Deadstock (punktown)

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Finally came the owner of the angry voice. He too resembled some giant insect, though black and bipedal, stalking in like a mantis with a soft pneumatic hiss. He was little more than a black man's bald head perched on a stubby, grub-like blob of a body, harnessed into a cybernetic frame. Javier had seen badly wounded war veterans reduced to moving about in this sort of mechanical "pony," though in this man's case his limbless state was obviously congenital. His mother had either not wanted him aborted, when obstetrical scanning disclosed his anomaly, or she had been too poor to have received advanced medical care at all. Orange flames had been stenciled onto the sides of the open thorax that held his nude little body in place, and decals had been pasted on the pony's skeletal limbs, but the machine had seen better days; one arm was silver instead of black, with a different sort of claw hand-a replacement part. The other arm gripped a big Decimator .220 revolver in its fist.

  "I'm Satin," he introduced himself, his eyes moving over the Snarlers with a challenging menace.

  "And this is Hollis," Mott said, sweeping his arm at the dead man on the floor between them.

  "Yeah? Well our friend Chang is in there with his throat shot out." Satin flicked his head back over his little nub of a shoulder.

  "Wanker shouldn't have been so trigger happy!" Tiny Meat said.

  "Enough," Javier said. "None of us are happy what happened to our friends. But I think we can agree that the real problem is out there." He pointed his pistol toward the window.

  "What are you doing here?" Big Meat asked the mutants.

  "Like we said, we're squatters," Mira told him.

  "We're the Tin Town Terata," Satin elaborated proudly. "The Triple Ts."

  "Yeah, nice alliteration," Patryk muttered.

  "So you're a gang, too," Javier noted. "That was your insignia outside, in green? Not smart, putting it there. You were begging the forcers to see it and come in here to investigate."

  "It was there to warn other gangs that this is our place now."

  "But now you want to leave," Mott snorted.

  "Funny, our two gangs both coming to this same place, here in money land," Javier said.

  Mira replied, "Not so unusual, when you're talking about a big abandoned building. We were surprised there weren't any other squatters already in here. Until we found a homeless man in one of the hallways. What was left of him, anyway, after they were done with him."

  "But how do Tin Town mutants find their way to Beaumonde Street?"

  "There was a war," Mira confessed. "The other mutie gang was bigger. The only way out for us was to escape Tin Town. Some of our enemies kept chasing us, so we had to go further and further, until they stopped chasing. We finally got on a train, and got off the train here. Before the war there were thirty-one of us. Sixteen of us made it to the train." She swept her arm at her friends. "Now we're five. The Blank People got the others, before we were able to lock them all outside." "God," Tabeth moaned.

  "What are you doing here?" Nick mumbled, his wet words barely decipherable.

  "Our friend you say was put into the trash zap-per," Javier answered. "He came out to Beaumonde looking for his girlfriend, and he didn't come back. We tracked him here."

  "Why would the trash zapper do that to him?" Nhu asked dubiously.

  "The same reason the Blank People killed all the pig-hens they caught on the roof," Mira said. "The same reason they killed that homeless man. And why they're trying to kill us. I think it's because they see us all as pests. Pests to be exterminated."

  "And the trash zapper thinks the same way?"

  "The zapper and the Blank People must've been programmed to recognize and take action against us undesirable types," Satin growled.

  "Undesirable is right," Nhu whispered to Tabeth. More loudly she said, "It still doesn't make sense, with a trash zapper."

  "So what the blast are these Blank People, anyway?" Javier asked. He wandered closer to the window, now trusting that the Tin Town Terata would not shoot him in the back as he did so. He had to fight his own reluctance to near the window, however, reminding himself again and again that the things could not see them through the one-way tinting. But was that true? Who knew what senses they relied on? A kind of sonar, like the blind Waiai race, that could penetrate the bulletproof pane?

  "Androids," Big Meat stated.

  "No," said Mira. "They're not mechanical, anyway. They just have a chip in their heads. The rest is all organic. We know-we put the bodies of the ones we killed in apartment 6-B."

  "And we've been putting the bodies of our dead friends in apartment 5-B," Satin added. "That's where we'll put Chang. I suggest you start using apartment 4-B." He nodded down at Hollis.

  Mott squeezed his gun's handle tighter. "What do you mean, 'start?'"

  Mira glanced up at Satin. "We've got to all work together here, Satin. Right?"

  "This is easy enough," Tabeth said, pacing nervously, and digging a hand phone out of her jacket's pocket. "We just call the forcers down here to get us out past those gray things."

  "Yeah! Of course!" Nhu lifted her arm, on which she wore a new-stolen-wrist comp like a bracelet.

  Javier blinked at them a few moments before he said, slowly as if speaking to far younger children, "Think for a minute, if that's possible. We call the forcers to this building in rich old Beaumonde Square, where our two gangs are inside with guns in our hands and a room full of dead mutants? And a couple of people with bullet holes in them?" He motioned toward Hollis. "And I bet more than one of us has go some illegal substances on 'em, am I right? Dung, girls, we'd be going from this prison to another prison."

  "Javier's right," Tiny Meat said. "We're the Folger Street Snarlers. Since when do we need to go crying to the forcers for help? We'll fight our way out of this-right, Big?" He slapped the shoulder of his larger twin, who presently carried him in the crook of one arm.

  "We can try," Satin said. "But I hope you got enough ammo, little fella. There's twelve apartments to a floor, and three floors, and two wings. And there's one of those Blank People for every single apartment."

  "So how many does that make?" Tiny Meat said.

  "That makes seventy-two of them," Patryk replied softly. For a few moments, nobody said anything.

  The body of the mutant named Chang was carried to apartment 5, here on the ground floor of B-Wing, by Patryk and Nick, escorted by Tabeth and Barbie with guns in their hands. Patryk held his breath when the door slid into the wall and the stench of the makeshift morgue rolled over him. Tabeth hung back in the hallway and stifled a retch. Patryk saw indistinct forms crudely wrapped in clear plastic tarps the mutants had scrounged from somewhere in the building. Some of the forms were on the small side-either creatures like Mira, or else the Blank People had made themthat small.

  Next, this same crew carried Hollis into apartment 4-B, as Satin had facetiously suggested. They laid him on the floor, all out of tarps to wrap him in. They'd already taken his pistol and ammo, and a candy bar they'd found in a jacket pocket to add to the food Javier was pooling together, but now Barbie pointed at the corpse, and two of the supernumerary faces on the side of her skull rasped in unison, "We should take his jacket. It's cold in here."

  "I wouldn't do that if I was you," Patryk advised her. "That's a Snarler jacket. Mott or Tiny Meat see one of you Teratas in that and Javier might not be able to stop 'em in time."

  Barbie nodded, seeing his point. They left Hollis in the room, looking very alone on the barren floor, devoid of all furniture, but the door slid shut to close off the image.

  The others had abandoned apartment 12-B where Hollis and Chang had died, as much to escape the blood on the floor as those two Blank People still lingering at the window. Looking back at them as he left the room, Javier said, "I don't think they're trying to get in, now. I think they're just reminding us that they're out there."

  They all moved to the room in which the Terata had set up their own little camp: apartment 1-B, just off the front lobby that bridged the two wings
of Steward Gardens. In 1-B there were some chairs and couches that the Terata had stolen from that lobby, on which they had since been sleeping. Glancing around at the other items the squatters had salvaged from here and there, Mott whispered to Tiny Meat, "I don't think these last five are the toughest, and that's why they're still alive. Dung! Look at them. The only reason they're still alive is the Blank People probably killed off the best fighters first. The only one of these sad fucks that I'd be worried about is that Satan bastard."

  "Satin," Big Meat corrected. "You two remember what Javier said. Our gangs aren't at war; we've got to team up against these Blank People."

  "Shut up," Tiny Meat told his brother. "Were we talking to you?"

  "Listen," Mott said to Big Meat, "I hate to say this, but Javier's getting soft in his old age. How does he know these freaks didn't kill Brat themselves, like they did Hollis, even if it was just by accident? More believable if they'd said those Blank Fucks got him, instead of that trash zapper story."

  Javier swept together the small store of edibles he had gathered from his crew. He saw the mutants all glancing at it as if it were a steaming, aromatic buffet. "What have you folks been eating?"

  "We had some food with us when we started out, because we knew we'd be out of Tin Town for a while," said Mira. "But it's almost gone now. We found a pig-hen in one of the rooms; it must've flown in before we sealed everything off. So we ate that, yesterday." In a lower voice, she admitted, "We were talking about, you know, maybe having to eat our friends. I know that sounds crazy, but…"

  "I understand."

  "Anyway, first I suggested we try eating one of the Blank People. They are organic. Though in a way, that sounds even more terrible."

  "I don't think we'll have to resort to that," Javier reassured her. "How long have you folks been trapped inside here, anyway?"

  "Eleven days."

  "Dung," he said, wagging his head.

  "So," Nhu pointed at the humble pile of food, some of it purchased at Quidd's Market only hours earlier, "we divide up our food, and the Teratas ration their own stuff, right?"

  "No," Javier said. "It all goes in one pot."

  "There's too many of us all together!" she protested.

  "Well that's the way it's going to be, until we get out of here. Clear? Anybody gets caught sneaking into it, and I don't care if you're a Snarler or a Terata, you'll be eating my bullets instead. Trust me. I'm going to put Patryk in charge of the food."

  "Oh, you are, huh?" Satin said. But Mira reached up and put a hand on one of the flippers that would have been a leg, to reassure him. Still, Satin asked, "And why him?"

  Javier shrugged. "Because he's got a backpack. And because he does what he's told."

  "What about water?" Nhu asked.

  "There's running water," Mira said. "And this place is self-sufficient for power. It must have its own generator system in the basement."

  Nhu headed into the little kitchen unit of 1-B. "A nice place like this, there has to be a food fabricator."

  Mira followed after her, waddling quickly. "I wouldn't do that if I was you."

  Nhu flicked on a light, glanced around her, moved to a control strip set into a faux black marble counter top. "Is there anything still in the fabricator stores? Did you try?"

  "Of course we tried, but."

  Nhu started tapping the keys without waiting for the tiny woman to finish. A screen lit up, showed a menu of meals the fabricator could create from the generic soup in its banks (a raw material that consisted largely of fermented bacteria). She punched up something simple: imitation chili con carne. After a hesitation, then the sound of rushing air, there was a gurgling and a tray was pushed out of the processing unit onto the counter. In a ceramic bowl fizzed a foamy black sludge that smelled like pond algae.

  "Oh, wow," Nhu said, cupping a hand over her nose and mouth.

  "It's gone bad," Mira said.

  "How long has this place been abandoned, then?"

  "Well, I think the soup sat in the banks but never got used," Mira replied. "Because I don't think this building was abandoned. It seems to me like it never even opened in the first place."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  wrapped in skin

  On the way from his flat to the Arbury School, Stake became mired in traffic. His battered hover-car was wedged in a stream of vehicles of every sort, some even riding on wheels. He glanced up in envy at the helicars that swarmed more freely above him, though their flight paths were still limited to invisible channels beamed in layers between the ranks of towering buildings. These too were of every stripe. Skyscrapers with sides so smooth and featureless (with vidscreens on the interior, instead of windows) that one might think they were solid granite monuments in a graveyard for dead gods. Other buildings that looked like they'd been pieced together from thousands of odd-matched parts salvaged from stripped factory machines, steam curling out of grids and grates in their complex flanks. Buildings with snake skins of multicolored mosaics. Buildings wearing an armor of riveted metal plates, like retired warships looming vertically with their sterns jammed into the street. Flat roofs upon which perched smaller buildings, symbiotically. Other structures tapering to needle points that seemed to etch the clouds upon the blue glass of the sky. Stacked apartments. Stacked businesses. On street level: shop fronts, and gang kids squatting on tenement steps, glaring insolently at the slow sludge of traffic. In many an earlier traffic jam, he had seen such kids walk across the roofs of vehicles to attack someone in a car who they felt had gestured or looked at them in a challenging way, or simply in order to rob a certain individual too boxed in to escape. He now saw a group of small but hard-faced teenage boys loitering outside a Vietnamese pho restaurant, who wore as their identifying garb clear plastic jackets that brazenly showed off the guns they wore in holsters beneath them. Ah, Punktown.

  A movement caught his eye, distracting him from the banner advertisements he had begun watching numbly as they scrolled across the top of his dashboard monitor. A hoverbike, weaving slowly but deftly through the deadlocked larger vehicles. The person astride it was slight in frame. A woman, most likely. And though a helmet enclosed her head, he saw the blue of her bared arms.

  Stake's heart was jolted. A Ha Jiin, he thought. Thi, he thought.

  But it could not be Thi. What were the odds of her being in this city? No, Thi was not on this world of Oasis. Not even in this dimension.

  Thi was not the only Ha Jiin woman in existence, was she? Though for him, she might as well have been.

  He continued watching the woman on the bike as she worked her way between the idling cars with a stubbornness, a tough determination, that he felt was characteristic of her race. And watching her, Stake felt transported back to the teeming city of Di Noon. The buildings were not nearly as tall as these giants which cast an icy sea of shadow over the street. And it was primarily motorbikes, in staggering numbers, that flooded the streets in place of all these bulkier crafts. Smoothly humming hoverbikes, noisily buzzing older bikes with wheels, and even bicycles-all of them miraculously seeming never to collide with each other, though he had seen, and himself barely evaded, countless near collisions. It was in Di Noon that he had developed his preference for riding outside on a bike rather than packaged up inside a car. Cutting through Di Noon's hot, tropical muggi-ness and smog of exhaust. Out in the blaze of twin blue-white suns that wrung the sweat from his skin and steamed the blood in his heart. The throng of life, so intense and immediate, and him immersed in its very substance, corpuscle in a vein.

  The Blue War had been the only war that Earth had participated in-thus far, anyway-in which the soil of battle was not only that of an alien world, but an alien plane of existence. The blue-skinned people themselves might very well be a parallel incarnation of his own kind, for all the Theta researchers knew. The Colonial Forces had gone there to support the new Jin Haa nation as it fought to maintain its sovereignty from that of the Ha Jiin, and Di Noon where Stake was initially stationed was the
capital city of the Jin Haa. This support from the Earth Colonies of course had nothing to do with the rich clouds of gas that seethed and fermented in pockets beneath the surface of the blue-leaved jungles, waiting to be bottled up for transportation back to their own dimension.

  Watching the elusive figure of the woman on the hoverbike recede, Stake vividly recalled in every cell of his being the first time that he and a large group of fellow soldiers had seated themselves inside one of the big metal pods, in two long rows facing each other. Also aboard the transdimen-sional pod was a small team of Theta agents, the research branch that explored and mapped whatever alternate material planes they could pry their way into. This car which now confined him felt like a smaller, more personal version of that pod. And he shivered, as he had then. He shivered, as if again he experienced his body being sifted through the veil, filtered through the very weave of the universe, squeezed out like strings of hamburger to be reconstituted in another realm as far away as infinity and as close as the opposite side of a thin sheet of paper.

  Something in the logjam seemed to break, and the river of steel and plastic began to flow forward again. And a moment later, he lost sight of the woman on the hoverbike altogether.

  Sitting on a bench outside the Arbury School, under the watchful eye of the guard in the visitors' entrance scanning vestibule, Stake tried not to be obvious about eyeing a girl in blazer and plaid skirt and navy socks that clung to round hard calves as she knelt down to gather the books she'd spilled. Her silky, blue-black hair made him think she might be adorable little Yuki, but when she straightened and turned he saw the swimming clear tendrils that sprouted out of her eye sockets, and realized she was of the humanoid Tikkihotto race. Most of the girls at the school were Earth colonists, though he had spotted the occasional Choom, and a minute ago he had seen a female alien more akin to a giant dust mite walking upright on her four hindmost legs. However exclusive this private school was, it couldn't get away with racial exclusivity, though money was often the best way to filter undesirables. Because of her anatomy, the mite being wore only a diagonal band of the same black material as the blazers across her body, the school insignia displayed on this. The alien girl who had been walking beside her, though, with her gaping face like that of a deep sea hatchetfish, had been wearing the typical uniform, her tartan skirt giving Stake a look at knobby legs shimmering with silvery-gray scales.