Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Hey, guys,” he called out the door to the uniforms, “get in here!” He was afraid the Mee’hi might all escape through chinks or cracks in the walls, and glanced around him for something to start catching them in.

  A voice startled him, and his eyes jolted back to the figure on the floor. Whether man or woman he couldn’t tell, but he saw the fingers curl ever-so-slightly, and a deep slurred sound came from between the clenched teeth, like a recording played at a very slow speed. The poor being was still barely alive, the last of its juices not yet wrung from it. Maybe it had even thought itself dead, its eyes covered in that black resin, until MacDiaz had burst in to awaken it.

  Pitiful monstrosity. For another irrational moment, MacDiaz wanted to press his weapon to its caked skull and put it out of its suffering, but the uniformed officers had suddenly joined him. All he could do now was pray that once the thing was freed of the nest, which was both killing it and keeping it alive, it would pass at last into true death.

  * * *

  She had been failing. Part of him welcomed this, though not as large a part as he might have imagined, and where once he would have felt guilty secretly hoping she would soon die, now he felt guilty secretly hoping she would remain alive.

  This time when he came to see her, she stared up at him through her bubble with suspicion and perhaps even fear, as if he had come to her bedside to murder her. She covered herself with her blanket to her chin and demanded, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “It’s Roger—your son,” MacDiaz told her, and glanced around him for assistance. Couldn’t they increase her medications? Inject something into one of the tiny ports along the wall to enter her artificial and then actual circulation to temporarily bring her back around, coax out from the dimming maze of her brain the frail soul that was lost there?

  But at last, as her mind cleared a bit on its own—maybe she had just awakened from a doze, or his face had cut through the fog—she remembered him. But her voice was tiny like a child’s and she kept asking every few minutes who was taking care of her dog, Lady...which had died five years ago.

  MacDiaz was exhausted when he left her; she had fallen back into a doze and he had lingered a while, just staring at her face. As he threaded his way back through the halls, an elderly man shuffled up to him and lightly touched his arm. The man had tears in his eyes, and for a moment MacDiaz wondered if he might have escaped from one of the drawers in the walls.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the old man moaned, “I can’t find my wife. She’s in one of these things...but I can’t find her. I can’t remember her number...”

  MacDiaz took the man back to the desk, and left him with a tech who would find his wife’s number in her file. But as he left him in her care, MacDiaz was foolishly concerned that instead of finding the wife’s drawer they would lock her husband in another one.

  * * *

  In his dream, MacDiaz was alive, but had been drugged or entranced, perhaps dazed by a blow, and he was dragged naked through a dark apartment, into a room where the ceiling was a gently rippling pool, too murky to see into. From this overhead pond, other nude figures hung by their necks, dangling as casually as coats tucked away in a closet...or more like carcasses hooked in a meat locker. With a grunt, the vague, shadowy person who had been dragging him along hoisted him up in his arms and then, straining, pressed MacDiaz’s head into the chilly rippling pool.

  Then he was left suspended there, and staring sightlessly into a black void. But his vision began to adjust; indeed, his eyes began to cast two yellow beams—like Kali’s eyes, he thought in the dream. Images came indistinctly at first: pale fluttering shapes, gray staggering forms...at a distance his beams of light couldn’t reach. But these shades drew closer, moved in and out of his rays, which followed the weaving path of this one only to switch to illuminate another. The figures shambled ever closer, and in so doing, revealed the catastrophic condition of their apparitional forms. A shotgun suicide with his face blown open from the inside. A woman with her washed bare chest like a white sheet covered in a calligraphy of stab wounds...a profusion of small black dashes so clustered that they resembled a horde of insects feeding on her. He was seeing into the land of the dead, he realized, though he was still alive, though the other bodies with whom he dangled lacked their heads, and thus saw nothing. He was alone, and terrified, helpless to free himself...and worst of all, there were no mysteries revealed, there came no enlightenment from his privileged vision. There was only what he’d seen all along, but immortalized in a limbo where it never faded, where the dead could never find rest from their haunting.

  A sharp pain just below his left eye awakened him, and instinctively he slapped at the spot. Sitting up in bed, he reached out to the lamp beside him; his wife groaned irritably at the sudden glare and rolled away from him.

  On the blanket across his lap, MacDiaz spotted a grayish-translucent insect, wriggling on its back, injured by his swat. It was a Mee’hi, and he realized it had bitten him in his sleep.

  From the bathroom he brought a plastic cup, and scooped it in there, and he took it back into the bathroom with him and closed the door. He contemplated the squirming creature. Had it stowed away in his shoe or clothing from that crime scene he had investigated several weeks ago; but why wait until now to attack him? Perhaps it was the first scout of an entire horde that was seeking him out in revenge. His temper rising, MacDiaz kicked open the lid of the toilet and began to tip the cup so as to dump the tiny alien into it. But he hesitated. It would be murder, and conscious this time. Though the evidence would be flushed away, the crime would be recorded in his mind, and his memories were routinely extracted and utilized for court cases. Whether out of a sense of morality or self preservation or both, he closed the toilet lid and transferred the wounded being into a capped pill bottle.

  The next morning, he saw that the flesh around his eye had become pink and swollen; light made the eye burn so painfully and water so profusely that he could only find comfort in squinting it shut to block out light entirely. Even then, his right eye watered a bit, too—either in sympathy or because the poison of the bite was spreading.

  He slipped the vial with the still scrabbling being into his jacket pocket, and on his way to work stopped at the hospital to have the bite looked at...after first leaving his prisoner to be cared for as well. The physician who saw him (he was seen quickly when he revealed he was a policeman) informed him that male Mee’hi did indeed inject poison, though it was generally only dangerous when the bites were numerous. Further, this was a bite from an immature male, whose poison was not yet fully effective. “Maybe he escaped that crime scene,” the doctor guessed, “and has spent these past few weeks hunting you down out of vengeance.” He seemed to find the notion amusing. Somehow, though, this idea made MacDiaz pity the thing a bit. Immature...a child, perhaps. Filled with grief, maybe over the death of siblings, parents. Angrily lashing out, hopelessly seeking to defeat a far larger and stronger enemy.

  After asking MacDiaz which pharmacy he preferred, the physician sent a prescription for an antibiotic over to the Superdrugs on Polymer Street, where MacDiaz knew a pretty Indian woman usually worked the counter. Her face flashed before him now. Once she’d told him she worked part-time for a book store. If he so much as glanced at every page of every book in that store, he thought, he would essentially become that store. The thought made his skull want to droop forward.

  “Doctor,” MacDiaz said, slipping back on his jacket and then the dark glasses he had donned to soothe his tortured eyes, “I have a Mnemosyne-755 memory chip that I received at the age of ten, and I was thinking of...having it removed...”

  “Yes, they have better chips than that available now, certainly...”

  “I don’t want it replaced...I just want it removed.”

  The doctor smiled, cocked his head a little, again as if amused. MacDiaz didn’t like him. “Why?”

  “I just don’t want it any more,” the detective replied somewhat testily.


  “Well, I have a chip and I’m quite happy with it...I don’t see how a doctor dealing with as many races as I do could do without one.”

  “I’m sure it’s useful to you. But I’d like mine out, and I was wondering how involved and expensive such a procedure would be. Whether most insurances would cover it, or...”

  “Well, see, you don’t have to have it removed. It can be simply shut off, which is a very easy procedure, and doesn’t require surgery.”

  “I would want it out.”

  “It wouldn’t just suddenly turn itself back on, you know...unless you changed your mind later and wanted it switched back on. It’s not going to reactivate if you bump your head,” the doctor chuckled.

  MacDiaz rose to leave. “Thank you,” he said, more testily than before, and strode from the office.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, Mr. MacDiaz,” the tech said, hurrying out from behind her desk as if to intercept him, “we haven’t had a chance yet to move her...are you sure you don’t want to wait?”

  He wasn’t sure, but he started along the familiar path, the tech scurrying to keep up. There was no one outside the drawer to indicate anything was out of the ordinary, and he was glad he hadn’t come here to make this discovery on his own accidentally. Of course, that wasn’t possible; the life support system had alerted the desk that there was a problem, so no one would have made any surprising discoveries. Still, the mental picture of opening the drawer to that discovery was unavoidable.

  The tech moved around him to activate the drawer, and the bubble flowed out of its niche in the wall, lowered on its arms to proffer its solemn burden.

  “Oh my God,” MacDiaz whispered, as if there was still some surprise, after all. In the moments it took for the drawer to open and bubble to lower, he had imagined what his mother would look like dead. Her face twisted in a grimace, her eyes bulging from their sockets, her flesh purple and black. But there was calm...her mouth in that strange little smile of the dead. Her lids weren’t entirely closed, however; a subtle thing, but subtly disturbing.

  As he had on that visit when she hadn’t remembered him, he took in her unmoving face for a long time, the tech waiting expectantly. Her hair—once red and thick and which he had twined small fingers in—just gray wisps; her cheeks—once smooth and soft under boyhood kisses—withered and concave. Her eyes—which had taken in her movies—half open and half shut. That small detail seemed to mock him. It was an undecided detail. An incomplete detail. They should be shut. She should be at peace, entirely.

  “Close the door, please,” he husked to the attendant, turning away, tears beginning to course down his own cheeks. He had seen enough. He had owed her one last visit. But he did not want to take in any more...he did not want to remember her this way.

  * * *

  “You know,” this other doctor informed him, after she had finished her scan of the chip in his brain, “there are chips now that allow the user the option of singling out and erasing any memory you want to be rid of. You have complete control, and can even shut the chip off entirely during those times when you don’t want it to be in use...just with a simple thought.”

  “I don’t want a new chip,” he reiterated. “Just this one out.”

  She sighed. “Well, of course that’s your choice. I just wanted to make you aware of all your options...especially where it might have some impact on the kind of work you do.”

  “I’m very much aware of that,” MacDiaz told her.

  And so it was done that afternoon. As he lay resting, waiting for his wife to come pick him up, he thought that if his mother had had a memory chip, she would never have forgotten who her son was. In her small prison she could have spent happy hours reliving all the best parts of her life, liberated by and lost in those recollections...even their tastes and smells, the feel of a cool evening breeze against her face. In her delirium, she might even have come to believe they were her present. But then, it might have made her imprisonment all the more profound...knowing that despite sensation those were merely memories, however beautiful...times past and gone, not present experience. Further, there would be the bad memories trapped inside that small bubble with her...the disappointments and anxieties and fears of a long life, inescapable. The death of a pet dog sharply relived, perhaps over and over, each time like the first...

  Lying there recovering, at first he wondered if the chip were indeed gone. Staring at the gloomy ceiling, he could still project his mother’s face there...the half-lidded eyes. But when he pushed further back, searching for the scene of that room of hanging headless corpses, he found it was a softer image, more abstracted than precise. He closed his eyes and let out a shaky little breath. A kind of peace came over him, as if he had been exorcized. He didn’t dare look for the face of his mother in her youth. He knew it wouldn’t be there, not clearly. But he had photographs, and vids, to be briefly visited. It was a sacrifice he could live with. Anyway, he would find that feelings persisted when pictures did not.

  His wife came to drive him home. And days passed, weeks, months, and the faces of the dead—burst by bullets, grinning mysteriously at their own fates, bloated like the faces of pudgy plastic dolls and shriveled to crusted skulls—began to fade to smoke and shadow. Gray and difficult to see. As elusive and vague as ghosts—and memories—should often remain.

  NOM DE GUERRE

  In the bar’s subaqueous illumination, the eight men at the two pushed-together tables all glowed the same misty blue-green. It was a trick of the light, an external gloss: they were anything but alike. Aside from the fact that they were all killers, of course.

  The most obvious difference was that half of the party wasn’t human. The four Vlessi sat at one of the two small tables, their hulking bodies pressed tightly shoulder to shoulder, which might have proved a problem had they been drinking. They didn’t drink, and that made Jasper Conch more wary of them than their intimidating appearance. At least the things had been cordial enough, respectful enough to meet his team here...but it made him feel less inclined to drink his own beer, as if he feared that once he was sufficiently intoxicated, the Vlessi would simply kill him and his friends here and have it done with.

  Back to their intimidating appearance: each of the aliens was taller than the tallest of the human assassins, and the only clothing they wore was a gauzy orange scarf (except for the leader, who wore lime green). Conch had once heard of another human in another bar who had playfully tugged at a Vlessi’s scarf. The Vlessi had playfully tugged the man’s adam’s apple out.

  Each Vlessi had a sleek white coat like a dog’s belly after it’s shaved for an operation. Their chests were long and narrow, shallow and bony, their arms and legs as thin as a deer’s, and in fact their feet were more or less hooves (which had led to their nickname: the White Devils). Their hands were large and humanoid, however, the nails the same black as their hooves. Their heads were large atop the popsicle stick bodies, and hung forward as if with their weight. These heads resembled nothing so much as a human pelvis, shot through with open hollows and covered in that thin, short-furred skin. No visible mouth, no place even where a brain could be imagined to be housed. Set into the various cavities of this skull-pelvis were six tiny eyes, lidlessly staring like those of a doll. And these doll eyes seemed haphazardly glued on, to the extent that they varied in placement from one Vlessi to the other, and were not situated on any given creature with a sense of symmetry. Nature abhors the asymmetrical, Conch knew, but maybe the Vlessi had their own brand of nature.

  No clothing: no place to hide a gun. They didn’t use guns, then? Though Conch should find that encouraging, he didn’t. It bothered him even more than their sobriety. Come to think of it, he had heard the White Devils drank blood, but he dismissed that as urban legend (especially since no mouth was even apparent, despite their translated speech). Then again, maybe they did drink blood...just to maintain their reputation.

  Brass, one of Conch’s boys, leaned his creaky cloned-leather
coat against his own to murmur grinningly in his ear: “I think the one on the right is a female. Her nipples stick out more. See that? Look, man, look. See? Either that or the wanker’s caught a chill. You see that? I’m getting excited looking at that thing. Six perky pink nipples, man. One in my teeth, one in each hand...between my toes...”

  Conch smiled and ground out his herb cigarette. “Shut up, man,” he murmured back. He was half-listening to one of his other friends, Hans, describe the warrior code of the feline Ramons to the Vlessi, and how their swords compared favorably to those of Earth’s ancient samurai. Conch hoped Hans didn’t get started on samurai; such a cliche, he thought. Enough with ronins and bushido, and Hans’ misogynistic manga and anime. The wanker even had a garish dragon embroidered on the back of his leather jacket, as if all his Yakuza tattoos weren’t enough. Sometimes he wore a Chinese kung-fu suit, though, just for a little variety Conch supposed. But for all his affection for ancient warriors, Conch had never known Hans to shy away from carrying a good gun.

  Conch’s third man was Indigo, who just sipped a shot a molecule at a time and smiled faintly at the chatter of the men and the watery, garbled translation of the Devils’ voices, never joining in himself. Indigo was crew-cut and goateed, lean as a greyhound, with eyes both bright and dark under low brows. If the Devils couldn’t tell from his vibe that he was the deadliest of the crew, then they were more bone-headed than they looked. Indigo was thirty, a few years younger than Conch, who was the oldest of the lot.

  No seasoned, graying and paunchy syndy killers, they. No syndy affiliation at all, though they had had some peripheral dealings and errands in their early teen years, before they carved their own little niche as freelancers. Porko’s boys had once tried to put them down, but they had skinned one of his hitmen alive in a basement and the greasy wanker had left them alone after that. They didn’t conflict with syndy operations much, anyway. For a good five years now they had taken nothing but corporate contracts, like this one.