Punktown: Shades of Grey (7 page)

“So where are the rest of the wee little ghastlies?”

“Inside.
In the flesh.
Moving through it…”

“What…”

“And one other life form in that top floor room. It didn’t show before. The reading’s crazy…”

“Is it her?”

“I think so. But whatever it is…it’s attached to all of this.” And again he poked the wall of flesh before him.

They waited for Paisley and Jed. Several minutes later Junk got a call on his
head-set
. It was Paisley. They had easily sniped all three of the stray creatures with fast-acting and powerful corrosive gel bullets to insure a certain kill, not knowing what these things could take.
Head shots
so they couldn’t cry out while their bodies melted. Jed was the crew’s best shot.

“Get back here quick, and get your masks ready. We’re going burrowing.”

“Say what?”

Junk cut her off, waited.

When Jed and Paisley found them behind the building, Junk swallowed a glob of saliva that had seemed to be poised on the rim of his throat, punched the projectile setting on his weapon, turned and let loose a burst of gel bullets into the wall of flesh.

It burned well, and quickly, the yawing wound sizzling and bubbling at the edges. There wasn’t much in the way of smoke but the smell was such that they all slapped their masks down. The smell was from the semi-fluid
material which
filled the immense sack of flesh, to their unpleasant surprise. It plopped out heavily at their feet in piles and folds rather than gushing out in a splash, but still Junk murmured, “We broke her water.”

“Are we going in?” Raptores grunted.

“Might as well.” And Junk waded into the slow wave of ooze, ducking his head. The others saw him push his way fully inside. They could still see him in the gelatinous depths, but blurred as through Vaseline. Raptores waded into the thick mass after him, also inclined to duck his head into his shoulders, a shiver passing through him. If any of the seams or zippers in his jumpsuit were compromised, and this possibly poisonous, possibly diseased matter leaked through…

Junk saw only translucent dark depths before him, but when he turned to one side he could discern a wall through the sluggishly undulating sap, and he could read the graffiti sprayed there. He faced forwards again, moved as though gripped in a heavy gravity. He consulted his scan for stairs. This elevator coming up was obviously no good. He could make out its black opening, curiously glanced in to see if the sac extended fully into the lift cabin.

One of the offspring swam rapidly out at him, its bony arms pin-wheeling faster than the ooze should allow. The pouty cherub’s lips were pulled back to show glistening needle-like teeth in combs of multiple rows.

The burst from his assault engine drove the thing back into the cabin, and by the time it hit the back wall it was already in separating pieces. Some sank, some floated lightly in the ooze. The ooze itself rocked and rolled at the disturbance, but soon settled. “Keep moving,” Junk phoned back to the others. Just ahead were the stairs.

It took a lot for Junk to keep going. He thought of the fresh, lovely body he had entered into ten years before…

But someone had to look out for the undesirables of Warehouse Way. Someone had to care for the unwanted, the outcasts, the broken of spirit and body. They had to look out for their own.

««—»»

On the second floor, no sooner had Junk hit the landing
when
a dozen of the offspring surged out at him from doors along the hall and from a crawlspace panel in the ceiling.

Raptores pressed up beside him and they
swept back
most of the creatures in one hammering arc. Limbs somersaulted languidly through the gelatin. Ray bolts streaked red from Raptores’ gun like bright fish, along with three other sorts of projectile. One of the things jumped
piggy-back
on Junk from behind; Paisley yanked it off by the arm, pressed it under her knee and blasted her pistol against its temple.

Jed was tackled by
two which
leaped and sailed at him. Together, the three tumbled backwards down the stairwell, the teeth of the things locked on his arms. He screamed in the headsets of his friends. Paisley plunged down after him first, from the top step to the bottom in one bound. Her shots spun the creatures off Jed. She helped him up, and he nervously chuckled a curse.

“Let’s just bomb the whole house, Boss,” Raptores said.

“No,” snapped Junk. “Move on.”

On the third floor, another wave came rushing down the hall to intercept them, their mouths open but issuing no sounds. How had they been alerted? Telepathically, or by the invasive rippling vibrations through the slowly draining fluid?

All of them were cut to ribbons, blasted to chunks and melted to sizzling spinning globoids by the four invaders firing in unison. The team pushed on through the setting flotsam.

At last, fourth floor landing. Junk pointed. “She’s in the last room down the hall, on the right.”

As he stalked down the hall he thought of the room she had had on the top floor of a Forma Street tenement hive. Neon and laser through the window had painted her flesh, an ever-changing canvas…

He glanced down at the scan, clipped to the side of his assault engine. “Coming!”

They poured from the doors, dropped from the ceiling. At the end of the hall was a window giving out onto the fire escape, and there the skin of the sac was puckered. The pucker opened briefly enough for the two from the roof to swing into the hall, gibbon-like, then closed after them.

Jed opened up on this pair, blew them back out the puckered orifice and melted that into a spreading wound. The viscous fluid began to pour out onto the fire escape and drool in thick columns down to the sidewalk.

Junk shattered one that got in his way and plunged through its debris to get his hand on the knob of the half-open last door. Beyond it he heard a muffled cry. Then he was hauling the door fully open with all his strength against the resistance of the fluid.

She was there, huddled in a corner. The great sac was connected to her body ultimately by a ridiculously narrow membrane, and the far half of the room was free of the sac before it bulged radically. It was indeed Betty, and she was naked. And for all the horrors that had distorted her through the years—the scars, the waste from drugs, and now this—he still recognized that body.

He hesitated in firing, his gun pointed at her. And her dazed eyes lifted to meet his. Tears were flowing from them.

“You’re killing my children!”

“I’m sorry,” Junk groaned.

“You said I’d be safe here, Junk…you said I’d be safe…”

“Betty
..
”

“Outcasts have outcasts, Junk?” She gave a smile that quivered like a dying thing. “Is that it?”

“Betty…”

Raptores appeared in the threshold behind Junk. “Move, Boss, come on!”

“No!” Junk growled, letting his gun slowly tumble from his hands, whirling to catch the barrels of the other man’s.

In jerking at the weapon, Junk caused one of the triggers to be struck by Raptores’ finger. One muzzle flashed. One gel bullet burst against Junk Pharaoh’s chest.

“Junk!” Raptores shouted, blasting the ears of his friends.

“Junk!” Betty moaned from her corner.

His eyes bulging in disbelief, Junk felt his upper body do a slow somersault forward and away from his lower. His arms spun weakly.

“Oh God!” Raptores howled.

“You trigger-happy piece of shit!” Paisley shrieked.

Junk’s eyes glazed as his head settled. It was all that was left of him by then, and it too sizzled and melted and was gone only seconds after that.

“You monstrous little mutant-spewing whore!” Raptores roared, and he let loose everything his gun possessed as he strode at Sweaty Betty. He burst through her sac, out of the skin into the open air of her corner. But the corner was so pounded, so devastated by his onslaught that this portion of the room—of the building—cracked and crumbled in one sudden avalanche, sliding away from the rest of the structure to crash and thunder four stories below into the alley. Raptores went screaming with the ruin, and was buried beneath it.

The fluid from the sac flowed in a dream-slow waterfall to further bury him and the fragments of Sweaty Betty.

Paisley and Jed stood dazed and staring out through the hole. They could see the zapper tanks of the waste treatment center, beyond their low barrier. Could hear their hum.

“He didn’t want her killed,” Paisley said. “We could have cut that thing off her and got her out of the Way to a doctor!”

“She was a monster, Paisley,” Jed told her in a trembling voice. “And her kids…you know? We couldn’t have them running around in the neighborhood. Those things didn’t belong here…”

Paisley faced
Jed,
tears flowing from her primary eyes while the two smaller, glassy blind eyes above those only stared at him dully. As a child, she had worn hats tugged low and combed her hair in bangs to hide them. “I’m a monster, too, Jed…y’know?”

“Hey,” he snapped, “
we
got our jobs! We got our community to protect! We got to look out for our own!” He whirled away from her, stepped back into the deflating sac to work his way downstairs. After a moment Paisley blinked the tears off her lashes and followed.

“She was our own,” she muttered to herself.

— | — | —

PURPLE WINGS

“On purple wings you take me high

Soaring free across the sky

But with your Cupid’s bow

You shoot me down and bring me low

I love you
,
I hate you

I love you
,
I hate you

You’re an angel and a witch

You beautiful fucking bitch.”

— 5Guyz

They were at the
Blue Panda
, sitting at their usual two tables butted together; Karlos and his girlfriend Aundrea, Sissy, rex, Keith and Josh. They all worked together at the Paxton branch of PetZone. More specifically, Karlos had worked there once but had been fired after an ugly dispute with his boss. He now worked the drive-through booth at BurgerZone. He hadn’t been fired yet but he had been reprimanded for throwing a shake into the hovercar of an insulting customer. BurgerZone prided itself on not using automated drive-through booths, he’d been lectured, but this was not what the company meant when they advertised their human touch.

The lights were low and the alcohol content high in their sugary drinks.
rex
sucked anodyne gas from a little metal globe via a hose with a tiny valve. Sissy teased him by grabbing the gas away and jetting a little of it into his eyes. He yelped in his Outback Colony accent, “Hey, cootie, what makes you think you’re such a cutie?” It was a quote from a song by Shawn O’Nasty. Or
a misquote
, as Aundrea laughingly pointed out.