Nights in Punktown Read online

  Nights in

  Punktown

  A Trio of Dark Science Fiction Stories

  JEFFREY THOMAS

  The Jeffrey Thomas Chapbook Series

  #2

  Copyright © 2019 Jeffrey Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Tithi Luadthong/Shutterstock.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.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Draped in Flesh is original to this collection.

  Out of Nothing first appeared in the online publication DarkFuse Magazine, 2017.

  Little Wing first appeared in the publication Dark Discoveries, JournalStone, 2018.

  CONTENTS

  1. DRAPED IN FLESH

  2. OUT OF NOTHING

  3. LITTLE WING

  4. About the Author

  DRAPED IN FLESH

  Isabella didn’t know if any of the other tenants had yet ventured to the roof to have a closer look at the mass that had fallen there from the sky.

  She herself had only been to the roof on one previous occasion. Last summer, a short time after having moved into this apartment building called Benevento Arms, she had taken her old classmate Clara – visiting from Miniosis, Paxton’s larger but less colorful sister city – up to the roof so they could look out at Punktown (as Paxton was more colloquially known) and share a bottle of wine. When they’d stepped out of the little shed that enclosed the stairwell, the two young women had encountered three men about their own age, of Earth heritage like themselves, reclining in foldout lawn chairs with bottles of Zub in hand, staring up at the sky, its underbelly of cloud aglow with neon and laser and holographic advertisements so that it seemed as though they were awaiting the arrival of some prophesized storm of falling colored light. When the men spotted the women, they sat up as if suddenly sober and called for them to join them. The women had begun to retreat back into the graffiti-layered shed, Isabella pulling at her friend’s arm.

  “Hey,” one of the men had called, rising a bit unsteadily to his feet. He was muscular, wearing a white undershirt and shorts, his short hair and thick beard black. “Don’t be afraid, ladies! You...you’re on floor 8, right? I’m Emir – I’m on 9. Hey, come on, come back! We have a cooler here for your wine!” He gestured. But Isabella had begged off, and Emir and his two similarly built friends had moaned, “Aww!”

  In the stairwell, as the door had slid shut, Clara had laughed in a whisper, “Horny fucks.”

  “Really,” Isabella had said, less amused, because she had to live in this building. “They might have tried to get us drunk and rape us.”

  “Dearie, you’re the Punktowner, not me. You know there are a lot worse things in this city than those little boys.”

  “You don’t know that. You never know what someone is capable of,” Isabella had replied. “We don’t even know what we’re capable of.”

  “Anyway,” Clara had said, “they weren’t cute.”

  This afternoon, when the door slid back and Isabella stepped out onto the roof, she gratefully found herself alone. Except for the great mass of flesh.

  It was winter, the air a rush of knives, but at least it hadn’t snowed for a while. Usually Weather Control disallowed that stuff after Christmas.

  The air was almost painfully clear to the eye and Punktown stretched off in every direction, first and foremost. Punktown took a backseat to nothing. Since quaint old Benevento Arms had only twelve stories, other buildings soared up past it on all sides, some of them seemingly unto infinity; skyscrapers penetrating the heavens, their upper portions lost in haze. Down below, slow hovercars clotted the streets. Up here, helicars swarmed a bit more freely between the gargantuan columns, like intent hornets.

  A massive free-floating hologram advertising some melodramatic VT series, in the Korean language, faced Isabella. Momentarily she stood in place to watch the trailer. She determined the story centered around a love triangle. Lots of soundless yelling and sobbing, even a fistfight between two jealous young men as handsome as models. A gorgeous young woman spat blood into a handkerchief...uh-oh. Dramatic terminal illness. Isabella hated love stories. Insipid. They only reminded her of her own love stories, failures like canceled VT shows.

  Finally taking her eyes from the holographic trailer, Isabella moved forward upon the rooftop.

  The great mass, an airless and collapsed zeppelin of flesh, had come to rest here like a parachute. It covered about three quarters of the roof’s surface. Isabella stole upon it warily, as if the massive thing might suddenly shudder, judder, back into life. After all, who could say this glob was actually dead?

  It appeared gelatinous, a material that subtly glowed – in a golden metallic way – from within. Tiny bubbles floated slowly, ponderously, through its substance as though through an intoxicating beverage. Isabella knelt at its edge, in awe, to run her hand over this matter as if in a sensuous caress. She found that it wasn’t as gelatinous as she had taken it to be, but firmer, almost like soft rubber.

  At her approach, a flock of gray birds with tapir-like snouts had shot up from where they had been perched upon the tallest hump of the uneven, protoplasmic mass. Isabella lifted her head to watch them scatter. They hadn’t been feeding on the thing, had they? She didn’t know these nuisance city birds to be that kind of scavenger. She saw three bird had stayed behind, fluttering their wings madly. It was odd, but their lower bodies seemed partly sunken into the matter. Were they stuck? It wasn’t trying to feed on them, was it? But after all three of them – more or less at once – gave a strange spasm, the straggler birds launched into the sky, wildly and awkwardly at first, then regained their composure and swept off to catch up with their tribe.

  Isabella rose to her feet. She wanted to go to the far side of the building and look down. There, the rubbery golden mass was draped in such a way that it hung down about halfway to the street, obscuring the windows on that side of the building from floors 12 to 7. She knew all too well, because her bedroom window was currently blocked by the thing as though a heavy shade had been drawn to cut off the light. She didn’t approach that side of the roof, however, as it would mean actually climbing up onto the blob and walking across it.

  She didn’t trust it because she didn’t know enough about the material’s properties, its potential threats, because it hadn’t been sufficiently explained to the tenants what the thing was. The landlord had assured them all, in a message sent to their wrist comps, that the Health Agency of Paxton had been notified. HAP had told the landlord that the thing was a portion sloughed off a damaged ship – of “partly organic composition” – coming into Punktown for an emergency landing. The ship itself had landed more or less successfully, with apparently no casualties to either its crew or Punktown citizens. Isabella couldn’t recall what race the ship had belonged to, if the landlord had mentioned it at all. There were too many to keep track of in Punktown.

  Well, it had been three days now, and no health agents had as yet come to examine the debris, let alone clear it away – however they intended to do that.

  The landlord had informed them in a follow-up message, no doubt in response to concerned calls, that the Health Agency hadn’t forgotten them...they simply had quite a backlog of work to deal with. This was, after all, Punktown.

  Isabella walked along the edge of the thing, where it thinned to a membrane only about two inches in height, as if skirting a surf lest it wet her sneakers. Behind the shed that contained the stairwell – and the mass was partly flopped across its roof – there was a pronounced heap, and upon it she enc
ountered a strange feature that caused her to stop in her tracks.

  Here, the golden tissues appeared to had been torn away, or melted bloodlessly away, revealing an isolated bit of interior structure, like a fragment from a titanic skeleton. However, this uncovered object appeared metallic, the color of brass. Was this, then, not part of the “organic” component of the alleged ship?

  Weirdly, this structure, consisting mostly of two ring-like shapes – large enough that she could have slipped her body through them – looked to Isabella like a partly exposed set of brass knuckles made for a violent god. She stared up at them, atop their heap, and realized the air within the rings was blurry. Not only blurry, but swirling. Clockwise within one ring, counterclockwise in the other ring.

  She grew dizzy staring into them both simultaneously. A strange thought came to her...that this arrangement was a kind of brain, if only a primitive one, perhaps a brain for just this section of the living ship. That data...or calculations...or thoughts...swirled around and around in one ring, until they were churned into the proper state to be transferred to the adjacent ring, where they were further processed, or put into usage.

  She felt an urge, then, to climb up onto that mound, and thrust her arms into the rings...one in each. This sensation was almost a compulsion. It was as though something – the thoughts whirling in opposite directions around and around in those rings? – was coaxing her. Almost beseeching her, like a melancholy lover that needed her.

  It needs to rejoin its ship, Isabella thought. This thought seemed more than an intuition to her. It was more a certainty, as though transmitted to her. It’s in pain. It’s lonely.

  She tore herself backwards a step. She almost lost her footing...she feared she might black out. She squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed her brain shut, spun away and groped her way back toward the shed in the center of the flat roof.

  Isabella got herself inside, slid the door shut behind her. It seemed to cut off the spell. She leaned against the inner wall for a few moments, catching her breath, before she descended back into Benevento Arms.

  ***

  Tomorrow was Valentine’s Day. Isabella had almost forgotten, but she received a message from her ex-boyfriend Claudio on her wrist comp and when she opened it, a holographic heart flashed up into the air in front of her, revolving and spewing gold glitter that flickered and fell. It was like some startling booby-trap. Isabella wondered, had he sent this same valentine to the girl he’d been fucking behind her back for over six months before she’d found out? She trashed the message.

  What a gruesome holiday, she thought. How grotesque, these old holidays, like Christmas...celebrating the birth of a man who was tortured to death, whose torture was blithely displayed on necklaces and in churches to subdue worshippers with guilt. This St. Valentine, he’d been beheaded – so go eat some chocolates! These cute red hearts exchanged by lovers...they were a crude representation of an organ the size of two clenched fists that pushed blood through the body. Why not revere a liver, instead? The bowels? Hell, what about the brain? A penis, a vagina? Who were they kidding...of course those two bits were what it really boiled down to.

  Love, Isabella sneered, if thoughts could sneer. It was just peacock feathers and mating dances. Just the biological impulse to seek a temporary union, an illusion of wholeness, in order to propagate one’s species. In the end, about as romantic a function as shitting, wasn’t it?

  Whatever day it was on Earth that the holiday would fall on, here on the colonized world Oasis it was the weekend. Isabella slipped out of bed, wearing the sweatpants and oversized Del Kahn concert shirt she favored sleeping in. When she remembered Claudio had given her this shirt, which had belonged to him – reminded of this by his surprising, irritating message – she sighed with self disgust.

  Remembering how she’d drank half a bottle of wine last night, after coming down from the roof, and gone to bed early, and pleasured herself and fallen into a deep sleep afterwards, she sniffed her fingers. Claudio had told her he loved the smell of her sex. She had loved his body’s scents, too; armpits, balls. It was funny, she reflected, how one might be attracted in one’s lover to the very kinds of smells that would repulse if it were another person.

  She got to her feet, moved barefoot to her bedroom’s single window, and confronted it.

  The faintly glowing gold flesh was like the lid closed over a sleeping eye. When she stepped a bit closer, she could see those bubbles floating dreamily throughout it. They were mesmerizing. She tried to watch one bubble for as long as she could, as one will attempt to follow a single raindrop running down a window pane, until she finally lost track of it amongst all the others. They were like masses of people, viewed from high above, restless and wandering and lost.

  Staring ahead, no longer following any particular bubble, Isabella reached out her hand in a somnambulistic way and touched a button. The lower window pane slid upwards.

  Even with the pane lifted, she remained separated from the world outside. Sunlight beyond the membrane caused it to glow beyond its natural luminosity, making it translucent. It was beautiful, wasn’t it? Like amber, in which some innocently passing insect might become trapped forever. In which she might become trapped. But what an odd thought.

  Isabella reached out a hand to touch the organism, as she had done on the roof, with tentative sensitive fingertips. The hand with which she had relieved her oddly amplified hunger last night.

  She felt the matter immediately push back against her. Bulge slightly into the room through the rectangular opening of the window frame. She was startled, but defied the urge to jerk her hand away. What was this? Again, she had a sense or intuition of a kind of longing. Or was it only her own longing, reflected back at her from this material in some way?

  As if teasing a shape from very soft clay, Isabella worked her fingers – not entirely consciously – to pinch out a cone of the material. She did only half the work. It also pushed itself out, eagerly, as if wanting her to shape it. When this extrusion was long enough, thick enough, she slid it through her closed hand, back and forth, to smooth and further elongate it.

  “Well look at you,” she said dreamily, gazing down at this and smiling at it, the cylindrical shape in her lightly closed fist.

  The rubbery cylinder firmed up in her hand.

  Without letting go of this extrusion, lest it become absorbed back into the rest, Isabella gripped it in her right hand but jerked the waistband of her sweatpants down with her left. She had nothing on under them. She reversed her body, thrust her bared bottom out, nuzzled the protrusion against herself. Rubbed it against her until she could guide it, slide it, inside.

  “Ohh God, yeah,” she murmured. “Oh, fuck yeah.”

  She was able to let go of it now, as it was firmly slotted inside her. Though the membrane pressing through the window opening subtly pulsated, she had to provide most of the movement herself. She gripped the edges of the window frame and pushed/pulled herself. A growing rhythm. Mounting...

  ...quickly exploding.

  She fell forward, onto the carpet of her bedroom, with a sobbing exclamation.

  She twisted to look up from the floor, over her shoulder, at the window. At the golden membrane...as flat and inscrutable as before.

  Isabella got to her feet shakily. Without a word to the flesh that blocked her view of the world beyond, she closed her window again.

  She felt no sense of rebuke. Hell...rather, she almost wanted to thank it.

  ***

  With the weekend past, it was back to work. On her way down to the ground floor of Benevento Arms on what served the planet Oasis as “Monday,” Isabella boarded the lift at floor 8 to find the young man who’d once introduced himself to her as Emir, living on floor 9, leaning in a corner. Oh God, she thought, wishing she had retreated from the lift before the door could slide shut. With his head lowered, eyes downcast, she hadn’t recognized him until it was too late. Enclosing just the two of them, the lift hissed smoothly toward the lob
by.

  He didn’t speak to her, which rather surprised her. At a quick backward glance, Emir struck her as distracted. Isabella recalled how this tall and cocky young man with his overly virile beard and muscles had called to her and Carla on that summer evening to join him and his two friends for some drinks. And no doubt, hopefully – ultimately, inevitably – for some nice, to his mind, animalistic copulation. Isabella looked toward him again, leerily, and at last he lifted his eyes to meet hers, eyes in baggy dark sockets, only to immediately drop his gaze once more.

  “Hey,” she said to him, less wary of him due to this unexpected shyness. Was he less bold when sober, when not bolstered by the company of a friend?

  “Hey,” he replied.

  “How are you? Emir, right? Floor 9?”

  “I’m fine,” he said hastily, almost defensively. “You’re on 8?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Isabella”

  “Nice,” he stammered, as if drunk. Leaning hard into the corner as if unable to stand on his own. Not drunk, maybe, but badly hungover? “I mean...nice name.”

  Isabella allowed her gaze to lower. The front of the young man’s pants was tented outward, and at the very tip of this display (was he even aware of it?) was a small, dark, wet stain in the fabric, as of precum.

  When Isabella lifted her eyes it was to see Emir’s own locked with hers. His voice sounding hesitant, uncomfortable, he asked her, “How’ve you been feeling? Everything okay with you?” It might have been small talk under other circumstances, but something about his tone, his edginess, made it sound like he wanted to know how she was doing for comparison.

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “Never better.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah...me too.” And he slid his body up along the wall, using it to support him, as if to prove it to her. “Just tired, you know?”