Punktown: Shades of Grey (6 page)

SWEATY BETTY, TERMITE QUEEN OF THE DANGED

No such thing as vampires, huh? Tell it to Junk Pharaoh, whose military surplus life scan told him there were about thirty-five of them in the old tenement on Warehouse Way, one of the least cozy hunks of Paxton—more popularly known as Punktown even to police, for whom Warehouse Way was scarcely more than a rumor. Let dog eat dog, so long as the mongrels didn’t stray into the pretty uptown gardens.

They looked after their own on Warehouse Way, which was why Junk and his crew had been called in from their camp over in the little brick factory by the old shuttle docks. All the factories and sprawling warehouses in this corner of town had been given over to the homeless, the desperate. Why not? Again, kept them here, and not at the newer warehouse clusters. At first, uptowners had even made an organized effort to transform some warehouses into housing units for the homeless, but too many volunteers had been lost—feeding some of the denizens in a way they hadn’t intended—and the project had pulled out.

Yeah, there had been a lot of too-hungry sharks down here at first, but that was where Junk came in. For the past five years, he and his crew had been pulling up the weeds.
They were paid by the community in a great variety of ways
. Collection plates scraped up a little coin door to door, but mostly it was work exchanged for work, talent for talent. Food was brought to the Brick House every day, representing the many ethnic and otherworldly types of the colony. And there was plenty of sex—a buffet as variegated as the food. All in all, it boiled down to system. Like it or not, system made life better for the majority…even amongst the outsiders and disenfranchised of Outhouse Way, as Junk called it. They took care of their own.

««—»»

“I seen that spidery little crack-bare kid all over the place the past few days, every time I turn around. No wonder. There’s lots of him!” said Raptores, crouched behind a crumbling plaster parapet trimming the flat roof of the old Tinberg Ceramics Mill. Across his thighs he cradled a squat little two-fisted gun capable of firing five different types of projectile, from solid to beam.

Beside him hunkered Junk, with the scan. “Thirty-five of the kid.” He turned the scan on its side, held it up to his eyes and peered through its magnification feature. “And they all look the same. According to the scan they all weigh the same…”

“Who’d wanna clone some scrawny little mutant-ass punk?”

“I don’t know. But they fit the description of the kid who attacked Tahnyah, Mrs. Alcove and old Nodick. And if Mr. Pulp and Jellyfish were still alive, I’m sure they’d describe these freaks, too.” All five victims had been viciously set upon, bitten and clawed, and their flowing blood licked off them by one of these skeletal albino youths. The latter two had been attacked with more ferocity and had succumbed to their wounds. “You know, maybe Mr. Pulp and Jellyfish got attacked by more than one…maybe a bunch of ’em…and that’s why they died.”

“The thought of a bunch of these nudie little gargoyle-butt bloodsuckers clambering all over me makes me wanna puke.”

“Mm,” agreed Junk, watching through the mag screen. Across the street was a row of narrow tenement houses at the very edge of Warehouse Way where it ended abruptly at the Sporcizia Brothers’ Waste Treatment Center with its towering, white, loudly humming zapper tanks looming above their repulsion barrier. Junk knew Porco and Ladro Sporcizia from school—when he’d been bored enough to attend—and knew they were now in with the syndy. A chem spill and two fires at the plant had gutted most of the tenements in the row, but the one he was focused on was ceramic block and had held up. A plastic house beside it was a wrinkled, sagging Dali painting of a house.

He had counted four of the creatures outside the four-story
block house
. One on the flat roof, squatting by a hooded vent fan, watching birds feed on stale bread he had tossed out for them. Two huddled on a metal fire escape, apparently grooming each other like baboons though they were utterly hairless even on their heads. Picking scabs and popping zits, Junk thought, but the scan had been dropped too many times for him to zoom that close without heavy grain. And
one creature climbing down the side of the building from the roof
. He climbed
head-first
, fingers and toes hooking in the seams between the grimy aqua blocks.

The one on the roof pounced at the birds. They fluttered up in a cloud and he scratched crazily at bare tile. The noise apparently startled the climbing one. He lost his
grip,
fell with a distant soft thump. He leapt to his feet and ran at a startling speed around the building, hugging his bony ribs and shaking and rolling his head at an equally maddened speed. After the third lap he darted through the open front door and slammed it shut after him.

“These things have
gotta
go,” Junk sighed.

««—»»

It was dusk. In the Brick House, Junk and Raptores suited up again in full combat regalia. Raptores had been a soldier and still had his sources outside the Way. With them, also suited up, were two others of the community’s police force, Jed and Paisley. The two remaining
crew members
would hold the fort.

While Junk deftly french-braided the long black hair that usually hung to either side of his fine-boned brown face, he told them just where the tenement was located. “The last house in the row, at the corner.”

Paisley’s face slackened. “Not aqua, with chrome trim.”

“That’s it—why?”

“Oh, man…Junk…”

“What?”

“You obviously don’t know.”

“Obviously.”

“That’s where Betty lives. At least, that was where she had holed up the last I heard.”

“Oh…man,” Junk breathed.

Betty. Sweaty Betty, they had always called her out on Forma Street. Ten years ago, one of the prettiest and most popular street geishas on that crayon-bright, playground-noisy boulevard. Junk had been a lot younger then.
Young enough to fall in love with a street girl.
Young enough to ask her to leave the street with him.
She had laughed him off. Junk hadn’t liked being laughed off any more then than he did now; he left Forma Street. But five years later when he ventured that way again he searched her out, and found her.

She had been tortured by a band of fun-seeking adolescents, her face badly hacked up and badly fixed at an illegal clinic. The most they did for her was give her good strong drugs. She was still selling her body to buy those drugs when Junk found her, but aside from mutilation freaks—some of them rich businessmen on lunch break—she had to scrape up her living from mutants, the diseased,
the
lowest dregs of Forma Street.

This time Betty dazedly allowed Junk to take her away. He brought her to his new neighborhood on Warehouse Way. Set her up in a flat with some elderly mutants. Gave her weak drugs to help wean her.

Then he left her to her new life and hoped for the best. Was it her earlier rejection of him, he asked himself on those few occasions when he let himself think of her, or was it her face that made him avoid her? He wondered…and both possibilities filled him with guilt. He saw her sometimes. They smiled and said hello. Sometimes they both looked away instead.

She had never weaned herself, but settled for the sludge drugs she could afford with the coinage she earned from selling her body to the old men and the sorrier mutants of the community. Mostly, she made her own drugs the best she could.

“That house? You’re sure? When was this?”

“I don’t remember. I was poking around in those old houses for stuff I could make jewelry from, me and Liz Fuentes, and I went to explore the aqua house but Liz stopped me and said Betty was camped in there. Alone, she said. Nobody else wants to live
there
’cause of the Brothers’ waste spill and the smell from the zappers.”

“Man…” Raptores said. “That’s it! See?
Those ghoul-ass little vampire punks.
She’s living in the scum slum, man! See?
Sweaty’s giving birth to those things!”

“Get off it,” Junk rumbled.

“It makes sense,” Jed muttered. “They must be mutants. And they haven’t been here long, so she must be churning ’em out fast. It’s ’cause of those damn slime brothers, but we got to stop her, Junk. I’m sorry, man, but how many of these critters is she gonna put out?”

“All that mutant sperm in her didn’t help,” Raptores theorized. “Maybe she’s having one kid for every john she’s notched lately…”

“We gotta stop her, Junk,” Jed said.

“Shut it! I’m thinking…”

“What’s to think about, Boss, it’s our job,” Raptores argued. “Let’s go in there and give that girl some belated abortions…”

Raptores was then flying backwards, but his flight was brief and ended abruptly at a wall. With his left fist Junk pinned him. In his right was a pistol with its barrel jammed under Raptores’ jaw. The pistol was armed and humming. Junk hissed, “You know better, Rap. You know better.”

“I know better, man. Forgive.”

Junk pushed him away. “Let’s go,” he muttered, his slanted blue eyes hot but lowered. “We can’t let those things hurt the neighbors.”

««—»»

“They glow. See?” whispered Jed from the alley of the ceramics mill. “Like ghosts.”

“Like the danged themselves,” Raptores rasped in mock solemnity.

There were only two outside, both hunched on the roof edge like gargoyles as Raptores had called them, but not very vigilant gargoyles, as they were intensely grooming or picking at each other. Through his helmet’s night screen with its mag feature Junk could now see them closely. Picking scabs. Their faces were child-like and devoid of any life-like expression. Paisley had the scan.

“Three are away from the nest, not far. Should we get them first or after?”

“Mm. You and Jed go take ’em.
Me and Rap
will get a closer look. If we go in blazing first the strays might hear and hide or go deeper into the neighborhood. But when you find those three, make it quiet so the rest don’t hear.”

“Right-o.” Paisley nodded to Jed and they retreated back down the alley.

“Let’s go around back, see about a rear door,” Junk told Raptores.

They worked their way behind the aqua building easily and silently. There was a back door. Raptores braced his gun for action while Junk moved forward to test it.

He touched the OPEN tab. He heard the tongue click back. No lock code. They were in. He and Raptores exchanged nods,
then
Junk eased the door open.

The doorway was barricaded. No, blocked. It seemed to have been filled with a malleable glossy white
material which
was translucent in the lights from the looming zapper tanks behind him.
An almost phosphorescent white.
Junk prodded it gingerly with the multiple muzzles of his Inferno-7 Assault Engine.
Soft but resilient.
Paisley had left him the scan and he held it up for a reading. He had to work to coax a reading from the device while Raptores kept watch.

At last: “Christ-O-Mighty.”

“What?”

Junk gaped at the softly luminous matter. “It’s living flesh of some kind. And it goes back far.”

“How far?”

An incredulous
double-check
of the scan. “It entirely fills the four-story building except for half of one room on the top story.”

“Man!” Raptores hissed.

“Yeah,” Junk agreed.