Punktown: Shades of Grey (10 page)

But not an angry song.
A love song.

««—»»

“Will you be mine and mine alone,” Josh recited, lying in his bed while he watched Aundrea dress. She had had to remove her wings to replace her bra and T-shirt. “Or when the sun finds me again, will I find you’ve already flown?” He held out his hand to her and after she sealed her slacks she took hold of it and squeezed, rubbing her thumb across the top of it.

But she gave him a sympathetic look that to Josh felt almost pitying and said, “I can’t promise you my heart when my mind is undecided and my soul is divided and I feel so torn apart.”

Josh propped himself up on one elbow. He was too lacking in confidence to debate with her as aggressively as he wanted—perhaps he would wait to express his fullest feelings in a letter—but he had to say something. He was feeling more and more earnest about his emotions by the moment. He was truly and deeply falling in love, he believed. And he certainly didn’t want this to be the last time he had her in his bed. “How long can a person be torn between two lovers when one plus two is three?” he quoted Rickee Ortiz meekly, but with a repressed desperation.

Aundrea sighed, turned slightly away from him to slip her wings back on. Josh noticed that some flecks of purple glitter and one sequin had dropped off and scattered across his floor. She said, “Please don’t pressure me, love, to follow the path you choose; if I surrender to your dreams or you give in to mine, both of us will lose.”

Josh wanted to sigh, too, but he dared not. He lowered himself to his back again and gazed up at his ceiling…but he felt Aundrea’s eyes on him and became
self conscious
about his nakedness. Keeping his eyes off her, ashamed and hurt and a little angry, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and rose so as to dress.

“Let’s go grab a burger,” Aundrea blurted out abruptly and jovially, singing the jingle for the BurgerZone VT ads, “A Fishsand and some fries! An extra-large bag of dilkies and a choc-o-late surprise!” She darted over to him and pounced on his bare back,
piggy-back
style. He tried to grab onto her legs to hold her up but they both toppled to the bed, Aundrea laughing loudly and a smile coming even to Josh’s lips.

He must keep on waiting, he thought. Waiting and hoping to be the one who won her…

««—»»

The dashboard monitor showed Karlos a static-shot, flickering street map, yet he was grateful that his onboard computer system was still functioning at all. He himself had never been to Josh’s condominium before, but when he’d asked his navigation system to set the course it had done so, though his hovercar’s autopilot mode was not up to the task by itself. He followed the directions while playing actual, audible music over his car’s entertainment system, rather than piping it straight to his brain chip.

He had found a song that suited his mood, his feelings. Normally he wouldn’t have listened to Del Kahn, who was now in his early forties though still quite popular with those who had grown up with him, but he’d half-remembered a song he’d heard his father play, and he was listening to it now for the third time in a row.

Kahn sang the song in a subdued, deep voice. The barren instrumentation consisted of little more than a beat like a melancholy stroll, and almost church-like organ music that several times in the song lifted with a kind of false hope before falling short of its pinnacle and returning to a morose undercurrent. The song was called
Green Bird
.

“Your pet bird was small and green

And when he died, we walked on down

To a graveyard, large and gray

On the furthest edge of town.

We walked and walked, sad and slow

Til we found a name that fit

A gravestone for a man named ‘Green’

We felt that was appropriate.

I watched as you knelt and dug

A little hole, to make his bed

I thought
,
I hope I’m that loved

When it’s my turn to be dead.

By the winter, you had gone

Something happened, something died

I wondered what I could have done

To make you want to leave my side.

I walk this graveyard path alone

Looking for a name that fits

For a man who’s a lost fool

For a man who’s broke to bits.

I find a gravestone, carved with ‘Green’

I kneel and scoop some dirt in hand

Let it trickle to the ground

Our love is buried where I stand.”

As the organ music trailed off, Karlos swiped a tear from his cheek. He didn’t know exactly what part of the song he might want to quote to Aundrea to express his pain…perhaps he wanted to recite it to her in its entirety.

He played it again from the beginning, memorizing the words.

««—»»

Josh’s hovercar rested in the driveway of his parents’ condominium in Woods Court on the outskirts of Punktown, where the cosmetic and widely spaced trees that lined the micro-neighborhood’s streets hardly lived up to the moniker. Aundrea was poised at the passenger’s door, her hand on its latch, waiting for Josh to enter his vehicle and unlock her side. As she stood waiting, she saw a reflection in the window of a figure moving up behind her and turned toward it sharply, letting go of the door.

“Please hear my words, they’re the only gift I bring,” Karlos told her, spreading his hands out from his sides, his eyes pained, “the message of my meaning is in the rhymes I sing.”

“Dung, crap and shit!” Aundrea cried out, as Gala Dali did at the start of her song
Flush You
. It was a currently popular expression of surprise or dismay, or both.

Josh looked up across the bonnet of his car and saw his rival there. It was as though a lightning bolt pierced him through the crown, pinning him to the
street
as his every nerve was flooded with its charge. He knew Karlos’s temper. Even though he’d known he was taking this risk all along, he hadn’t faced the possibility head on…had hoped Aundrea would split from Karlos before such a confrontation could occur. His first impulse was to run back to his condo’s door, but if Karlos had a gun he could pick him off easily. And hadn’t Karlos asked him not long ago for the number of the black market dealer he had bought some of his more exotic swords from? That dealer, whom he never would have dealt with himself had he known that he was one of those scary Coleopteroids, no doubt had plenty of frightening firearms to sell. And he remembered it was a gun that Karlos had expressed interest in buying…

He ducked lower behind his car and finished unlocking its door, while Aundrea kept Karlos occupied. He could hear her shouting again as she backed away from her approaching boyfriend.

“Stop stalking me, fucker, I’ll call the force down here,” she yelled, scrambling backward around the tail of the hovercar, to where Josh was. Josh would protect her from whatever her volcanic boyfriend might do. “You aren’t some mighty hunter to hunt your little deer!”

Karlos was upset that Aundrea would quote such a song at him; Japan Black had written it about her ex-husband, who despite a restraining order had followed her around on tour, menacingly obsessed with her. He had ultimately raped her and then killed both her and himself in her hotel room. The song was
Stalker
.

Following her around the end of the car, still holding out his arms helplessly, Karlos despaired. This hardly seemed the best way to quote the entire Del Kahn song to her. He needed her to be receptive, to sit with him and listen to what he had to say, to consider his feelings deeply. The ugliness of the scene put him at a loss. Maybe he should have abandoned his attempt to surprise her in the act altogether, when he’d decided not to buy the gun. He could have let her know later that he knew all about her and Josh. But he had so wanted to demonstrate to both of them, in person and simultaneously, that he was aware of their deceit.

“Please hear my words,” he repeated, feebly.

Aundrea’s progress was halted when she bumped into Josh, who had dipped inside his car and then emerged again.

Karlos faced both of them now. His anguish at gazing into Aundrea’s face was replaced with hatred for his supposed friend. He stopped advancing, immobilized by the knot of emotions.

Josh pushed Aundrea to one side, out of his way, and from behind the purple wings strapped to her back appeared a Tikkihotto dagger with a long blade nearly as slim as a spike. He rushed forward to meet Karlos. They briefly thudded together.

The skewer went deep, up under his ribs. Karlos gave a little grunt and took a few steps back, looking down at his chest. The handle of the knife, bound in strips of black leather, protruded from him surreally. The entire length of the blade was neatly hidden inside him.

Josh had been too terrified, too sickened to draw the knife out and strike a second blow. He scurried backward and this time collided with Aundrea, almost knocking them both down. Aundrea was screaming. She grabbed onto his shoulders and dug her fingers in as if she meant to tear the flesh from the bones beneath.

Together, they watched Karlos stagger against the car, grabbing onto it to keep from falling. He gave a little cough and blood bubbled over his lip. His jaw slackened and a wave of it flowed over his chin.

He wove drunkenly, directed his dazed eyes toward his friends again.

Words gushed like blood through his mind. Lyrics of a dozen songs
overlapped,
distorted, tripped over each other in an effort to rise with biting lucidity from his reddened lips. Rhymes to communicate his outrage, his terror, his agony, the realization that his life was ending.
Something that would crush them forever under its emotion.
Shame them. Curse them. Words they would play back again and again in self-punishment.

But as his hands slipped off the car and he crumpled, he gave only a half-choked cry that was thoroughly incoherent. Inarticulate. It would have to do.

Aundrea continued her keening wail. Josh began to emit a series of whimpers. Despite this, for one moment of terrible clarity, they all knew exactly what the other was expressing, as if for the very first time.

— | — | —

PERFECTLY BEASTLY

Yu heard Peck screaming above him on the fifth floor.
          
“Damn it, Russet, shoot that thing on the stairs and get up there to him!”

Over his headset, Yu heard his partner reply, “I don’t know if it’s the Ophluu or one of his animals…”

“To hell with the animals! Listen to him! Go!”