Deadstock (punktown)

by Jeffrey Thomas

  "I'm not the police," Stake told her, but he did not elaborate on just what he was, or who had hired him. "And did you tell the police about the messages from Krimson that you've been hearing on your Ouija phone?"

  "Wh-what? Who told you that?" Caren said, glancing nervously from her biology teacher back to Stake. She looked like a deer poised to bolt. Bup Be turned its head ever so slightly, as if it were wary itself.

  "Please sit down, Caren," Stake said, while he got off the edge of the desk and stood over her to be more physically assertive. She did as he requested, lowering herself into the nearest desk at hand. While he spoke, he tried not to look at the girl for too unbroken a stretch or with too much engrossment, lest he begin to bear a resemblance to Punktown's Prince of Porn himself, indirectly. "Caren, you know this matter is of the greatest importance; a matter of life and death. Krimson is your friend, and we need to do what we can to-"

  "She's already dead," Caren interrupted him.

  Stake stopped. Then asked, "So why do you say that?"

  "Because of what you just said!" Caren whined. "Because I've heard her on my Ouija phone! Of course she's dead!" Tears began to cap her eyes.

  "You recognize her voice?"

  "She was my best friend! I know it's her!"

  "And what kinds of things has she said to you?"

  "Look, I really don't feel comfortable talking about this, okay? Krimson was scared of her father. She said he's a very scary guy. So if she was scared of him, then I'm scared of him, too. If this stuff gets back to him, he'll be mad at me for the things I know. The stuff Krimson didn't want him to know!"

  "This won't get back to her father. I'm not working for her father. I promise not to involve your name in this, no matter what you tell me." Stake glanced at Janice. "You promise too, don't you, Miss Poole?"

  "Of course! Caren," Janice said, leaning forward emphatically, "we only have Krimson's best interests at heart. If she is dead, then we have to establish that officially, don't we? Doesn't she deserve that? And if someone hurt her, doesn't she deserve to be avenged? The person who hurt her punished?"

  Caren dabbed at her eyes. "Yes."

  "So tell me, dear," Stake said, compassionate but firm. "What is it you've heard on your Ouija phone?"

  "Oh God," Caren moaned, dropping her face into her hands. "The first time, I just heard her say my name. 'Caren. Caren.' Maybe that time I wasn't sure it was her, yet. But the next time I heard her, I definitely recognized her. She said something like, 'I'm in the void.'" Caren Bistro looked up, red-eyed. "They say creepy stuff like that. All of them."

  "But did she say anything else that only Krimson might say?"

  "Yes. The third time I heard her, she said, 'Caren. Tell Brat… love him. Caren. Tell Brat.'"

  "And who is Brat? Is Brat her boyfriend? The older boyfriend she was rumored to be seeing?"

  "Oh God," Caren groaned again, wagging her head, her hair falling about her face as if she might hide within it.

  "Caren, please. Remember, your name will not come up, I swear it!"

  "Yes," she sighed. "Brat was an older guy. Nineteen. She knew her father might hurt Brat if he found out about it. I'm the only one she trusted."

  "And you've been a good friend, Caren. You kept your friend's secret like she asked. But if she's dead now, then there's no more reason to-"

  "There is reason! I told you, her father will be furious if he knows I was protecting her like that! He already came to me and offered a reward if I knew anything! Do you know how tempted I was? But I don't trust him!"

  "He won't find out about this. No one will. But please, Caren, what is this Brat's last name? Where might I find him?"

  "I don't know where he went! I tried to phone him to ask him about Krimson, but his brother said he's disappeared, too!"

  "Do you feel he could have been the one to hurt her?"

  "Maybe. I only met him once, for a little bit. He seemed nice, but he was part of a gang, so I don't know."

  "Part of a gang? Where'd she meet up with him?"

  "Um, at the Canberra Mall." "Do you know where he's from? The name of his gang?"

  "Oh, um, she said Folger Street. The B Level, in Subtown. They're the Folger Street Somethings."

  "Huh."

  She sniffled forlornly. "You want to know what I think?"

  "What's that?"

  "I think her father found them together. Maybe in bed. And he went so crazy that he killed them both. So now he's trying to look like he's grieving, hounding the forcers to find her, while all the time he's the one who really did it!"

  Stake and Janice exchanged grave looks. Could such a scenario be possible?

  Regretting that she'd shared her theory, Caren frantically begged him, "Please, please, you can't tell anyone I said that!"

  "I told you, my dear," Stake reassured her. "Not a soul. But I have to know the boy's last name. Brat.?"

  "Brat Gentile. She called him Brat Genitalia." She gave a rumpled smile. "And he called her Smirk. It's Krimson spelled backwards. Partly."

  Stake nodded. "Very good, Caren. You've been very, very helpful. And a very good friend to Krimson. But in a way it wasn't fair of Krimson to put such a burden on you. Don't you feel better now, for letting it all out to someone?"

  "I guess," Caren Bistro whimpered. She reached behind her for a packet of tissues she kept in a zip-pered pouch of her backpack. In so doing, she dislodged Bup Be, which fell out of the backpack to the floor. It lay there in a yellow silk Vietnamese ao dai with white pants. As Stake watched, the doll lifted its stubby arms in the air, waiting for Caren to stoop down and retrieve it. Caren did so, and pressed the doll to her chest as if to nurse it. Without meeting Stake's eyes, she muttered, "There was one more thing Krimson said to me. Just two nights ago."

  "Yes? And what was that?"

  "It sounded like she said, 'Yuki's mom is crying.'"

  "Yuki's mom?" Stake stepped closer to her. "Look, Caren, do you have your phone on you right now? Do you think you could try to-"

  The girl's eyes went wide. "No! No more! No more!" And before Stake could attempt to calm her, Caren Bistro fled from the room, clutching the little Asian-looking doll as if rescuing an infant child from danger.

  Yuki Fukuda had changed into her "Hey Jelly!" pajamas, patterned with the popular big-eyed jellyfish image that had started the current jellyfish craze. She sat on her bed cross-legged watching her wall-sized VT, but her mind was on the man her father had hired to find Dai-oo-ika. Earlier that day he had asked her for Caren Bistro's name. Yuki wanted to call him now and ask him what mean little Caren had revealed, if anything, about having heard Krimson Tableau on her Ouija phone. But Yuki knew that her father would frown upon her contacting the detective on her own, and involving herself in the investigation unless Mr. Stake approached her for information directly.

  Thoughts of Krimson Tableau speaking on Caren Bistro's Ouija phone put her in mind of her own Ouija phone.

  Yuki unfolded her legs, got off the bed and padded barefoot across her sprawling bedroom's immaculate white carpet. She took the phone off her desk and then sat in the desk's chair, just swiveling back and forth and staring down at the toy-like little gadget in her lap. At last, swallowing, she activated it, depressed the button labeled SCAN, and slipped the phone through her glossy hair to press it to her ear.

  Fizzing static: it was the constant background noise, no matter how much one fine-tuned and filtered with the controls. It could be diminished but not eradicated. Occasional crackles, brief louder spurts that sometimes made her flinch. Sometimes a voice emerged out of such a burst. A miserable wail. An angry inarticulate shout. But so far, nothing. Yuki let the scan feature run on. She would do her searching, and if they were willing, the essences that dwelt within that sea of static would come to meet her halfway.

  She closed her eyes. She imagined herself in a bathysphere of sorts, a tiny one-person sub, lowering through the fathoms. Deeper, into an alien realm. With shadowy, amorphous forms like
jellyfish floating just beyond the sub's piercing lights. Deeper.

  "Yuki."

  Garbled. A mouth full of sizzling, hissing static. Distorted. Muffled.

  But she knew it was her mother. She knew it in the little hairs that rose on her arms. She knew it in her cells.

  "Mom," she whispered into the mouthpiece. "Mom, please talk to me."

  "Yuki."

  As always, the tears that could not be locked out slipped from beneath the closed doors of her lids. "Mom," her own voice quavered, "please tell me how you are. Please, please, Mom, I love you."

  Then, more words, but chopped into fragments by the crackles. Words beaming from so far away, like a sun ray scattered and diffused through the ocean depths. It sounded to Yuki as if the distant voice had said, "You are a… lone." Alone?

  "Mom? Hello? Mom?" "Yuki."

  This voice was not distant, unclear. Only too close, too loud, too firm. Her eyelids snapped open. Standing in her bedroom doorway was her father. His face immobile, though a demon's furious snarl seemed to be layered beneath its smooth mask.

  "Daddy," she squeaked.

  John Fukuda stepped into her room, tall and sharp-edged in the business suit he still wore. "I'm sorry I ever bought you that thing."

  "Why, Daddy? What."

  "I heard you. I heard what you were trying to do. You're trying to contact your mother."

  "But I did!" she protested. "Daddy, she's spoken to me before! I was afraid to tell you, but she has! I know it's her!"

  "How can you know?" he snapped. "You were only a baby when she died!"

  "You've shown me vids of her; your wedding vid!" she reminded him, her tears flowing copiously now, face half-crumpled like the tissue she gripped in her free hand. "But I just know. I know it's her! She wants to tell me something."

  "Tell you what?"

  "I don't know. I can only hear her a little." He came nearer, held out his hand. "Give me that thing."

  "Please, Daddy!"

  "Give it to me!" he shouted.

  With a sob, Yuki rose from her chair and handed the device to her father. He pocketed it without a glance, and said, "I was foolish to have bought you this. I don't want you playing with your friends', either. If I learn of it, you'll be sorry. Do you understand me?"

  "But why? Why don't you want me to-"

  "Enough!" he bellowed. He had never yelled at her this way before, and she almost staggered back as if struck. He turned toward the door. "Go to bed now."

  Yuki fell into her chair again as if her legs had gone out beneath her. And she buried her face in her hands, crying inarticulately like one of those sad creatures swimming in a vast ocean she could not glimpse, but which was essentially the air all around her.

  Earlier that afternoon, after Caren Bistro had left, Janice Poole had come out from behind her desk and smiled at Stake lasciviously, as much as she dared to do within range of the camera that monitored her classroom. She whispered, "Want to come home with me after I finish up here?"

  He gazed over her shoulder. Atop a counter that ran the length of the room were a number of tanks containing various animals, from fish to insects to rodents to a group of Kalian lizards much smaller than the edible glebbi, though these short-limbed specimens still had long, serpentine necks upon which perched smiling crocodilian heads. These creatures were piled atop each other in an unmov-ing orgy. At most, one of the periscope heads would turn lazily this way or that. At last, Stake said, "Umm, I'm not feeling that great tonight. I haven't been sleeping well."

  "Ohh, really?" Janice stepped closer to him as if her proximity, the aura of her lust, might sway him. "Hey," she said. "Am I your girlfriend now or what?"

  Now he looked directly at her, and smiled. "Am I your boyfriends?"

  "Hm. Plural, huh?"

  He grinned, felt a little guilty. "Sorry. Look, I really am tired. I'll call you tomorrow, all right?" And then he headed to her classroom's door. "Thanks for your help just now."

  Janice folded her arms and raised an eyebrow at him. "Mm," was all she said as he left.

  Now, he was back in his flat on noisy, colorful Forma Street. And now, alone, he almost regretted not going home with Janice after all. He remembered those lizards, taking mindless comfort in the contact of each other's bodies.

  That, in turn, made him think of Thi Gonh.

  Unanswered questions haunted him to this day, as if she had taken them to the grave with her. But he felt confident that she was still alive. This was because he had tried to find her, and had at least glimpsed her footprints before they vanished into obscurity. He had never returned to her world, her dimension, after the war-that was true. But he had called here and there. Sent messages. Sifted through the net. The first footprints had been clear enough, in fact.

  When the 5th Advance Rangers had met up with his group and they had left the captured monastery, releasing the clerics detained during the occupation of it, the combined force of soldiers had taken the two Ha Jiin prisoners with them. It wasn't until the third day that an air cavalry vehicle had been able to rendezvous with the group, and carry the prisoners away for further, official interrogation. Sometimes prisoners were used in exchange for captured Colonial Forces soldiers. But Stake had feared that the Earth Killer would be too great a prize to trade. Too heinous a criminal to set free.

  During those three days that they dragged the prisoners along with them, they had even engaged the enemy a few times (and it was in one of these brief firefights that Private Devereux, whose life Thi had spared in that clearing, was killed by another Ha Jiin's bullet). But it was from his fellow soldiers, many of them now camouflage-faced clones, that Stake felt the greatest threat. Not to himself, but to the blue-skinned woman. With Sergeant Adams now in command, he didn't have it within his power so much to protect her. Or be left alone with her. As it had turned out, however, the trek had been too dangerous and Adams too bent on his mission for any abuse to have been directed at the woman, besides the occasional hateful comment. Yet when the cavalry ship landed to spirit her off, Stake's anxiety had become even greater than before. Now, he would not be able to protect her at all. Now, in all likelihood, he would never see her again.

  Standing in his dingy apartment, staring sightlessly down into the bustle of the street, Stake remembered her eyes as she had entered into the craft and glanced back at him before the door slid shut behind her and the soldier escorting her. He remembered that there was nothing to remember about her eyes. Blank, dark, as mysterious as those of the lizards that had gazed back at him in Janice Poole's classroom. Black, flashing bright red, and then gone.

  Upon returning from the field to the allied city of Di Noon, he had called this office and that officer, sent urgent and repeated messages. He urged anyone who would listen to show mercy to the Earth Killer, relating the story that her own companion had revealed to him-how she had herself taken mercy on three Earth soldiers vulnerable within her gun sights.

  She had not been released to the Ha Jiin until after the war had ended, but it wasn't that much longer in any case. Still, as Stake continued to follow her situation, primarily through the news media and military reports, there had come yet another direction for his concern. After hearing the same testimony from her companion that had won her leniency with the Earth forces, her own government tried her for treason. But there was her record to take into consideration. Though she had spared three Earthmen in a moment of weakness, that did not return life to the many other soldiers she had not hesitated a moment in dispatching. In the end, the Earth Killer had been awarded her freedom, dismissed from military service. And her people had given her a new moniker, half out of contempt, and half out of a kind of humor based on lingering respect.

  She was called the Earth Lover.

  The footprints of the Earth Lover had disappeared into the blue jungles of her planet after that. Trailed off into a private life somewhere, hidden from notoriety and shame. A woman turned patriot turned murderer turned pariah. Another live war casualt
y.

  To this day, she remained as much a cipher to Stake as he was to himself. Was it her living ghost, or his own, that rattled its chains in the halls of sleep more disconcertingly? Or had he and she become one entity in a way, in an abstract form of his mimicry, his empathy? In trying to find her, he wondered, had he as much been trying to find himself?

  She's using you, Private Devereux had told him. To keep from being executed by his men. Letting Stake make love to her, to prevent being raped again by the others.

  In an alley below he saw two dogs of different breeds sniffing at a burst trash bag together. Like the lizards. That unthinking, instinctual need for companionship. He hoped that at least it had been this between them. Not just her using him. If not love, if not even affection, at least this. Was that too much for him to have asked of her in return?

  As he had countless times before, he replayed her face on the screen of his mind, as she had appeared when he was atop her. She had seemed to have honestly lost herself in pleasure on two or three occasions. On one such occasion, her eyes had slit-ted almost entirely closed until only a sliver of white showed, as if she had gone into a trance. And she had cooed, in the softest tone he ever heard from her, "Ohh, ban ta like. Ban ta like."

  Later, he had asked Private Henderson what "ban ta" meant. He had replied, "Ah, that would mean 'your lover.'" Then realization had shown in the other soldier's face. But he had said nothing. A good man, that Henderson.

  And she had always called him Ga Noh. The chimera. The shapeshifter.

  He recalled her eyes open, another time, as he crushed himself into her as though he might fuse their bodies, her left leg hooked in the corner of his elbow, her knee bent back to her ear and her foot bobbing, bobbing in the air with thrusts that were almost violent, almost rape. But those wide eyes were not hateful. Or afraid. Did memory distort them into something passionate?

  He had buried his face, buried his soul, in the thick dark jungle between her legs. She had held his head there. Pushing him onward, urging him to lose himself further. And she had done the same for him, avidly lapping like a dog drinking water, her eyes on his all the while, watching for his pleasure and watching for his magic-until his shame at his gift and for how he was using her made him squeeze his eyelids shut.