Ghosts of Punktown (9 page)

     “What did they look like?”

     “It was just a flash, you know, like you get sometimes looking too quick from a light area into a dark area? So it could just be my imagination, man; too much coffee or not enough. But it sort of looked like someone small, with no clothes. I don’t know, maybe just wishful thinking.” The man snorted. “Just have a look around, will ya?”

     “I’ll do that.”

     Miter signed off.

*     *     *

     LeBlanc checked the rest of the third floor thoroughly, then descended to the second floor. He beeped Miter in the process. “I haven’t seen anything. You?”

     “No. Maybe I need a nap, man; I barely slept today, you know? I’m not a young guy like you. How old are you, now...like fourteen?”

     “Fifteen.”

     “Wow. Be patient, El Jones, and you’ll be able to legally drink in a few years.”

     LeBlanc said nothing, but cut their connection.

     When LeBlanc had finished his rounds of the second level and returned to the third, he was surprised but not startled to find Miter in the Hall of Antiquities, reading the plaque on the wall beside the flesh scarecrow in its glass case. “Hey,” said LeBlanc, and Miter whirled around fast, a hand going to the pistol holstered under his gray suit jacket.

     “For Chrissakes, dung-hole, are you trying to burst my beater? Jesus.” He straightened up. “That’s what I get for coming in here and reading about all this creepy Antse stuff.”

     “Did you see someone come up here?”

     “No, but I thought I’d have a look around where I found that body last week, you know?”

     Miter blew out his cheeks, still shaken, and LeBlanc smirked internally. The older guard had been on the day shift twenty years ago, when the psychotic artist Toll Loveland had terrorized Punktown with his bio-art. Two Health Agents on the artist’s trail had come to the Hill Way Galleries to have a look at Loveland’s art therein, in the hopes of discovering clues. The way Miter told it, he had assisted the Health Agents in their case; one might think that when these men finally defeated Loveland, Miter was right there beside them. The museum had acquired more of Loveland’s art after his death – including a bio-engineered golem of roughly human form, its flesh programmed to once an hour sprout clusters of what looked like little wavering branches or an unraveling circulatory system, before returning always to its original shape. Now that LeBlanc thought of it, this effigy reminded him of the Antse flesh scarecrow. It also had sort of reminded him of himself, sometimes. Was he only a tricky moving sculpture
imitating a man? Might he himself be housed in a place like this one day, a mere artifact of the culture that had fashioned him?

     “Well I swept this floor and two pretty thoroughly, and didn’t see anything,” LeBlanc reported. “If you’re really worried, we could get the forcers down here to do a scan.”

     “I dunno...I’m not too keen on forcers after the way they grilled me last week.” Miter nibbled his lip. “Let’s just do our jobs a bit more and if there is a problem we’ll go from there.”

     LeBlanc started out of the room to continue on to the next, which housed artifacts of the Tikkihotto race. “All right, I’ll keep looking. Just don’t shoot me tonight, okay?”

     “Then just don’t sneak up on me anymore, forest face.”

     Sometimes LeBlanc thought that if Miter had been beside him in the Blue War, and had seen how adept a killer his bio-engineering had made him, he’d never make any of his witty comments.

*     *     *

     LeBlanc had just entered a room featuring more relics from here on Oasis, of the extinct Irezk Island tribe of Chooms, when his wrist comp again beeped him. This time when he saw his partner, Miter looked even more alarmed than when LeBlanc had startled him. “Jones, I saw the thing...it ran out of the Kalian room just as I was going in, but I definitely saw it!”

     So Miter was still in the Hall of Antiquities, further back. LeBlanc had left the room of Kalian artifacts only five minutes earlier. “And, what is it?”

     “I don’t know...it looked like a kid, or maybe an old man. Small, no clothes, all a bright yellow color.”

     “Yellow?”

     “Maybe a homeless mutant.”

     “Did you beep the forcers?”

     “Whatever it is, it’s just skin and bones. Let’s try to take it ourselves so we don’t have some smug patrollers laughing at us for the rest of the...hey...
hey!
You there!
” Miter’s face had jerked out of the frame, leaving LeBlanc with a yawing shot of the ceiling.

     “What?” LeBlanc leaned forward on the balls of his feet. “What is it?”

     “There it is! It’s looking at me!”

     “Where are you now?”

     “Dung, man, it’s coming at me!”

     The image on LeBlanc’s screen went wild as Miter moved to confront whatever it was he was seeing. Then, LeBlanc heard shots, not just from the wrist comp’s speaker but echoing from back a ways in the Hall of Antiquities. Feeling long unused muscles uncoil eagerly, LeBlanc bolted toward the sounds, pulling his own handgun from its shoulder holster as he ran.

     He passed through the Kalian room without seeing either Miter or the person he had reported. LeBlanc kept running, but stole a glance at his wrist comp and was shocked to see a stationary, tilted camera angle of the museum’s floor and part of one wall. Included in the frame was an object LeBlanc recognized: the base of the glass case in which the Antse flesh effigy hung suspended.

     LeBlanc skidded to a stop at the entrance to the room of Antse artifacts, hiding around the corner a moment lest the intruder be armed, or Miter prove too trigger-happy. But a peek into the room showed he had no need to fear any panicked shots from Miter. The security guard lay on his face in the center of the floor, arms flung out from him, his gun still gripped. Seeing no one else around the man, LeBlanc rushed into the room and crouched at his side. A corona of blood was spreading under Miter’s head. LeBlanc rolled him over – and even with all his military experience, sucked in his breath when he saw how the man’s face and neck had been raked and lacerated...and his eyes messily scooped from their sockets.

     Looking up, LeBlanc saw drops and spatters of a dark liquid trailing across the floor, out of the room through its opposite entrance. The clone rose and moved to the start of the spatters. It was a black fluid with a noxious odor, apparently as thick as sludge. So Miter had hit the thing. LeBlanc was about to follow the trail of what had to be blood when something he had noticed peripherally finally caught hold in his mind. He turned, nerves crackling, toward the raised platform on which the three spheres had rested, the sculptures of Antse clerics coiled into their meditative pose.

     The platform was empty.

     “Not sculptures,” LeBlanc whispered to himself, and then he turned back toward the trail of long stagnant blood and followed it from the room.

*     *     *

     As far as LeBlanc knew, all of the exhibits in the museum were linked to the alarm system, so he wasn’t sure why it hadn’t already been activated by the changes to the three Antse figures on their pedestal – though, being an exhibit themselves, in a museum in which many of the modern artworks were articulated, maybe the system had overlooked their behavior – but when he heard the alarm system come whooping to life now, he knew some other display must have been disturbed. Good – the alarm would go straight through to the nearest forcer precinct house, saving him the call he had been about to make...leaving him free to stay focused on the task at hand. Search and destroy.

     LeBlanc passed stealthily into a chamber featuring articles from both the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa people of Sinan. There was a porcelain mask-like wall hanging of a woman’s face with delicately painted blue skin. LeBlanc knew these exhibits well enough to note right away that the face’s eyes had been scratched at so furiously that not only was their paint missing, leaving rough white patches, but the mask was cracked as well. Worse, its companion piece lay on the floor in fragments. A wooden plaque like a religious icon, painted partially in gold flake, hung crooked on the wall, the revered subject of its portrait also with his eyes eradicated, leaving depressions in the wood. And the eyes of a stone statue too heavy to topple and tough to gouge had been slathered with a thick black fluid: the perpetrator’s own blood.

     “Great,” LeBlanc muttered. “That’s great.”

     He moved on, finding a similar situation in rooms containing works of the insect-like Coleopteroids and the bipedal dog-like Dacvibese. Whether the eye was compound, in the case of the former, or with a goat-like pupil and pink iris, as with the latter, all the eyes the fleeing entity had encountered were marred or expunged.

     LeBlanc was racing now, barely stopping to look about the rooms he sped through, wondering how the being could be so fast, even wounded, even stopping to wreak such havoc, that he couldn’t keep up with it. He was rushing so much that he nearly forgot his soldier’s wariness not to blunder into an ambush, and had to force himself to control his advance, remain aware of every surrounding detail. He used his wrist comp to deactivate the distraction of the whooping alarm.

     Ultimately, having completed the circuit of the Hall of Antiquities, he found the thing huddled close to the mammoth metal bust of the god Raloom, as if appealing to that unfamiliar deity for protection, hugging its own legs in a fetal-like position but apparently unable to fold itself up into the neat ball it had assumed for untold years. Having spent so much energy and lost so much blood, the thing was shaking so violently that its body almost blurred.

     When LeBlanc came to a halt, aiming his gun at it, the creature raised its head. Either naturally or from centuries of desiccation, it was a skeletal thing, with a bare grin of teeth and eye sockets so deeply sunken and shadowed that LeBlanc couldn’t tell if there were orbs within them. Had the yellow mineral pigment covering its emaciated body helped to preserve it in some way?

     LeBlanc didn’t wait to find out whether the being could still rise up and attack him. Just as the creature opened its mouth in a wheezing hiss, he shot it once through the forehead. The wall behind it and Raloom’s right cheek were splattered with a more copious amount of that foul-smelling black sludge. The cleric’s two hands spread open, and from one of them rolled the red and half-crushed remnants of Miter’s unworthy eyes.

     From behind him LeBlanc heard clapping footfalls, back the way he had come. Another of the trio of clerics. Did it think it could return to its platform, hide again in meditation as it had for so many, many years? Well, this was one infidel who was not willing to let that happen.

     LeBlanc dashed back in the direction of the room of Antse exhibits, and up ahead he caught a glimpse of a small, scrawny yellow figure as it passed from one room into another. LeBlanc raised his arm and fired off a chain of shots as he sprinted. He saw the thing veer off suddenly to the left, out of sight. When he caught up with the creature, they were both amongst the Antse displays again, Miter splayed on the floor.

     For lack of better shelter, the cleric had ducked behind the effigy’s showcase, and through the glass LeBlanc could see that its left arm had been torn off at the elbow from one of his projectiles. The being opened its skull-like mouth in a hiss, and from the way it tensed its body LeBlanc knew that it meant to throw itself out from behind the showcase and come at him. Before it could do so, LeBlanc let loose another flurry of shots, shooting the Antse right through the glass. The showcase collapsed in a great crash, the meat martyr falling with it, now punctured with bullets and glass shards in addition to its spikes and nails. When the last crystalline tinkle had quieted, the Antse cleric lay dead, buried under the pile of glass like the effigy.

     “Hold it! Freeze where you are!”