Punktown: Shades Of Grey Part 2

He never would have volunteered to work two hours late before, but now here he was, driving home in the dark, with some nice overtime to show for his dedication. He was relieved, however, to get away from that nasty little sun-or-moon-faced mockery with its sarcastic, s.a.d.i.s.tic Cheshire grin. He hoped he had turned its yellow heart a nice shade of moldy gray with all the negative energies he had contentedly projected into it tonight.

The colony city of Punktown at night was like driving through a vast kaleidoscope. An immense holographic advertis.e.m.e.nt for a new children's movie had hundreds of ghostly purple teddy bears parachuting endlessly from the pinkish underbelly of the black sky. An old shunt line pa.s.sed along a tunnel straight through a building that looked like it was carved from one t.i.tanic block of translucent amber, while the dome-like structure next door had an exterior like wrinkled, mummified skin (which maybe it was). Mostly humans had settled here, but more exotic races were represented by buildings like that leathery dome, and vehicles like the fin-covered canary-yellow contraption which buzzed so low over Cardiff's roof that he heard the shriek of brief, sc.r.a.ping contact.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" he barked, slamming the heel of his palm on his console. He stabbed his horn, long and loud. He saw the yellow vehicle drop to his level just ahead of him. In the rear window, a pa.s.senger with a checkerboard face of alternating yellow and blue bubbles made a jerking gesture that could only be unfriendly. "Alien freak," Cardiff hissed. He began to accelerate, as if to ram his hovercar straight into the back of theirs, but caught himself...and luckily the yellow machine lifted again and coasted on ahead to find another gap to drop into.

"Got to calm down," he whispered to himself. "I'll get myself shot one of these days." He had once cursed out the window at a vehicle, only to have a pistol pointed at him out one of its windows, just as a warning.

He had bought a gun of his own, a few weeks ago. He hadn't told Saundra, his wife. No one knew that he owned it...or that he had brought it to work last week, though he had left it in his briefcase. The next day after he brought it to work, and brought it back home, he had decided he should purchase the Scapegoat.

He made a note to himself to get a smaller version of the Scapegoat for his car, as soon as he could afford to do so.

When he let himself into his apartment, Cardiff saw that Saundra sat on the sofa in the darkened living room, her friend Seth seated beside her. Seth hastily withdrew his hand from the low V of her clingy, violet sweater, and sat back from her with a jolt. Saundra, however, c.o.c.ked her head back to gaze up at her husband blandly. Cardiff had quickly averted his eyes, as if he had been the one who'd been caught, and lingered there in the doorway with his coat and his briefcase.

"I thought you had gone to see your parents, when you didn't come home," Saundra said.

He still didn't look at his attractive wife, embarra.s.sed that he had compromised her privacy; instead, he stared at the VT, where a naked pair or trio of aliens (it was hard to differentiate them) copulated in slow motion (presumably, unless that was their normal rate of motion), with various ecstatic subt.i.tles in several languages scrolling across the borders of the screen. "No," he murmured, "I worked late."

"Really? Good. You should work more overtime...we could use the money."

"Hey, buddy-bob," said Seth, awkwardly.

"H'lo, Seth." Cardiff threw a glance at his wife's guest, raising a palm in greeting. Seth was a co-worker she had befriended, who had been coming over here or inviting Saundra over his place for about two months now.

Saundra's arm, Cardiff saw, was moving slightly like a pulsing worm along the back rest of the sofa. He realized she was kneading the back of Seth's neck with her hand. "Lena went out with Marisol tonight." She yawned. Like a cat stretching its long lithe body, she rose from the couch. "You can watch in here...Seth and I will watch in the other room."

Seth didn't rise at first; he shot a look from Saundra to Cardiff back to Saundra again. But she tipped her head toward the doorway and at last he stood to follow her from the room. "Okay, so, later on, buddy-bob," he mumbled with something like amicable apology to Cardiff.

Cardiff nodded. When they had left the room he shut off the VT and went to eat a late supper in the kitchen, leaving Saundra and Seth to watch the smaller VT in the other room, which was his bedroom.

Before he left the living room for the kitchen, however, his eyes were attracted to a greenish glow in the corner. The Whipping Boy, on a little table, like some sardonic voyeur, its court jester's face gleeful. Seeing it there, Cardiff was paralyzed with a fury so great he could have walked over to the thing and flung it out the window. b.l.o.o.d.y wretched toy, gloating. That superior, cruel humor glinting in its mascaraed eyes. What sick freak had ever penned the original of that face? Cardiff thought that he'd like to stick a knife right into its forehead...and then, perhaps, into the forehead of the artist who had drawn it.

When the vidphone rang, Cardiff awoke on the sofa with the VT running again, quietly. He had been watching a very old Earth movie (it was in black and white, even) called "Schindler's List," which was quite sad, and he supposed he should have felt scorn for those uniformed Germans but he was too continuously distracted instead by the disdain he felt for that peeping-tom jester in the corner. Yet he had dozed off at some point, and when he went to answer the phone now he wasn't sure if Saundra and Seth were still in the bedroom.

On the vidplate was a stranger, a gaunt-faced Detective Bell from police precinct 15. He had bad news, he announced...and within minutes, Cardiff was on his way to Precinct House 15, without having rapped on his bedroom door to let Saundra know where he was going, or what had happened...

When the attendant pulled the drawer open, Cardiff stared down at a teenage girl with her mouth in a weird little smile and a greater smile grinning at her throat.

"That's Marisol," Cardiff whispered, almost in a faint. "Lena's friend..."

"Idiot," Detective Bell hissed, nudging past the bungling attendant to slide the drawer in, and slide a second one out.

"Oh G.o.d, oh no...my baby...my little girl," Cardiff sobbed instantly, and Bell caught him as the attendant scrambled forward to glide the drawer away again. Cardiff saw his daughter's long black hair, matted and glued with her own blood, vanish through a caul of tears.

"We have three boys in custody already," Bell told him, still holding onto his arms. "We're pretty sure they're responsible. They were pumped up on buzzers when we brought them in, and one of them has a record of previous s.e.xual a.s.sault..."

"s.e.xual a.s.sault," Cardiff echoed, gasping for air. "s.e.xual a.s.sault...my baby...my little girl..."

"I know," Bell told him. "I know."

Cardiff was given three days off from work. He made a vidrecording of the single mention of his daughter's murder that he witnessed on VT. They might not have bothered at all had Lena and Marisol not been so pretty, so photogenic, even in death. They showed a vid of his daughter's body splayed in some parking lot where she had been found, even showed a close-up of tiny red ants swarming on her bare belly around the navel that Cardiff had kissed to tease her as a toddler. Then, they showed the three young men brought into court for their arraignment. They were all three of them short, slender, crewcut, such a mix of ethnic groups they had become no ethnic group at all, like a distillation of the worst of every race and culture. One of them rubbed away tears in his eyes. After he made the recording, Cardiff played it back, and froze on the face of this crying boy. He was crying for himself, not the two girls he had slain. Not for Lena.

But worse than the crying boy was another who smiled. He even looked directly into the camera, and hence directly at Cardiff, and smiled. Cardiff froze on his face the longest. He studied the boy, waiting for something other than sadness to come. Something other than anguish. He waited, as if he couldn't remember what else he might feel, as if he were trying to remind himself why he was even looking at this smirking stranger's face.

At last, unfulfilled, he shut the VT off. And with its glow extinguished, a subtler luminosity caught his attention.

"You!" Cardiff bellowed, leaping instantly to his feet. He aimed his finger at the evil imp's green circle of face. "You think this is funny, f.u.c.ker? You think this is all a big joke? Huh? Huh?" He started toward the thing, his hands like an eagle's talons.

Saundra and Seth came in from the other room, having heard his outburst. Saundra's eyes were red and Seth had been comforting her.

Cardiff glanced over his shoulder at them and then turned instead to the door, leaving his apartment.

When he returned to work after the funeral, Cardiff had bought a small hate machine for his car, and an even smaller one with a flip-open lid that revealed a red clown's face, which he carried in his jacket pocket. He would need to have this one on him when he went to the trial.

He had been working for several hours when he remembered the photo of Lena he had hidden in his drawer. Drawer like a morgue drawer. He immediately fetched it out, gazed at it. His baby girl, chewing on the rubber hand. He smiled. Tears rose to his eyes. And he pinned the photo to the gray padded wall of his cubicle.

When he returned to work the next day, the photo was gone. Not turned to face the wall. Gone.

He found it soon enough in his drawer. That didn't matter. It had been removed. He even thought he saw a new smudged thumbprint rudely on the gloss of the photo itself, like the fingerprints those three boys had left on his beloved child's flesh.

He had begun carrying the handgun in his briefcase again, starting yesterday, his first day back since the murder. He did not know why. Only that he felt better carrying it around with him. And now, he placed his briefcase before him on his desk. The lock opened with a satisfying clack like a gun's slide being worked back, a clip pushed into a handle. He lifted the weapon from inside, like a distorted pearl from inside an opened oyster, a pearl that had formed around an irritating grain of sand, a core of hatred. It felt so good in his fist, like a collapsed star of pure hate, a teaspoon of which would weigh many tons-a whole gun forged out of such metal.

He sat there holding it, ogling it, a long time. And as was her talent, Ruth came into his cubicle, sensing that he was not at work. Her deep voice was already rasping forth...but it caught on the gravel in her throat at the sight of the silvery gun.

Cardiff rose to his feet sharply. He pointed the gun at her face. At her widening eyes, just inches away from the muzzle...

But he hesitated, confused, as if he had suddenly forgotten who he was. And if he couldn't remember who he was, he couldn't remember why he wanted to kill this woman.

Why should he kill her? What had she done? No, she was not the real enemy. She was not the true source of his misery.

No. He turned, instead, to point his gun at the happy, evil sun/moon face of that hideous infernal machine on his desk.

Ruth darted away as Cardiff opened fire. He barely noticed her, and couldn't have cared less. He fired shot after shot into the little machine of tarnished silver, shattering its orange face, its demonic grin.

He heard screams, running, an alarm for security. Tears streamed down his face. Tears of great, crushing sadness. But also tears of joy, of triumph...for Cardiff saw, fallen out of the decimated hate machine onto his desk, its tiny and utterly withered heart.

SWEATY BETTY, TERMITE QUEEN OF THE DANGED.

No such thing as vampires, huh? Tell it to Junk Pharaoh, whose military surplus life scan told him there were about thirty-five of them in the old tenement on Warehouse Way, one of the least cozy hunks of Paxton-more popularly known as Punktown even to police, for whom Warehouse Way was scarcely more than a rumor. Let dog eat dog, so long as the mongrels didn't stray into the pretty uptown gardens.

They looked after their own on Warehouse Way, which was why Junk and his crew had been called in from their camp over in the little brick factory by the old shuttle docks. All the factories and sprawling warehouses in this corner of town had been given over to the homeless, the desperate. Why not? Again, kept them here, and not at the newer warehouse cl.u.s.ters. At first, uptowners had even made an organized effort to transform some warehouses into housing units for the homeless, but too many volunteers had been lost-feeding some of the denizens in a way they hadn't intended-and the project had pulled out.

Yeah, there had been a lot of too-hungry sharks down here at first, but that was where Junk came in. For the past five years, he and his crew had been pulling up the weeds. They were paid by the community in a great variety of ways. Collection plates sc.r.a.ped up a little coin door to door, but mostly it was work exchanged for work, talent for talent. Food was brought to the Brick House every day, representing the many ethnic and otherworldly types of the colony. And there was plenty of s.e.x-a buffet as variegated as the food. All in all, it boiled down to system. Like it or not, system made life better for the majority...even amongst the outsiders and disenfranchised of Outhouse Way, as Junk called it. They took care of their own.

"I seen that spidery little crack-bare kid all over the place the past few days, every time I turn around. No wonder. There's lots of him!" said Raptores, crouched behind a crumbling plaster parapet tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the flat roof of the old Tinberg Ceramics Mill. Across his thighs he cradled a squat little two-fisted gun capable of firing five different types of projectile, from solid to beam.

Beside him hunkered Junk, with the scan. "Thirty-five of the kid." He turned the scan on its side, held it up to his eyes and peered through its magnification feature. "And they all look the same. According to the scan they all weigh the same..."

"Who'd wanna clone some scrawny little mutant-a.s.s punk?"

"I don't know. But they fit the description of the kid who attacked Tahnyah, Mrs. Alcove and old Nod.i.c.k. And if Mr. Pulp and Jellyfish were still alive, I'm sure they'd describe these freaks, too." All five victims had been viciously set upon, bitten and clawed, and their flowing blood licked off them by one of these skeletal albino youths. The latter two had been attacked with more ferocity and had succ.u.mbed to their wounds. "You know, maybe Mr. Pulp and Jellyfish got attacked by more than one...maybe a bunch of 'em...and that's why they died."

"The thought of a bunch of these nudie little gargoyle-b.u.t.t bloodsuckers clambering all over me makes me wanna puke."

"Mm," agreed Junk, watching through the mag screen. Across the street was a row of narrow tenement houses at the very edge of Warehouse Way where it ended abruptly at the Sporcizia Brothers' Waste Treatment Center with its towering, white, loudly humming zapper tanks looming above their repulsion barrier. Junk knew Porco and Ladro Sporcizia from school-when he'd been bored enough to attend-and knew they were now in with the syndy. A chem spill and two fires at the plant had gutted most of the tenements in the row, but the one he was focused on was ceramic block and had held up. A plastic house beside it was a wrinkled, sagging Dali painting of a house.

He had counted four of the creatures outside the four-story block house. One on the flat roof, squatting by a hooded vent fan, watching birds feed on stale bread he had tossed out for them. Two huddled on a metal fire escape, apparently grooming each other like baboons though they were utterly hairless even on their heads. Picking scabs and popping zits, Junk thought, but the scan had been dropped too many times for him to zoom that close without heavy grain. And one creature climbing down the side of the building from the roof. He climbed head-first, fingers and toes hooking in the seams between the grimy aqua blocks.

The one on the roof pounced at the birds. They fluttered up in a cloud and he scratched crazily at bare tile. The noise apparently startled the climbing one. He lost his grip, fell with a distant soft thump. He leapt to his feet and ran at a startling speed around the building, hugging his bony ribs and shaking and rolling his head at an equally maddened speed. After the third lap he darted through the open front door and slammed it shut after him.

"These things have gotta go," Junk sighed.

It was dusk. In the Brick House, Junk and Raptores suited up again in full combat regalia. Raptores had been a soldier and still had his sources outside the Way. With them, also suited up, were two others of the community's police force, Jed and Paisley. The two remaining crew members would hold the fort.

While Junk deftly french-braided the long black hair that usually hung to either side of his fine-boned brown face, he told them just where the tenement was located. "The last house in the row, at the corner."

Paisley's face slackened. "Not aqua, with chrome trim."

"That's it-why?"

"Oh, man...Junk..."

"What?"

"You obviously don't know."

"Obviously."

"That's where Betty lives. At least, that was where she had holed up the last I heard."

"Oh...man," Junk breathed.

Betty. Sweaty Betty, they had always called her out on Forma Street. Ten years ago, one of the prettiest and most popular street geishas on that crayon-bright, playground-noisy boulevard. Junk had been a lot younger then. Young enough to fall in love with a street girl. Young enough to ask her to leave the street with him. She had laughed him off. Junk hadn't liked being laughed off any more then than he did now; he left Forma Street. But five years later when he ventured that way again he searched her out, and found her.

She had been tortured by a band of fun-seeking adolescents, her face badly hacked up and badly fixed at an illegal clinic. The most they did for her was give her good strong drugs. She was still selling her body to buy those drugs when Junk found her, but aside from mutilation freaks-some of them rich businessmen on lunch break-she had to sc.r.a.pe up her living from mutants, the diseased, the lowest dregs of Forma Street.

This time Betty dazedly allowed Junk to take her away. He brought her to his new neighborhood on Warehouse Way. Set her up in a flat with some elderly mutants. Gave her weak drugs to help wean her.

Then he left her to her new life and hoped for the best. Was it her earlier rejection of him, he asked himself on those few occasions when he let himself think of her, or was it her face that made him avoid her? He wondered...and both possibilities filled him with guilt. He saw her sometimes. They smiled and said h.e.l.lo. Sometimes they both looked away instead.

She had never weaned herself, but settled for the sludge drugs she could afford with the coinage she earned from selling her body to the old men and the sorrier mutants of the community. Mostly, she made her own drugs the best she could.

"That house? You're sure? When was this?"

"I don't remember. I was poking around in those old houses for stuff I could make jewelry from, me and Liz Fuentes, and I went to explore the aqua house but Liz stopped me and said Betty was camped in there. Alone, she said. n.o.body else wants to live there 'cause of the Brothers' waste spill and the smell from the zappers."

"Man..." Raptores said. "That's it! See? Those ghoul-a.s.s little vampire punks. She's living in the sc.u.m slum, man! See? Sweaty's giving birth to those things!"

"Get off it," Junk rumbled.

"It makes sense," Jed muttered. "They must be mutants. And they haven't been here long, so she must be churning 'em out fast. It's 'cause of those d.a.m.n slime brothers, but we got to stop her, Junk. I'm sorry, man, but how many of these critters is she gonna put out?"

"All that mutant sperm in her didn't help," Raptores theorized. "Maybe she's having one kid for every john she's notched lately..."

"We gotta stop her, Junk," Jed said.

"Shut it! I'm thinking..."

"What's to think about, Boss, it's our job," Raptores argued. "Let's go in there and give that girl some belated abortions..."

Raptores was then flying backwards, but his flight was brief and ended abruptly at a wall. With his left fist Junk pinned him. In his right was a pistol with its barrel jammed under Raptores' jaw. The pistol was armed and humming. Junk hissed, "You know better, Rap. You know better."

"I know better, man. Forgive."

Junk pushed him away. "Let's go," he muttered, his slanted blue eyes hot but lowered. "We can't let those things hurt the neighbors."

"They glow. See?" whispered Jed from the alley of the ceramics mill. "Like ghosts."

"Like the danged themselves," Raptores rasped in mock solemnity.

There were only two outside, both hunched on the roof edge like gargoyles as Raptores had called them, but not very vigilant gargoyles, as they were intensely grooming or picking at each other. Through his helmet's night screen with its mag feature Junk could now see them closely. Picking scabs. Their faces were child-like and devoid of any life-like expression. Paisley had the scan.

"Three are away from the nest, not far. Should we get them first or after?"

"Mm. You and Jed go take 'em. Me and Rap will get a closer look. If we go in blazing first the strays might hear and hide or go deeper into the neighborhood. But when you find those three, make it quiet so the rest don't hear."

"Right-o." Paisley nodded to Jed and they retreated back down the alley.

"Let's go around back, see about a rear door," Junk told Raptores.

They worked their way behind the aqua building easily and silently. There was a back door. Raptores braced his gun for action while Junk moved forward to test it.

He touched the OPEN tab. He heard the tongue click back. No lock code. They were in. He and Raptores exchanged nods, then Junk eased the door open.