Witpunk

by Claude Lalumiere; Marty Halpern

  "No," he said. "It wasn't like that – "

  I didn't let him finish. Smacking the wearable up against my face, I thumbed the power switch. The computer farted its displeasure. "How sad," I said. "Sergeant Abalain's computer doesn't like the look in my eye." I turned it toward Abalain, who backed away. "Gentlemen?" I said to the Blancs. Two of them grabbed Abalain by the shoulders. He tried to twist his head away, but the wearable was more flexible than his neck was. A second later, the computer chirped and lit up all Christmas.

  I dropped the wearable to the ground and emptied my pockets onto it. "You should be able to have some fun with all of this," I said. Abalain babbled something I didn't hear. The officer slapped him in the face – whether in response or just on general principle, I didn't care. Then they were all hitting him.

  I used the last of my steri-wipes to get his blood off my hands.

  Day 63: It'll All End in Tears

  "France thanks you for the service you have rendered her, monsieur." I figured the Blanc general was speaking more for the benefit of the news weasels on the other side of the mirrorwall than he was for me, but I nodded my head with what I hoped looked like sagacity. "Bringing the beast Abalain to justice will show the world the true face that lies behind the mask of the Commune de Paris."

  I tried to be blasé about it. But looking at this guy, I couldn't help but wonder about the arithmetic of Paree: how in the world did you add up the folks on my street, the ones I played baseball with, and the ones who sold me bread and sausage and wine – and end up with assholes like Abalain or this prat? What variable in the goddamn equation made people stop thinking and let their emotions do all the heavy lifting?

  I'd hoped to feel cleansed at having done for Abalain, but I didn't.

  "Good for you," I said, getting to my feet. "I'd love to stay and watch, but I have to go home now. I'm going to take a forty-eighthour shower, and then I'm going to sleep for a week."

  "I believe the people from your embassy want to talk to you, Monsieur Rosen," the general said warily.

  "Have them call my service," I said. That's me: Mister How to Make Friends and Influence People.

  "The photographers say they're not finished yet."

  That's just great, I thought. Is there anybody in this city who isn't working an angle?

  Sissy hadn't been working anything except maybe her hormones. I'd been able to store her carefully in the back of my mind while working up my escape plan. But she was clamoring to get out of my head now. Being away from the Commune didn't make me any more free than if I'd still been Abalain's pet ferret: I still had to face up to the fact that she was gone. How was I going to explain this to my aunt?

  The door behind me slammed open.

  "Lee!"

  I turned around so fast I fell over. That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. Then she was down on the carpet with me and hugging me and crying and I guess I got kind of sloppy too. But I swear the first words out of my mouth were: "Where the fuck have you been?"

  She slapped me, lightly. "I worried about you too."

  "Jesus," I said, sitting up. "I was convinced you were – " I couldn't say it, not now. It seemed it could still happen; I might be imagining this. "What happened to you? How did you get away?"

  "It was Eddie," she said.

  "Not true, Lee." Eddie flowed into the room, graceful in spite of his bulk. "She's the one who did it. I just got her back across the lines."

  "Will you two stop negotiating credits and just tell me what happened?"

  "When they separated us when the bus stopped I was so scared," Sissy said. "Everyone was scared. But then I thought about what you'd said. You said not to worry. And you always looked after me, Lee." She smiled, and even though her eyes looked dead with fatigue I still felt better for seeing that. "I figured you knew what you were talking about. So I didn't worry. Instead, I tried to guess what you'd do, and I decided that you'd watch and wait for a chance to do something."

  I looked at Sissy more closely. It wasn't just fatigue I was seeing in her eyes. There was something else, something sort of calm and understanding. This wasn't the girl I'd lost back at the Dialtone. Of course, being kidnapped can do that to a person.

  "So I'm watching what happens, and what happens is that everybody's so scared that they all just stand there gibbering and crying all over one another," she said. "They must have been doing that all along, but I never noticed it. Until I sat back and made myself look. We were all just crying like babies. And the guards must have noticed too, because when I looked I saw that they weren't really paying any attention to us. They were all watching the guys being rounded up." We were the ones making the fuss, I remembered. Some of us, anyway. Some of us were still trying to think of a way of finessing ourselves out of that jam.

  "So it was really pretty simple." Sissy smiled artlessly, and for a moment she was my kid cousin again. "I just kind of shuffled my feet and moved back without trying to move too much. And when I was at the back of the crowd I just sort of slipped out of it. It was dark and nobody noticed me. But you know, I don't think they were all that smart, Lee. We just let ourselves think they were 'cause we were all so scared. As soon as I started trying to think like you do, it was easy to get away." She hugged me fiercely. "I saw you trying to distract their attention from me, Lee." Now she was crying again. "What you did for me – I couldn't have done that for you." She dug her face into my shoulder and sobbed, and I felt like the stupidest idiot outside of a corporate boardroom. I had out-clevered myself into eight weeks or more of slavery, and she was smart enough to just walk away – and she was giving me the credit?

  "And that's when Eddie saved me."

  "I followed the bus," Eddie said with a shrug. "Probably not the smartest thing in the world, but hey. I should have seen it coming, and I didn't. I felt responsible, you know?" I knew. "Soon as I saw you all being off-loaded and sorted I figured I was screwed, and I was making my way back to the lines when I come across Sissy here. And damned if she didn't want to take me back and try to spring you. Took me ten minutes to persuade her we'd only get ourselves killed."

  "You can always trust Fat Eddie," I said. "He knows three ways around every angle there is. Listening to him definitely saved your life." I decided then that I was never going to tell Sissy the full story of my service to the Commune. Even if it seemed that the Sissy who was smiling at me now wasn't the same kid who'd wanted to see the sights back in the great Before.

  "She could have gone home, you know," Fat Eddie said. "Her mom sure as hell wanted her to. Instead, we've spent the last eight weeks nagging the shit out of anybody who'd listen, trying to find you. And now we have."

  "And now I want a shower," I said. "I want some clean clothes."

  "I want to go back to the Dialtone and finish my drink," Sissy said.

  I stared at her. "You're joking, right?"

  "Oh, you can shower and change first, if you want." She stood up, then grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet. "Come on, Lee. It's a glorious time to be in Paree."

  Paree – where snipers lurked in the high windows and unwashed thugs stared blindly at castrated video lottery terminals. Paree, where, on the pavé before a rusting Citroën, I had decided to die. The fatal anguish surged through me — and out. I was a dead man, dead many times over in the past eight weeks, and yet, miraculously, alive. Alive, in Gay Paree, where famed Dialtone yet stood, where the bartender would mix me a Manhattan and my cousin Sissy would dance while I watched approvingly from a side table, chewing on my work problems and swapping ironic glances with Fat Eddie.

  I extended an arm and Sissy took it at the elbow. Fat Eddie shouldered us a path through the crowd, over the epoxy cobblestones, and down the boulevard toward the Dialtone.

  Arabesques of Eldritch Weirdness #8

  Jerey Ford

  Inky night of live burial, gasping for dirt reeking with zombie blood wept from the eyes of a vampire bat into a flask in the hand of Doctor Imperius Fragturd, lab-coat
clad, psychotic ex-Nobel laureate, who has his once-beloved wife encased in a block of ice in a walk-in freezer of his own brilliant design and who has gone off his rocker with surrogate lust for the innocent hips of Wendy Hartshine, cheerleader and glee club captain, IQ 40, the tasty piece of trim in the broken-down Thunderbird convertible on the side of the road outside the dilapidated mansion that, back in the monster-ridden days of yore, before radio and prohibition, was the site of the final battle, ending in a mutual expiration, of The Cat Faced Freak and The Stalking Brain Eater, who brutally ate corpus callosum with little remorse and less grace like an ordinary man carrying the transplanted soul of a lamprey that made the arcing electrical leap at the insistence of a thunderstorm's harnessed energy, and always too much radiation, way too much frigging radiation, causing ants to mutate into geniuses, themselves, so that all they want to do is crawl in the ears of sleeping children and burrow through their brains to nourish their aching, pinprick imaginations and in the process spark dreams of a shadow-clad figure skulking through alleys wielding a straight razor that once shaved the beard of the poor Lazarus, down but not out, though showing bone, whose rotting, yellow-nailed hands are clawing up through the soft earth over in the cemetery, birthing himself in order to once again seek the ancient mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian adept with all the answers to all the questions, like how the town soda jerk, Jed Bleener, Wendy's wide-eyed, handsome beau, is going to save her screeching sweater meat from the clutches of Fragturd before he experiments on her flesh, turning it sour green and wrinkled in the act of implanting his own desire into her sacred, as yet undefiled, temple of God with a special formula of demon spittle, alien gaze, and ape sweat, making her love him the way he loves him, the way the Devil of insidious Science and all that is unknown, Heathen, Nazi, and anti-Christian insists that he do for the sake of the plot and the proliferation of pulp.

  The Seven-Day Itch

  Elise Moser

  Paula's back had been itching for a couple of days. It was a strange itch, deep, persistent; unlike any other itch she ever remembered having. It was almost verging on pain, the kind you get when there's a boil on your back. That's what it felt like, a boil. But when she twisted her arm back and managed to just brush her fingertips at the edge of the spot she could tell there was nothing there.

  Most of the time she didn't think about the itch, but occasionally it intruded into her consciousness. She felt it, suddenly, in the middle of a meeting at school, when the weenie from the staff association added six items to the agenda; she wiggled until she thought she could get at it with the corner of her chair, but she suddenly realized several people were staring at her. So she put it out of her mind. The next morning she tried to see it in the mirror, but no matter how she twisted she couldn't see anything but unblemished skin. In the shower she tried to scrub it with the loofah, but the loofah seemed to be getting caught on something – and anyway scrubbing didn't help, so she just backed into the hot water and forgot about the itch, again.

  Now, lying in bed in the gray morning light, with Janet's warm breasts against her back and Janet's warm breath against her neck, Paula became aware that she could feel the itch again. This was perfect – Janet could scratch it for her. She reached a hand back and gently squeezed Janet's hip. "Janet." Janet hmmed. Paula shook the hip a little. "Janet," she said, a little louder, "can you scratch my back? It's been itching for days and I just can't reach it." Janet kissed Paula's back and then, lazily, propped her head up on her fist.

  "Okay, honey bun. Where is it?"

  Paula twisted her arm back and gestured toward the spot. "Kind of there. Give it a try, and I'll tell you when you get it." Janet started gently scratching and Paula directed her. "No, more to the left. No, my left. That's right. Almost there. A little higher. Higher. High – yes, right there. Is there something there?"

  Janet paused and then scratched again. "Nope. Nothing."

  "Scratch harder."

  Janet scratched. "It feels funny."

  "What do you mean 'funny'?"

  "Well, kind of elastic, or something. Like I feel like I could push it in a little bit." Janet stopped scratching, and probed a little. The skin was almost like rubber, giving gently. Janet gave a little cry.

  "What, Jan?"

  "I don't know, Paul. It's so weird, but it feels almost like . . . like my fingertip is being . . . pulled."

  Paula felt Janet pushing against her and then heard a kind of choking sound, as if Janet were struggling to swallow and breathe at the same time.

  "Paula." Janet's voice was strangely pitched.

  Paula was lying on her side, eyes closed but alert. "Yes?"

  "Paula." There was a strange pause. Paula became aware that Janet was, well, almost panting. She gave a half-laugh, and turned her head part way around to look at Janet.

  "Janet, what's the matter?"

  Janet leaned over. Paula could hear her breathing fast. "What's the matter, Jan? What is it, babe?"

  Janet inhaled, a great, ragged breath. "I don't know what's happening," she said, her voice wild, "this is too strange." She breathed again, deeply, deliberately. "Paula. One time, when I was in about grade five, I glued my eye shut."

  Paula furrowed her eyebrows. What was Janet talking about?

  "I glued my upper and lower right eyelids together with epoxy by accident while building a model plane." Paula waited while Janet paused. "I remember what that felt like, and it was not like this," she whispered.

  "What is it, hon?" Paula asked, pushing down her impatience so her voice would come out calm and soothing.

  "Part of my fingernail's gone, it's sunk into your back, it's gone."

  Paula raised her eyebrows. Janet must be under more stress than she'd realized. What was she on about? Janet began to sob in a strangled way.

  "Paula, you're going to think I'm crazy, even I think I'm crazy." She stopped and took a deep breath. "Paula, what does this feel like to you?"

  Paula turned her head again. She shrugged. "I don't know. It feels fine. It doesn't really itch anymore. Maybe you could just stay there all day," she joked, and then laughed. The laugh died though; there was something about the quality of Janet's silence that was even more disturbing than the sobs had been. "Janet, what's wrong?" Still silence, except for a kind of bronchial rattling that must be Janet's breathing. Paula's voice rose. "What's wrong, babe?" No answer. "Come over here," she said, patting her side of the bed.

  Paula could feel Janet pushing against her back with her other hand. Finally Janet stopped pushing and spoke, and when she spoke it was as if through gritted teeth. "I can't." she said in a hoarse whisper. "I can't. I don't know how to explain this, but" – and then her voice rose into a wail like a tidal wave – "I'm stuck in your back, my finger's stuck and I can't get it out!" Then Janet panicked. By the time she stopped flailing around both she and Paula had scratches, Janet on her hand and arm and Paula all over her back – and one long one across her cheek and the bridge of her nose, which she got when she tried to turn and face Janet and caught a wild arm on a sideswipe.

  They both called in sick and then struggled to put on some clothes. Janet found a sleeveless cotton jumper someone had given her once which buttoned fortuitously up the left side. It was entirely unseasonal and it looked incongruous with Janet's hiking boots, but that didn't matter. Paula was more difficult to dress, until they finally found a black sequined evening jacket which was slit halfway up the back and had a deeply plunging neckline. It looked very eccentric over jeans and sneakers; any time Paula leaned to one side, one or both of her breasts would slip out of the exotic neckline like plump unruly fish. Paula put her hair in a ponytail and then stood in front of the hall mirror, head bowed so Janet could see over her, while Janet tried to pull a brush through her own hair. She was very nervous and wasn't really paying attention; the result was an unusually lopsided frizz, but Janet was too frustrated to keep trying.

  They put Janet's giant coat over both their shoulders, Paula
poking her forefinger accidentally into Janet's nostril as she tried to grab the lapel; then they tried to get into the car. Eventually they managed. They would have felt like a lesbian Laurel and Hardy if they hadn't been so freaked out already.

  Paula drove them to Angie's office. Angie had been Paula's roommate when they were undergrads, and she had a thriving "woman-centered" medical practice. Paula and Janet had to sit in the waiting room, perched sideways on adjoining chairs, until some patient called in to cancel, and then Angie invited them in to the examining room. She started to make small talk but stopped when she noticed their strange clothes. She began to smile and then frowned when she saw Janet's finger stuck in Paula's back.

  First Angie tried to just pull it out. This didn't work. Then she braced herself against Paula's back and yanked, hard, on Janet's hand, causing Janet to roar in pain. Then Angie examined them more closely. She tried to probe with a Q-tip, but the Q-tip got stuck and then, when she tentatively pushed at it, was pulled in, slowly, like a twig in quicksand, and disappeared. This made Janet whimper, and Angie sat down hard in the visitor's chair and got deeply red in the face. Paula kept trying to turn around and see them, saying, "What? What? WHAT!"