Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  *

  “Can you give me a munit to ride the shunt?” Posy asked one woman walking along the sidewalk in front of the construction site. “I missed my school bus.” But the woman kept her eyes forward, her businesswoman’s high heels clicking sharply as if to drown out Posy’s voice. Posy quickly turned the other way, looked up at a muscular young man as he came striding along. At least he took a moment to glance down at her, but he also took a moment to spit in her face. His phlegm ran down her forehead, and a drop fell on her lips. She brushed it away with her sleeve, biting back the urge to shout a curse after the man. She wished Aargh was with her just then, instead of foraging for food elsewhere on the site’s periphery, but then again she was glad he wasn’t. She wouldn’t want him arrested for dismembering somebody in plain view.

  When she had only been sheltering on the site for a few days, almost two years ago now, three of the Snakehead gang had approached her, had begun talking in a friendly way, and offered to take her to the basement where it was warmer and there was food. But another squatter had already warned her that the gang sold runaway young girls and foggy-headed junkies to low-level street pimps. Posy had not said a word to the chatty trio, had tried to turn and walk away. That was when they made a grab for her.

  And a second later, one of the youths was yanked backwards as if he had been snatched out of existence. With two boys holding her, Posy had looked over her shoulder to see Aargh there (though of course he didn’t have that name back then), looming behind her, hugging the Snakehead to his chest. The boy’s spiky-haired head was turned completely backwards. One of the pair holding Posy let go of her to pull out a little pistol, but the seven-foot KeeZee was already there and grabbing onto his arm with one hand (the crack of bone still echoed in Posy’s mind to this day), punching him in the face with the other hand. The boy’s face was pushed in like a doll Posy had once owned that a neighbor kid had stomped with his heel. The third Snakehead boy managed to run off, to hide away in that cozy basement kingdom of his.

  The Snakeheads had never bothered her since, even when the KeeZee hadn’t been at her side. Anyway, that was how they’d met, she and Aargh, and more often than not he’d been by her side ever since.

  As she’d turned to glare at the receding figure of the man who’d spit on her, Posy noticed something she had somehow missed before. With her familiarity of the grounds, she was surprised it hadn’t jumped out at her. Maybe she’d seen it peripherally but mistaken it for a billboard announcing some product or movie.

  Affixed to the fence that separated the construction site from the sidewalk was a huge sign that showed a building or series of conjoined buildings in a kind of whimsical fantasyscape. It was the uniform pink color of the building(s) that lent that fantastical air. Above this mystical vista, this mirage, loomed the words COMING SOON. Just under that, in a different font: Funtown . At first she had thought it said Punktown. That was what they called this megalopolis that soared up all around her, built by Earth colonists upon the much humbler city of her own native ancestors. But no . . . the sign said Funtown .

  “Huh,” said Posy. “Funtown.” Even though she had no conception of the sign’s significance, she said the word with a suspicious tone, as if it were some kind of bitter medicine in the thinnest of candy shells.

  *

  They regrouped at noon. Posy had made three munits begging for change to ride the shunt line, and Aargh had rounded up a fair amount of recyclable beer and soda cans with a deposit refund. There was a grimy little supermarket nearby with an automated system for depositing these and collecting the refund. The separate chamber in which one did this was titled REDEMPTION CENTER.

  In the market they bought a few snacks with the money they made and ate them on the walk home to the site. As they neared it, Posy remembered the new sign she had seen that morning and took Aargh by the hand to show him. She ignored the looks thrown their way, the little girl with the ear-to-ear Choom smile hand-in-hand with the seven-foot-tall KeeZee, all dressed in black as KeeZee usually were, his strangely flattened head like a pipe wrench thinly covered in translucent gray skin, into which were set three small eyes like black pearls, and his hair in dreadlocks that Posy had braided for him. He walked with a strong limp, because he had one prosthetic leg, and by prosthetic leg that meant he had fashioned it himself from a length of black metal pipe. KeeZee often found jobs as bouncers, guards, strong-arms, but Posy was sure his missing limb, and maybe some defeat or disgrace that went along with it, was the reason why he had taken to living on the construction site. She couldn’t ask him because his kind couldn’t articulate human language. That was why, for lack of knowing his true name, she had given him the name Aargh.

  “See?” she said, pointing toward the new sign affixed to the outside of the surrounding security fence. “Funtown. Just like I said.” She added, “Coming soon.”

  She looked way up at him and he wagged his head, but whether that meant he didn’t comprehend or didn’t like what he comprehended, she couldn’t know.

  *

  Evening fell, and they retired to the spot they had claimed as their own: a far corner on the second floor, where there was a cement floor upon which they could unroll their sleeping bags. Aargh had surprised her with the padded sleeping bags about a year ago; he couldn’t tell her if he’d saved up for them or stolen them from a store or even from other squatters. Aargh had made walls for their little corner, using sheets of corrugated metal tied in place with metal wire.

  After Aargh had erected these walls, through pantomime he had demonstrated what she took to be a safety measure, a means of quick escape from a dangerous gang or a snipe on the hunt if the need arose. He showed her that if they used his pair of cutters to snip the wire where it held the upper portion of the rear metal sheet in place, it could be pushed outward, where it would bang onto the edge of a tall concrete wall that reared close to this flank of the unfinished building. Instant bridge. The neighboring wall was actually the base of a shunt platform, though no shunt had ever stopped there for passengers. Perhaps one would have, if the construction project had been completed; a service stop for the building’s tenants, workers, or shoppers, depending on what its purpose was to have been.

  But shunts did frequently shoot past in either direction on the two cables strung above that platform, occasionally raining a drizzle of bright sparks in their wake, which fizzled out as they struck the top of that close wall. Sometimes a spark even struck the floor near their feet. A passing shunt would send a wave of air washing down over them. Once a wave of warm air had flashed a memory into Posy’s mind—riding in a hovercar with her father, the passenger window down and summer air blowing in across her face—but that memory was quickly gone like the fleeting shunt, either because the memory was too untenable to hold on to or too painful. A firefly memory, like the spilling sparks that dazzled and faded.

  There was one shunt that stopped nearby, however, one evening every week, and here it came now like clockwork. As Aargh and Posy sat on the edge of the cement floor, dangling their legs over the side of the building and finishing the last of the day’s hard-earned sustenance, they saw the shunt shoot right past their shelter—vibrating the metal sheets a bit—but gradually slow to a stop over the roof of the supermarket they had visited earlier today. A panel in the market’s roof slid back, and a ribbed tube extended from the bottom of the shunt like an insect’s proboscis dipping into a flower. The fat tube squirmed and rattled as it sucked up the cans crushed in the automated refund machines of the market’s redemption center. The shunt must make similar stops all over Punktown, because the words in red on its silver flank were: Redemption Express .

  Once, Posy had asked their old friend Welder, “What does ‘redemption’ mean?”

  Welder had thought for a moment, and then replied, “Repurchasing . . . redeeming . . . atonement. Deliverance, rescue, salvation.” Welder was a robot.

  “Rescue,” Posy echoed. “Salvation.” She had looked wistfully toward
the same shunt line they sat watching now, and had said to Welder, “Someday I’m going to run down the platform when I know that shunt is coming soon, and wait until it stops to suck up those cans. Then I’m going to climb up on its back and ride right on out of here.”

  “Ride where?” Welder asked her.

  “To where you said. Deliverance.”

  “You will only ride to the next supermarket or liquor store where that car collects its load,” Welder had said.

  “You’re such a killjoy,” she’d told him sulkily—and he could be—but how she missed him.

  She and Aargh watched the Redemption Express glide back into movement along its elevated cable. It sprinkled a phosphorescent spray behind it. “See you next week,” Posy muttered.

  She held a last bit of spongy cream-filled cake in her hand. She knew Aargh wouldn’t be happy about it, would prefer she eat the cake herself, but before she turned in for the night she’d want to set the cake out for the snipe.

  *

  Aargh came with her, of course, because he wouldn’t let her out of his sight at night, but he knew better by now than to try to hold her back. So he followed her downstairs, to an area toward the rear of the ground floor where heaps of trash had accumulated, discarded by tenants and blown in by the winds. Piles of busted garbage bags, mattresses too vile for even the most desperate junkie. Here, atop an altar of moldering wooden shipping pallets, Posy set down the piece of cake.

  She and Aargh withdrew to a safe distance to watch. Posy was always afraid someone else would steal the food. She had seen a shambling, badly deformed mutant do that once, and Aargh had started forward to dissuade him, but she had stopped her friend.

  A few minutes later it slunk out of the darkness: a single snipe. They often hunted in packs, but this one was missing an eye and moved with a limp like Aargh himself. An old, wounded rogue. Damaged and on its own—just like them. It was a pale ghostly blue, so skeletal its skin was an afterthought; something between a greyhound and a demon. As they watched, it rose onto its hind legs so it could pluck up the cake and stuff it between its fanged jaws. As it chewed, it turned its head and looked directly back at them with its remaining eye. Then it swallowed, dropped back to four legs, and silently plunged back into the dark.

  “You’re welcome,” Posy whispered, smiling but shuddering at the same time.

  *

  She always remembered Welder advising her not to put food out for the snipe, the first time he’d seen her doing it. “They’re wild things . . . scary things,” he had warned. “You can’t tame this creature.”

  “I’m not trying to tame it,” she’d told him. “But it’s like us. It’s got nowhere else. Anyway, if we feed it, maybe it won’t try to eat anybody.”

  “Dubious logic,” Welder replied. “They follow their nature. Their nature is to kill.”

  Posy had bugged her eyes under the brim of her floppy hat, made claws of her dirty hands, and said, “I hear they like to eat rusty old robots best of all . . . arooooo!”

  She had nicknamed Welder, too. He was a blocky automaton of peeling bright yellow paint, whose creators had given no thought to making him look anthropomorphic. When she first met him—when he had wandered onto the grounds to escape a dense blizzard—and found the machine could talk, she asked him if he were one of robots that had been displaced during the violent worker riots of the Union War and gone underground. No, Welder explained, he hadn’t existed back then; he had been slated for junk when the factory where he’d been working as a welding automaton had shut down. Posy had then told Welder about her father, who had lost his job when his company closed up. Her father had later left her and her mother to fend for themselves. She even told Welder how she and her mother, who was a drug addict, ended up homeless, living on the streets. On a snowy night just like this they had sheltered on the floor of a warm ATM booth. But when pretty pink dawn had come, sparkling drifts sloping up against the sides of the ATM kiosk, Posy had found her mother slumped dead beside her.

  “I’m sorry,” Welder had said. He had sounded sincere about it, too. So Posy had liked him right away.

  He became the third member of their little group. She loved Aargh, but their conversations were one-sided. Aargh didn’t seem perturbed by Welder’s inclusion, or worried for Posy’s safety around him, as the robot could take no undue interest in her. They were a family of three. They were as much a family as Posy had ever known.

  But after only a few months, Welder’s power source had run down without warning one night when they were rushing across a section of the building where there was no finished floor above them, just bare girders against a sudden onslaught of rain. Posy had seen that Welder was no longer hovering along beside her and the loping Aargh. She had looked back to see him resting on his base in a growing puddle. When she called to him he didn’t come, and she and Aargh had no idea how to reactivate him no matter how soaked they became peering inside those service panels of his they could open. He stood in the same spot in the brightness of the following day.

  Posy didn’t want gang kids breaking him up for fun or spraying graffiti on him, so she directed Aargh to lift him up and lug him to a dark corner of the grounds—not far from where she fed the snipe—where there squatted a large, inactive trash zapper. They secreted him in the narrow space between the back of the zapper and the wall, lying on his back. Posy tugged a flower free from her bridal hat and placed it in one of his claw hands. “You just rest here for a while, Welder,” Posy had croaked, throat raw from crying. “We’ll get you a new power cell someday, okay? We’ll do our best. And then we’ll come back here for you.”

  *

  Posy watched Aargh through the whole operation as he dragged down a loop of insulated cable from a bundle overhead, using a board with a nail at the end to hook it. Then, using his wire cutters, he chewed away the rubbery insulation to expose the copper veins within. “Are you sure that’s safe?” Posy asked, but of course he didn’t answer. Still, she commented, “Don’t take too much of that or we won’t have lights around here anymore.”

  Aargh was wrenching out more and more of the copper wire, wrapping it around his hand, when a voice behind them called, “Hello there!” Posy spun around, startled. Aargh’s movements were slower, but she knew he would be ready for trouble.

  Three people were walking toward them, distinctly odd figures Posy knew she’d never seen on the construction site before, though it was a variegated bunch that was dispersed throughout the building and the squatters came and went. Aargh quickly snipped free the ends of the wire coiled around his hand, his fist now doubly huge and metallic. He put his other hand on Posy’s shoulder, urging her to get moving. Perhaps noticing this, from a distance the central approaching figure raised an arm and called, “Don’t be afraid! Hold up, there!”

  Posy was tensed to bolt like a startled antelope. She wanted to . . . but still she held off, curious.

  “We don’t mean you any harm,” the man said as he drew closer. His cheery voice echoed off the cement ceiling. “We have gifts for you! We bring good news!”

  The trio was near enough now that Posy could see that the man who had spoken wore an expensive business suit. Flanking him, though, were two fully armored soldiers carrying big two-handed guns. She was sorry now she hadn’t fled. Were they forcers? But how could they be? The police force always wore black.

  The two soldiers wore full-head helmets and body armor, all of it colored a light pink. Even the bulky guns they carried, which Posy didn’t know were called assault engines, were the same hue. She thought their pink armor was very peculiar. Were there women inside? Their padded bodies didn’t look female. She thought the color made them look less convincing than even toy soldiers.

  The man in the suit had sandy hair, greased back but with a few strands drooping across his forehead, and a goatee sprinkled with crumbs of silver. His forehead was filmed in sweat; he looked hot in his five-piece suit, having loosened his shirt collar. The entire suit, except for th
e white shirt, was a pale candy pink, the same pink as the toy soldiers. Maybe they weren’t women after all. When he spoke, the man in the suit had an accent like the boss bad guys in old VT movies Posy had seen. She didn’t know the word “British.”

  “I’ve been talking with all you folks on the site today,” the man said, still closing the space between them, “and you two appear to be the last!” When Aargh felt the trio had gotten close enough, he took a threatening step forward, metal fist bunched at his side. The newcomers stopped in their tracks. The man in the suit held up both hands and said, “Slow down, big fella. I’m your new best friend, trust me.”

  “He doesn’t speak or understand English,” Posy spoke up, her tone wary. “He doesn’t have a translator chip or anything. I call him Aargh.”

  “Well, that’s funny; ‘aargh’ is what I thought when I saw him.” The stranger chuckled. “Just kidding. And what’s your name, my lovely?”

  “I’m called Posy.”

  “Oh, how fitting. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Teddy Cannula—chief of security for an exciting new project I’m introducing to all of you on the site today.”

  “Who are they?” Posy interrupted, motioned toward the flanking soldiers.

  “Two of my security team, dear, nothing to be alarmed about. As I was saying, there’s a wonderful, fabulous new place coming soon to this very site—a place called Funtown. It’s going to be a mall, but the word mall doesn’t do it justice. You’re too young to know what the Canberra Mall was like back when it was the Canberra Circus Mall . . . how fun it was before it became all boring stores like any other shopping center. But Funtown is going to bring back the fun! It’s going to be the bestest mall in the whole of Punktown!”

  “You mean, they’re going to finish this building?”

  “Oh no, no. This building itself isn’t big enough to house Funtown. They’re going to tear down most of this whole block. Funtown’s going to be huge!”