Deadstock: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “But why? Why don’t you want me to – ”

  “Enough!” he bellowed. He had never yelled at her this way before, and she almost staggered back as if struck. He turned toward the door. “Go to bed now.”

  Yuki fell into her chair again as if her legs had gone out beneath her. And she buried her face in her hands, crying inarticulately like one of those sad creatures swimming in a vast ocean she could not glimpse, but which was essentially the air all around her.

  ***

  Earlier that afternoon, after Caren Bistro had left, Janice Poole had come out from behind her desk and smiled at Stake lasciviously, as much as she dared to do within range of the camera that monitored her classroom. She whispered, “Want to come home with me after I finish up here?”

  He gazed over her shoulder. Atop a counter that ran the length of the room were a number of tanks containing various animals, from fish to insects to rodents to a group of Kalian lizards much smaller than the edible glebbi, though these short-limbed specimens still had long, serpentine necks upon which perched smiling crocodilian heads. These creatures were piled atop each other in an unmoving orgy. At most, one of the periscope heads would turn lazily this way or that. At last, Stake said, “Umm, I’m not feeling that great tonight. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “Ohh, really?” Janice stepped closer to him as if her proximity, the aura of her lust, might sway him. “Hey,” she said. “Am I your girlfriend now or what?”

  Now he looked directly at her, and smiled. “Am I your boyfriends?”

  “Hm. Plural, huh?”

  He grinned, felt a little guilty. “Sorry. Look, I really am tired. I’ll call you tomorrow, all right?” And then he headed to her classroom’s door. “Thanks for your help just now.”

  Janice folded her arms and raised an eyebrow at him. “Mm,” was all she said as he left.

  Now, he was back in his flat on noisy, colorful Forma Street. And now, alone, he almost regretted not going home with Janice after all. He remembered those lizards, taking mindless comfort in the contact of each other’s bodies.

  That, in turn, made him think of Thi Gonh.

  Unanswered questions haunted him to this day, as if she had taken them to the grave with her. But he felt confident that she was still alive. This was because he had tried to find her, and had at least glimpsed her footprints before they vanished into obscurity. He had never returned to her world, her dimension, after the war – that was true. But he had called here and there. Sent messages. Sifted through the net. The first footprints had been clear enough, in fact.

  When the 5th Advance Rangers had met up with his group and they had left the captured monastery, releasing the clerics detained during the occupation of it, the combined force of soldiers had taken the two Ha Jiin prisoners with them. It wasn’t until the third day that an air cavalry vehicle had been able to rendezvous with the group, and carry the prisoners away for further, official interrogation. Sometimes prisoners were used in exchange for captured Colonial Forces soldiers. But Stake had feared that the Earth Killer would be too great a prize to trade. Too heinous a criminal to set free.

  During those three days that they dragged the prisoners along with them, they had even engaged the enemy a few times (and it was in one of these brief firefights that Private Devereux, whose life Thi had spared in that clearing, was killed by another Ha Jiin’s bullet). But it was from his fellow soldiers, many of them now camouflage-faced clones, that Stake felt the greatest threat. Not to himself, but to the blue-skinned woman. With Sergeant Adams now in command, he didn’t have it within his power so much to protect her. Or be left alone with her. As it had turned out, however, the trek had been too dangerous and Adams too bent on his mission for any abuse to have been directed at the woman, besides the occasional hateful comment. Yet when the cavalry ship landed to spirit her off, Stake’s anxiety had become even greater than before. Now, he would not be able to protect her at all. Now, in all likelihood, he would never see her again.

  Standing in his dingy apartment, staring sightlessly down into the bustle of the street, Stake remembered her eyes as she had entered into the craft and glanced back at him before the door slid shut behind her and the soldier escorting her. He remembered that there was nothing to remember about her eyes. Blank, dark, as mysterious as those of the lizards that had gazed back at him in Janice Poole’s classroom. Black, flashing bright red, and then gone.

  Upon returning from the field to the allied city of Di Noon, he had called this office and that officer, sent urgent and repeated messages. He urged anyone who would listen to show mercy to the Earth Killer, relating the story that her own companion had revealed to him – how she had herself taken mercy on three Earth soldiers vulnerable within her gun sights.

  She had not been released to the Ha Jiin until after the war had ended, but it wasn’t that much longer in any case. Still, as Stake continued to follow her situation, primarily through the news media and military reports, there had come yet another direction for his concern. After hearing the same testimony from her companion that had won her leniency with the Earth forces, her own government tried her for treason. But there was her record to take into consideration. Though she had spared three Earthmen in a moment of weakness, that did not return life to the many other soldiers she had not hesitated a moment in dispatching. In the end, the Earth Killer had been awarded her freedom, dismissed from military service. And her people had given her a new moniker, half out of contempt, and half out of a kind of humor based on lingering respect.

  She was called the Earth Lover.

  The footprints of the Earth Lover had disappeared into the blue jungles of her planet after that. Trailed off into a private life somewhere, hidden from notoriety and shame. A woman turned patriot turned murderer turned pariah. Another live war casualty.

  To this day, she remained as much a cipher to Stake as he was to himself. Was it her living ghost, or his own, that rattled its chains in the halls of sleep more disconcertingly? Or had he and she become one entity in a way, in an abstract form of his mimicry, his empathy? In trying to find her, he wondered, had he as much been trying to find himself?

  She’s using you, Private Devereux had told him. To keep from being executed by his men. Letting Stake make love to her, to prevent being raped again by the others.

  In an alley below he saw two dogs of different breeds sniffing at a burst trash bag together. Like the lizards. That unthinking, instinctual need for companionship. He hoped that at least it had been this between them. Not just her using him. If not love, if not even affection, at least this. Was that too much for him to have asked of her in return?

  As he had countless times before, he replayed her face on the screen of his mind, as she had appeared when he was atop her. She had seemed to have honestly lost herself in pleasure on two or three occasions. On one such occasion, her eyes had slitted almost entirely closed until only a sliver of white showed, as if she had gone into a trance. And she had cooed, in the softest tone he ever heard from her, “Ohh, ban ta like. Ban ta like.”

  Later, he had asked Private Henderson what “ban ta” meant. He had replied, “Ah, that would mean ‘your lover.’” Then realization had shown in the other soldier’s face. But he had said nothing. A good man, that Henderson.

  And she had always called him Ga Noh. The chimera. The shapeshifter.

  He recalled her eyes open, another time, as he crushed himself into her as though he might fuse their bodies, her left leg hooked in the corner of his elbow, her knee bent back to her ear and her foot bobbing, bobbing in the air with thrusts that were almost violent, almost rape. But those wide eyes were not hateful. Or afraid. Did memory distort them into something passionate?

  He had buried his face, buried his soul, in the thick dark jungle between her legs. She had held his head there. Pushing him onward, urging him to lose himself further. And she had done the same for him, avidly lapping like a dog drinking water, her eyes on his all the while, watching for his
pleasure and watching for his magic – until his shame at his gift and for how he was using her made him squeeze his eyelids shut.

  He smelled her skin now. He smelled the hair of her head, her hair down there. Her hard slender calves were unshaven, hairy as a boy’s. It excited him. A few hairs grew from the corona of her nipples. It enthralled him, all of it – every detail pretty or plain – because she was not a dream, not a fantasy; real flesh and blood, a creature of the earth and forest, hands not fossilized white like the aristocracy of her race but with dirt and blood under their fingernails.

  Or was she? Was she so real, now? Hadn’t she become a fantasy after all, like a porn movie android, like a seemingly three-dimensional actress in a holovid?

  Why couldn’t he forget her? He had tried. And sometimes, for months even, had succeeded. But some ghosts couldn’t be exorcized.

  Why had she returned again, as if reincarnated, at this time specifically? What was happening, or not happening, in his life to bring her back with such extra intensity?

  The tease of Janice’s attraction to him? The beautiful slanted eyes of Yuki? Or was it even John Fukuda, longing for his murdered wife? Aching for his dead twin brother, a missing half, the absence of which couldn’t help but leave him shattered and incomplete? In empathizing with Fukuda too much, had Stake only reopened his own war wounds?

  She did care for me, he chided himself. Hateful – afraid – of his doubts. He reminded himself of something else she had said. Something she had told him before being led into the air cavalry craft. Her tone dark and strong again, not her bedroom whisper.

  “T’ank you, Ga Noh. T’ank you, take care, take care of me. Some time I take care you. I take care you, too.”

  Tears burned Stake’s eyes like acid. Angrily, he swiped his wrist across his face. And then he pulled his window’s shade.

  ***

  When John Fukuda entered his own bedroom, he heard a soft hissing sound and realized the Ouija phone was still activated inside his jacket pocket. He closed his door, slipped out the gadget, and stared down at it as if to melt it in the heat of his gaze.

  Was that a tiny voice he heard? Small as the voice of an insect that had crawled inside the thing through a hole in its mouthpiece?

  Slowly, as if afraid it might explode in his hand, explode against his skull, Fukuda lifted the device to his own ear. Held it an inch away from touching.

  “James.”

  “My God,” he whispered. He trembled more inside than outside. “Yuriko.”

  “James.”

  John Fukuda dropped the phone to the carpet. And then he stomped the heel of his shoe upon it.

  FOURTEEN: THE OUTSIDER

  Dai-oo-ika lifted his eyeless head to watch Dolly appear out of the labyrinth of sewer tunnels, a plastic shopping bag in hand. She stepped over the streaming brook of a run-off channel and hoisted herself up onto the tiled platform that was their home, pulling the hanging blanket back into place behind her to offer some illusion of security. As she hunched down beside him and started opening her bag, the old woman paused to frown at her companion.

  “Did you get bigger while I was gone, or what? I don’t know how you keep looking bigger but you won’t eat a damn thing I give you.” She rustled through her bag. “Can’t say I haven’t tried. How about this?” She extracted a banana, all black and soft except for its end. She broke this off and extended it to him. The tentacles that were all he had for a face, ringed in black and silvery bands, writhed and squirmed but did not reach out for the morsel. His hands remained on his knees. “No?” Dolly said. “Christ, are you fussy or don’t you ever eat at all?” She crammed the good banana end into her mouth, then peeled the gelatinous rotting section and ate that, too.

  Watching her, Dai-oo-ika thought of his child mother again. Nourishing him with her love. Embracing him to her chest. He missed her; a yawning canyon of inarticulate yearning. Yes, that was the hunger he always felt.

  Dolly settled in beside him, sitting on her stained mattress. She produced her syringe filled with a metallic sand of microscopic nanomites, almost insects and almost machines. “Time for my medicine again, Junior,” she told him. “You be a good boy and watch over me while I rest.” She injected a measure of the nanomites into a vein in her wrist, then sighed and hid the syringe back inside her coat. She leaned her head against the tiled wall, closing her eyes. “Don’t let those punks steal my stuff while I’m resting,” she purred grumpily. “They try to...steal...my mediciii...”

  Dai-oo-ika continued to watch her, as she had requested. He watched her eyeballs move back and forth beneath their thin lids as if tossing and turning under a ratty blanket in troubling sleep. He sensed that there was no rest for her species, even at rest. But then, he had his own disturbing dreams, didn’t he? Not only of the past – of his lovely, angelic child mother, kissing his belly – but of a future time that would come, or at least was intended to come. He had been having one of these dreams just before Dolly had returned from foraging. Dai-oo-ika had envisioned a burning and mostly flattened city, stretching out black and twisted to all horizons. Below him, thousands of upturned faces and arms lifted in praise. The faces were a mix of human and nonhuman, but all were charred black, blistered by fire and deformed with radiation. Silvery pus ran out of heat-sealed eyes. Yet despite the pain these people must be feeling, they were singing to him, all in one voice of adoration. And he looked down upon them from a great height. For he was huge. Huger than an elephant. Vast.

  He was their god.

  Arms lifted, so many arms lifted as if to embrace him. It would take that many to embrace him. But when he had been small, it had taken only one pair. Having remembered those arms, he could not forget them again. How he longed to be enfolded in them just one more time.

  Dai-oo-ika stirred, shifted his growing bulk. The blue tarp he had been wearing as a poncho made a crinkling sound as he removed it, but Dolly was too lost in her dreams to be bothered by the noise. He moved closer to her. And spread his thick arms, to embrace her. His friend. He loved her. She was all he had for a mother now.

  Dolly gave a dreamy, muffled moan as her face was pressed against his white belly. He squeezed her tighter, until she not only indented his flesh, but began to slide into it. Where only moments earlier the flesh of his belly had been firm as the flank of a whale, now it was a yielding cloud of cells, a raw pudding of protoplasm that let Dolly’s body break its surface, submerge beneath it.

  Dai-oo-ika embraced Dolly until there was nothing left to embrace. And when he opened his arms again, she was gone.

  He knelt there in their little corner of Punktown, surrounded by her cartons of junk, his arms spread empty. On one level, he felt nourished again at last. But on another level, the embrace had left him feeling only emptier still. His friend had fed him. And his friend had gone.

  A confusion overwhelmed him. A sense of helplessness. He did not understand his world. He did not understand what he was, or what he should expect of himself. Had what he’d just done been against his nature, or a fulfilling of it?

  Piercing through all this turmoil was one bright, burning ray. It shot out of him as if to burn this whole city to a crisp. Though he could not utter a sound, it was a howl to burst the eardrums – or mind – of every life form in the universe. It was something he had never felt before.

  Guilt.

  Along with the nanomites in Dolly’s system he had absorbed her syringe as well, and the entire swarm now coursed through Dai-oo-ika, racing madly, exploring and mapping this terra incognita and adapting their programming to tickle and soothe a new kind of brain. But their thousands of minuscule claws only itched at it, scratched at it, irritated it instead. A maddening infestation of fleas in the hide of his mind. Gripped in a humming spasm, Dai-oo-ika spread open his wings, their struts like clawed fingers to rake an unknown enemy. Like the wings of a butterfly fresh from its cocoon, drying in the air. But at that moment, Dai-oo-ika wished he had never emerged from his chrysalis of forge
tfulness.

  Then, abruptly, he cocked his Medusa-faced head, as if a faraway sound had caught his attention. It was as though his silent howl of rage and loss had burned a tunnel through the ether, allowing this distant sound to come to him. It was like a ghostly but familiar voice. It possessed a quality of kinship.

  He turned toward it, because he had nowhere else to go. He would follow the voice like a beacon. But rather than lead him up out of the sewers, it led him deeper into their maze instead.

  ***

  “Want anything from the caf?” Mirelle asked her coworker Suuti.

  Mirelle was attractive, he supposed, for a woman of Earth ancestry, but he just couldn’t get past those terribly small mouths of theirs. Still, the Choom found her company pleasant. They were cooped up together in this small monitoring office of Fallon Waste Management Systems for their entire shift, and so a harmonious atmosphere was paramount.

  “Uhh, how about a mustard?” he said. Hot mustard was a traditional Choom drink that he had coaxed Mirelle into trying, and now she even bought the occasional cup herself. He began reaching for some change.

  “No, no.” She held up a hand. “It’s my treat.” Mirelle left the office, and Suuti leaned back in his chair, stretched and groaned. His bored gaze returned to the bank of status displays and security screens ranged above his terminal.

  With Mirelle out of the room for twenty minutes or so (he figured she’d work a bathroom break in there), Suuti sat forward to change one screen so as to play one of the porn vids he had secreted into the system. He was starting to select a Ron Bistro classic when a loud burst of static on another screen drew his attention.

  A pixilated blizzard filled the monitor. Suuti frowned and lowered his gaze to the tool bar at the bottom of the image. One of the sewage conduits not so far from here; Section D-16. Suuti lifted his eyes again to see a vague dark form shifting behind the veil of static. Then, most of the crackling blizzard cleared, and Suuti saw the form more distinctly.