Ghosts of Punktown Page 14

  “Some of it. Other stuff is borrowed from school.”

  I didn’t know if “borrow” meant borrow or “borrow” as in borrow for good, but anyway, I tapped a picture in the magazine she’d opened on my thigh. “And what is this thing, exactly?”

  “An antimatter-catalyzed fusion generator.”

  I looked up at her slowly. I guess my eyes said more than any words I was trying to come up with.

  That bright smile of hers, bigger this time. “Well, they told me you were good.”

  “Hey,” I said, regaining my balance, “I’m Quick Billy.”

  * * *

  Those cuddly twins were bigger than I’d first judged them, God bless them, with black nipples like licorice gumdrops. Her skin was smooth, so smooth, and when we were slick with sweat it was like melting chocolate and I wanted to taste every inch of it. She would clench me tight with her legs like she was afraid I’d float away from her if she didn’t hold me down, hold me inside her, and she looked up into my face one time with a kind of urgent desperation that clenched my heart tighter than her legs, and cooed, “William, you make me crazy.”

  “You can’t pin that on me,” I told her.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Don’t ever leave me.”

  Told you I was quick. But I wish I could say that I was smarter than I’d always thought I was. She tried to explain her research project to me as I brought her what she needed over the next few months. Tried explaining quantum teleportation, molecular displacement, suchlike stuff, but it all sounded like magic to me. In fact, the hardest things I tracked down for her – and I can’t tell you how I did it – were a couple of books that sounded pretty magical to me, especially given how old they were. One was called The Atlas of Chaos, by a Choom named Wadoor, and the other was The Veins of the Old Ones by a Tikkihotto guy named Skretuu. These two books were the only things she didn’t try to discuss with me; in fact, she seemed kind of evasive about them. One time I got a little extra curious, but she cured that quick by dragging me by the hand back to her bed.

  Since her actual bed was heaped in clothing and piles of books, for us bed meant the fold-out sofa, which we’d open for the night as I spent less and less time at my own place. We’d lie there in the weird emerald green glow coming through the cooling vents of the generator I’d managed to get for her. I’d sold it to her cheaply enough, considering, but I’m not saying it was cheap – not that I spent a cent on it myself, ahem. It was a used super-duper-whatever generator, and one night steam started hissing out of it, giving us both a moment of panic, but she got the thing under control again.

  Across the living room from Candy’s work station were sliding glass doors that opened out onto a stingy little strip of metal trying to pass for a balcony. But we’d often open the doors up and lean over the railing, me in my boxers and she in just my shirt, watching neighborhood kids play in the alley. They were one of Punktown’s races that I didn’t know the name for, with skinny white bodies and six long legs, looking like cadavers with an extra set of limbs sewn on. They actually scampered up and down the alley walls like spiders, tossing back and forth four balls – one red, one yellow, one black and one white – like expert jugglers, though I never did figure out the rhyme or reason of their game. Still, it was fun enough cheering them on. One afternoon, squeezing my hand as we watched, Candy pecked me on the cheek out of the blue and whispered, “I love you.”

  I was stupid. Always the cynic, but probably it was more to do with insecurity. I snickered and said, “Aw, come on, baby – you’re just slumming while you’re away from Mom and Dad. After you win all these prizes for your project and sell the rights to some mega-corp, you think you’re gonna settle down with a runner for a crime family?”

  She let go of my hand and edged away from me. I could tell I’d really hurt her. “Why don’t you give me a little credit, huh? How about a little faith in me?”

  I squirmed inside my skin, muttered a little and rubbed her back. Gradually she warmed to me again, but I never did apologize enough for what I said.

  Three days later, while I was out looking up some new item for her (I’d stopped taking money for them a long time ago), I tried again and again to reach her on my palm comp but couldn’t get through. So I drove to her flat instead.

  Emergency vehicles surrounded the building, even in the alley where the spider children would play. For a minute, I couldn’t find the strength to step out of my car, or even shut its engine off. I just gaped up at Colonial Estates, at its top right corner where Candy’s apartment had once been. Now, that corner of the building was – gone. There was no fire, no billowing black smoke. No debris in the street below. Later, when I managed to pull aside forcers, fire fighters, EMTs to question them, each told me basically the same thing, which wasn’t much. It was like that corner of the building had been vaporized, without so much as a cinder block falling to the sidewalk.

  And the apartment’s tenant? Well, they said, unless it turned out that she’d run off to the market or something, then it looked like she’d been vaporized, too.

  * * *

  Three months after the accident...and I still hadn’t slept with another woman. That wasn’t like me at all. I learned something about myself the hard way. I was capable of a love much stronger, truer, and more lasting than I ever would have believed of myself. Candy had said, “Don’t ever leave me.” Well, she had left me – but my love hadn’t vanished along with her.

  Three months after the accident...and one night a glow behind my eyelids awakened me in my own little Punktown flat. I opened my eyes to a vivid green glow that filled my room, and with a start I was throwing myself out of bed, almost tangling my leg in the sheets and pitching to the floor, but I managed to stay upright and whip out my pistol from under my pillow, besides.

  Floating in the center of my bedroom was an open doorway. A room lay beyond that threshold, two-dimensional like a room reflected in a mirror, and the green illumination spilled out from in there. Though the metal door with the blistered beige paint and the number 30 was itself missing, I recognized the room I found myself staring into. But I didn’t even need to recognize it, because standing just beyond the doorway that hovered a few inches off my ratty carpet was Candy, gaping back at me, looking just as rattled as I must have looked.

  I was reminded of the first time we met, standing on opposite sides of this same portal, and peering at each other through the security monitors.

  “Oh my God, my God, Candy...” I babbled, over and over. I was unaware that I was still pointing my gun at this vision, this mirage or hallucination, and I found I couldn’t approach it. In fact, I’d backed up until my legs touched my mattress.

  “William!” she called across my bedroom to me. Her voice sounded weirdly muffled and far away, almost like it was underwater. Her eyes were wide. She was bundled inside a blanket like a shawl, and I thought I saw her breath wisp out. “William!”

  “Oh my God, Candy.” I wanted to ask her if she was dead. If she was a ghost. But I knew it was something even more horrible than that. Behind her, across the room I saw the balcony windows, their drawn curtains washed in the emerald light from the generator I’d found for her. It hadn’t exploded and vaporized her living room, after all.

  “I created a displacement bubble, William,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to teleport myself, I only wanted to extend a bubble, to test the field. But I got shifted out of our plane.”

  “Shifted where?” At last, my feet made their own decision to shuffle me closer to the doorway into her room-within-my-room.

  “I don’t know where I am, but I’m cold.” She drew the blanket around herself more tightly. “So cold...”

  “Do you have enough food to eat?” I asked. It seemed like a crazy question, but it was a consideration, wasn’t it? “It’s been three months now!”

  “Three months?” Her face twisted. She looked around herself, apparently checking out the time as displayed inside her room. “It’s only b
een a few hours!”

  “A few hours?” My mind knotted up with more questions. “How did you get here? How’d you find your way to me?”

  “I knew where you live.”

  “I know that, but how?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking about you, and...”

  “Oh man,” I cut her off, “why did I ever get that generator thing for you? I knew it was old. Why did I get you all that stuff?”

  She gave me the faintest, weariest of smiles, a ghost of the smiles I knew. “If you hadn’t got it for me, we never would have met in the first place.”

  “No, baby, this is all my fault,” I groaned. I was very close to the doorway now, and while she talked I reached out my hand tentatively to reach through it.

  “Don’t!” she screamed. And then, from under her blanket, a limb emerged. Her right arm was the same beautiful dark color I remembered it to be, but the end of it was a smooth, tapered stump ending at the wrist. “Please,” she moaned, shaking her head, “don’t touch it, William.”

  A mist started clouding the doorway, like fog breathed on a mirror glass. It softened the green light, but more than that, it made Candy’s voice more muffled. In moments, I could see her moving her lips but I couldn’t hear a word.

  “Candy!” I shouted. Despite her warning, I felt my body coil as if I might try jumping through the rift before it could close.

  But then the doorway and its eerie glow – and the woman framed within it – vanished altogether, as if it had all been a waking dream, now dispersed. The only evidence I had that it had occurred was the tears that brimmed in my eyes.

  * * *

  At twenty-nine I guess you could say I was officially no longer a street punk. Teeb himself had taken notice of my work. Now I had runners working under me to buffer me from the actual street action.

  In the months following Candy’s visit that night, I had contacted her parents and tried to get them to believe what had happened. In short, they thought I was cruel, and sick, for suggesting such a wild story about their deceased daughter. Even wilder was the suggestion that Candy would have been involved with me at all. Her mother even went so far as to sneer and say something to the effect that Candy’s boyfriends had always been from good, wealthy families, and that was the kind of man she would have ended up marrying – not a scruffy beret-wearing alley rat like myself.

  I managed to track down one professor at Paxton Polytech who was willing to listen. I told him just enough about the equipment I’d gotten for her to make him believe me. He instructed that if Candy should visit me again, I best have a camera ready to record the encounter, and he gave me a list of questions to ask her, urging me to call him immediately in such an event.

  Together, we visited Colonial Estates, but already the missing section of the building had been repaired. Still, we got the landlord to let us check out the restored apartment, which wasn’t yet tenanted. He had always been decent to Candy and me, and as we strolled around the apartment with him he made a wincing expression and said, “I hate to tell you this, but the workers found something strange one day when they came in. Right there in the middle of the living room floor was...well, it was a human hand.”

  I stopped in my tracks, my mouth hanging open, before I managed to get out, “A right hand?”

  “Yes. But it was just bones, like something off somebody dead a long time. We figured it might be something left over from the explosion – but then, why didn’t anyone find it before, and why lying there in the middle of a brand-new floor? So I decided it must be a prank. But when we turned it over to the forcers, well,” and now he touched my arm sympathetically, “it was Candida’s DNA. Sorry to be the one to tell you.”

  “How long after the explosion was this?”

  “Ah, about three months.”

  I nodded. That would have corresponded with Candy’s experience of time; for her, just a matter of hours would have passed. Hours into her ordeal, she had tried reaching through the portal. Through a twisted maze of space and time, that part of her at least had found its way back to her point of origin. But bones, the man had said...just bones.

  Well, after that I waited. Every night for weeks I lay awake, waiting. But the weeks passed. Months. And five years, before Candy appeared to me again.

  I still had the list of questions somewhere, and the professor’s number, too, but when I lifted my head to see that doorway floating at the foot of my bed, all I could do was jump to the floor and stand riveted.

  Five years is a long time. I had a wife now, and she sat up in bed groggily, too. When I heard her mumbling in confusion, I whipped around impatiently and convinced her it was only another one of her drug-induced delusions. I dragged her slack body out of bed, shoved her into the bathroom and told her to take a shower to rinse out her brain. I heard her slump down onto the closed toilet seat as I shut the door, and then I turned to see Candy there, gazing across the room at me yearningly. She was still wrapped in her blanket. She looked like she hadn’t aged a day. But when I came close to the invisible barrier between us, I could tell she saw how five years had changed me so much.

  I babbled. I told her about her parents, her professor, asked her how she had found me this time when she had never been to this apartment before, but she barely seemed to hear me. She was too agitated, kept looking over her shoulder at the drawn curtains of the glass balcony doors. I could barely hear her trembling voice as she whispered, “Why did I use those books, William? Why did I have you get me those stupid books?”

  “Candy, what is it? Why...”

  Her eyes were wild, almost crazed, as she looked back at me again and hissed, “They keep scratching at the windows, William! They want to get in! They know I’m in here!”

  “Who? Who are they? People?”

  “Not people – just arms. I see their shadows out there, through the curtains. Long, long arms like tree branches.” She fought back a sob. “Like tentacles, William...”

  The fog was beginning to obscure the doorway already. “God, no!” I choked. “Candy...wait...”

  I darted across the room, found my handgun, turned back to the doorway and tossed the pistol toward it. I wanted her to have at least some means of defending herself from whatever was out there in the limbo she was trapped in. But of course, the gun vanished in a blink, never reaching her. I imagined it thumping onto the living room floor of apartment 30 of the Colonial Estates, much to the bewilderment of its current tenants.

  The mist was swallowing her. Again, I couldn’t hear her, and so I wasn’t sure if she heard me – even though I yelled with all my might – when I called, “Candy, I love you! I love you, Candy!”

  And then she was gone.

  My wife staggered back into the room, dripping on the carpet, and grumbled, “Who were you talking to on the phone? Who is this you love, Bill?”

  “Shut up,” I said without looking around at her.

  I divorced my wife a short time later.

  * * *

  After I, ah, allegedly dropped two of those kamikaze triggers with my .55 at the birthday party, Teeb had made me one of his captains, but it wasn’t just about gratitude. I was good, better all the time, because my work was all that mattered to me. So at the age of thirty-four, Wild Bill was a name known to every hood and law forcer in Punktown.

  I lived alone, and so this time I was the only one to see when the doorway reappeared. I’d been awake watching VT, because I was still inclined to sleep during the day. I stood up out of my chair, and she was there, poised at the threshold. The panic in her eyes made me step close, but I knew better than to pull my Scythe out of its holster – even when I saw what was happening behind her.

  There was no sound at all. At least that much was a blessing.

  The glass of the sliding balcony doors was shattered, and shadows were writhing outside the torn curtains, a seething mass of shadows. Then, a forked black arm slipped through and thrashed around blindly, trying to catch hold of Candy, but so far she was bey
ond its reach.

  She looked into my eyes, seemingly only a few feet from me. I saw her open her mouth to scream, and though I couldn’t hear her, I knew she was calling my name.

  And then she jumped through the doorway, as if to throw herself into my arms.

  “Candy, no, no!” I cried.

  She winked out of existence, but the room remained. Another arm, then another, snaked into the room, like rubbery tree branches. The whipping limbs smashed furniture, and one of them clawed down the poster of Frankie Dystopia. There was a blast of green light that made me bury my face in my shoulder, and an afterimage was burnt on my eyes for minutes afterwards. Either intentionally or accidentally, one of the arms had done something to make the generator blow.

  When my vision cleared, the hovering doorway had disappeared.

  * * *

  I’m forty-four now, and plenty of people speculate that Neptune Teeb will pass his crown to his right-hand man, Wild Bill, should he retire before some enemy guns him down.