Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Yes, he decided. And obviously she had sent Grey from the room to spare him. To return his gift of sympathy. But had letting him live to witness the death of the others been a kind of joke meant to taunt him, or a true gesture of mercy?

  His eyes settled again on that blue-boned limb. The soft, delicate hand he had been holding only minutes before.

  Grey groaned, winced. He didn’t know if he would die, or live to be healed and to leave this town. But whatever her ultimate reasons, at least Maria had given him a fighting chance.

  SISTERS OF NO MERCY

  While waiting for Ayn to come back with the vid of her mission, the other five watched The Evil Men Channel. It was a relatively new VT channel in Punktown, though the sentiments behind it certainly predated interplanetary colonization. The thing to be for today’s businessman, the new catch-phrase, the driving ideal, was “evil”. There were books entitled Evil Strategies in Business, Get Evil! and Live Evil!. It was a term used more by men, though their female counterparts were no less ruthless in their aspirations and techniques. These five young women, once they graduated college, would implement the honed, devastating skills they were learning now...and no doubt eventually marry men of the kind they were presently admiring.

  The two men in the holograph tank, larger than life—one interviewer, one interviewee—had shaven and branded heads. The interviewee, popular repeat guest N. Ron Hubherd, discussing his business partner’s recent ambush-death, was missing his left ear where he’d sliced it off himself at a ritualistic inspirational business meeting, at which he’d also sacrificed a lamb. This had been televised last week.

  “That there, ladies, is one testicular evil man,” husked Gale, cat mouth curled in a lusty smirk. “Rob Malice thinks he’s so bloody because he cut his finger off—I hear he almost passed out afterward. If he ever met this guy he’d be so embarrassed he’d have it cloned back.”

  “It makes me sick,” Shivka agreed, leaning across the bar, wrist flopped lazily with cigarette in hand, “these worms who think they’re evil.”

  “Rob won’t have to cut throat—‘daddy’s’ giving him the business on a platter. No testes, that worm.”

  “Speaking of testes,” said Alexandra, “here comes Ayn.”

  Ayn was all smiles, had the glaze-eyed look some women have fresh from sex. No questions yet—they wanted to see for themselves. Though they could guess the general outcome already, there was a specific detail that generated some suspense.

  The Evil Men Channel was replaced by point-of-view footage shot by the special night-vision glasses Ayn had worn tonight. A street of rain-slicked pavement, glistening grimy white wall tiles. The floating camera turned into an alley; they could hear the crunch of broken glass and debris under Ayn’s heels. This alley bore no fruit. The camera floated off down another branch, thick with steam hissing from a row of vents. Something small and black, startled, leapt off a malfunctioned garbage zapper. “Shit!” they heard Ayn rasp, and all laughed.

  “Scared, Ayn?” Gale smirked.

  “Well, I could have been mugged, you know? That isn’t exactly the kind of neighborhood I normally frequent.”

  “I should hope not.”

  They hushed, more respectful now, as it became obvious that the camera was coming up on a larger black form, this one too numb to be startled, practically unmoving. Watching the holograph tank, seemingly filled with steam, they now felt that they themselves stood over this person slumped against the alley wall. And it could almost have been the vid of any one of them, thus far. Ayn was the most recent applicant. She’d been a good “novice”, as they called it...but now was her chance to enter the sorority in earnest. At Paxton University, they were the elite, the mysterious, the envied Sisters of No Mercy.

  Yes, this one was Ayn’s choice. The drooling piece of refuse blubbered and sputtered and ultimately grinned with a disbelieving pleasure that almost cut through his drugged or drunken haze as Ayn opened his soiled pants, worked them down his legs and then bent over him. The camera with her. Tank filled with the vision. Trees of leg hair.

  The Sisters whooped and applauded. “Not even a moment’s hesitation!” Alexandra cried in delight.

  “You’ve got it,” Gale said, nodding. “You are it, girl”.

  “You’re beautiful,” said the drunk in the alley. “You’re beautiful...”

  And then he screamed.

  The camera-view shook from side to side. They heard Ayn grunt. The man kept screaming. Now they heard Ayn gasp, her voice more distinct, her mouth clear.

  “He had my hair,” she explained.

  The camera moved in again, however. Shook viciously from side to side. They saw blood, they heard Ayn moaning

  “God,” Gale said, “I can’t believe you really went ahead and did it like this...”

  “Really,” said Shivka .

  They didn’t whoop or clap now, merely watched in stunned, almost reverential awe. They had all used knives or scalpels or shears. Ayn had told them she would use her teeth. They had thought she was being unrealistic, and Gale, their leader, had ordered her to bring a knife, knowing that even she herself wouldn’t be capable of doing it with her teeth. “You won’t be able to go through with it,”she had warned Ayn then. “You really have something, kid,” she told Ayn now that is was over.

  They brought the lights up, and the Sisters finally applauded—though still not wildly. Ayn presented Gale with the bottle containing the prize she had won from her mission. The initiation was over.

  The others gathered around as Gale branded Ayn on the left breast with the symbol of the Sisters of No Mercy, and then they celebrated. The awe loosened up a bit; Ayn was hugged and rubbed on the back. Giddy with her triumph, she suggested, “Why not put it in the blendo and mix it in our drinks? That would be a nice ritualistic touch!”

  “God, Ayn, you’re initiated already—calm down!” Gale told her in laughing amazement.

  During the course of the festivities Ayn played the vid back again, froze it on certain images, and after some more drinks played it backwards. Taking Alexandra aside, Shivka commented, “Ayn is going to own a corporation some day, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  He was a mutant on top of being a drunken unemployed piece of living trash. Watery blue eyes the size of balled fists, wisps of white hair. Stinking of shit and urine and drink. Ayn stood over him toweringly while he blinked his unthinking eyes up at her.

  She was beautiful, as the first derelict had said. Blond hair swept into a pompadour, the flesh around her eyes, of her lips and entire face sexy with a languid puffiness. Fashionably pale, lips a vivid red, green silken suit-dress, and a gun in her purse should she be interrupted in her pursuits down this way.

  The mutant certainly wasn’t attractive. And he had no job. A man with no job. No career. No aspirations. He didn’t deserve the little piece of flesh that made it possible for him to be called a man alongside the men Ayn coveted on The Evil Men Channel.

  She unfolded the glasses from her purse.

  “What are you, some kind of social worker?” asked the garbage at her feet, blended so aptly with the rot and ruin strewn about him, gazing up fish-like.

  Stupid freak. What did he know of society, or work? Numbing himself purposely to avoid both. Well, she would cut through that fog soon enough...

  Blood splashed onto the inside of the holograph tank, now an aquarium of pain.

  Gale opened her mouth to say something. It was the weekly meeting of the Sisters, a week since Ayn’s initiation ceremony. Ayn had brought a vid for them to watch. Now that it was over, Gale felt the need to say something, to ask something, but before she could, the vid went on into a new episode...

  This one was an obese black man. Ayn turned to the others to grin. “I put on a nice tight bathing cap this time to protect my hair, after those last two...”

  “Ayn...”

  “Watch.”

  The man fought. Pain made him nearly lucid, and he was strong. The came
ra-view flew, they heard Ayn curse as she fell, pushed away by the man’s foot. She righted herself. A pistol rose into view. Aimed. Puffed silently, twice. Now the man’s convulsions were involuntary.

  The camera bent low to resume its close footage.

  When that was done, Gale almost expected a third episode. There wasn’t. “Ayn,” she said, throwing up her hands, “what was that dung all about? We initiated you once, didn’t we?”

  Ayn smiled uncomfortably, glanced from Gale to the other four, and back. “It was for our entertainment, mostly...don’t you think that was intense? Good solid inspirational entertainment, like The Evil Men, right? What’s the matter?”

  “Ayn, it’s a one-time symbolic ritual, not a hobby, all right? We’re the Sisters, the most important sorority P. U.’s ever known, not a club of vampires.”

  Ayn’s mouth gaped slightly open. She held Gale’s gaze but couldn’t bring herself to look at the other four again. Blood had risen into her sexily puffy white face in rash-like mottled areas. “I’m not a vampire, Gale.”

  “Well, is this a new pasttime for you or what? Did you get a job as a hitman with the Yueh-sheng Triad and forget to tell us?”

  “I thought you admired what I did!”

  “I did...I did, but...I was never really comfortable with it. I....” Gale straightened up, lifted her chin a little. “I’m not sure we have the same kind of motivations for what we do.”

  “What are you talking about, Gale? I want what you want—to be evil!”

  “Ayn...why don’t you please go in the other room for a few minutes. Please?”

  “Why?”

  “So we others can talk.”

  “Talk? About what?”

  “Vote.”

  “Oh. I see. That’s what I thought you meant.”

  “Please go in the other room, Ayn. All right?”

  “Oh. All right. Fine.” With calm poise but a still blotchy face, Ayn went to eject her vid disc and pocket it before clicking out of the room on her black high heels.

  Shivka was shaking her head the moment the door slid shut behind Ayn. “She’s too into the hyper-dramatic, too immature.”

  “She’s just trying to out-do all of us,” Alexandra said.

  “She’s out. I feel bad,” Gale said. “She’s got enough testes for ten evil men, in some ways...but she really needs to get her energy focused. Very immature.”

  “We can always let her try again next year,” Alexandra said. “Maybe she won’t be so over-zealous after she learns her lesson.”

  “You’ve got to have some class and dignity,” Gale said, going toward the door to summon Ayn back in. She addressed all four first, however. “Are we all voted, then?”

  No one went against the decision. Gale slid open the door. “Ayn. Could you come back in, please?”

  Ayn clicked in. Her silken emerald green jacket and skirt glistened, her pompadour as fixed as a sculpture, restored from hair-pulling and covering by protective head gear. Smudged lipstick cleaned away, lips again as razor-defined as a geisha’s. She looked like she was confidently entering a boardroom, head of some new, suitably voracious corporation. She the leader, here to address these others, decide their fates. After all, hadn’t they all turned out to be the slimy little worms they claimed to abhor?

  “Ayn,” Gale said.

  “Yes?” Ayn said, and then shot Gale in the face with the pistol from her purse. The cartridges, depleted from that business with the obese man, ran out before she got to Alexandra so she had to go after her with the knife Gale had given her. That worked out fairly quickly, though she did get her hair pulled again.

  Ayn set fire to the room before she left. Worms, she thought, clicking quickly down the street to the subway. The Sisters of No Mercy, they had dared to call themselves...and then had tried to reject her? Alexandra had blubbered and begged to be spared. That might have been funny had it not been so pathetic.

  No, no worms in the Sisters any more; she’d see to that, she thought as she boarded a train that would take her to the affluent, well-policed area of Punktown where she and her family lived.

  No, she would see to it that all new initiates really proved themselves from now on.

  HEART FOR HEART’S SAKE

  Nimbus looked out the window into the alley below; at the wall of the facing building, in particular. Some of Teal’s handiwork showed there, spray-painted in a variety of bright colors, the shapes so cleanly drawn they appeared stenciled. He had told her once that he had been spreading his graffiti throughout Punktown since he was a child. This work of art was a long strip of Egyptian hieroglyphics. She had never asked him what they said, if he even knew.

  She also wondered then how many of his earlier graffiti masterpieces she had seen in her life before she had met him...never knowing when she glanced at them, or leaned her back against them to smoke cigarettes, or huddled under them to sleep in alleys on cold nights, that someday their destinies would converge. Never knowing that she would become his partner in a number of senses.

  She watched a battered hovercleaner make its way into the alley mouth; as they usually were, the hapless robot was covered entirely in spray graffiti less artistic than Teal’s. Its voracious grinding and crashing as it hit the rich filth deposit made Nimbus’s jaw tighten. At its approach, a flattened cardboard carton flipped over and two pale youths went scrambling down the alley so as not to be crushed against the floor of trash. White insects under a rock, exposed. A shadow passed over Nimbus’s heart.

  A hiss of air in an angry pneumatic burst caused her to look around, startled. A hovercleaner up here, too? Her body tensed to run. Old instincts die hard.

  Teal sat at his work bench, which ran along the high wall of brick he had painted a glossy pink. A small portable heater blew on him; the loft was large and unevenly heated. A mug of coffee by his elbow. It was as domestic a vision as any Nimbus had ever known. Teal was wrestling with the hissing snake of an air line hooked to a compressor he had salvaged somewhere, his brow knotted with intensity. Nimbus smiled at this sight with a slow fluid spread of warmth throughout her, dispelling the cold shadow like a ray of sun beaming out from behind a cloud.

  She padded across to him in her socks, hugged him from behind. He grunted a little irritably and squirmed, still fighting to moderate the flow of air through the line, so she teased him further by bending to nuzzle his ear, her hair falling into his face. He might have snapped at her then, but he had controlled the air level and sighed, sat back from his work, letting his shoulders press against Nimbus’s breasts. He reached up behind him to rub her arms. “More coffee?” Nimbus purred, pulling at his ear lobe with her teeth.

  “I need to save enough for tomorrow morning. It’s all we have left.”

  “I can buy some. A small package.”

  “We don’t have enough money.”

  “No?”

  “No. Wait until Willie pays me.”

  “He’d better pay you. He knows you need it.”

  Willie was an old friend, now with his own modest print shop. Teal did artwork for him, designed logos for the business cards and letterheads of Willie’s clients. Right now, this was pretty much the extent of Teal’s income. He was fortunate that his uncle was the landlord.

  Nimbus came around front to sit on Teal’s lap. He smiled wearily, rubbed her thigh through the cottony softness of her much laundered sweat pants. Both had not yet changed out of the warm sweats they wore to bed, or showered for the day. Nimbus found Teal’s rough stubble and disheveled short hair as appealing as if he were a small boy fresh from a nap and rubbing his eyes. An almost maternal feeling, she had for him at times. Even after a year, it was all so strange to her, so alien. But so warming...

  Teal’s hand had slipped under the back of her sweat shirt now to slide up and down smooth hard skin. Nimbus could feel him stiffening under her bottom. She smiled down into his face, got off his legs, took him by the hand.

  The bed was close to a glowing orange heater in a corn
er of the high-ceilinged loft. They could shed their clothing and remain above the blankets in comfort. And they warmed each other in their embrace, in the friction of their bodies, until they were hot and sweating.

  Teal curled one of her thighs in each arm as if to carry them on his shoulders, and pressed his lips deeply into the soft white flesh of her belly. He licked inside the squint of her navel. He buried his nose in the musk of her glossy wires. She held his head, his short hair bristling between her spread fingers that arched like her back with her pleasure.

  When he looked up at her from down there, his pupils glowed brightly with the heater’s orange light. Teal had inherited a mutation which made his pupils a silvery color, like metallic cataracts. His irises were a violet corona around them. He claimed that he saw perfectly well, that his vision was clear and his perception of color normal, but she liked to believe that these were the lenses he focused his imagination through to create his art. She liked having those special lenses focused on her, even though they glowed somewhat eerily now as he crept up along her body, smiling, to stretch out upon her. When his face was above hers, she saw her reflection in those bright discs like twin cameo portraits.

  Lodged inside her, he propped himself up on stiff arms to look down between them at where they were locked, and to look at her body in general. As an artist, he was a lover of shape and form. She wondered in what way she might be inspiring him at his very moment, and felt a great fondness for his mysterious mind...felt proud that, even with his intensely individual vision, he had allowed her to link her art with his in the way their bodies were merged now.

  Those artists of various mediums she had given her body to before meeting Teal had claimed to look upon her as an inspiration. An inspiration for their own desire, she snorted in her mind. Even when they had rhapsodized over her finely sculpted form, in the midst of passion they might as well have been grunting incoherently. Lust for beauty, not Teal’s reverent appreciation. All right...so there was lust in him, too. But a kind of reverent lust. Teal was no poser as lover or artist.