Everybody Scream! Read online

  Everybody

  Scream!

  A Punktown Novel

  Jeffrey Thomas

  Also by Jeffrey Thomas

  Terror Incognita

  Punktown

  AAAIIIEEE!!!

  Monstrocity

  Letters From Hades

  Punktown: Third Eye (editor)

  Boneland

  Honey is Sweeter Than Blood

  Everybody Scream!

  Everybody Scream! © 2004 by Jeffrey Thomas

  All rights reserved

  Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

  Hyattsville, MD

  First Paperback Edition

  Cover image: David Anthony Magitis

  Book design: Jennifer Barnes

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 0-9745031-9-3

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2004095075

  www.RawDogScreaming.com

  Acknowledgments

  Infinite thanks to the Raw Dog Screaming typing pool, who arduously transferred to type a manuscript written by hand in 1987-1988–most particularly to Jennifer Barnes, who did the bulk of the work. And thanks to Scott Thomas, for being Frankie Dystopia and my brother.

  Smoke Circus

  Licorice skies

  Bend the lights

  Of a steel skeleton horizon.

  I spin in your vehicles

  Cotton candy clouds

  Popcorn teen faces

  Scream the riders, loud.

  Amass the delighted

  Vibrant, excited

  Is this where life starts?

  Shooting gallery hearts.

  Bumper car kisses

  Who stops to idol?

  The flax of humanity

  Like a gold hero's title.

  Flesh and metal

  Neon and death

  Flame the smoke circus

  The purpose of breath.

  -Frankie Dystopia

  In the colony city of Paxton, also known as Punktown, the current number one rock group was Sphitt, and the number one rock song this summer was their hit In Your Face. This song now played on Kid Belfast's music system–the third time he had heard it this morning. It had been background music previously but now he focused on it, listened to it.

  As it was for millions of other young men right now, In Your Face was his song. It wasn’t that he especially emulated the group physically, or their nearly indistinguishable kindred groups Flemm, Mhukas and Sputum (several of which had the same manager), as many of their other fans did. Sphitt’s hair was snowy white fluffy lion manes overwhelming their tiny faces with their little chins and chiseled cheekbones and seemingly ceaselessly distended puckered pouts. Kid had short bristled hair, a nondescript light brown, and his lips were thin, their compressed lack of expression hardly sultry. When the members of Flemm and Sphitt did smile for the stills, their smiles were lazy insolent smirks worn like jackets tossed over their shoulders, and this was the unified smirk of most of their fans, as much a distinguishing badge as the explosive manes. When Kid smiled it was a shy, embarrassed grin like a fissure in his usual composure.

  Also, Kid didn’t spit much. Many boys now frequently punctuated their speech and activities with spitting, spit over each other’s shoulders in greeting, at each other’s boots in farewell, and at each other’s bodies in hostility. Naturally he had done this to some obligatory extent, but he had seldom joined in the frequent contests of mucus launching of milling boys, and had only tried chewing tobacco once. He had almost vomited. It was, almost inconceivably, simply the music itself which appealed to him–its bombastic, melodramatic chest-beating, every song an overwrought epic of operatic emotion. Only their thundering exultant anthems seemed to rouse him from his near constant sullenness, but it was naturally their passionately unhappy, venom-spitting opuses that gripped him most. More than manes and kissable pouts with saliva loaded behind them, Kid Belfast embraced the lyrics of the songs by Sphitt, Mhukas and the rest.

  He lay on his back in Noelle’s bed, the sheet a stilled tide against the beach of his naked hairless chest, fingers laced under his head. It was his music system but it was here in Noelle’s dorm room, a guest like he was, though it stayed while he came and went.

  Noelle giggled with Bonnie Gross at the window, their bottoms presented to Kid, Bonnie’s tiny bottom bare, tanned a darker color than Noelle’s skin, although Noelle was partly black in extraction and predominately so in appearance. Bonnie was nude, as usual, Noelle wore an oversized men’s white undershirt as a nightshirt. Somebody in a car, a male fellow student, was yelling back and forth with the young women. Kid was not a student; he had just slept over.

  “Yeahhh, I’ll be there!” Noelle shouted huskily. “I’ll be there! I will be there!” The male yelled something back. “I don’t know–I’ll be there.” His turn. Then Noelle. “I don’t know where I’ll be–everywhere!” Him. Then her. “All day!”

  “Just be there!” Bonnie giggle-yelled down. Goodbyes were called. Noelle and Bonnie turned away from the window, Bonnie strutting past Kid on the bed, her back arched and shoulders so thrust back that her small tanned breasts aimed up at the ceiling. Kid might have been excited by her nakedness if he hadn’t hated the idea of items as soft as bottoms and breasts being burnt to a leathery darkness. Noelle, on the other hand, was natural in her light darkness...soft...and Bonnie was always naked, always open, but Noelle had that shirt on, the points of her breasts teasingly nosing out the material, the hem falling just below her thighs. Noelle better understood her visual effect.

  It took Kid a great effort to ask Noelle from the bed, as she bustled about with groggy animation, “Where is it you’re going today?”

  “The fair,” she said, stopping at the cooking unit her mother had bought her to heat a mug of water from the jug in the mini fridge Bonnie’s mother had bought her, so as to make tea.

  “With who?”

  “Oh, I’ll be there with thousands of people.”

  “Including the person who was yelling up at you just now?”

  “Yeah–including him–he’ll be there. With thousands of people.”

  “And you’ll be meeting him. Right?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” She gave him a look. Not a long one, but long enough.

  Bonnie laughed at Kid, sipped her glass of cough syrup-thick, apricot-scented breakfast wine. “The Green Monster,” she said in a horror movie voice, wriggling the fingers of her free hand.

  “That should be a ride at the fair,” Noelle Buda joked. Both women giggled heartily.

  The bones of Kid’s face worked under the skin. His eyes screwed themselves into the ceiling. Angry replies, counterattacks ground themselves against each other in his mind like his teeth, but couldn’t pry their way out of his jaws. Bonnie had to be in his way, as always, throwing his strength off balance, an obstacle, one of Noelle’s “buddies,” a cancerous growth that Kid would have liked to slice off Noelle and ground under his heel.

  “In your face,” sang Chauncy Carnal, of Sphitt, “I want to shoot my gun,

  Blow your brains out, now ain’t that fun?

  Seize you by your tresses, slam home my sperm

  Rip off all your dresses until your lessons are all learned

  If that’s what it takes for you to look in my eyes

  If I have to deafen you so you’ll hear my cries

  If I have to tear into your dreams to make myself real

  Do I have to spit in your face to make you feel?

  To make you feel, make you feel that I’m real?

  Oh, oh, oh, in your face, you sorry little bitch

  Yeah!”

  Barnacle-like organisms clung, or rather were fused, to the insides of the damp tunn
el, each one as big around as a large truck tire, projecting funnel-like, black and glistening but for the anemone-like translucent white tentacles which flowered at the ends. The tentacles glowed, attracting unwary moths and such and illuminating the tunnel, and slowly writhed as if in some underwater current, but Wes and Fen merely avoided them casually. Once this circular tunnel had conveyed water; the barnacle-things had fed on insect-like plankton forms, but had since adapted mindlessly to the plankton of the air. They were possibly a hundred years old, like this tunnel.

  Wes and Fen were both nineteen. Their plastic sleeping bags still lay on the sheets of packing foam and the flattened-out giant cardboard box they had put down to insulate themselves further from the moist tunnel floor. Wes sat cross-legged on his bag pouring some black coffee from a thermos. Fen, who hated coffee, sat on a chair made from two cinder blocks and a board, smoking a cigarette. On their radio/chip player they listened to a chip by Sputum–but not too loud. They were in hiding. By Wes’s knee on his bag lay his automatic pistol.

  “Have a doughnut, spitter,” said Wes, chewing, holding out a crinkly bag.

  “They’re stale. They were stale yesterday. I need some real food.”

  “All we can eat at the carnival tonight.”

  “All we can eat. Are you going to sit down and vote on the best quilt, too, while you’re at it? We aren’t going there to eat and play games, mucoid, we’re going to make our move and get out of there. What if one of the enemy is there and spots us? Many people will be there, it’s not impossible.”

  “The enemy,” Wes echoed with a smirk.

  Clack-clack. Fen’s automatic was a foot from Wes’s nose. Though Wes’s identical Tikkihotto military sidearm was closer to him than his friend’s gun, Wes didn’t take the chance. “Yes,” hissed Fen Colon, “the enemy. You can mock the fact that I was in the army for two years, but the sleeping bag you slept in last night is an army bag, the gun you carry is an army weapon, the coat on your back is an army jacket, the boots on your feet and the thermos you got your coffee from are army issue. And it’s my army training that’s kept us alive so far and that will see us through tonight, after which our lives will get a hell of a lot better. So mock me, mock the service...but the next time you do you’re on your own. You can do things the civilian way, and walk right into the minefields and blow yourself to confetti.”

  “Oh yeah, if I left you on my own you’d really let me walk away alive.” Wes wasn’t so cowardly that he couldn’t speak his mind with death poised in his face.

  “You miserable little drooler.” Fen spun away from Wes and off his chair, stepped further down the tunnel and then whirled to glare at his friend, cramming his pistol back into its holster. “You really got a high opinion of me, don’t you? A soldier never betrays a buddy! Never! You’d do that to me in a second, but don’t ever think I’m as low as you!”

  “All I said was one stupid little thing!” Wes turned his head to spit on the wall to emphasize his exasperation. “Let’s just forget it all, huh?” Wes sipped his coffee. You’d think that Fen’s code of honor had been forged on the battlefield instead of at a military training station/vocational school on the outskirts of Paxton. Fen had acquired their gear mostly from army surplus stores, and much of it was of the Tikkihotto, not Earth Colonies, armed service. Wes bit into his doughnut. Stale. Too stale for poor Fen, the soldier.

  “The enemy are soldiers,” Fen grumbled. “You don’t stand a chance against soldiers unless you yourself are a soldier. Being a soldier is a state of mind, a religion, and your gun is your Bible and your crucifix and your God. God won’t keep me alive unless He’s in the mood, but my gun is always there for me. The enemies think the same as me, mucoid, the same way. And they outnumber us a hundred to one. You haven’t seen them, you think it’s all a joke. I almost wish we would run into them tonight so you’d see.”

  “Alright, okay. I’ll take it seriously. What if some of them are there buying when we make the move–do we wait and let them go or fuck them, too?”

  “I want to avoid engaging at all costs. Only if we must will we engage them. They aren’t yet aware of us; the less they know about us after the move the less far away we have to run to be safe.”

  “They won’t wonder about that drooler we fucked? That won’t put them on guard?”

  “Moband was highly connected, highly involved in many avenues. They won’t necessarily...won’t be likely to associate his murder with LaKarnafeaux.”

  “Yeah, well just maybe to be on the safe side they’ll have some gunners around keeping an eye on LaKarnafeaux. If I can think of that, then I’m sure these soldiers can.” Wes stressed the word a little sarcastically.

  Fen let it go by. “They know LaKarnafeaux can look after himself. He may be a little on guard, but I don’t think he’ll be too fortified. All should go well. But we aren’t going there tonight to buy candyfloss. Remember that.”

  “You’re the one who wouldn’t eat stale doughnuts.”

  Fen fingered his pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. Two left. That was worse than only having stale doughnuts. He’d have to pick up a few packs tonight at the fair, along with a few quick bites. This pack, and the pen lighter (a writing instrument, red, with a lighting device at the other end) he now used to ignite his second to last cigarette, he had taken off Moband’s corpse. Wes had done the actual killing, after they’d first found out who the big dealer of the drug purple vortex was, said to be working the fair. Only this lighter pen, applied to Moband’s forehead, had finally elicited the information. Roland LaKarnafeaux. The “enemy,” as Fen Colon referred to them, got all their vortex from him...hence Fen’s insistence on caution tonight when he and Wes Sundry went to rob and kill LaKarnafeaux.

  Wes preferred calling the enemy what they called themselves–Martians.

  The next cut by Sputum started up...I Am What You Eat. Wes bobbed his head enthusiastically to the thumping beat, spit at a mammoth barnacle on the wall and then sang along to the words:

  “Hey you squirmin’ mermaid, wriggle on the beach

  The water’s so close and so far from your reach

  Flap your fishy tail–spit, you smell fine!

  Got my knife all set and I’m ready to dine

  Here I go, lady, I’m casting my line!

  The worm I’ve got for you is a good three feet

  Swallow it all, baby, cuz I am what you eat!”

  Yeah, maybe they could meet a few girls at the fair tonight, too, thought Wes, inspired. Fen didn’t want to hang around long, but purple vortex might prove a quick bait. He hadn’t had much time for fun with Moband, a surgical hermaphrodite; he’d had to close his eyes to climax–and not because Moband was dead, but so overweight and homely. Wes was determined to have a little fun tonight no matter how much Fen tried to hold him down.

  “You can spit it out later if you don’t think it’s sweet

  But invite me in for dinner cuz I am what you eat

  What you eat, what you eat, bitch

  Yeah!”

  Dolly Horowitz lived in a fifty-third floor apartment in Robin Plaza, with an expansive view of lovely Plaza Park across the street, as safe an area as any in Punktown could be, but she wasn’t happy with it. Her husband had moved them there from Miniosis last year to be near his work assignment with Tessler Bioplastics. She spent most of her time consoling herself in the inferior malls and art galleries of Paxton, or painting. She had already dressed for some painting after breakfast, in tight blue jeans and a powder blue work shirt open at the throat and rolled up to the elbows, white sneakers and no socks. Hair pinned up in back. She looked so great this way, as sophisticated casual as she was in an evening gown. Also, she had the girls to occupy her. Her husband’s daughter by his first wife, Chana, was off for the summer in Caba; her eighteenth birthday present from her father. Fawn, Dolly’s daughter, was home. Next week school would start, and though the summer would still be in effect by the calendar’s reckoning, it would be officially over
for all the kids. Fawn was going to the fair tonight as she had the past two nights, a last party before school. Tonight was the last night for the fair.

  Fawn came scuffing into the kitchen in her furry white slippers and pink satin Kodju-inspired robe, her long dark red hair mussed, sneering at her own grogginess. She was a pretty girl, turned sixteen a month ago, and her somewhat long nose gave her narrow face an intelligent refinement and a touch of ethnic character, Dolly was pleased to note. Dolly had chosen for Fawn her beautiful rusty hair and soulful hazel eyes through scientific artistic design when she had decided to become a mother (not carrying Fawn inside her either, due to her work with the museum in Miniosis at that time, though carrying one’s child the natural way was coming back in the upper class, a “statement” some called it). Fawn was tall and slender–her mother liked to describe her as willowy. Though Dolly was kind and affectionate toward Chana, her resemblance to her own mother–short, dark and large-breasted–was bothersome and partly responsible for Dolly’s design for Fawn.

  “I’ll make you some breakfast before I go paint,” said Dolly.

  “Ugh–no thanks. I feel like retching up everything I ate last night.” Fawn plopped herself at the breakfast counter. Propped her elbows on the counter and her forehead in her palms. “I have a junk food hangover.”

  “And you want to go again tonight. You know, Miss Brain Damage, it isn’t the money you waste going down there night after night or the poisons you put in your body–it’s a dangerous and scary place for a sixteen-year-old girl to be, with just a few friends and no adults. This is Punktown! Even in Miniosis it wouldn’t be smart! Look, Daddy and me went with you the first night and you had fun…why can’t you wait and see if Daddy can come home early enough tonight to take you?”

  “I promised Cookie and Heather!”

  “Well I can unpromise Cookie and Heather. I don’t like it!”

  “I can’t stay locked in a castle all my life!” Fawn whined, morose.

  “Oh you poor little neglected thing. You don’t care how I worry, though, do you?”