Health Agent Read online

  Health Agent

  A Punktown Novel

  Jeffrey Thomas

  Health Agent © 2008 by Jeffrey Thomas

  All rights reserved

  Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press,

  Hyattsville, MD

  First Edition

  Cover image: Jeffrey Thomas

  Book design: Jennifer Barnes

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-933293-43-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008935997

  www.rawdogscreaming.com

  Other books by Jeffrey Thomas

  Punktown

  AAAIIIEEE!!!

  Monstrocity

  Letters from Hades

  Everybody Scream!

  A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers

  Deadstock

  Blue War

  Acknowledgment:

  With deepest gratitude to my sister-in-law Nancy, who typeset this novel from a manuscript handwritten between February 1987-February 1989.

  INTRODUCTION

  DANGEROUS PLAYTHINGS

  There have been recurrent themes through much of my Punktown fiction, but maybe a few words of introduction to Punktown itself are needed first, should this be your first outing there. Punktown is my milieu of choice, my favorite haunt, a vast megalopolis established by Earth colonists on a far-flung world, its streets rife with criminals and lost souls, aliens and mutants, and the occasional hero, however reluctant or troubled. And then there are the villains...

  Health Agent revolves around biotechnology put to trivial, dubious, even dangerous uses—science unfettered by moral responsibility, become a kind of plaything—and I suppose it’s an obsession with me, judging from other Punktown-based fiction of mine. There is my 2003 novel Monstrocity, in which a company that produces grotesque edible life-forms also grows an even more grotesque secret army of monsters. The novel Deadstock, 2007, concerns a biotech company that creates little bio-engineered pets to sell to children—one of these living dolls, concocted from mysterious cell samples, turning out to be the larval kin of H. P. Lovecraft’s god-like Old Ones. And then there’s Deadstock’s 2008 follow up, Blue War, wherein an organic building material becomes infected with a virus, and instead of forming an apartment village begins replicating Punktown—to disastrous effect—on another colony world. Add to this short stories like The Reflections of Ghosts in the collection Punktown, 2000, about a man who makes distorted clones of himself as an artistic statement, and I think you can see what I mean by obsession.

  THE FUTURE VIA THE PAST

  The Reflections of Ghosts—probably my favorite of my Punktown short stories, and the most reprinted—also intersects with another favorite subject of mine, that being the artist and his work. But before The Reflections of Ghosts, art and science collided in Health Agent, which also predates all the other novels I’ve just listed. Health Agent took form as a handwritten manuscript, begun in February of 1987. (Over twenty years ago, yes, but I’d already been writing stories set in Punktown for seven years by then, though the first Punktown short story wasn’t to appear in print until 1992.) Between February of 1987 and February of 1989, when I completed it, I broke off from Health Agent to write the novel Everybody Scream!, which takes place at an annual carnival outside Punktown, as I had recently been to the Spencer Fair in Massachusetts and was full of impressions and inspirations. It amazes me now that I took such a long break in the middle of Health Agent’s action, because I still consider it one of my most intricately plotted stories, with a lot of driving force. I don’t think this break between Parts One and Two would have been apparent to a reader had I not made this confession, nor would I think it apparent even after I’ve confessed it. But I almost made what could very well have been a grave mistake at this halfway point, when I returned to it. I had just become involved with my first wife, Rose, a gentle young deaf woman, and I came this close to making her the novel’s love interest, and chronicling in a fictitious way our romantic relationship within the remaining plot. Thank God, good sense won out (as it doesn’t always do), and I resisted going this route, sticking instead to the tight police-type thriller I had fashioned to that point. There exists somewhere in my house, however, a page or maybe several pages that started down that road, and I might have suggested the material appear here as a kind of DVD extra if I were ambitious enough to hunt for it.

  It was my desire to leave Health Agent as close to its original form, here, as possible. I did give the story a slight polish after it had been typeset from its handwritten manuscript by my sister-in-law Nancy, several years ago, but I stuck with my style from that time because, well, that’s who I was back then, and that’s what Punktown was like back then, and though the years may have evolved both myself and Punktown, I very much want Health Agent to remain true to all that. I wouldn’t go back now and add references to the Blue War, for instance, or other places, events or characters from the later stories, to tie them all together, though it’s okay for the later stories to make references to those that have gone before—and before the Blue War of my 2008 novel there was a Red War, as you will see. But I did make a few alterations during my polish, one of these being to change the name of the character Pink Cowrie to Opal Cowrie. When I did this, I guess I worried people might think too much of the pop star Pink (though a few years later, maybe not), but also I felt having the health agents named Black and Pink might be too contrived. (Even if I did drink coffee from matching, marble-patterned black and pink mugs during the writing of the book.) So I’m still going with the altered Opal. And as for Black; as I was writing the novel, I realized I was referring to the character Montgomery Black primarily as Black in the first half of the book, and Monty in the second half. I think this had less to do with the long break in my work on Health Agent than it did some changes in Monty’s character. He starts out as a more morally ambiguous protagonist, committing a pretty shocking act in the first chapter, but as the story progresses and some major events befall him, I think Monty becomes more fully engaged morally, less an agent and more an individual, and this is reflected in the switch from the hard-sounding Black to the softer Monty. So when I did my polish, I made sure to make this switch from Black in Part One to Monty in the remainder of the book fully consistent.

  I have to give my friend Thomas Hughes some credit for the creation of my villain, Toll Loveland. Like my brother Scott, at my invitation Tom has written a number of stories set in the Punktown universe (well, mostly set in the neighboring city of Miniosis), one of these—Domino Diamond—appearing in an anthology I edited called Punktown: Third Eye, which consists of Punktown stories by other writers as well. One of Tom’s follow-up stories about the beguiling “gender bender” Domino Diamond features a mad artist as its antagonist, and I sort of, uh, stole that basic idea for Health Agent. Thanks, Tom, and I hope to help you get your other two Domino Diamond stories into print to return the favor.

  COVERING ART

  A little background on the cover art might be of interest, it being rendered by the author himself for a novel about an artist. I created the cover for an earlier publisher that was to have released Health Agent, before they dropped all their forthcoming projects (thankfully, returning later to publish some other of my books instead). It’s primarily a collage. The lower portion, the city, is from a photo of Hong Kong, which I distorted by flipping it in mirror image and elongating it. I then cut up the resultant photocopies and shuffled the pieces around, and did a little touch up by hand. (Since making the collage I have flown over—and switched planes in—Hong Kong numerous times and it is indeed a sight to behold from the air.) The cells floating down from the sky represent both a biological threat and a strange black blizzard from the novel. I photocopied
the cells from a book, pasted them in and touched them up (giving them cilia, etc.) by hand.

  When I scanned this composition into my computer, I originally gave it a maroon sort of tint to meld it all together more uniformly. But experimenting further, I inverted the colors and came up with an effect I loved: a sort of luminous green, negative look that put me in mind of gargantuan fleas and horny skin cells and such, as photographed through an electron microscope. So to further this scientific effect, I added my name and the title in green glowing letters to resemble readouts on some kind of medical monitor, maybe. For the book you hold in your hands, the publisher made some tweaks, reproducing my type with type of their own, sticking to the same look but moving things around just a bit and adding another line of type.

  Now you have more on Health Agent’s origins than perhaps you require, or my humble novel warrants, but I hope you found it of at least some degree of interest. I turn you over to health agent Montgomery Black, who two decades ago—before private eye Jeremy Stake roamed the streets of Punktown in Deadstock and Blue War—was unraveling mysteries, bringing enemies to justice, and learning about the mysteries of his own heart along the way.

  —Jeffrey Thomas, January 5th, 2008

  Part One:

  Cupid of Death

  ONE

  The Serdab Memorial was no single obelisk or monument, but every tile of Red Station, a subway stop in Paxton, known better as Punktown. The walls, the sides of descending/ascending escalator banks or wide staircases, were set with red tiles as glossy as porcelain, and set back inside these somewhat murky translucent tiles were apparently three-dimensional faces, each one different from the next, the visages of soldiers killed in the Red War. They were holographic reproductions taken from information stored in the dog tags of the soldiers represented, the resulting death-mask tiles called serdabs, after the ancient Egyptian word referring to a hidden cell in the masonry of a tomb into which were placed images of the dead. The rows of faces, male and female, human and otherwise, were more or less distinct depending on the quality of light which reached them, and on how much grime or graffiti obscured them. Some tiles had been pried out and stolen, maybe to decorate the dashboard of a car or mantel of an errant art-lover’s apartment.

  Bum Junket stepped off one of the trains of the Red Line into the echoy strumming of a guitar further down the tunnel and a man singing about knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door in a twangy nasal voice. Almost instantly Bum was lighting a cigarette, jostled and bumped by the flow from the phallic silvery train. He felt a bit watery in the legs, having had to stand on the train, but he couldn’t give up smoking. Anyway, why should he? It was a cool, soothing brand that didn’t make him wheeze any much more than he already did. Bum took his time in strolling along the tunnel toward some benches against a long unbroken stretch of tiled wall, although he couldn’t wait to sit again, feeling weak and tired as though hungry but not in the slightest bit hungry. Bum was twenty-four, black, and very thin, resembling closely a child emaciated by starvation, his dry skin taut over the hard definition of eye sockets and high cheekbones, his cheeks sunken and teeth distended, whites of his eyes a foggy yellow-brown and large squiggly veins rooted at either temple. He looked most like an unwrapped, animated mummy. His hair, however, was neatly close-cropped, he wore an outsized black and white checkered jacket with a caricature of sharp-edged padded broad shoulders, a silken silver shirt, baggy white pants with a narrow belt riding high above his hips, and silver slippers that revealed his bone-spurred ankles. Over a shoulder hung a black and silver checkered giant’s handbag in proportion to his jacket. Bum was ever highly concerned with his look.

  “At last,” he groaned aloud, reaching the benches like a shipwrecked sailor having swum to shore. He lowered himself carefully as if setting down a box of rare china.

  “Scum,” said a Choom to him on the next bench over. Bum was alone on his bench but the Choom shared his with an old man curled in sleep, wearing a faded bathrobe over his graying street clothes. The Choom—native to this planet, Oasis, and human in form but for the great mouth rambling back to his ears—wore black lipstick and his red-dyed hair was draped with shiny glamour to hide one eye.

  “Oh, fuck you,” groaned Bum, looking away, then he looked back briefly to ask, “Who is that with you, Blo, your new boyfriend?”

  “I know about you, Junk-it, Rump told me everything,” sneered the Choom. “Look at you. Who do you think you are coming back here? You don’t care who you kill, do you? Don’t you care about anyone but yourself? You selfish pus-bag scum.”

  “How do I know I didn’t get it from you, oh high and mighty?”

  “I doubt it sincerely. I take care of myself, I take herbs and vitamins and every kind of immunity pill I can get my hands on.”

  “Oh that doesn’t help; there’s no cure…”

  “Preventative medicine, fudger… a stronger house is less likely to be blown down in a storm.”

  “Blow down on this.” Bum made an open fist at his crotch.

  “Oh, you mean it hasn’t fallen off yet?”

  “You know the risks—go get married if you’re so fucking afraid.”

  “Why should I have to give up my lifestyle because of you?”

  “Ah-hah!” Bum lifted his chin at Blo. “And why should I? God , we’re all going to get it anyway, aren’t we? Should I give up eating and smoking and reading, too?”

  “You won’t infect anyone else by reading, you ass. You had better go, Bum, I mean it…some of us will get together and throw you out if we have to, I promise.”

  “Do that. And I’ll go down to the Blue Line station and make friends there, and those friends will come through here, and they’ll be your friends. So what’s the fucking difference?”

  “Get off the streets altogether, you selfish bastard! My God, what do you need the money for—a fur-lined coffin?”

  “What are you so afraid for, Blo? Your herbs and vitamins will save you.”

  “We have to keep our world as clean and safe as possible! Can’t you make a little sacrifice instead of doing a lot of damage?”

  “My God, you sound like the Health Agency! My life is not a little sacrifice.”

  “Your life is over!”

  “Not yet. Leave me alone. You could have caught it as easily as me if you haven’t already, and you’d feel different if it were you.”

  “I’d take myself into an experimental program.”

  “Oh mutant-shit,” Bum dismissed, looking away to blow out smoke.

  “Look at you! Who would want you anyway?”

  “I’m not a fat pig like you. No one and nothing will suppress me…I don’t give in to life.”

  “Such pride from a selfish skeleton that guzzles sperm in bathrooms.” Bum was a john-head, as the local slang went, while Blo would get picked up by the commuters passing through, go off with them to their apartment or his, a hotel or a car. He serviced less individuals but made more money for his efforts. These two types of male prostitutes in the Red Station had never happily coexisted even before this new, super-resistant mutant STD.

  “I’ll hold on long enough until they find a cure,” Bum said, more quietly.

  “You’re already dead.” Blo rose from his bench. “I’m going to find some others who feel my way, Bum, I mean it. You’d better leave before I come back. We’ll even make a call to the Health Agency, if we have to.”

  Tremulous anger flashed out through the foggy glaze over Bum’s eyes. “Go ahead! You’re the selfish one, trying to control my life! Call whoever you want! I’ll just get myself a lawyer like that girl on VT!”

  “How will you afford a lawyer?”

  “By guzzling sperm in bathrooms.” Bum smiled hatefully.

  “Oh, fine.” Blo nodded. “Fine, alright. I’ll be back, Bum.”

  “Fine, too.” Bum stubbed out his cigarette against the side of the red marble bench, cried out after the red-haired Choom, “I’m still alive, you bastard…I have rent and bills t
o pay!” His slim mechanically-boned hands trembled as they pinched a fresh cigarette from their package. Bum muttered, “Unsympathetic fudger.”

  Three well-dressed women clicked by in their hard heels, laughing, laden with colorful shopping bags, two with large bags featuring a painting by a Choom artist whose work was being spotlighted this month at a nearby museum. The painting, his most famous, was of a starved dead dog lying on the street which the artist had encountered and painted on the spot. The laughter and clicking ascended to the open upper-world where it was gray, cold late winter. The guitar music and singing had ended, too. Bum swivelled his attention to the right; tensed inside. Two teenage boys and a girl vaulted up onto the subway platform from down in the train trench. The Trogs, a gang numbering in the hundreds. All three were dressed entirely in black, with long black raincoats and black fedoras, black goggles with a dot of red light in the center of each lens, skull-like on their impassive pale faces. All three carried a hooked black cane. People near the mouth of the tunnel from which they’d emerged drifted off like leaves before a wind. A nearby solitary forcer, also garbed in black—but with a full-head helmet and, hanging from a strap, a machine-gun which fired short individual ray bolts—turned his inhuman head ever-so-slightly to follow them. One pair of goggles swept Bum’s way and he quickly averted his gaze. One time a passing Trog had idly hooked his neck, slender even then, with his cane and jerked him off his feet.

  The Trogs strolled off down the tunnel; Bum’s stomach unknotted. Two good-looking short-haired boys of about seventeen came to sit where Blo had been. One had a white polo shirt, tight white pants ending just below his knees, white slippers, and the other a white wool sweater, tight fading blue jeans, black slippers. College boys. Into Bum’s third cigarette a tall man in an utterly unrumpled ash gray business suit just off a train approached the boys and opened a conversation but didn’t sit. The sweater-wearing boy left the bench to accompany the commuter to the escalators. Bum sniffed in distaste. Fucking punks, most likely were even straight, just working their way through school or picking up a bit of weekend fun-money. To Bum their ilk were exploitative invaders. Of course, a few genuines dressed like the pretty college boys to attract those who were drawn to that flavor.