Punktown: Shades of Grey (18 page)

They considered it a gang-related death, and there were even murders in retribution. This did not satisfy Kiwi, however, or ease her grief in the slightest. She knew it was not a rival gang that had killed her brother Tri in such a grisly fashion, and left his seated body propped against the dumpster in that courtyard behind the coffee shop, where the dead robot still dreamed under its blanket of snow. Tri’s blue and orange e-ikko was gripped in his fist when they found him, as if he had tried to defend himself, though no blood stained its blade. There were splinters of wood pulp wedged between the blade and its base, but that could have been from the throwing contest they had held. Kiwi’s mother wailed. Her father drank, and looked at more photographs, these of his son when he was an infant and a toddler and just starting school. That night he came to sit on the edge of Kiwi’s bed, but he only sobbed inarticulately, and he didn’t stroke her head at all. Revenge, revenge, Tri’s gang and even the younger children vowed, unsated. Kiwi wanted revenge, too. But she knew their enemy was masquerading. She knew it had had its four victims already, and might well hibernate for years to come until it again needed to feed, to be refreshed. But she didn’t care. She would have her vengeance.

10: The Purging

She sneaked out into the night, into the snow that never seemed to cease, as if time were turning in on itself over and over in a loop that needed breaking. She had a flammable fluid in a red plastic container. She had her father’s cigarette lighter. Though it was late, she had to be quick when she darted out into the street...when she crossed to the triangular traffic island. She uncapped the container, splashed the trunk with its carved lovers’ initials (were her father’s and mother’s there? had her father secretly carved her Aunt Lan’s there?),
splashed
the beautiful painted angel with the luminous blue robes and the gouged eyes. Before she thumbed the lighter on, she tilted her head back and stared up into the waterfall of swaying vegetation, looming over her like a living cathedral. The wind hissed through the yellow tendrils like a warning. As if to answer that hiss, Kiwi produced a flame in her hand. Little at first, just like a seed that she planted at the base of the willow tree, but it soon bloomed and blossomed and she had to run across the street to escape its spreading autumnal leaves. A passing car clipped her hip and she spun around fast and fell hard, but fortunately it was the sidewalk that she sprawled upon. The car did not stop. Nor did the flames.

11: The Hive

A column of black
smoke,
underlit a vivid orange, climbed high into the night like a magical beanstalk. Fire-fighting robots came, attended by human crews, and by now
Kiwi had been joined by her parents on the sidewalk
; they apparently believed she had stepped outside only moments before themselves. Kiwi saw her father’s face in profile as his eyes followed the billowing flames, saw the fire-glow ripple across his face like memories of sunlight. Branches once climbed upon, now sheathed in flame. Branches stained in blood, turned into tinder. Kiwi gazed across the street and saw a few stray members of Tri’s gang, drawn like moths to the blaze. A ring of faces bordered the intersection by the time the hoses and chemical sprays arced toward the conflagration. When they struck the fires, an angry sizzling hiss rose up. The hiss became a buzz. The buzz was as much a vibration in Kiwi’s head as it was a sound. A vast plume of sparks cascaded into the air, borne aloft in the twisted column of smoke (itself like a black specter of the trunk it rose from). These sparks drifted high, blazed, dispersed, faded.
Like fireflies.
Like a whole swarm of bright orange insects, briefly and dazzlingly alive, then dying in the winter’s cold air. The fire was soon brought under control, now that the crews had arrived. Even the smoke was quick to dissipate. And when it did, only the lower trunk of the willow tree remained. It looked shorn off, a huge stump, and the inside of the charred stump was strangely hollow. There was something else strange, but only Kiwi seemed to attribute any significance to it. She saw a firefighter stoop and pick up a fedora, and shake the snow and ash from it.

12: The End

Kiwi returned to her old neighborhood often to see her mother, though she lived in the neighboring city of Miniosis now. She was nineteen; her sad, leeched father had passed away two years ago. He just let go, was the way people—her mother included—explained it. His bedside reminiscences about Aunt
Lan
had not been repeated after the night the willow tree was destroyed. Kiwi would occasionally recall a particular story he had read to her, back when his stories had still come from books: in Greek mythology, Myrrha was cursed by the petty goddess of love Aphrodite so that she fell in love with her own father, Cinyras. Revolted by Myrrha’s seduction of him, Cinyras then attempted to murder her. To escape her fate, Myrrha asked the gods to turn her into a tree. Recollecting this story made Kiwi fantasize that the spirits of the willow tree’s victims had been kept prisoner within it—and when the tree had burned, those spirits were freed from their cell. It was as though the still-living spirit of Kiwi’s father had been trapped for many years in the willow tree’s trunk, as well, and been released in some small way by the cleansing flames that night. When she came back home on her visits, however, Kiwi still occasionally heard strange stories told by her superstitious mother and her own childhood friends, sometimes bordering on folk tales and urban legends. There were always going to be unsolved murders, though, weren’t there? And mysterious strangers glimpsed on stormy nights? There would always be monsters. But all that remained of the willow tree that had given this section of the city its name had been removed years before, extracted like a rotted tooth. On the traffic island now, a local group had volunteered to plant a basin of flowers. Every summer, they bloomed in phosphorescent shades of blue—like the robes of a glowing angel.

— | — | —

PART II

SCOTT THOMAS

— | — | —

PULSE

Stan Derma considered it a fall from grace, having to work for the privately owned Travis Transport Bus Company after having served with the city-run public system. The bus, for one, belonged in a scrap yard and the routes and hours were undesirable, to say the least. He worked the dangerous sectors where the better-armored city buses were not obliged to go. Too many drivers for Travis Transport had found that it was a dead end job in more ways than one.

The city bus had been a thing of beauty, silver, sleek, comfortable, air-conditioned. It was divided into three segments, the first of which was the driver’s cab, partitioned off behind a class-four plexi-door that could hold its own against every form of bullet and most ray and plasma weapons. His divider on the Travis “boat” would barely stop
spit balls
.

Just behind the driver’s cab was the passenger entry booth where folks climbed up into the vehicle and paid—the automatic machines accepted both cards and hard money. A weapon scan would commence; if weapons were detected, the driver would be alerted and the person carrying would need to run their firearms ID card through a scanner in the entry booth before being allowed into the passenger area.

While no bus drivers in Punktown were allowed to carry weapons themselves, the city buses were equipped with a handy feature, a full stun emergency blast. Say a brawl or gang rape broke out in the passenger compartment…the driver could hit a button which would trigger a sudden clap of stunning energy that would incapacitate everyone in the bus. While only lethal to a minuscule number of species, and perhaps those with certain heart ailments, the blast would give the driver time to pull over and radio the police. Of course anyone boarding the bus would be warned by a recorded voice while still in the entry booth. Even so, there were a few deaths each year attributed to the stun blast, mostly old folks whose hearing was as bad as their hearts or brittle little insect-like Leelios, whose English was notoriously poor. Still, the recorded warning kept the city transit department safe from lawsuits.

Flipping back a few months, we find Stan Derma walking from his apartment to the small bakery on the corner of Forty-Fourth where he stopped every workday for breakfast. It was a hot day for spring and the gray filth that had erupted when a pollution-sucker exploded in the sky the week before was still caked on the sides of buildings and steaming in the gutters. City clean-up crews were raking in overtime tending to the mess, so they were in no hurry to remove it.

Quiet-looking, lean and dark-haired, thirty-two-year-old Stan ordered a croissant and coffee from the pleasant Tikkihotto woman behind the counter. She commented on what a lovely day it was. She always said it was a lovely day, regardless of the weather, and Stan smiled halfheartedly.

Stan ate quickly at a small table in the corner where someone had carved DIE HUMANS into the artificial wood. Probably a native Choom, Stan speculated. Some would never forgive the earth invaders who had colonized Oasis and claimed the cities now called Miniosis and Paxton (better known as Punktown).

A vidtank situated above the serving counter was tuned to an all-news channel. A smartly dressed human woman was reporting on a grim discovery made at the trade docks east of the city. Apparently a routine check of a cargo ship, that was supposed to be carrying a type of powdered coral used in the manufacture of high-speed wires, turned up a freight chamber full of dead Veers. Sixty-three of the unfortunate little humanoids had crammed into the ship in a smuggling attempt, each likely having paid a handsome sum to the pilot, merely to suffocate. Stan grinned when the ordinarily objective reporter Lisa Wren concluded her report by saying that she had to wonder if it would have been a greater tragedy if the stowaways had lived and gotten out into the streets of Paxton.

The Veers were outlawed from stepping foot on Oasis. Their eating habits and incorrigible savagery made a mockery of their visual charm.
Full grown
Veers resembled earth children, small and cute and smooth. On close inspection, one might be able to see that their teeth were one forged and sharp beak-like expanse of bone and that their skin was somewhat glossy and doll-like, but then close inspection could prove fatal.

Stan wondered if whatever god-force had assembled the universe had made the Veers the ironic answer to all the abuse suffered by innocent children. Maybe the god who saw fit to populate so many worlds with creatures that closely resembled humans (or did humans resemble the others?) had himself, or herself, a dark chuckle when making those adorable-looking demons.

At any rate, the dreadful cargo was dead and it was just as well. The pilot had slipped away when the port police went to check his load and he had not been located for questioning.

Stan finished his croissant and killed off his coffee while walking to the terminal. He punched in, checked the fuel in his bus and headed out on his route.

It was a Monday morning and the traffic was atrocious. Sneery business types pushed their way on at his first stop. Stan could monitor the passenger compartment from several strategically placed cameras and noticed that the trim, bespectacled corporate gent who had rushed to the back seat was jerking off to colored photographs of aborted babies secreted behind his
Wall Street Journal
.
 

One of Stan’s regulars, a plump girl with Celtic hair, smiled at him as she climbed on at his second stop. Stan looked away shyly and saw his own sad smile reflected in the glass of the driver’s window. She seemed like a student, always carrying books, reading on the days when the traffic made the ride long. She looked warm and soft in her appealingly unrevealing clothes. She looked a little embarrassed when Stan did not beam back (though he’d have liked to) and moved quickly to the fourth row and opened a book.

Third stop. The man with the smeary fetus photos finished his business, crossed himself and got off at Hudson and Fifty-Third. A young blond girl, maybe nine or ten, climbed into the entry booth and fed some coins into the register machine. She smiled through the plexi-door and Stan was relieved to see that she had separately defined teeth, rather than a single fused bar. The secretly imported Veers had all died, hadn’t they, and there was nothing to be worried about, though it always worried Stan to see children riding the bus alone; it was Punktown after all.