Deadstock (punktown)

by Jeffrey Thomas

  They wore beautiful flowing robes of azure silk, embroidered with raised religious symbols also seen worked into the mosaics. On their heads, black three-cornered hats. And because the holy caste started smoking their incense as children, each of the ten monks had a whorl-like hole in place of a face. Like a huge knothole in leathery blue tree bark. The incense had cancerous properties that ate their features away over the years, obliterating their identities so that they were all identical servants of their faith. The cancer eventually reduced their fingers to nubs so that the hands they rubbed along the tiles were more like blunt flippers, fleshy mittens. They sacrificed their fingers by pinching the hot glowing incense out of the bowls of the pipes they smoked. Then, they pressed the ash to a point in the center of their chests until over time a smaller vortex wound opened there, like a window straight to their hearts. They humbled themselves this way day after day. Until they were fully transmogrified. Until they needed the incense no more.

  "This is how hardcore these people are," marveled one of the soldiers, wagging his head in awe. In fear. "This is why they're so fucking tough to fight!"

  Devoted to their faith. Devoted to win their war against the emerging Jin Haa nation. And the Earth Colonies' military forces that supported it.

  It was because of this fierce devotion that Corporal Jeremy Stake was a little surprised that the two Ha Jiin fighters who had taken refuge in the monastery surrendered when the Earth soldiers surrounded it. Stake was in command by the time they captured the monastery, because their unit's lieutenant and sergeant had both been killed by sniper fire.

  The captured fighters were a woman in her early twenties and a boy of maybe nineteen with a badly infected leg wound that had slowed them down and forced them to hide out in the monastery. Stake ordered their medic to see to the boy. Their guns were collected. From the woman they took a sniper rifle; a sophisticated Earth weapon she had no doubt taken off a corpse at some point.

  "Let me shoot that bitch!" Private Cortez raged, aiming his own gun at the now unarmed woman, her fingers linked on top of her head. "She's the one who killed the lieutenant and Sergeant Lindy-has to be!"

  "We don't execute prisoners unless they attempt escape," Stake intoned, quoting regulations.

  "She looks like she's gonna make a run for it to me" remarked another unit member, leveling his bulky, multi-barreled assault engine.

  "She was picking off our officers," Cortez said. "You would've been next, man!"

  "I mean it," Stake told them. "Just get some restraints on them."

  "Sir," said Private Henderson, calling him over to examine the sniper gun they had confiscated. He pointed to some Ha Jiin characters etched or burned into the weapon's stock. "Can you read this?"

  "What's it say?"

  Henderson met his eyes gravely. "'The Earth Killer.'"

  Overhearing this exchange, Cortez bounced on his feet and jerked his gun at the woman, raging anew. "It's her! She's the Earth Killer! That's what they call her! She's snuffed I don't know how many of us, Stake! We need to riddle this fucking bitch now!"

  "I told you to back off, didn't I?" Stake snapped. "Don't argue with me or it goes in my report."

  "The corporal's gunning for general," wisecracked another man, but he ignored it.

  The Earth Killer. Her own people had dubbed her that. A legend, almost, even to them. And it had worked its way to the ears of the Colonial troopers. A cold-blooded little beauty, carrying a gun almost as big as herself, with a patient trigger finger and an instinctive eye for drilling solid projectiles and various types of ray beams into enemy soldiers at great distances, even through the intervening chaos of jungle vegetation.

  But Stake wanted to know her real name, and he stepped closer to her. He asked her, in his crude fumbling attempt at the native language. She said nothing, staring at him unblinkingly. He edged closer, to intimidate her. But not too close, because he was intimidated himself, though she was five feet tall at best, slim as an adolescent boy, and had had her wrists banded together in front of her. Those cat-like eyes. He stared into them. He repeated his question.

  "Thi Gonh," she answered this time, in a voice surprisingly dark and strong for her small frame. And then she gasped. And Private Cortez broke into laughter.

  "You're starting to mimic her, Stake," he said. "And she looks like she just saw a ghost!"

  Stake realized he had been looking at her too intensely, and severed his eye contact. But he hadn't been able to help himself. The young woman was indeed a beauty, as the rumors had indicated. The shape of her face was delicate, with fine cheekbones, the mouth feminine but hard with a kind of composed arrogance. Her nose looked like it might have been broken at some point, but this-like the black mole below one corner of her mouth-rendered her beauty more individual, gave it a flawed humanity to blend with the ethereal loveliness. There was a fold of skin over the inner corners of her eyes in what is called the epicanthus, giving them the slanted look of the Asian peoples for whom Stake felt the Ha Jiin were this dimension's analogue.

  The woman's flesh was the robin's egg blue that made these people so eerily lovely, like ghosts. Her waist-length hair, parted in the center and gathered loosely behind her head, stray strands hanging in her face, was midnight black-and yet, it had a metallic red sheen where the light slid across it. Similarly, the pupils of her eyes were black as volcanic glass, but when they caught the light a certain way glowed a bright, unsettling red. Demons, some of the Earth soldiers called the Ha Jiin. It made it easier to kill them.

  Stake had the woman patted down for secreted communication devices or weapons, a blade or such. When he saw the soldier give her chest a double squeeze, thinking that the corporal didn't see him grin in the woman's glaring face, Stake growled, "Show some professionalism, you stupid fuck! Put her in one of the rooms we can lock. Stand guard outside it."

  "Leave her cuffs on?"

  "Yeah, for now."

  This private and, at Stake's urging, the more professional Henderson escorted the woman away. Stake thought better of it and had a third man follow them, gun ready. Even without weapons, the Ha Jiin could fight like panthers.

  Stake went on to check the medic's progress with the wounded boy, who had been taken to one of the tiny bed chambers-containing little more than a thin mattress on the floor-that each of the monks had been using before the Earth soldiers had corralled them all into one large room where they could be guarded. The boy had spoken English when the two Ha Jiin had been captured, and Stake had hoped to question him, but the medic had put him out in order to safely work on him.

  Instead, he made contact with his superiors and gave a report of his unit's status. The loss of the two commanding officers and two infantrymen, the seizure of the monastery, the capture of the Ha Jiin fighters. He mentioned the words etched on the female's Earth-made weapon. And he was commended for his work.

  Stake was told to hold the monastery until another ground unit rendezvoused with them in a few days, and then together they would go onward to the next X on the map, the next block on the chessboard. Since none of the Colonial Forces soldiers were so badly wounded as to require that a medevac fly in and transport them out, a flier wouldn't be sent in just yet to collect the prisoners; probably not until the joined units were ready to move onward together to their next destination. Due to the sensitivity of their operations, Stake as yet had no idea where that destination might lie, or what his people were to do when they got there.

  He was ordered not to harm the clerics, as it could make for bad press. They would not be taken away when the flier eventually came in. Though small probing bands of the Colonial Forces wormed their way through this part of the jungle, officially they were not even supposed to be here due to the area's great religious significance. (Here, the valuable subterranean gases that certain parties wanted to harvest leaked from occasional fissures, coiling into the air like spirits to be worshiped.) Stake felt that his superiors wanted to digest the situation better before sending in
any conspicuous aircraft. It might even be that the joined units would be required to bring the prisoners along with them on foot. When the orders came, whatever they were, he would obey them.

  Ultimately, as night began to fall, Stake checked back on the captured woman. The guards were rotated, and Henderson reported that he had managed to exchange a few words with the reticent prisoner in her own tongue, aided by the up-to-date translation chip he wore in his head, programmed with the Ha Jiin language and so many others. Smiling, he told the corporal, "You really spooked her. She called you a Ga Noh. That sort of means a chimera or a shapeshifter. A mystical kind of being; part human, part god. Maybe good, maybe evil."

  "Did you tell her that I'm only some Tin Town freak?"

  "No sir. It could be useful if she's in awe of you." "Just like you are, right, Henderson?" "Exactly like that, sir."

  Stake looked at the closed door of the room she was kept in, a thick panel of blue-glazed wood. "I'm going to go in and have a look at her."

  The woman was sitting cross-legged on the mattress, her wrists bound in her lap. She and the boy had reverently kicked off their sandals when first brought into the monastery. Stake's eyes took in her bare feet, the spacing and stunting of the big toe (did the thong of the sandals do that, over time?) making them look somewhat prehensile, and there were even little spurts of coarse black hair on their knuckles. Monkey feet, the Colonials joked about the Ha Jiin, to dehumanize them further. The woman's feet were small, like those of a child. Self-consciously, he lifted his eyes from them to meet her gaze. Her own eyes presently flashed that disturbing red color, as if lit from within.

  Stake knelt down in front of her, at the edge of the mattress. "I'm Corporal Jeremy Stake," he told her, touching his chest. In halting snatches of the Ha Jiin language, he tried to tell her that he was the commanding officer, though surely she knew that already from the insignias on his blue-camouflaged uniform and from observing him take charge of the others. He had no doubt now that it was she who had picked off the lieutenant and sergeant, and that she was only too familiar with reading insignias of rank in her rifle's magnifying screen.

  She said nothing. But she held his gaze. She was waiting for him to start changing again, he realized. Watching to see her own face reproduced on his, like a reflection appearing through subsiding ripples after a pebble has broken through a pond's smooth surface.

  Several little flies hovered through the room, and one alighted on her chin, crawled toward her mole as if might be some rare berry. The woman turned her face toward her shoulder and crushed the bug against herself. When she returned her eyes to Stake's, he saw the tiny insect smeared across her lower lip in black flecks.

  Without thinking, seemingly without willing it- but aware that the heavy door was closed behind him-Stake reached out with his thumb and wiped the flecks from her lower lip.

  She opened her mouth, and closed it around his thumb.

  For a moment he expected her to crush her jaws together. Then shake her head from side to side like a dog with a cat in its teeth. Instead, she sucked on his thumb. Keeping her eyes fixed on his. They were black again, at the same time mysterious and full of meaning.

  And that was when Corporal Jeremy Stake knew that he and the Earth Killer were going to be lovers.

  With her still sucking on his thumb, and swirling her tongue around it, he heard a strange sound from beyond the thick door. Unearthly, uncanny. Between the sound and the woman's actions, the hair rose on the back of his neck. He realized it was the sound the monks made through the spiral hole where their faces had once been. All ten monks were making the sound together. It was a time for chanting. They could see no timepieces, but it must have been an hour they felt arrive inside them.

  The noise grew louder. Louder. It hurt his ears. Became deafening.

  Stake no longer saw the woman. He saw only his pain. He clamped both hands over his ears, and opened his mouth wide in a cry of agony. His mouth widened. Widened. The sound of the monks was now coming from his own mouth, which widened more and more. His mouth was going to open until it swallowed his nose, then his eyes. Until all that was left was a gaping hole screaming in the center of his face.

  Oh my God, he thought. I'm changing into one of them.

  His eyes sprang open, his palms still pressed to his ears. That horrible sound still pouring out of his wide, wide mouth. Jeremy Stake scrambled out of the chair in front of his computer station, awake once again, and staggered into his bathroom. Terrified of what he would see in the mirror there.

  But when he dared to activate the mirror-screen (which reversed his reflection for him, so that he might appear to himself as he appeared to others), Stake saw that his mouth was not locked open wide, and spreading wider, after all. It was more of a drooping grimace, really. And he panted through it, gripping the edge of the sink. Gazing at his reflection, he muttered a chant of his own.

  "Jeremy Stake. Jeremy Stake. Jeremy Stake." As if he were his own prisoner of war, giving his name, rank and serial number.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  the flesh machines

  "These are the ones we've killed inside the building," said Mira, waving a plump little arm. A neat row of five mostly intact bodies lay on their backs in the gloom of apartment 6-B of Steward Gardens. "Five to the ten of us they've killed."

  "I didn't notice the missing spaces when we were outside," Javier said, referring to the narrow alcoves the Blank People occupied. He stepped closer to the corpses and prodded one's leg with the toe of his shoe.

  "Like I say, this is only five out of seventy-two of them. No wonder you didn't notice."

  "So they're not androids, huh?" Javier said dubiously, crouching down beside one of the bodies. Even this close he smelled no decay from the corpses, just a faint fishiness from the raw wounds where the Tin Town Terata's guns had blown chunks out of them. Most of the killing wounds were to the heads. He lifted a slender but heavy arm, completely blown off at the elbow. It was rubbery to the touch and in consistency. He noted the whitish filaments that dangled out of the stump in place of veins, or maybe nerves, or maybe tendons.

  "They're belfs," Mira stated. Bio-engineered life forms. "But very simple ones, not like real people. They're like organic androids."

  Javier laid the limb on the floor again, and bent closer to this creature's decimated head. The interior was as gray as the exterior. A slime of clear fluid coated the insides of the creature's wounds, and a viscous pool had spread under its body, but he saw no shards of skull. He saw no brain. Just solid gray meat throughout, interwoven with a network of those white filaments. However, inside the gaping head he did spot a corner of the shattered programming chip that Mira had alluded to. "So these chips are all turned on."

  "All I can think is that the people who would've opened this place, but never did, left the Blank People active to keep out intruders and vandals. And they're probably all tied in to one computer server, along with the generator."

  Javier looked up at her. "Okay, but if the power in this place is on, and if these things and the homicidal trash zapper are all running off one server, then why can't the computer just open every window in this place and let all the Blank Fucks inside to finish us off?"

  "Well, I can't tell. Maybe the owners programmed the computer to just communicate with these things, to use them as security, and the trash zapper is either an oversight or they left it fully active because the owners still needed to use it. But the weird way it attacked your friend makes me think its program is crossed with the Blank People's program. They're following the same purpose."

  "A mixed purpose. To dispose of us trash."

  "Yeah, but even the Blank People's behavior can't be normal. The way they're acting, it wouldn't have worked out for this place. Can you imagine these things waking up and killing every visitor, every deliveryman? They're too aggressive. Their program is glitched. Who knows; maybe the owners of this place didn't leave them turned on. Maybe a virus got into the system just recently
and woke them up. It could be that homeless guy they killed triggered the initial effect, by messing around in here somehow. Being the first person to trip a security alarm, and bring the things out of a dormant state, but now they're filling their role in a distorted way."

  Javier got to his feet and smiled his city tough's sneering smile. "Huh. You're pretty smart, you know that?"

  He saw her beautiful face redden. "My body is stunted. Not my brain."

  "So are you the leader of your gang?"

  "Oh no. No. He was killed by the gang we were fighting, before we even got out of Tin Town."

  "But the others seem to do as you say. More or less."

  "They respect me, I guess." She shrugged humbly.

  "I wish my people would be respecting me a little better. They've always been rough dogs to rein in, but lately I don't know. Maybe because I'm getting old for this dung. I'm twenty-five. I ain't a teenager anymore. Hell, most of the original Snarlers have all gone off and gotten married and whatnot. These kids you see me with all came later."

  "Maybe with us mutants that's not an issue so much. We're together more out of survival than to, um…"

  "Than to what-be criminals? Sell drugs? Mug people? Torch cars and abandoned warehouses for a cut of the insurance money?" His tone had become defensive. "Yeah, I've done all those things."

  Mira stammered, "I just mean, our gangs in Tin Town can have people of all ages."

  He drew in a breath to calm himself. "Well, I'm definitely feeling ancient for the Snarlers. Twenty-five is like being a worn-out old grandpa."

  Mira smiled. "You don't look worn out to me."