Ghosts of Punktown Read online

  “I dunno...I’m not too keen on forcers after the way they grilled me last week.” Miter nibbled his lip. “Let’s just do our jobs a bit more and if there is a problem we’ll go from there.”

  LeBlanc started out of the room to continue on to the next, which housed artifacts of the Tikkihotto race. “All right, I’ll keep looking. Just don’t shoot me tonight, okay?”

  “Then just don’t sneak up on me anymore, forest face.”

  Sometimes LeBlanc thought that if Miter had been beside him in the Blue War, and had seen how adept a killer his bio-engineering had made him, he’d never make any of his witty comments.

  * * *

  LeBlanc had just entered a room featuring more relics from here on Oasis, of the extinct Irezk Island tribe of Chooms, when his wrist comp again beeped him. This time when he saw his partner, Miter looked even more alarmed than when LeBlanc had startled him. “Jones, I saw the thing...it ran out of the Kalian room just as I was going in, but I definitely saw it!”

  So Miter was still in the Hall of Antiquities, further back. LeBlanc had left the room of Kalian artifacts only five minutes earlier. “And, what is it?”

  “I don’t know...it looked like a kid, or maybe an old man. Small, no clothes, all a bright yellow color.”

  “Yellow?”

  “Maybe a homeless mutant.”

  “Did you beep the forcers?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s just skin and bones. Let’s try to take it ourselves so we don’t have some smug patrollers laughing at us for the rest of the...hey...hey! You there!” Miter’s face had jerked out of the frame, leaving LeBlanc with a yawing shot of the ceiling.

  “What?” LeBlanc leaned forward on the balls of his feet. “What is it?”

  “There it is! It’s looking at me!”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Dung, man, it’s coming at me!”

  The image on LeBlanc’s screen went wild as Miter moved to confront whatever it was he was seeing. Then, LeBlanc heard shots, not just from the wrist comp’s speaker but echoing from back a ways in the Hall of Antiquities. Feeling long unused muscles uncoil eagerly, LeBlanc bolted toward the sounds, pulling his own handgun from its shoulder holster as he ran.

  He passed through the Kalian room without seeing either Miter or the person he had reported. LeBlanc kept running, but stole a glance at his wrist comp and was shocked to see a stationary, tilted camera angle of the museum’s floor and part of one wall. Included in the frame was an object LeBlanc recognized: the base of the glass case in which the Antse flesh effigy hung suspended.

  LeBlanc skidded to a stop at the entrance to the room of Antse artifacts, hiding around the corner a moment lest the intruder be armed, or Miter prove too trigger-happy. But a peek into the room showed he had no need to fear any panicked shots from Miter. The security guard lay on his face in the center of the floor, arms flung out from him, his gun still gripped. Seeing no one else around the man, LeBlanc rushed into the room and crouched at his side. A corona of blood was spreading under Miter’s head. LeBlanc rolled him over – and even with all his military experience, sucked in his breath when he saw how the man’s face and neck had been raked and lacerated...and his eyes messily scooped from their sockets.

  Looking up, LeBlanc saw drops and spatters of a dark liquid trailing across the floor, out of the room through its opposite entrance. The clone rose and moved to the start of the spatters. It was a black fluid with a noxious odor, apparently as thick as sludge. So Miter had hit the thing. LeBlanc was about to follow the trail of what had to be blood when something he had noticed peripherally finally caught hold in his mind. He turned, nerves crackling, toward the raised platform on which the three spheres had rested, the sculptures of Antse clerics coiled into their meditative pose.

  The platform was empty.

  “Not sculptures,” LeBlanc whispered to himself, and then he turned back toward the trail of long stagnant blood and followed it from the room.

  * * *

  As far as LeBlanc knew, all of the exhibits in the museum were linked to the alarm system, so he wasn’t sure why it hadn’t already been activated by the changes to the three Antse figures on their pedestal – though, being an exhibit themselves, in a museum in which many of the modern artworks were articulated, maybe the system had overlooked their behavior – but when he heard the alarm system come whooping to life now, he knew some other display must have been disturbed. Good – the alarm would go straight through to the nearest forcer precinct house, saving him the call he had been about to make...leaving him free to stay focused on the task at hand. Search and destroy.

  LeBlanc passed stealthily into a chamber featuring articles from both the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa people of Sinan. There was a porcelain mask-like wall hanging of a woman’s face with delicately painted blue skin. LeBlanc knew these exhibits well enough to note right away that the face’s eyes had been scratched at so furiously that not only was their paint missing, leaving rough white patches, but the mask was cracked as well. Worse, its companion piece lay on the floor in fragments. A wooden plaque like a religious icon, painted partially in gold flake, hung crooked on the wall, the revered subject of its portrait also with his eyes eradicated, leaving depressions in the wood. And the eyes of a stone statue too heavy to topple and tough to gouge had been slathered with a thick black fluid: the perpetrator’s own blood.

  “Great,” LeBlanc muttered. “That’s great.”

  He moved on, finding a similar situation in rooms containing works of the insect-like Coleopteroids and the bipedal dog-like Dacvibese. Whether the eye was compound, in the case of the former, or with a goat-like pupil and pink iris, as with the latter, all the eyes the fleeing entity had encountered were marred or expunged.

  LeBlanc was racing now, barely stopping to look about the rooms he sped through, wondering how the being could be so fast, even wounded, even stopping to wreak such havoc, that he couldn’t keep up with it. He was rushing so much that he nearly forgot his soldier’s wariness not to blunder into an ambush, and had to force himself to control his advance, remain aware of every surrounding detail. He used his wrist comp to deactivate the distraction of the whooping alarm.

  Ultimately, having completed the circuit of the Hall of Antiquities, he found the thing huddled close to the mammoth metal bust of the god Raloom, as if appealing to that unfamiliar deity for protection, hugging its own legs in a fetal-like position but apparently unable to fold itself up into the neat ball it had assumed for untold years. Having spent so much energy and lost so much blood, the thing was shaking so violently that its body almost blurred.

  When LeBlanc came to a halt, aiming his gun at it, the creature raised its head. Either naturally or from centuries of desiccation, it was a skeletal thing, with a bare grin of teeth and eye sockets so deeply sunken and shadowed that LeBlanc couldn’t tell if there were orbs within them. Had the yellow mineral pigment covering its emaciated body helped to preserve it in some way?

  LeBlanc didn’t wait to find out whether the being could still rise up and attack him. Just as the creature opened its mouth in a wheezing hiss, he shot it once through the forehead. The wall behind it and Raloom’s right cheek were splattered with a more copious amount of that foul-smelling black sludge. The cleric’s two hands spread open, and from one of them rolled the red and half-crushed remnants of Miter’s unworthy eyes.

  From behind him LeBlanc heard clapping footfalls, back the way he had come. Another of the trio of clerics. Did it think it could return to its platform, hide again in meditation as it had for so many, many years? Well, this was one infidel who was not willing to let that happen.

  LeBlanc dashed back in the direction of the room of Antse exhibits, and up ahead he caught a glimpse of a small, scrawny yellow figure as it passed from one room into another. LeBlanc raised his arm and fired off a chain of shots as he sprinted. He saw the thing veer off suddenly to the left, out of sight. When he caught up with the creature, they were both amongst the Antse d
isplays again, Miter splayed on the floor.

  For lack of better shelter, the cleric had ducked behind the effigy’s showcase, and through the glass LeBlanc could see that its left arm had been torn off at the elbow from one of his projectiles. The being opened its skull-like mouth in a hiss, and from the way it tensed its body LeBlanc knew that it meant to throw itself out from behind the showcase and come at him. Before it could do so, LeBlanc let loose another flurry of shots, shooting the Antse right through the glass. The showcase collapsed in a great crash, the meat martyr falling with it, now punctured with bullets and glass shards in addition to its spikes and nails. When the last crystalline tinkle had quieted, the Antse cleric lay dead, buried under the pile of glass like the effigy.

  “Hold it! Freeze where you are!”

  LeBlanc’s military instincts told him to whip around firing, but he was just able to restrain himself. He lifted his arms above his head. “Are you forcers?”

  “That’s right, dung-hole, and don’t you move!” LeBlanc’s gun was ripped out of his hand, and then two men were dragging his arms behind him, to secure them in restraints.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

  “What are we doing?” Now he could see the two men as they spun him around and trained their own guns on him. They were paunchy, out of shape in their black uniforms; obviously, not bio-engineered to be perfect soldiers as he had been. LeBlanc thought he might be able to take them both even with their guns pointed at him – might even be able to bust these restraints first in order to do so – but again, he reined himself in. One of the forcers gestured at Miter. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

  “He’s my partner! We – ” LeBlanc wanted to point out the skeletal form of the cleric under that mound of jagged glass, but the other forcer pointed to it himself.

  “And you don’t know anything about all this shot-up artwork either, I suppose? Bet you started with that room of Sinanese stuff back there, huh? Did it give you a flashback or something?”

  “Look, there was an intruder...three intruders...well, not intruders, but – ”

  The forcer couldn’t resist a hard laugh. “Can’t you even get your hallucinations straight, mad dog?” The man remarked to his partner, “They should have just junked all these psycho-killer war veteran clones for organ scrap.”

  Kneeling down beside Miter, the other said, “I don’t need any blue camouflage kidney transplanted into me...better they made these guys into dog meat.”

  “I wouldn’t want him in my dog, either!”

  “Look,” LeBlanc said, “do you see any bullet holes in him?”

  “We heard plenty of bullets on our way up, believe me.”

  “Well how about you look again over there...”

  Before he could finish, and before either of the forcers saw it, LeBlanc spotted a third skeletal yellow figure bolting toward the room from the room beyond. It launched itself into the air, and landed on the back of the standing forcer, wrapping its hands around his face to dig at his eyes.

  The man staggered and reeled, screeching, blood pulsing down his cheeks, while his partner sprang to his feet and looked torn between trying to pull the creature off him or waiting for a clear shot with his weapon.

  Meanwhile, LeBlanc had turned on his heel and darted from the room, heading for the stairs that would take him down to the lobby and out of the Hill Way Galleries. He half expected to be shot in the back for his trouble, but by now the surviving cleric should have proved his innocence. He thought he would wait outside until backup forcers arrived and freed him. He thought it might be the right time to give up fine art in favor of the culinary arts.

  “Help me! Oh God, help me!” he still heard the attacked man wailing. In years past, LeBlanc had gone to answer that cry many times, without hesitation, with barely little regard for his own safety, without knowing whether the cry came from a birther or a clone. He had dragged wounded men out of the line of fire, men who had been repaired to return home to their families and give birth to sons who might never know they owed their existence as much to him, who could never father a son. And he had won no medal, been awarded no pension. That would be like thanking a gun for its service, wouldn’t it?

  Once – maybe even as recently as fifteen minutes ago – LeBlanc might have stayed to help the forcer free his partner, if he would only remove his restraints first, even at the risk of his own life. But he had decided not to bother. Like many matters pertaining to the birthers, he was learning more and more all the time, he had no personal investment here.

  As these forcers had only helped remind him, security guard or no security guard, this was really not his battle.

  Bitter Brains

  Pre’tu was disinclined toward holidays and festivities of all stripes to begin with, but never had one darkened his heart so much as today’s. Holidays reminded one of one’s wifelessness, one’s childlessness, one’s diminishing of parents as time took them and one’s diminishing of money as one had to buy presents and food for those others who – with mocking grins of joy, or at least drunkenness – embraced each holiday only too readily, like certain birds that are enticed by any bright bauble no matter how broken and petty.

  This was a Tikkihotto holiday, but with the colonization of other spheres, other dimensions, it was becoming a festivity even more insidiously propagated. Pre’tu lived, as many Tikkihottos did, in the Earth-established colony known as Punktown, on the world Oasis. Oh, if only the merging with other cultures, other races human and otherwise, would dilute and dissolve such ancient and grotesque travesties of tradition and superstition, but it was not so. In the interest of political correctness, schoolchildren who were not even Tikkihottos – Earth children, Chooms, others – were encouraged to recognize the holiday, read about and discuss it, draw or paint or sculpt in clay or in hologram the horrid, gaping, too hungry bird heads.

  “Pre’tu! Pre’tu! Pre’tu!” the others chanted, like infant bird heads poking up from a nest, screeching for their glistening worms of pleasure. Birds still without feathers, translucent and frail, their eye feelers groping blindly. It was the prevailing image of this holiday, one of the two principal Tikkihotto holidays. Unimaginatively, one was a harvest festival, and this was a spring festival, celebrating the cycle of rebirth, the emergence of new life.

  “I’ll give you lot a worm,” Pre’tu muttered under his breath. “A worm to choke you mindless punch-swillers.”

  Cousins, friends of cousins, cousins of friends, priests in their best robes strutting like peacocks, and the homeless invited in for a charitable meal (some of whom weren’t even Tikkihottos, but willing to embrace any culture that put warm punch in their bellies). Pre’tu glared at a Choom, looking like an Earther but for that ghastly ponderous grin stretching right back to his ears. The transient was shaking his metal drinking straw in the air like a little spear, a few drops of fermented amniotic fluid dribbling from its end. “Drink up, ‘Hotto!” he shouted.

  He was the last. Of course he was. Hadn’t he always been, all his mercilessly long life? Last child born to his family, subsumed in the wake of his siblings. Last to become married (though first to have his wife desert him; oh certainly, his luck did turn around sometimes, didn’t it?).

  And now, because he had been mired – cursing and pounding his console – in Punktown’s traffic (knowing only too well what the consequences would be), he had been last to enter the festival hall. Last to join the celebration. And as tradition dictated, the last must drink bird head.

  He approached the great bird, strapped to the table before him as if it might rise from the dead, squawking in pain at the holes punched into its body, made thin-skinned and soft from a special steaming process, like a bag of gelatin in the form of a man-sized fowl. Its eye tendrils hung flaccid. Pre’tu’s own eye tendrils swam in the air, taking in the avian Eucharist. Someone – a child? – had left their metal straw still punctured in the swollen belly, inside which Pre’tu could see the shadow
y suggestion of a litter in the womb. He imagined them still alive, gurgling, drowning. Trapped, like himself.

  “Last drink bird head! Last drink bird head!”

  “Drink from my ass,” Pre’tu mumbled, but what choice did he have? They were a mass, a culture, a system, and he was nothing but a failure in life and the last to enter the room. The fool who must drink the dregs that even the homeless people had managed to avoid.

  Pre’tu leaned over the carcass, and inserted his straw into one of the nests of ocular tendrils. The tip pierced the socket, on into the morass that was all the mother beast had left for a brain (she, and everyone else in this room). Then Pre’tu leaned lower, applied his lips to the straw, and sucked.

  They cheered his name. Triumphant fool!

  And Pre’tu swallowed the blackened and bitter, bitter brains.

  Disfigured

  Mrs. Kingston's new forehead was high and broad, culminating in a plateau overhung with a close fringe of bangs. Just under the fringe were a few metal clasps, and a long scar ran down her forehead from one of them. Her eyelids were weighed heavily three-quarters shut. Another long scar ran under her jaw, passing over one of the two steel bolts protruding from the sides of her slim throat.