Punktown: Shades of Grey (9 page)

Theirs no way to say my love in this rhyme.”

He had ripped aside the shower curtain, thrust the note under Aundrea’s nose despite the water that fell upon those exposed words and her exposed body. He wanted to bellow at her immediately but his mind scrambled on a muddy hillside seeking handholds, as he sought the appropriate lyrics from the jukebox of his mind.

She snatched the note from him, tearing it in doing so and making it even wetter. Her mind, as well, staggered a moment under the pressure to search speedily through its gray file cabinets, but after several beats she screamed at him, “I love you, lover, but I love my friends, too; there are more people in my life than just you!”

“
Friends
!” Karlos roared before he could censor himself. But
who
was she kidding? For one thing, the lyric she quoted was misleading—it was from a song in which a girlfriend chides her boyfriend for trying to keep her away from her
girl
friends. This was no girlfriend…this was a guy. And that soggy scrap in her hand was very clearly not a friendly sentiment but a
love
letter.

“If you cheat on me, cow, you’ll be sorry for that!” Karlos channeled the rage of the ever-enraged Enigman. “I’m no fool to be walked on—I’ll cut off his hard-on as food for your cat!”

Aundrea squeezed the note into a small ball in her fist and shrieked, “We have to have trust cuz if we don’t then we’re through; but let me be me because I am not you!”

Trust
, his mind echoed now, as he testily passed a tray of food to the pilot of the helicar. He had to trust her that she would only be
friends
with Josh, not respond to his amorous feelings? Wasn’t that asking for more than was reasonable? That little bastard…he had thought Josh was one of his friends. She shouldn’t continue to talk to him. It would only encourage him. If only he could get her to quit PetZone…but he feared that if he pushed her too much he’d push her away entirely. But
Josh
! Josh was an overgrown kid…always quoting some stupid humorous song out of the blue just to sound outlandish or goofy. He was nineteen! Josh. Lusting after his girlfriend all this time. And she had kept his note, hidden it away.

Karlos searched his home music files, roughly tapping his tattooed control keys. He found the track he wanted—
Wanker
, also by Mystery Worm—and sang along to it in a sepulchral German accent inside the BurgerZone drive-through booth.

“He’s nothing but a waaaan-ker

He only wants to spaaaank her

Warm his worm inside her head

I live to make that wanker dead…”

««—»»

Josh now had himself believing his own poetic avowals of love, but truth be known (if only to himself), he hadn’t experienced any feeling stronger than friendship for Aundrea until she had expressed her own interest in him. What he had hoped for since becoming aware of her interest, and what his poetic lines had helped to achieve, was this: Aundrea’s pale skin bared and warm against his. It had been over a year since Melanie but at last he was sheathed again inside female flesh.

Aundrea was on hands and knees, and he was behind her, hands gripping her smooth, full ass cheeks like the sim-actors did in the porn vids he watched on the net. Her long purple hair hung down in her face, and at his request she wore only her fake purple cherub wings. As he pumped into her he recited, “On purple wings…uh…you take me high…oh God…soaring free across the…sky…uh…”

“Deeper, deeper,” Aundrea gasped, quoting Chandra Shankar, “I want to feel you fuck me in my heart!” The song was called
Fuck Me in the Heart
.

His parents were away for the day. Aundrea and Josh were in his bedroom; posters of music stars and naked women and naked music stars covered the walls. Exotic swords and knives were displayed in wall-mounted cases and cabinets in those spots not plastered with posters…each shining blade a mirror of Josh’s hard, busy phallus. On his music system played some steamy tracks by Maurice M. D. Aundrea’s clothes were carelessly flung into a chair, half-covering her pocketbook.

And in her pocketbook was a small remote transmitter that Karlos had slipped in there this morning when she’d been taking a shower.

««—»»

In his apartment, Karlos listened to the transmissions via the chip in his head that never stopped playing something of some kind, even when he slept at night. Right now he was hearing Maurice M. D., but also snatches of 5Guyz and Chandra Shankar. But it was like karaoke, because those weren’t the voices of 5Guyz or Chandra. Even when dancing, 5Guyz and Chandra never sounded that breathless.

Aundrea had indicated to him this morning, by sullenly passing him a
note, that
she was going to a movie today with Sissy. He hadn’t bought her story. He hadn’t bothered checking with Sissy, though—he knew she would have been instructed to cover for Aundrea.

The remote transmitter hadn’t cost him much. Though his paycheck was meager, less than hers, he still had enough money saved up for another purchase, and he set out to make it with Mystery Worm and Enigman alternating in his skull.

««—»»

In Enigman’s song
Whorekiller
, the woman-hating singer reached new levels of fury as he related an allegedly true account of his murder of an unfaithful ex-girlfriend he wouldn’t name. Karlos listened to this song now as he drove in his beleaguered hovercar (which occasionally dipped so low that its belly scraped the road). He didn’t know now whether the song echoed his rage, or if he was letting Enigman decide his course of action for him.

Either way, the words in his head were like a possessing demon, urging him to slake his thirst for revenge. He had always had music in his head, even before the chip: remembering songs, even rousing movie soundtracks, running it all through his mind in school, at work. But now it filled his brain like a balloon fit to burst. Filled it with all the rage and pain of every jilted, cheated lover in every sad and lonely song. It was like all those millions of songs played simultaneously, in one howling cacophony.

Josh himself was very much into weapons, had a collection of knives and swords including an expensive Ramon long sword his parents had bought him as a graduation present. He had given Karlos the number of a black market dealer a long time ago, when Karlos had considered buying a gun just because this was Punktown. Today, he had dug that number out of his computer files. Called it. Been given an address…

The dealer’s home was a parasitic structure built on the flat roof of a larger tenement building, with something of the appearance of a wasp’s nest. Near the door to the stairs when Karlos emerged onto the roof was a dead youth, sprawled naked in the sizzling summer heat. He’d been a Cokehead, quite obviously; scrawnier than a skeleton, eyes bulging like cue balls in his (her?) sockets, and a thick metal tube jammed permanently into the rotted-out cavity that had once been his nose. With his distaste for drugs, Karlos felt no pity for the thing, only concern that there might be more of its dangerous kind about. He felt further justified for wanting to see this weapons dealer. It was a world of hunger, and hunger made for hurt.

The somewhat globular structure had no windows, and after he’d circled it, he found no doors. Just creases and wrinkles in the rough gray skin, but Karlos stepped back sharply when one of the creases stretched into an opening and the bony, segmented black leg of a giant insect pushed its way out like something freeing itself from a cocoon. The something was a Coleopteroid…essentially, a beetle that stood on two hind legs and thus came up to Karlos’s shoulder. Of its six, tendril-like upper limbs, two had been amputated and replaced with more anthropomorphic mechanical arms better suited for a humanoid-oriented colony. Karlos had never seen one before, but he knew the Bedbugs came here from another dimension, and that they earnestly worshiped the dark gods that Mystery Worm only sang about.

“Are you Karlos?” asked the creature, its voice translated through a device that seemed surgically affixed to its chest. Or thorax. Its lidless, unmoving eyes gleamed blue-black in the molten sunlight. When he answered with a nod, it gestured for him to follow it back inside the nest. It courteously let him slip inside first, holding one lip of the entrance aside for him.

Within it was dark and even hotter than outside, with thick papery walls having been formed to subdivide the interior into several chambers. The small structure conjured in Karlos’s mind the image of a titan heart, extracted and left atop this building to wither and mummify, all its blood turned to dust, leaving only the invading organism which had killed it and continued to dwell inside.

There was a table near the door-slit, and the beetle flicked on a lamp with a dim violet glow. From one of the other rooms it brought a box, which it then rested on the table. When the lid was opened, the box revealed several rows of handguns cushioned like jewelry in recessed foam.

“Looking for anything in particular, Karlos?” the creature’s too-human, too-pleasant voice asked.

He only shrugged, but his eyes had latched onto one of the pistols immediately. It was a large-framed snub-nosed revolver, an archaic but ominous device, glossy black ceramic and looking like something that had been amputated from the Coleopteroid’s body as well. He lifted it out of the foam hollow, bounced its
light weight
but sinister form in his hand. He turned to point it at the purple-glowing lamp, then bent close to the light to read the words inscribed in the metal. It was, as he’d thought, a Decimator .300—close to the more powerful Decimator .340 with its phallic eight-inch barrel, with which Enigman claimed to have murdered his ex-girlfriend.

Though currently another artist played in his head, Karlos’s brain played back a line from Engiman recorded indelibly in his memory:

“Had her in my sights, and she cowered in fright; put her arms around her head, like that would stop my lead; started begging not to kill her, while I aimed my Decimator; like a target on her heart, when I blew her chest apart…”

“A good weapon with the right ammo,” his host assured him, clicking a tendril arm’s chitinous claw against the truncated barrel. “Not accurate, of course, with the chopped barrel, but with plasma rounds or even solid stuff, very devastating at close quarters. There’s a body outside…just an addict…would you like to take the gun outside and try it out?”

Karlos lifted a sluggish head, the beetle’s translated words finding their way very slowly through the two songs running simultaneously in his skull.

Thinking that Karlos simply hadn’t heard him, the extradimensional repeated, “There’s a corpse outside…on the roof…would you like to test the gun on him, using various types of ammo?”

Karlos stared mutely at the beetle several moments more. And then he shook his head, looked down at the hollow in the box of guns, and replaced the snub-nosed revolver.

That dead thing out there might have been a woman for all he could tell. The hair that hadn’t already fallen out was straggly, long. Its breasts might have withered away. But it might once have been pretty. It might once have been someone like Aundrea…

Somehow, through the clutter of throbbing noise, his brain was able to flash him one quick picture of Aundrea’s big, foolish grin when she was happy, when he’d made her laugh.

He pushed out of the nest with its smothering darkness, squinting in the harsh light, ignoring the beetle as it anxiously called after him, plucked at his shirt with a pincer.

As he walked back to the stairwell, he glanced down at the crumpled scarecrow body. Death sculpted in flesh, not music.
Bone, not words.
It was real, not an abstraction. It was ugly, and a waste, and it cut like a laser through the noise, the voices,
the
tumult. Karlos descended the stairs. He would confront her, yes.
But with words, and emotions, not bullets.

He tapped his arm, banished the music. For a few minutes his head fizzed with immense emptiness and all he heard was the hollow clanging of his own footfalls, as if it were the sound of him wandering lost in his own skull. He must think…must find just the right words, the perfect lyrics to express his pain to her as never before.