Punktown Read online

  Table of Contents

  PUNKTOWN

  Connect With Us

  Other Books by Author

  The Reflections of Ghosts

  Pink Pills

  The Flaying Season

  Union Dick

  Wakizashi

  Dissecting the Soul

  Precious Metal

  Sisters of No Mercy

  Heart for Heart’s Sake

  The Ballad of Moosecock Lip

  Face

  The Pressman

  The Palace of Nothingness

  The Rusted Gates of Heaven

  Immolation

  Unlimited Daylight

  The Library of Sorrows

  Nom de Guerre

  The Color Shrain

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  PUNKTOWN

  Jeffrey Thomas

  Digital Edition

  Punktown © 2014, 2010 by Jeffrey Thomas

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  THE REFLECTIONS OF GHOSTS

  There was no question; the dead thing in the gutter was one of his clones.

  It was naked and fetal-curled like a withered spider, rain drops bursting all over its white skeletal body. Its face was turned up to the sky, lips folded back from a frozen gnash of black teeth. Its flesh was ossified, like stone, pitted all over and cracked black at the joints and around the neck and jaw. The black eyes were like holes where spikes had been.

  Drew thought it was beautiful, lying there, like a cast figure from Pompeii. He looked up around him as he sipped from his lidded coffee. Across the street was the Chrislamic Cathedral, a looming metal structure of jagged black spires and stained glass windows all red in webs of black steel. On this side was a row of warehouses, half of them empty and sealed up, a few converted into housing for the cheap labor teams who worked in the warehouses that were still operating. It was a nice setting for the corpse; a quiet street, a lonely street. As lonely a street as anything could hope to die in.

  He was tempted to move the creature just a few feet to be more directly opposite the cathedral. In that way, it would seem even more like some lost soul denied its salvation. But no, the thing had chosen to die here, not there, and while Drew was the artist, he decided to respect its choice.

  He walked the rest of the way home quickly. Along the way, he passed a group of four Vlessi, an infrequently encountered race. Their inhuman appearance and probably fictitious reputation as blood-drinkers unnerved him somewhat, but when he was past them he gave them several looks over his shoulder, intrigued with their forms, making a few mental notes for possible use in his art.

  The lift to his loft was not functioning again today; it merely squealed painfully and shivered until he shut it off. The metal steps he took instead clanged under his heavy boots; some of the staircases he mounted were inside the old warehouse, some outside. Dirty rain water trickled between the filthy white ceramic tiles of the building’s skin, to which the external staircases were affixed like the skeletons of immense parasites. He heard a woman crying behind one window he passed. Wasn’t aware someone had moved into the trashed third level. Maybe it was a ghost. He used to think ghosts lived on the roof of the old sealed up factory across the way—at night they would often move about in the rain, a softly glowing blue—until he finally realized that it was someone’s holotank sending out a scattered signal on stormy nights. That would explain the frequent shootings. Movies. Drew had thought it was the ghosts living out their deaths.

  His loft comprised the entire upper floor. Its narrow balcony ran the length of the building, and on warm nights he would sit and listen to music as he stared out at the city lights of this Earth-established colony called Paxton—or, more commonly but not necessarily with more affection, Punktown. Sometimes he would sketch out there. Though he worked with more three-dimensional mediums, he was adamant that every artist should be able to draw, as every surgeon should still know how to stitch a suture.

  The balcony furniture was piled and tipped over now for the winter, and the rain slanted into his back as he struggled to unlock his door. The illumined code buttons were flickering, and he was about to dig out his key when finally the big metal door grated open three quarters of the way before jamming in its track. He slipped inside, hit an overhead bank of sickly greenish lights, and punched the internal door key. The door slid shut with a mournful metallic groan.

  The overhead lights were sputtering now, too. Maybe the storm was interfering with his illegal power tap-in. Well, that was the price he had to pay.

  He didn’t remove his overcoat. With it still swirling around his legs, weighted with the rain, he went directly to a series of metal shelves lined with large jugs of liquid and powder, labeled with markered tape. He pulled down one without a label, screwed off the cap to sniff the contents, flinched back from the fumes. This was the one.

  With the jug slung from one finger, through the handle like a trigger guard, he clomped back across his loft to the door, and returned to the torrents.

  The downpour was picking up strength, but he doubted the water would interfere with the sealant. It was, after all, water-proof.

  The clone was still there. No being had carted it away, no animal had come to dine. It had no stench. How long had it been dead? Did its fossilized skin seal in its decay? The plastic sealant would do that, much better.

  He poured the clear, sap-thick fluid directly onto the corpse, unmindful of a few wildly varied vehicles which floated past or splashed by through the wet street. He was careful not to let his feet get near the stuff as it began to pool around the figure. He wanted to pour the sealant on so heavily that the clone would be impossible to remove, glued to the street, until someone finally went so far as to chisel it free.

  Only a little sealant left, so he poured that on just to kill it off and tossed the jug into an alley between warehouses. He nodded, smiling at the figure, which glistened as though varnished. He thought it might be interesting to spray-paint his signature on the sidewalk near it—he had, after all, tattooed and branded his signature onto a few of his clones before setting them loose—but was afraid that someone might think this was some ordinary mutant, and he its murderer.

  Of course, there were always the clones in progress at his studio to prove the actual situation.

  He was getting soaked, was anxious to get back and take a hot bath, make a fresh tank of coffee. He left his dead offspring behind him, still satisfied with the way it had died and the way it would continue to exist as a work of art even in death.

  * * *

  He always kept full a large coffee tank that had once belonged to a local art cinema; its smell was a comfort and the aquarium burbling soothing. This brew was a little old, several days, so he drained it to m
ix a new one. He had already bathed, changed into clean sweat pants, a black tee shirt and kung fu shoes. Inspired by his discovery earlier that evening, he was anxious to get to work. There was a paying job in progress.

  Was that it now, sloshing in its chemical bath? This also gave off a nice burbling, though the chemical stink was unpleasant, so he usually kept the partition drawn, as now, and the vent fans on. Like fetuses with troubled dreams, the clones often tossed and turned in their amniotic baths.

  This one, as usual, was for a wealthy client. One clone took weeks, sometimes longer to create, but one sale would pay a month’s rent and keep Drew in food for himself and materials for his work.

  At first he had been naive about his sales. He had thought the clones he sold were exhibited in cell-like terrariums, perhaps, like exotic animals, or freely moved about at parties among the guests, to be examined up close, Well, yes, both of these were true. But a friend, Sol, his contact with the wealthy, had once attended a party where one of Drew’s clones was given as a birthday gift. The thing had been chained all night to a faux marble pillar. At the end of the night, it had been taken out into the brightly flood-lit yard and made to swallow a tremendously expensive ring. Then, the young man whose birthday it was had been given a knife so that he could retrieve his ring, his other present. His young friends had howled and hooted, cheering him on as he began to carve and dig and chase the scrambling thing. Sol had told Drew that the youth had been disappointed when the thing finally vomited up the ring as it died. But the youth gutted it anyway, threw the offal at his hysterical friends, chased his girlfriend around the pool with the thing’s head before finally tossing the head into the pool amid roars of approval.

  Drew had not known how to feel about all this, at first. For one thing, obviously, it was his artwork being destroyed, like a canvas slashed to ribbons.

  But also, the clones were an extension of himself, weren’t they?

  The most important thing to do with each clone, no matter what its final form would be, was to obliterate its resemblance to him. He did this through a multitude of means; chemical infusion, dyeing, branding, tattooing, scarification, burning, removal of limbs, addition of limbs, surgery, molecular tampering, genetic manipulation. He did not mean for the creatures to be self portraits. They must not look like him, or else that was merely nature and science at work, not an artist. He only used his own matter as a kind of clay, because it was available to him. And, if it ever became a legal problem (he had lost his art grant once he began making his clones), he could use the defense that it was his own body alone he was tampering with, and he could do anything he wanted to that. The ethics of cloning and the rights of cloned life forms were cloudy enough topics at this time that he felt reasonably safe in his activities. Just so long as it was only himself he cloned.

  Just as important as the physical obliteration was to obliterate the mind, so that it also bore no resemblance to his own. He achieved this, too, by various means, some crude and brutal, some utilizing more finesse, but always rendering the clone a shuffling sub-idiot at best, not even capable of serving canapés off a tray at one of those upper-scale parties. It was another legal defense—he was making nothing more human than a starfish, in this way—but also, he did not want his mind to be duplicated in something so wretched. Something that might feel horror at its own condition.

  In the end, he acclimated himself to the more sadistic uses of his progeny. The snuffed clones, the tortured clones, the hunted clones and gang-raped clones. Target practice for darts and arrows, Sol had heard—summer yard games. They were not himself. They were certainly not anyone else. He need mourn them no more than he mourned the skin cells he was constantly shedding, the fingernails he clipped. And if his art was destroyed, well, it was now another’s possession to do with what they wanted. The money they paid to own and sometimes kill part of him kept the main part of him alive.

  And with that money he could create the clones that mattered most to him; the ones he turned loose into the world when finished, to wander the streets of Paxton/Punktown wherever their mindless minds took them. Some naked, some clothed for winter, some beautiful in their way and others hideous, like the four he had turned out last Halloween, to his great amusement.

  But for all the clones he had turned out over the past three years, since he had begun, he had never seen one of their dead bodies before tonight. Oh he had heard of the fates of a few. Murdered by a gang, struck by a hovercar. He imagined most starved to death or froze. He had heard that several had been taken into homeless shelters. It always intrigued him to wonder where his creations had disappeared to in the vastness of the city. Once he had been thrilled to see one of them still alive after a year, eating a bird in a little courtyard park. The thing had looked up at him without recognition, its flesh permanently dyed a vivid red and spiral brands raised on its forehead and both naked pectorals, like some lovely demon. Even if people did not venture close enough to see his branded signature, even if they never knew Drew’s name, even if they thought the thing was a painted madman, a mutant, an alien being or a true demon, they would marvel at it, and even if Drew never saw them marvel, he was gratified knowing that they did. Whether people gazed in admiration or horror, he knew they gazed, and in gazing at his creations they gazed at him, their creator.

  Even though he turned them loose, he was always connected to the beings; though he disowned them, he owned them each and every one.

  Coffee in hand, he moved around the partition to check on his work in progress.

  In aquarium tanks atop a work bench and against the walls here and there, indistinct organic forms hung suspended in gurgling solutions of violet liquid. Some were embryos, though in one tank he had grown a copy of his head alone like a living bust; he meant to offer it for exhibition just like this to a local gallery, hooked up to life support in its womb-like container. He knelt, said, “Hello, Robespierre.” He tapped the glass, watched the eyelids flicker as if from a dream. He had suppressed growth of hair, eyebrows and lashes to keep its resemblance to a minimum, but for the sake of impact had left the thing as human-looking as possible.

  More sloshing; he looked up to see a swell of violet fluid pour over the side of the main bath, run down its side. He sighed, rose, took up a mop as he went to peer into the tank he had dubbed “Narcissus’s Pool.”

  Drew couldn’t help but grin at it. At her.

  Where he had suppressed hair in the disembodied head, he had encouraged it here; long dark hair stirred lazily around the clone’s face like a sea plant. He had not distorted or marred her face, had instead achieved great change through skillful genetic work. It was not a surgical sex change, but something more subtle and true. This was, for all intents and purposes, an actual female version of himself. Even nature in her genius could not achieve such a thing; an identical twin of the opposite sex.

  He rolled up his sleeve, slipped his hand into the bubbling violet fluid. Took one smallish breast in hand and kneaded it, as if he were molding the breast out of clay. He ran his thumb over the nipple, coaxing a reaction. It took several minutes, but at last the nipple began to harden. And so, in his way, did Drew. He grinned more broadly, and watched her eyes move in REMs beneath their thin lids. Soon he’d awaken this sleeping beauty. And he did make an awfully fetching woman, if he had to say so himself.

  He let his eyes trail down her body to the flaring of her hips, then to her shadowy patch of hair. Back up to the breasts which he had kept on the modest side, resisting the temptation to make them more bountiful. He didn’t want her to be a caricature.

  Yes, she was lovely. It was a pity that he had already ruined her mind. What kind of woman would he have been in that sense, he wondered?

  Though he had not, admittedly, obliterated her mind to the extent that he usually did in his creations.

  * * *

  In the section of his loft that he thought of as his living room, on the wall above the sofa in fact, Drew had suspended the one clone which he c
onstantly kept on personal display. It had a human enough head, but he had suppressed the formation of eyes, for he did not want anything to be perpetually gazing at him as he went about his work and his life, or dozed on his couch. But the thing did grunt or wheeze, sometimes. It was hooked up to a life support unit hidden behind the couch. A keyboard was on a side table; when the rare friend visited, Drew could amuse or tease them by hitting keys to inspire movement of the limbs or the face of the crucified thing—mostly just electrified muscle spasms and jerks.

  Its chest was opened up in two wide sheets like a spread cowhide, the flaps of a dissected frog belly, spiked to the wall. The ribs showed through a translucent membrane, as did the nest of fat bluish intestines.

  The first time he had seen the thing, Sol had said, “Drew-man, I think you must really hate yourself, to humiliate your own body like this. It’s masochistic. You create yourself so you can destroy yourself. It’s a kind of suicide, isn’t it?”

  Drew had laughed. “It’s art, that’s all. I just choose to use flesh as my medium. People always have. Tattoos and brands, scars and piercings. Flesh as canvas; only it hurts less to do it to a clone of me.”

  “Yeah, see, that’s it—a safe way to punish yourself.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “You can’t have kids, you told me, right? You don’t produce sperm. Is this some kind of perverse reaction to that? Are these your children, created in hatred of a body that can’t make the real thing?”

  “Sure,” Drew had replied, “why not?”

  “Is it because you hated your father, and he hated you?”