Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Water splashed in his face, and he spluttered, tried to sit up but found that the effort crucified him to the ground with countless spikes of pain. Falling onto his back again, his head resting in mud and slime, Huck stared up at the solid ceiling of Subtown high above him. He lifted his gun then – he could do that at least – and fired it at the network of pipelines and conduits, the bundles of sheathed power cables, one of the overhead lamps that in the day would cast bright artificial sunlight but which had dimmed for the evening. His bullets might have found the lamp’s covering yet did not shatter it, did not rupture any pipeline, but he imagined the projectiles punching through the ceiling, and rocketing into the city of Punktown itself above him. Smashing windows, shooting down helicars from the sky to crash into the sides of buildings in balls of fire. He jerked the trigger again and again until the Panzer, and his arm, grew too heavy to uphold any longer and both splashed into the rancid water.

  Huck stared straight up, panting between swallows of his blood…and waiting. He didn’t have to wait long before he heard urgent, whispered voices. One voice hissed, “Don’t go near him, man – he’s playing dead!”

  “I’m not playing,” Huck croaked, though he wasn’t sure they heard him.

  Then without having to lift his head, he saw three figures leaning over him warily, silhouetted against the lamp glow. Two had guns trained on him. One of these was a boy with a row of implanted metal spikes running across the top of his hairless head like a Mohawk haircut. The other was a mutant with the razor-jawed face of a piranha. Accompanying them, without an apparent weapon, was a boy plainly addicted to the drug called fish, his withered skin already turning dark purple. Under one arm, like a soccer ball, this youth carried a disembodied head with long black hair.

  “Well well, look at you,” the boy with the spiked crest snarled. “Not so tough anymore, huh, you momfuck psycho?”

  “Hi, friend, hiii!” the fish addict squealed in a falsetto, holding the head up for Huck to see and nodding it like it was speaking. A marionette missing the rest of its body.

  The mutant turned to the fish addict and jutted his chin toward the android’s severed head. “Why the blast are you still carrying that, you crazy fudger?”

  “Two reasons. A – this fucker wanted it so bad, but we’ve still got it…that means we win! And B – she gives the best head I’ve ever had.”

  The mutant pretended he was going to backhand his friend with his pistol. “The only head you’ve ever had.”

  Ignoring their exchange, the spiked boy hadn’t taken his eyes or his gun off Huck. He demanded, “What is it with you? What did we do to you to deserve all this?”

  Huck rasped, “You don’t deserve to live any more than I do.”

  “You got that last part right, you crazy –”

  Up from the water splashed the Panzer, and the fish addict said, “Hey!”

  The Panzer’s muzzle flashed, at the same time the spike-headed boy’s gun barked once -- and in one of those unintentional acts of artistry that Huck would have appreciated, their bullets passed each other in flight and both men were struck precisely in the center of the forehead.

  HANAKO

  5

  “Here, eat some of my candy,” she heard one voice whisper.

  “I don’t want that…I want my fish,” another voice whined childishly.

  “Shh! You’ll just have to wait for that, you fudging junkie – the forcers are probably still combing the Jungle!”

  Hanako’s vision returned after her hearing did. It had been this way; sometimes she heard but didn’t see, sometimes she saw but didn’t hear, sometimes she regained both senses together or else lost them both for unknown gaps of time.

  She found she was lying on her cheek, her head pillowed on her own hair, and a large sheet of gray plastic under her. Not far from her, two people sat on another flat piece of plastic. Several of these sheets, probably from a construction site, had been laid down on the trampled grass here, inside a cave-like nook formed from thick vegetation. The two people were a young mutant with a fish-like face – whom she recalled as having shot her many times -- and a scrawny purple-skinned boy whose film loop tattoo was distorted by the wasted boniness of his chest.

  “Are you sure they took Viktor, Igor and Alex?” the purple boy asked.

  “I saw it myself! Stupid fucks came strolling into the park, right into the forcers’ arms!”

  “They must not’ve known what happened here.”

  “What, they didn’t hear the gunfire? Half of Subtown must’ve heard it!”

  “Then we’re the only two left, aren’t we?” the purple boy said.

  “Looks that way, unless they let the others go…but we can’t wait around for that. We’ll lie low until I see the coast is clear, then we’ll get out of here – probably in the morning. We’ll be easy pickings for our enemies if we don’t. The forcers I’m not worried about…they’ll wrap up quick and all will be forgotten. You think they care a whole bunch of gangers got snuffed tonight? They’ll throw a blasting party!”

  Hanako’s consciousness blanked for a time after that. When her awareness sputtered back, and her senses with it, she found she was resting upright on her neck stump. She didn’t want to know why she had been repositioned, what had transpired since last overhearing the conversation of the two youths; maybe, she considered, she had even shut down her awareness purposely but now couldn’t recall having done so. Whatever further indignities she might have endured, and had yet to endure, she couldn’t even blink, let alone bite, and she regretted that immobility.

  From this angle she could see the purple boy had crawled into the bushes, his back to her, parting branches with his arms to reveal the bars of the fence that surrounded the park. Over his shoulder he giggled to his friend, “I see two little bitchies coming – let’s scare them with the head!”

  “Don’t be stupid, fudger! Get back over here before they see you!”

  “You thought it was funny with her arms and legs.”

  “That was before the forcers came to the Jungle!” the mutant hissed. “I said get back over here! We’re supposed to be lying low, drooler!”

  The purple boy sighed heavily like a petulant child, turned around and seemed to meet Hanako’s eyes. He looked unsettled for a moment, almost surprised – as if he had caught a glimmer of her continued sentience – but he broke the contact and stretched out on his side on one of the plastic sheets. The mutant was already reclining, wearing only his boxer shorts and using his rolled up fatigue trousers as a pillow.

  Hanako watched them for a long time, but her thoughts had turned to the man who had killed nearly all of their friends – except, apparently, for three the law had picked up. In the clearing where he had begun fighting them – the clearing where she had fought several of them – she had recognized him as the man with whom she had been trapped in the elevator.

  Surely he must have had some criminally-oriented quarrel with them, perhaps over drugs. But then, she had heard him claim her as a friend…and he had even carried her head and torso briefly, as if to take her with him, before the fighting had commenced. In the elevator he had explained that he had once been a bouncer at an android brothel, maybe even the very one she had escaped from. Might he have intended to return her? But why? Her body was ruined beyond repair, and her mind tainted by all those upgrades. Only to report her fate to her former owners, then? But why risk his life antagonizing a large group of dangerous gangers for such a thing?

  Perhaps, she considered, he had simply been insane.

  And where was he now? She hadn’t heard the youths discuss his fate…had been unhearing or unconscious and missed it, if they had. And so, she was left with these mysteries about him. She knew only one thing: that she was not displeased at what he had done here in the Jungle.

  The purple boy began snoring, and Hanako returned her attention to the two youths, realized they had been quiet for some time. Both had drifted to sleep.

  Her conscio
usness did not blank again, though it felt that way as several silent hours passed. The sound of traffic passing in the street beyond the fence, and reverberating hollowly against the ceiling throughout Subtown as a whole, was a subliminal susurration like an ocean surf.

  But then there came a more immediate rustling, though very soft and stealthy…perhaps mice or some other vermin stealing through the underbrush. The sound became a little more pronounced, if never loud, and persisted. Hanako watched the surrounding bushes, within her range of vision at least, expectedly. Eventually her observation was rewarded.

  With insinuating slowness, a number of leafy tendrils wove their way through the surrounding flora…darker than the surrounding flora…a dark purple hue. The purple vines inched along the ground, their progress seeming unhurried unless one considered the normal rate of growth for most plants. More of these vines with their metallic purple leaves followed, slinking up and over obstacles. They crawled or slunk like the long bodies of insects, centipedes perhaps, or the tentacles of some large creature unseen as a whole. Their advance was deliberate but patient, and Hanako was patient too as she watched.

  The vines coiled gently around the ankles and legs of the fish-faced mutant and the purple boy. Twisted so lightly around their wrists and arms…crossed their bare chests so delicately that the mutant only brushed at his skin briefly, as if flicking away a tickling ant, and grumbled a little. The purple vines continued twining around the two gang members, until they encircled both boys’ necks.

  The mutant boy’s saucer-like fish eyes bore no eyelids, and so he had slept with his eyes open, but if he had possessed lids they would have snapped open in startled confusion as the vines suddenly, visibly tightened around him. Bound his limbs, restrained his torso, and constricted across his throat. At the same time, the vines squeezed the purple boy, too, like the coils of a huge jungle serpent.

  The two of them tried to thrash, tried to cry out, but more vines came…much more quickly this time…to fortify the hold of the first lest the boys snap them and break free. Ropy tendrils wound around their heads, across their eyes like blindfolds, across their mouths like gags. The young men were being cocooned.

  The writhing cocoons grew less human-like in form, went from resembling men struggling in straitjackets to squirming larva-like creatures. But eventually, the larvae stopped squirming and lay inert. Eventually, not even the most muted, muffled sound came from within them. As they became still, so did the purple vines go still as well.

  Then, as Hanako went on silently observing, an insect-like creature crawled up over the top of one of the large chrysalises, just as purple and glossy as the tendrils’ leaves, a ring of soft spines around its base wavering like cilia. It was not an insect, however, as Hanako knew. The end of a vine – or the beginning of the very first vine – was tethered to the purple bulb…and as it crawled down the other side of the chrysalis and to the ground, this tether was stretched taut. With an inaudible twang, the tether snapped free. Now unmoored, the egg-like bulb continued crawling, past Hanako and back into the forest from which the vines had come. Within a minute, it had disappeared, and Hanako heard no further rustlings from it.

  Had it only been her imagination that, while it had briefly perched atop one of the encased bodies, the bulb had paused to regard her in turn? Ah, but it was a human trait to anthropomorphize things. Things such as plants and machines.

  Inasmuch as it was possible that the Jungle, and Punktown, could sleep – they slept.

  Hanako didn’t know how long it would be before her system shut down entirely. An hour, a month, a year? If an extended measure of time, she didn’t mind. Her only real ambition had been to make her existence as comfortable as possible, and this was a quiet place, a peaceful place -- like a secret garden.

  About the Author

  JEFFREY THOMAS’s other books set within his world of Punktown include the novels DEADSTOCK (finalist for the John W. Campbell Award), BLUE WAR, HEALTH AGENT, EVERYBODY SCREAM! and MONSTROCITY (finalist for the Bram Stoker Award), and the short story collections PUNKTOWN, VOICES FROM PUNKTOWN and PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY (coauthored with Scott Thomas). His Punktown stories have been translated into German, Russian, Polish and Greek editions, and Miskatonic River Press has created a role-playing game based on the Punktown universe. Thomas lives in Massachusetts.

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