Health Agent Read online

  Red Station was conservative, for conservative tastes. There were seldom if ever surgical hermaphrodites, strangely-endowed mutants, smoothly muscular naked men posing about with glamorous hair cascading down their backs, or obese naked men with studded leather masks over their heads, as you could find elsewhere in Punktown. And no little boys, as in that part of town called the Meat Rack…this was too public a place, and the police and vigilante groups kept the fauna from getting too exotic. Still, in his time Bum had given head to a few men seated right here on these benches, late in the night, and once to a man on a train itself, in a mostly empty car. Here he had met several of his life’s major loves, Max and Philly and Ream and a few others. Poor Philly had recently died of this very same STD in Miniosis, having moved there a few years ago; they had kept in touch. There hadn’t been time for Bum to go see him, since Philly was into snakebite again, one of the sources of their break-up, and the drug had chewed up all his body’s defenses. They would work this station together nearly every afternoon and evening, Bum and Philly, mostly to buy Philly his drugs, but that had been a happy six months. Bum was more lonely for those six months than for the year he had lived in Max’s cute apartment, with Max supporting him, keeping him off the streets…but ultimately stifling him, dominating him, denigrating him and the past he had “saved” Bum from. Fuck you, Mom, Bum thought at the memory. He ached now for Philly to be seated beside him, breaking up sandwich bread for the few city birds that found their way down here out of the rain or cold, joking with their friends, drinking coffee on Christmas Eve while they waited for the train that would take them across town to Philly’s mother’s house, while a street musician played carols on a beat-up old keyboard. A tear slipped like a single raindrop from the clouds of Bum’s eyes. Yes, Red Station was his place…he had to do his dying here. And he thought that his face, more appropriately than any of these soldiers, should become immortalized as part of these walls.

  Maybe I’ll do that, damn it, Bum considered, triumphant pride swelling to choke in his throat. Philly’s mother had a holographic portrait of Philly, in full natural colors, visible from every angle like an eerie decapitated head in a box, and it moved and talked when you hit a button, played back a recorded message. A valentine present—Philly had loved his mother so. Could somebody make use of that in replicating the style of these tiles, and create one of him as well? Then Bum would pry away two tiles and replace them, and he and Philly would be together again.

  “You’re so fucking sentimental, Bummy,” he chuckled/blubbered to himself, more tears coming, as if it were Philly saying it to him. Bum thought it couldn’t hurt to at least make some inquiries around. It would have to be soon, though.

  Familiar squeal; men’s room door opening down the tunnel a bit, by the base of a huge red marble support column, so bulbously thicker than it was tall (“I’ve seen them like that,” Philly had joked). Out floated something like a black jellyfish with an oil-slick iridescence, trailing long blue translucent tentacles just brushing the ground, from their looks hardly capable of supporting it but stronger than a man’s arm. Three smooth black balls like marbles floated several inches above the body. An extra-dimensional, Bum decided, never having seen this type of being before but not alarmed. Just another example of the magic of Red Station; it was so fun to simply sit and watch the people.

  He wondered if Blo really would come back with some reinforcements. He knew they wouldn’t kill him, so he didn’t regret not having a gun in his bag like the one Philly had carried. Still, he was a bit anxious. Maybe it would be best to change his hours to times he knew Blo wouldn’t be here. Too bad—he loved his specific hours; it was his time, with specific kinds of people coming through, and this was his life…

  Wiping his eyes, blowing his nose, Bum stubbed out his third cigarette and pushed himself off the bench with a wheezing strained groan. He swayed as a fuzzy ball of light rolled around in his skull a few times. His first few steps were a trudge until he got his bearings; he turned to watch the black jellyfish being float down onto the train bed and disappear into the tunnel from which the Trogs had come, the blue tentacles luminous for a second, then gone. Bum walked to the men’s room. Once Philly had stolen its sign and they had put it on the door to their apartment and laughed and laughed. Funny how Bum missed him so much now, when there were days and days in the past when he wouldn’t even think of him. Bum squealed open the men’s room door, entered.

  The smell nearly gagged him, filling his paper bag lungs like rotting garbage which threatened to tear through the bottoms. Smaller red tiles like snake scales on the walls, no portraits locked in them like ghost reflections—just his one moving portrait, temporary. Trash, graffiti, broken tiles and handles and faucets. Every stall was unoccupied, no one at the rank of red porcelain urinals, only one man at the counter of red sinks, sitting against it, picking at a fingernail moodily.

  A man in a business suit walked toward the men’s room. A small young blond woman who had been leaning against the squat marble pillar reading a magazine while waiting for a train pushed off from the pillar and caught the man by the elbow before he reached the men’s room door. “Excuse me…” she said.

  “Pardon me,” said Bum to the man at the sinks, whose eyes were on him. The smile Bum’s face made was like a nylon stocking being stretched across a yellow skull. “Contemplating the nature of the universe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “This is as good a place as any, I guess.”

  The man smiled, an abrupt change in expression that made Bum fall back a step internally and then captivated him. The man was tall, with dark blond hair swept back from a high broad forehead, his eyes heavy-lidded, deep in dark sockets and set far apart, a cold gray. A new blond mustache and goatee gave him an artistic, sensitive air, and before he had smiled he had looked icily solemn, disquietingly so…his small mouth still, light glowing on his forehead and high cheekbones and nose, the rest shadowed. But the smile, grin actually, cracked the face open into crinkles, the icy eyes warmed into glints. The man wore a V-necked navy blue pullover, baggy black pants and black slippers without socks, a large black leather pocketbook over a shoulder.

  “Good a place as any for a smoke, too,” Bum continued. He deftly plucked a cigarette, his hands remembering how to act now when he needed them. “You?”

  “Another brand.” The handsome man reached in his bag, produced a pack, tapped out a black herb cigarette. “Need a light?”

  “Thanks—yes.” Bum smiled anew. The tall stranger straightened up casually to extend a lighter, lit Bum’s cigarette and his own. The man held the lighter up to his eye to look at something on it.

  “Needs more fuel,” he mumbled softly, looking serious again.

  “I like your goatee. Don’t let it get too long, though…it looks more arty while it’s still fresh.”

  “I won’t.” The lighter made a bleep.

  Bum’s smile took on a narrower aspect. “Is that a camera?”

  “Mm—almost.” The blond man dropped the lighter into his pocketbook. “Are you Bum Junket?”

  “No…no, that isn’t my name…why? Who are you?”

  “The lighter is a scan for mutstav six-seventy, which you were also diagnosed as having at the Forma Street Clinic three days ago…”

  “That’s not true, you have the wrong person!”

  “Look at you.” The tall man nodded toward the mirrors without taking his blank eyes from Bum.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a health agent with a warrant for your arrest as a carrier of a lethal communicable disease.”

  “Show me your warrant, or your badge!” Bum felt that fuzzy ball of light rocking into movement again, the bones liquefying in his legs, which were really just bones only.

  “I’m not required to.” Instead of a warrant, the man’s dipping hand brought a pistol up from the handbag, aimed it from his waist calmly.

  “Jesus, don’t!” Bum screeched.

  “Please step ou
tside, Mr. Junket.”

  “Alright, don’t shoot!” sobbed Bum. He wobbled coltishly to the door. “My tests at the clinic were confidential,” he moaned over his shoulder.

  “The Health Agency has access to any and all Paxton medical information, sir.”

  Outside the men’s room, the small blond woman waited with a drawn snub-nosed revolver, the helmeted forcer keeping back a crowd, his fists clenching his ray blaster. Bum’s eyes found Blo in the growing throng—had he betrayed him, the traitor? No, they had his records, he remembered.

  “Back off, back off!” the woman growled huskily at the crowd. The forcer shoved a man’s chest with the length of his machine-gun.

  “Stop here, Mr. Junket,” said the goateed agent. “Could you go to your knees, please?”

  “Why?”

  “Go to your knees. I won’t ask you again.”

  Bum sank to his knees, shaking, laced his fingers on his head without having been asked, expecting his wrists to be cuffed. The half-circle of faces familiar and alien above him was too much; he clamped his streaming eyes shut, skull grimace bared. They would experiment on him now, his last weeks or months spent as a lamentable lab animal…

  The handsome health agent closed the distance between the back of Bum’s skull and his pistol barrel to six inches and fired one shot.

  The audience cried out in unison as though a trapeze artist had fallen to his death. Some recoiled, hid their faces; a teenage boy widened his eyes and said, “Jeez!”

  Though the handgun was a tarnished silvery revolver with a four-inch barrel, slim black rubber grip with a ring through the butt, and sounded like a lead-firing weapon, the bullet was a powerful plasma capsule. The plasma spread over Bum’s entire form before he could even pitch forward onto his face, a vividly glowing green, a pulsing form-fitting blanket. Bum’s brief writhing was languorous, probably painless. Then the arms shortened away to stumps, to nothing, the head diminished, and there was only an unmoving blob of torso until that too dwindled and vanished. No trace was left of body or plasma, no blood or char or stain.

  Less than ten seconds. Just a smell like burning plastic. The health agent returned his gun to the handbag and this time he did produce a badge and a warrant, holding both aloft and pivoting for all to see.

  “I am a health agent with a warrant to destroy and dispose of Bum Junket as being a wanton carrier of the lethal STD mutstav six-seventy. Mr. Junket is a previously arrested male prostitute and meant to continue these activities with full knowledge of his condition and its properties. He did not contact the Health Agency as required for a mutstav victim, despite the warnings of the Forma Street Clinic where he was diagnosed.”

  “You executed him!” hissed someone in the audience.

  “Those were my orders.” The agent lowered badge and paper. “It is the Health Agency’s hope that any other mutstav victims will pay heed to the consequences of Mr. Junket’s selfish and reckless conduct.”

  “He would’ve died soon anyway,” the woman added. “Slow and painful.”

  “That was for him to decide,” hissed that same someone.

  “Not under the circumstances,” replied the man. “The hazardous nature of Mr. Junket’s disease and actions superseded his rights as an individual…”

  Down the escalator came two men in baggy black rubbery suits, black hoods with face plates, orange tanks on their backs connected to orange spray guns. They charged into the men’s room to disinfect it. Out here you could hear the hissing sprays and smell the pleasantly-perfumed disinfectant. Only outside of a living host could the virus be killed…most easily by killing the organic matter it was nesting in; in effect, starving it to death. Nevertheless, the men’s room would be secured for a full two days, the period necessary for the virus to die on inorganic surfaces.

  “Sorry to alarm you, and thank you for your attention,” concluded the health agent. His female companion had holstered her snub revolver; together they walked to the escalators.

  “Murderer!” cried Blo. Despite his dislike of Bum and his own threats, he had never expected this. A public execution, without a trial even, meant to threaten the prostitutes of Red Station! “How do you know he was going to sell himself again?” Blo shouted at the impassive backs moving up the escalators. “Did he suck your sausage? Next you’ll be rounding us all up!”

  “Maybe we’ll have to,” said the woman, but only to the blond man.

  Bum had died in his beloved Red Station, at least…though there would be no tile bearing the epitaph of his face.

  TWO

  The headquarters for HAP—the Health Agency of Paxton—was a thirty-story structure off Route Forty, outside the compacted nucleus of Punktown in case of mishap, patterned exactly after the Health Agency of Miniosis—HAM—except that older building was gray stone and this one was shiny turquoise plastic, right down to the flowery scroll-work and crouched gargoyles around the multi-tiered beehive cupola that topped it. It was a bleak area of highway; rife with vehicle dealerships, new or used (mostly rented, either way—one could scarcely afford to fully own one, and to go through a bank meant only buying the illusion of ownership). There were distant woods within view, but they seemed as remote as clouds. From the windows of the Health Agency building one could see more of the woods below like a sea from an airplane, and small roads branching off Route Forty like tributaries from a river, lined with ominously blank-looking, lifelessly interchangeable plant structures. One of these plants, not far from HAP, set off a bit from the others and larger but still blankly inscrutable, was the waste processing plant for the town—an independent corporation commissioned by the Health Agency with a renewable five-year contract. The town’s water supply was purified from this building, and waste materials relayed by truck, teleporter and pipeline to be thoroughly disintegrated.

  Also in view, but more isolated in the forest sea like some oil refinery of old, was the “air factory” or atmosphere recycling center for this township, fully government-run by HAP, dominated by two tall conjoined cylinders of sky blue enamel, with a separate feature like a set of gigantic blue-enameled organ pipes. Like HAP and the waste plant, the air factory was gated, with guard shacks, and patrolled, security hovercraft ready on the roofs of all three establishments as though ranked on aircraft carriers in the battle to keep the environment from invasion. It was a war never won; just fought day by day.

  HAP’s gargoyles were actually cannons, with angry bulbous eyes that could move and blaze deadly rays below or at threatening aircraft. HAP’s security hovercraft hid like bees in the beehive, apparently so as not to conflict with the architect’s sense of aesthetics. Montgomery Black believed that this was the reason for the cannons in the gargoyles also, more so than simply for camouflage.

  Black and his partner, Opal Cowrie, entered their twenty-ninth floor squad room. It was mostly one great room portioned into individual cubicles like a noisy mall at Christmas time; a bustling little microcosm town. They had undergone a half-dozen security scans to get this far, the last outside the squad room door. Instantly their comrades greeted them.

  “Monty,” grinned a man with rolled-up white shirt sleeves falling in beside him, “how was it going undercover in Red Station? Do you feel that you penetrated the bowels of Punktown’s dark underside?”

  “I saw your name on the bathroom wall, Catch…you should at least charge for it.”

  “Did you probe the inside of Punktown’s deepest recesses?”

  “Get a job, Catch.” Catch fell behind, Black paused to add over his shoulder, “Anyway, no, I didn’t meet your wife down there.”

  Catch’s grin collapsed into a gape. “Hey, man, that’s not funny!”

  Black cracked his charming grin. He and Opal Cowrie continued on to their chief’s office. Opal rapped on frosted glass and a voice invited them in.

  “Good job, kids,” greeted their chief, Nemo Nedland, field captain of Organic Control division. Captain Nedland was thin, wan, pale, dark-haired and black-suited,
like a caricature of a funeral director. Soft-spoken, sad, as if every conversation were the consoling of the bereaved. “It went well. But then I didn’t really expect Red’s boy prosties to be stupid enough to gang up on a health agent.”

  “A few were pretty riled,” Opal grumbled.

  “The condom dispenser in the men’s room was smashed,” Black said absently.

  “We’ll replace it, and put an antibiotic dispenser in there too, for whatever that’s worth. Immediately. It won’t look good if we’re killing people in Red Station without even making sure the condom dispensers work. Idiots down there. Maybe a photo of Bum Junket on the men’s room wall would do more good. What was it with him?”

  “A drowning man loves company.”

  “I guess.” Nedland paced in the constricted cubicle office; he hadn’t asked his agents to sit, but he never seemed to sit much himself. Just drifted broodingly about. “I have a revelation, kids—hope you aren’t mad.”

  “Uh-oh, what?” said Opal.

  Sad apologetic smile. “The boss has told me from on high to run Junket’s elimination on VT.”

  “Who shot it?” Black purred, somewhat wary.

  “Red Station security cameras.”

  “Big deal,” said Opal, “so we’re celebrities for a night. I’m not afraid. I’ll just disguise up a bit if I go undercover in the near future.”

  “I’m not concerned,” agreed Black. “Run it.” Though secretly he was afraid he might have to shave his mustache and goatee for a while, also to alter his appearance.