Punktown: Shades of Grey (17 page)

5: The Monster

Bobo’s uncle swore he’d seen a monster exactly a week ago. Bobo told the other children about it, and even Tri and the older boys of the gang stood listening and didn’t scoff too much. The uncle was unloading a company hovervan, backed up to the dock behind a brick building with a café on its ground floor. It was snowing hard that day, did they remember
?,
and the uncle heard a sound behind him. There was a little courtyard with a big dumpster that zapped the café’s trash, and a lot of heaped and rusting junk no one had ever bothered slinging into the dumpster to get zapped, too. Bobo’s uncle saw something stand up, all covered in snow that began to trickle off its body. It was such a cold day, did they remember
?,
that nothing should be living after lying on the ground long enough to be covered all in snow like that. And it was big,
big
, and dark, but he couldn’t make it out, and he only looked for a second because he ran out of the alley, around to the front where the coffee house was, and when he came back with another man, who carried a gun, there was no sign of the monster the uncle had seen except for these dragging, messy tracks that were impossible to make out. Tri listened all the way through this tale but then he reminded the younger children, his sister among them, that there was an old robot in that courtyard that had been used for shipping/receiving work when the café had once been a small factory. The robot hadn’t budged in a decade or more, but maybe something had set it off, a transmission from a hand phone or palmcomp or even the radio of a passing hovercar, and it had finally risen. Together they went to that courtyard, and there they found the derelict automaton sprawled where it had always lain, parts of it torn off, other parts caked in graffiti. It was covered in a deep, smooth drift of snow, Bobo pointed out. The snow hadn’t fallen off it. What his uncle had seen had to be something else. Furthermore, his uncle had said it had long arms like tentacles. A lot of long arms like tentacles. That much he saw before he fled. Tri smacked Bobo lightly across the back of his skull and told him it must have been a coat with long rawhide fringe. Or, what if they
were
arms? So what? Then it was either an alien or a mutant. There were plenty of aliens and mutants. Any one of them could be called a monster. People called human murderers, and these children themselves, monsters. There were lots of monsters about. It could have been any one of them. That didn’t mean it was the one that had killed that Choom in the basement parking bay...that woman in the alley...that man they found in the willow tree. Anyway, Tri said, it could very well be three different monsters
who
killed those people. But Kiwi listened to this, and not for the first time since these killings had begun she thought of her father’s oft-heard bedtime story. She wondered if Tri had ever heard it, too, either from their father or from their mother, but she’d never dared bring it up to Tri. Now that Tri was almost a man, he and his father were perpetually at near-violent odds. Tri despised his father’s heavy drinking and use of anodyne gas (though Kiwi had known her brother to drink and gas up with his friends). As much as she dreaded listening to her father’s slurred and painful recollections, she was afraid that if she complained about him or even brought up his bedside
visits,
it would set off her hot-tempered brother and cause him to confront her father. Her father—who was himself often hot-tempered, always sad, usually unemployed, gray before he should be gray, his very skin gray as if some monster sat down on the edge of his own mattress at night while her mother lay sleeping unaware right beside him, and rested its head on her father’s lap while it inhaled the life from his pores.

6: The Window

Four of the boys in the gang Tri belonged to took turns standing at the very edge of the sidewalk, the traffic whipping by so close that it made their long trendy winter coats flap, and hurling their tomahawk-like e-ikkos through the flashing gaps between the vehicles, the e-ikkos twirling end over end until their blades thunked into the bark of the willow tree, where they had sprayed a target in red paint on top of layers of earlier graffiti. Kiwi hoped they hadn’t sprayed on top of the angel someone had intricately painted there many years ago (primarily in shades of a luminescent blue paint that had faded over the years but which once must have caused the angel to glow in the night like a phantom). It was bad enough that someone had gouged out its eyes with a knife, and someone else had painted a huge phallus on it, but it still managed to be beautiful, more like a serene and tolerant spirit standing in front of the tree than a flat image upon its grooved bark. She thought of the Japanese goddess O-Ryu. She had encountered her name on the net when researching a report for school. O-Ryu was the goddess of willow trees. Kiwi couldn’t tell from here if the angel painting had been damaged; she stood behind the tall boys of the gang, watching their e-ikko contest. One boy said to Tri that if he won, for his prize he would demand to spend the night with Tri’s mother. Tri raised his weapon as if to cleave the boy’s head down the center—he was not entirely joking in the gesture—but the gang’s leader barked at them both to cease. The boy who’d teased Tri hurled his weapon and it clanged hard against the fender of a passing hoverbus. He was almost hit, himself, darting into the street to retrieve it, and he cursed when he saw that the blade had been dinged. While the others laughed, Tri taunting him the loudest, Kiwi raised her eyes to the face of the brick building directly opposite her, across this intersection at the center of which—like an oasis, or a mirage—stood the triangular traffic island. She had heard her father’s bedtime story in many variations. Sometimes he talked more about the aunt she had never known. Told her more about the adventures he and the two sisters had shared that summer, and that autumn, before the mythologized and martyred Aunt
Lan
died that winter. Other times he spoke—a little more, at least—about the killings that had taken place that winter. There had been four. There had been three, this winter.
Three, so far.
She had heard the details often enough to know that the elderly woman who had been found in her rocker in front of her VT, mauled as if by a madman, or a lion, had lived right there, right up there in the apartment behind that window, that window with a view right down on the traffic island—like an oasis in the middle of the intersection—a view right down directly on the willow tree.

7: The Photos

The first photo her father showed her, showed her proudly, proud that his young daughter would ask to see these old photographs, was of her father and mother at the time they had worked together in the little brick factory that had now closed down like so many factories had, and since become a coffee shop. They were standing on the street in front of it with their arms around each other’s waists, barely out of their teens. The next photograph had been taken inside her mother’s old apartment building, and it was a few years older, because it showed her Aunt
Lan
standing in front of a window. She was silhouetted, eclipsed, the light making a halo around her head, her face dark with shadow but smiling. She did indeed have short hair cut in neat bangs like her niece’s. Kiwi hadn’t seen this picture in years. Neither had her father. She thought he might begin to weep as he held it in his lap, but he had only downed two beers so far tonight and he moved on to more pictures.
More of her mother.
More of her Aunt
Lan
.
More of their friends and neighbors here in Willow Tree.
Toward the bottom of the stack there was a picture of Aunt
Lan
standing in front of the willow tree, both her arms tucked behind her as if she’d been lashed to the trunk though obviously she was merely leaning back against it. Sunlight had managed to pry its way through the shadows of the city towers, beaming directly down onto the island. Aunt
Lan
wore cheap sunglasses with circular lenses. From a distance, they made her look as if she had skull sockets in place of eyes. Another of the photos showed a gang of boys much like the one Kiwi’s brother belonged to; her father explained that he had worked with one of those tough youths in the factory. Kiwi stared at this photo a long time before she realized what was wrong with it. She stopped her father from moving on to the next picture. She didn’t tell him, however, what she had figured out about it. She could ascertain from the buildings behind the youths that they were standing at the intersection. Directly behind them was the traffic island. But she did not see the willow tree. Could their bodies be obscuring it? She felt she should be able to see the tree, huge as it was, between and even above their heads. But it was as if the tree had been cut down. Could it have been? And then replaced with another specimen? Had the original become sick? Maybe the tree hadn’t been planted yet at that time; but no, there was that photo of Aunt
Lan
from the same period (the photos even had superimposed dates in their corners), with her leaning against its body. Kiwi glanced at her father’s face but he either didn’t notice anything unusual in the shot, or was not seeing the photo in the same way she saw it. She didn’t ask him about it, though. She let him shuffle through to the next memory.

8: The Dream

That night, from out her bedroom window, and from the precarious perch of her dreams, Kiwi watched a man walk along the street below with a blizzard swirling around him. He was a big man, a huge block of a man, a fedora crunched down onto his head, his broad body hunched inside a heavy coat. From this coat hung a long rawhide fringe that whipped all about him in the air. She watched the man come to a stop on the sidewalk, and she was afraid, wanted to duck down out of sight, thinking he was gazing up at her. She could see his small eyes catch a glimmer of orange light, flash in his shadowy face like the eyes of a lion in the dark. But then she realized he was facing across the street, not at her window. (In her dream, her apartment building was not in its actual location.) He was gazing up at a window in a brick building of native Choom design and origin. Kiwi recognized that window. Though she could not see through its curtains, she knew an elderly woman sat behind that glass, rocking in a chair, watching some old movie on her VT. As she spied on the spying man in the fringed coat, she saw the fringe become even more animated in its movements, even though the storm had fallen into a lull. She saw one long strand of the man’s fringe shoot out, lengthen like elastic, like a string of putty, across the empty street, and up to that curtained window with its blue VT glow. Kiwi watched the extended limb, for now she understood it to be such, pick and claw at the edge of the window, seeking a way inside. A solitary hovercar sped by in the street, churning up a little whirlwind of snow in its wake. Its lights briefly slashed across the bulky figure, though the vehicle’s owner might not have noticed that he passed directly below the extended limb. The headlights sent a myriad of reflected glimmers across the hulking figure. Sparkling orange gems. Gems that moved slowly, that swarmed, all over the black figure. They were hundreds, thousands of little beetles with glistening orange shells. But they weren’t just crawling on the figure, she realized. They seemed to entirely
compose
the figure, masses of beetles in the millions, not thousands, filling that coat and the snowy fedora. Kiwi watched as the thing’s yellow, tentacle-like arm managed to raise the edge of the window just a fraction, and apparently snake its way inside. Minutes passed, filled only by mute snow. At last, the rope-like arm withdrew. Did she see dark droplets fall from its tip as it was retracted? Did a few drops mark the snow where the figure had stood, when it began walking along the sidewalk again? Kiwi repositioned herself so as to follow the progress of the man, the alien, the mutant,
the
monster as he continued on to the street corner. He was at the intersection. And
now he began to cross—slowly, without fear of being hit, there being an uncanny lack of traffic, a disquieting quiet—to the little triangular traffic island
. But now, at last, Kiwi saw that there was no willow tree upon the island. Not at first, anyway. A gust of wind caromed down into the street, raising a billowing cloud of snow. When it had cleared away enough for her to see the traffic island again, the bulky figure in its greatcoat and fedora was gone. But the willow tree was there on its island, after all. And that was when Kiwi opened her eyes in her dark bedroom and stared at her ceiling, across which blazed like meteors the headlights of
vehicles which
never, in real life, stopped zipping along the streets of Willow Tree. In her head, a buzzing sound like the cries of cicadas was fading off down a tunnel. Then gone. Though she had never heard them make a sound, she imagined it was a chorus those many orange beetles that appeared on the willow tree might sing, when their eggs were hatched, and they were born anew each summer.

9: The Victim