Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Maybe you need a plumber,” Mean joked.

  “Maybe I should do a little plumbing for you,” snorted Stack.

  Miller found himself backing off a step, and raising his hands. “Gentlemen, honestly, I’m doing my best...”

  “How do we know that you’re telling the truth, huh, Miller?” the mutant grumbled. “We can’t see inside you. How do we know you didn’t turn around and sell that painting to someone else?”

  “What? I wouldn’t do that! Do you think I’m stupid enough to pull something like that on Mr. Diablo?”

  “You wouldn’t be the first stupid person whose eyes he had to gouge out with a spoon.”

  Mean put a calming hand on his partner’s tattooed arm. “Millie...look...Mr. Diablo trusted in your ability. Now you tell us your ability is flawed. It’s bad news, you understand?”

  “Of course, I agree, but I’m not hiding the painting from him. I’m not going to sell it to anyone else. I’m not an undercover forcer trying to trap you. I want this thing out of me as much as he does. I want my money, after all, right?”

  “It’s just that Mr. Diablo has a buyer waiting, Millie. And that man is impatient, too.”

  “Like I said...I can only do my best...”

  Stack caught hold of the tassel hanging from the top of Miller’s fez, and jerked the hat off his head. Spinning the hat around by the gold braid, he snarled, “You’re incompetent, Miller. You’re crapping everything up.” He batted Miller across the face with the spinning green fez. “You’d better have good news for us soon.” He spun the fez off into the air, sent it rolling into the gutter. A passing hovercar made it roll some more, its felt gathering grit and dirt.

  “I want that as much as you do,” Miller replied in a tremulous voice, containing his anger, but not quite his terror.

  He watched the two men stroll away, Mean smiling at him half-apologetically, half-mockingly over his shoulder.

  -Nine-

  That night Miller lay on his fold-out sofa-bed staring at the blank screen of his livingroom ceiling, and with his powers of visualization he imagined the worms that at this moment must be squirming in his sink’s basin...the way his thoughts squirmed in his basin of bone.

  Should he get out of bed right now, throw on his shrain-colored suit (he had left his fez in the gutter), pack a suitcase and grab the next tube to Miniosis, until he could perhaps teleport to Earth or some other of its colonies? But if he did that, and assuming he wasn’t tracked down and murdered for sure (Mr. Diablo had associates everywhere), he would never collect the great sum of money he had been promised for the delivery of the Nguyen painting. No. He must buy more time, so that he could try and try again until at last he cracked his stubborn safe. Maybe he was just sick. Maybe he was under too much stress. Maybe he needed to adapt his technique somewhat...

  Finally he fell asleep. He dreamed he was hooked up to beeping life support systems. He dreamed he was the Choom god Raloom, wasting away, drained of his godly powers.

  -Ten-

  He stood on the flat roof of his lime-green tenement building, the solid sky above him criss-crossed with plumbing lines and sheathed power cables, the burnt-out shell of a dead helicar wedged in the groin of two support girders. A dome-capped ventilation fan whirred behind him, giving off a warm laundry smell, and there was a soiled mattress up here, discarded wine bottles and spent bulbs of anodyne gas. He had rested a small glass of cloudy absinthe on the crumbling parapet, like a gargoyle watching the traffic and the pedestrians seething below him.

  He saw them coming, and he did not flinch, did not gasp, though his heart beat faster in the cloistered darkness of his chest. He felt as immobile as a gargoyle, as a sculpture in the Hill Way Galleries, as an insect frozen in a chunk of amber. It was Lisa Wallen and Stack. He wished it was Bird and Mean, but he supposed it wouldn’t have made much difference.

  When they had crossed to his side of the street, Lisa caught Stack by the arm and pointed up at Miller. He thought he might wave to her, to keep them in a civil mood—but before he could, together they lunged more quickly toward the front steps of the narrow building. Miller turned from the parapet, faced across the roof to the kiosk-like structure that gave access to it.

  Stack burst out onto the roof first, with such a momentum that Miller feared he might back up too much, back right over the lip of the roof. Again, as yesterday, he held up his two hands. “I’m still trying,” he blurted.

  “And we’re here to help you,” snorted the mutant. “Maybe I can shake it out of you if I dangle you over the side...”

  Backed up as far as he could go, Miller started edging sideways instead. “Please...don’t...”

  Lisa grinned ferally. “Maybe we can give you some incentive to try harder, Miller.” She had a Ramon dagger with a long, straight blade in her hand. “Maybe we can even cut it out of you. Have you ever tried that approach before?”

  They’re only trying to scare me, Miller told himself desperately, edging sideways more rapidly now, but not so rapidly as to inspire them to run. Maybe, he thought, maybe I can scare them, too...

  He stared hard at the dagger in Lisa’s fist. A Ramon dagger like his old neighbor Michael Templin might have seen during his eight year military stint on Ram...

  But Lisa lurched forward then, to jump the distance that separated them, and Miller’s eyes raised from her dagger to her face.

  Lisa Wallen wore her hair in tight braids and the area around her eyes was tattooed to resemble the Egyptian Eye of Horus. It made her eyes look like those of a painted statue. He saw all this as if in a photograph his eyes snapped at that moment, in one fast blink. A photograph that he took in his two hands. But in his desperation, with so little time to fold, he did something he had never done before. He crushed the photo, instead. He balled it up in his fists, rolled it into a tighter ball between his palms, and crammed it as hard as he could into his navel to make it fit.

  The Ramon knife was gone. But so was the hand that had held it. Lisa had vanished, leaving no one between Miller and Stack. If Stack had had eyelids, his eyes might have widened in amazement. Instead, he stopped in his tracks and hissed, “Fuck!”

  Miller raised his eyes to him, and despite his fear, he smiled. For a rare moment in his life, he felt a confidence planted on solid metal legs. He felt like a god.

  Stack was reaching around behind him, to something tucked in the back waistband of his pants.

  Miller tilted his head forward slightly, locking his eyes on those of the mutant.

  Stack’s gun was thrust out into the space between them where Lisa had been. It was a Scimitar .55, like Miller’s lost gun, but it was green with gold flecks instead of red with silver.

  It looked like a toy.

  -One-

  The assignment had been for the third grade class to make a diorama out of a shoe box, in which to display the prehistoric life of this Earth-settled planet, Oasis.

  Some of the children had really risen to the occasion, displaying a great deal of creativity and imagination. Dave Walter had decided on an underwater scene. The bottom of his diorama was lush with plants of scissored paper, and stones glued in place. Hanging on strings from the top of the shoe box, as it rested on its side, were a variety of armored fishes and cephalopods in tightly coiled shells. When the eight-year old Miller stooped to gaze into this little cardboard aquarium, he gently blew on the mobile of two-dimensional sea life to make it stir like swimming things.

  Terry Tidwell had taken the route of airborne prehistoric animals, also suspended from the ceiling of his box on strings. As he knelt to inspect this display, Miller blew these animals also: a kind of giant starfish with broad webs between its five arms, lifted on steamy volcanic updrafts (Terry had sculpted a volcano out of plasticlay), the living parachute of a jellyfish, and a group of ribbon-like creatures in a living aurora borealis. Where Dave had draw his aquatic life on cardboard, Terry had done so on paper, and these lighter animals floated more dramatically when blown upon, M
iller a giant looming over them, like a deity breathing life into his creations.

  Dylan Staley had elected to conjure up the insects of an early prehistoric period, before the evolution of higher forms. He had sculpted his animals out of plasticlay, but they bristled with legs made of wire or the broken teeth of combs. There was a kind of giant dragonfly, a huge millipede-like creature, and an immense beetle with its carapace opened, from which spread several pairs of wings made from iridescent cellophane. It had multiple pincered jaws.

  There was a lot of noise in the classroom, a lot of exclamations of admiration from student and teacher alike. Miller didn’t expect many accolades for his own humble project, however; he was not at all artistic. For his own faux terrarium, he had merely glued several of his toy prehistoric monsters to the floor of his box and stuffed some torn lettuce in there for foliage, crude volcanos and clouds drawn in crayon as a background.

  He was relived to see he wasn’t the only child who had used this technique, however, when he reached the very last diorama. It was the one belonging to Dylan Staley’s brother, Lane. Like Miller, Lane had simply drawn a background of trees on the bottom of the box, though his clouds were glued puffs of cotton ball. His animals were also plastic toys, not even glued to the floor of the diorama, but simply rested there. But Miller was more intrigued with this display than any other, because he loved prehistoric monster toys and he had never before seen these particular figures.

  All three of the miniature beasts were beguiling, but especially the bipedal Shredder, as it had been nicknamed because of the four scissoring bony blades like flower petals surrounding its circular mouth. It had eyes shaped like those of an Earthly oriental, and Miller liked how its front arms were poised with their lobster-like pincers gaping wide for attack. The plastic Shredder was a kind of gray color, though maybe green. Maybe even with a little bit of yellow in the mix. An elusive color, almost like a non-color, but it seemed the perfect color for this monster that Miller ached to pluck out of the diorama and tuck inside his shirt.

  He couldn’t do that. Someone would see him. And it would be wrong...

  But he stared at the monster, and stared at it, wishing he could steal it, fantasizing that he could quickly hide it away close to his chest before anyone could see him, and he blinked, and he saw the Shredder vividly in his mind but he no longer saw it inside the shoe box. It had disappeared.

  Startled, almost in a panic, Miller stepped away from Lane Staley’s diorama. He moved across the room as quickly but as inconspicuously as he could manage. He hoped no one would think he had taken it. He hadn’t. He had never touched the strange-colored toy. He glanced back at the box as if he might see the figurine there again. Maybe it had only toppled over from him breathing on it...

  But he knew it was gone, because later he heard Lane’s surprised exclamation. And then, at the end of the day, from across the room, he saw Lane crying and being comforted by their teacher. Their teacher, who sternly addressed the class and advised them that whoever had stolen Lane Staley’s toy had been very cruel to do so, very greedy and thoughtless, and had better think about returning it right away.

  Even before Miller found the toy inside him, even before he found a way to get it out of him again and handle it, and play with it, he felt guilty. Somehow, though he had never until that day suspected his ability, he had known from the moment the toy vanished that he had been responsible.

  Even after he was able to materialize the toy again, however, he did not return it. It was part greed. It was part fear of being caught as the culprit if he returned it, even anonymously. But because he was afraid his mother would ask him where he had got it, he always returned it to the dark toy chest inside him when he was done secretly playing with it behind his closed bedroom door.

  Though it seemed unrealistic that Lane Staley could be traumatized by so small a loss, Miller always felt that Lane looked despondent after that day. That is, on those occasions that he could bring himself to look at him.

  After not so long a time, Miller no longer brought the toy out to play with. He preferred to leave it hidden, unseen, in the gloom like a buried corpse.

  -Eleven-

  After searching the flat in vain, Bird and Mean finally decided to try the roof of the lime-colored tenement building, and as soon as they emerged from its kiosk-like access structure they knew they had found not only Miller, but their two missing associates.

  Miller’s back was propped up against a big ventilation fan, a bullet hole above his right eyebrow. The blood had flowed down across his white shirt, saturating it, and had pooled in the lap of his expensive suit. It wasn’t difficult to figure out how he had died; Stack lay not so far away, a green Scimitar .55 in one fist. But Mean could not figure out how his friend had died. He knelt down beside him, rolled him over, detected no mark of violence. He looked up at Bird, who was crouched down beside Lisa. He didn’t seem to be having any better luck at ascertaining his friend’s demise.

  Bird stood, looked around him some more, and then exclaimed, “There it is!” He rushed to the parapet, against which a painting was leaning. It was a painting of the Choom god Raloom, terminally ill in a hospital bed.

  “That lying little fuck,” Mean mumbled, looking over at Miller again. Then his eyes fell on an odd piece of furniture a little bit distant. He could understand that soiled mattress being here, but why would anyone bring such a beautiful chest of drawers up to this roof? He drew closer to it for a better look. Maybe this was worth bringing with them, too. The chest, or bureau, was small and delicate, made of a wood thickly lacquered an indigo blue. Gold trim, and gold-painted designs: insects flying across its drawers, and gold knobs shaped like cocoons of some kind.

  Something from the planet Ram, Mean would guess. Idly, he opened one of its drawers. He was glad he did. There was a thick wad of bills in there, which he tucked into a front pocket after making sure Bird wasn’t looking.

  In another drawer of the beautiful chest he found a Scimitar .55, red enamel with silvery glitter. He pulled this out and tucked it in the front of his pants.

  In a third drawer, he found a plastic prehistoric monster, a Shredder, and he held it before his eyes only a moment before he tossed it away from him, where it skittered to a stop against Miller’s leg.

  Atop the beautiful indigo chest was a conical silver cage, and in this cage was a dead butterfly, though the eyes painted on its unmoving wings stared open against their background of shrain.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such science fiction/horror novels as DEADSTOCK (finalist for the John W. Campbell Award), BLUE WAR, HEALTH AGENT, MONSTROCITY (finalist for the Bram Stoker Award), LETTERS FROM HADES, THE FALL OF HADES, BONELAND and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM DEALERS.

  His short story collections include PUNKTOWN, VOICES FROM PUNKTOWN, PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY (co-authored with Scott Thomas), NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS, UNHOLY DIMENSIONS, VOICES FROM HADES, AAAIIIEEE!!! and THIRTEEN SPECIMENS.

  Stories of his have been reprinted in THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR and THE YEAR’S BEST HORROR STORIES. Though he considers Vietnam his second home, he is a resident of ye olde Massachusetts. Visit his blog at www.JeffreyEThomas.com.

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

  To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.

 

 

 
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