spread rapidly, until branches flared with an unearthly light before turning into a dripping, raining fall of plasma. The shooters gathered around the perimeter of the field, holding back amongst those trees, began screaming in a terrible banshee chorus. Huck continued turning, firing the plasma, and firing solid missiles into that green-lit inferno as well, until – his dizziness overcoming him – he dropped onto his side.

  One kid who had been hiding amongst the trees stumbled out into the field, waving arms that had already tapered to stubs near the elbows, his ribs showing through his chest. Lying on his side, Huck reached out almost casually and shot at him with the Panzer, but missed. After a few more steps the kid fell onto his face anyway.

  Bits of grass, dirt and pebbles jetted up from the ground in a marching eruption, accompanied by the chatter of automatic fire. The line of bullets stitched toward Huck, then over his body without penetrating. A short, badly overweight young man with question marks tattooed all over his shaved head and face came roaring out of the phantasmal, glowing and melting trees like a berserker, extending a machine pistol with a banana magazine. Drops of plasma were opening small craters all over him, and spreading to join each other in larger craters. Even as he charged at Huck, his nose caved in and joined his mouth to make one huge orifice. He couldn’t sustain his charge after that, plunged onto his belly, but in doing so squeezed off one last burst of rounds. One of these struck Huck’s left hand, and he let go of the Thor .93. The fat boy lay twitching on his face, while Huck pulled his knees under him, and used his right fist with the Panzer in it to push himself to his feet. Once standing, he tucked the Panzer into its holster, tottered toward the dying youth, and with a grunt of agony bent down to pry the machine pistol out of the kid’s sausage-like fingers. The gun was hard plastic, clear with a smoke gray tint, like a toy. But it was fully automatic, and it had that long curved magazine.

  Then, like a sleepwalker, Huck began staggering from the center of the field, toward one area of the surrounding trees where the plasma hadn’t turned the trees molten or had already exhausted itself. He was so focused on this spot, shadowed dark like a doorway, that he didn’t hear the boy racing at him from behind, swinging a machete. The blow was aimed at the center of his head yet missed by a fraction, deflecting off the curved edge of his skull but taking his right ear off before the blade was stopped by the leather jacket across Huck’s shoulder. Without taking the time to turn around just yet, Huck bent his arm back and fired the machine pistol upside down over the same shoulder, one short burst. Only then did he turn, almost losing his balance again, saw a Tikkihotto boy lying on the ground with several holes in his body, and gave him several more. Then, he resumed his dragging march toward that shadowed corridor of trees.

  Shots cracking behind him, bullets snapping branches and red ray bolts hissing through leaves, but Huck put a little speed into his loping flight and made it back into the forest. Pursuing shouts, forces consolidating, but how many left? Maybe six, he figured, eight tops if none of the gang were outside of the Jungle -- but of those, how many were unharmed enough to still engage him?

  He crashed through the riotous shrubbery between the trunks, across a bed of needles red like a carpet of drying blood, feeling his own blood pulse down the side of his neck and under his collar from the wound where his ear had been. His smashed hand he’d stuffed into the pocket of his jacket. Blood was flowing down his throat from the hole in his jaw, and he couldn’t help swallowing it. He gagged, fell against a trunk to vomit blood between his feet until the last retch brought up only phantom glass shards that raked his throat, then pushed himself away from the tree to resume moving…and resumed swallowing his blood. That would be poetic, he thought, wouldn’t it – death by drowning in his own blood?

  The miniature forest opened up yet again, and he found himself facing a broad walkway. On the other side of it was the park’s man-made pond, and near that a large gazebo that had been meant as a bandstand for live music. Instead it was thick with graffiti and overgrown with leafy tendrils so that it was largely enclosed. Huck considered finding shelter within it, or maybe he could crawl beneath it, and ambush the remaining gang kids when they appeared. Maybe he could even close his eyes for a while under there…rest…just for a short while…

  No. No. His legs urged him mechanically toward some other destination…but as he turned away to skirt the edge of the pond, out of the tail of his eye he caught a metallic glimmer inside the leafy tendrils woven about the gazebo.

  The machine pistol leapt up, instincts responding despite their agonizing distractions, and the plastic gun clattered as Huck hosed the
gazebo with slugs, back and forth with even strokes as if spray painting it from afar. Wood chips flew, leafy tendrils were shredded, and as the gazebo’s obscuring growth became reduced three figures could be glimpsed inside briefly before they dropped. Huck followed them to the floor of the gazebo until the gun’s long banana mag ran out. He then tossed the gun, drew his Panzer once more, lingered a moment to see if any of the figures stirred. He thought they might be wounded escapees from the opening massacre, who had regrouped here to wait things out, or maybe they had been healthy gangers waiting for him to come closer before they sprang a surprise. Well, they weren’t healthy now. There was no stirring, and Huck continued along the rim of the stagnant pool.

  He glanced down to his left at the water, and in an open patch in its thick layer of bright green scum he saw a submerged face gazing back at him. His heart convulsed, as he expected a hidden shooter to burst to the surface then and open up on him. Or were those the eyes of the mysterious naiad he had dreamed of? He had brought his gun up, pointed it at the face, and was about to fire when he realized it was his own reflection.

  There was gunfire then, but it came from another – behind him. Wild, frantic shots…poorly aimed…yet one slug clapped him in the right buttock, exiting through his groin, while another bored into the calf of his good leg. Now with both legs compromised, Huck lost his balance in the middle of turning to face his attacker, and fell backwards into the marshy weeds at the very border of the pond.