Ghosts of Punktown (29 page)

     “This is all the hole I need,” said the boy holding the long-haired head.

    
No fuck holes?
Huck didn’t want to distract himself by pondering that statement just now.

     “Do you know what your friend did today, amigo?” Renaldo asked, his grin twitching at the corners as if its moorings might give way. “She walked into our camp here and tore the faces off two of my friends. I had to shoot them myself to put them out of their misery. Yeah…I buried two of my friends right here in the park today, because of
your
friend.”

     “I’m sure her actions were totally unprovoked.”

     “They were!” insisted a mutant with the fang-filled face of a piranha, moving up beside Renaldo. “We didn’t do anything to that bitch – she just came up to us and starting tearing us apart! If I hadn’t emptied two mags in her she would’ve got me, next!”

     “Seems like your friend might have blown a circuit or two,” Renaldo said.

     “I don’t know anything about all that. All I know is I’m taking her with me.”

     Renaldo shook his head in disbelief, just as he had when he’d talked with Huck that first time. “Crazy. Drunk or sober, you’re just as momfuck crazy, aren’t you?” He waved his arm toward the corpse, which looked more like something ready to be placed on a pan and slid into an oven. “Hey, take her – she’s yours.”

     Huck hadn’t taken his eyes off Renaldo’s since the gang’s chief had come forward. “Thanks,” he muttered, then turned and walked to the body, bent down and scooped it up in his left arm. Having done so, he turned toward the boy who carried the severed head, held out his hand for it.

     “I’m not finished, old man,” the boy protested. He wore his hair in a knotted French braid, and if there was a look Huck disliked more than a lightning bolt shaved on your skull it was a male with his hair knotted in a French braid.

     Renaldo walked over to the boy, wrapped his fist in the disembodied head’s long black hair and jerked it off his friend’s jutting penis. “Give me that.”

     “Ow!” the boy cried. “Teeth, man!”

     Now holding the dangling head, its features still obscured by tangled strands, Renaldo turned around to face Huck again. He advanced a few paces to where someone had jammed the tip of a machete into the carbonized ground, so that it stood upright like a poor man’s Excalibur. In fact, it was more a sword than a machete; Huck recognized it as a replica of a classical Tikkihotto weapon, with a cruel spike jutting out of the pommel.

     “Here she is, my crazy friend,” Renaldo said, and in extending the head, he brought its stump down on the spike of that Tikkihotto sword – impaling it like a trophy of war. “come and get it,” he said, gesturing magnanimously.

     Huck hesitated a moment, then walked toward the head, his eyes remaining on Renaldo, though peripherally he saw one dark eye glinting through the black curtain of hair, and the head’s slack little mouth. He reached out, lifted the head off the spike, and transferred it to his left hand, holding it by the hair while still cradling the body against his side with his left arm. His right hand remained free.

     “Thanks,” he said, and he turned his back to Renaldo slowly.

     “Hey,” the gang leader said, when Huck had taken a single step.

     Huck froze, but did not turn around.

     Renaldo came closer to him. His tone was more menacing than amicable now. “I told you – two of my friends are dead because of your little doll.”

     “And now she’s dead,” Huck replied. “I’d say you’re even.”

     “Even?” Renaldo took another step nearer. “I said
two
.”

     Huck smiled, his gaze for a moment drifting beyond the bushy tops of the stalks that enclosed the crude camp. From here, he could see the face of his apartment building, partly covered in dark vines. As if to himself, he answered, “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

     A half twist of his body and he had the handle of the Tikkihotto sword in his right hand. A little further in his twist and the point of the sword came free of the ground. A full twist, and the sword whooshed through the air, and through the front of Renaldo’s throat. The young man’s eyes bulged, and even his blood seemed stunned in surprise for a moment before it burst down the front of his chest and across his tattoo in a dark waterfall, splashing upon his feet. As Renaldo stumbled backwards, his head tipped far back and came half uncapped from his body. His open neck sucked and wheezed, and then he toppled. But Huck hadn’t waited to see any of this. He had already let go of the sword – and the remnants of the little robot’s body. Instead, both hands were slipping under the flaps of his open leather jacket.

     When his guns were out – the Thor .93 in his left hand and the Panzer in his right – he swiveled and fired first at two boys in particular, whose positions he had fixed in his head. Before the boy seated cross-legged could raise his shotgun, he took a double tap of metal projectiles from the Panzer, the combined effect splitting his head down to the nose in a gaping V. The Thor was loaded with gel capsules containing green plasma, the strongest variety, and one of these burst against the forehead of the boy with the assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He started to scream, but it degraded into a sputtering mewl as the top of his head liquefied and collapsed in on itself. Within moments, his entire head had dissolved, like a candle melting in time lapse photography. He was still on his feet for another moment more before finally crumpling to the ground, where the green-glowing blanket of hungry plasma continued to spread down his chest.

     Huck whirled with arms extended, firing both pistols simultaneously at the standing gang members first – they being in a better position to draw guns from their trousers, or rush him with their machetes. Spent shell casings spewed from the Panzer’s ejector port, and plasma gel caps raced from the muzzle of the Thor as fast as he could pull the semiautomatic’s trigger -- and there were sixty of the latter in a single magazine. Not that he didn’t have more magazines for both pistols in his pockets. Both handguns possessed an internal silencing feature, so they made no loud reports, but there was noise enough from the gang members as they shouted and bellowed in surprise and rage, and wailed and shrieked as they were hit and died.

     The others hadn’t been as fixed in his mind’s sights as had the boys with the shotgun and assault rifle, so he only wounded some of them – but in the case of the plasma, even a hit to the shoulder or leg would prove fatal soon enough as it rapidly advanced like luminous green lava. One of the women lay on her back shrilling and staring down at her own body, or where her own body had once been – it was completely gone below the hips.

     Three bullets struck Huck in the back. His leather jacket was torn, but its gel lining absorbed the impacts so that it only felt like someone had slapped him several times with an open hand. Huck spun, fired three quick shots of his own. It was the boy who had been violating the android’s decapitated head. One bullet smashed through his front teeth and came out the back of his neck, sending chunks of vertebrae scattering like a handful of bloody dice. Another bullet, also passing through his mouth, even flicked the tail of his knotted French braid. This caused Huck to laugh wildly. He was still laughing when he snapped his head around to confront a boy who was racing at him with an upraised machete. The boy was only several feet away when Huck shot him in the eye with a gel cap, and then he stepped aside to avoid the boy as he went howling face-first into the ground. The boy managed to get to his knees and bring his hands up to catch the hot, drooling gunk that had been his face, but it only caused his hands to swiftly start dissolving, too. Huck kicked him out of his way, as he continued pivoting and triggering both pistols.

     A boy making a dash for the encircling weeds took one bullet from the Panzer – Huck wasn’t even sure where it hit him, maybe in the spine or through the heart from behind – and
instantly
plunged onto his belly. He couldn’t be faking death to avoid further injury…not the way his face impacted with the ground. Huck had seen men punched full of holes take a long time to die, had seen men survive even serious head wounds, while others like this kid died before they hit the ground. Died like a light switch had been thrown. It had partly to do with a killer’s skill, but much more to do with the vagaries of bodies and bullets. It was one of the elements of the unexpected that had kept this game intriguing for so long.

     A number of the gang members made it successfully into the towering weeds, some wounded and a lucky few unscathed, but others were appearing
from
the weeds, having been drawn by the sounds of combat. Huck was not surprised, had been expecting this – he had counted fifteen youths in the clearing, but on his last visit to the park had seen more like twice that number. Some of them may have gone home for the night, if they had homes outside the park, but Huck suspected this was not their only camp within the Jungle’s borders.

     He shot one kid in the stomach just as he parted the stalks to enter the clearing, and when the boy dropped screaming Huck noted an interesting thing. The boy was writhing and babbling in Spanish from the agony in his guts, but not only that -- he was also shielding his face from sap that poured from some of the stalks, which had been broken by Huck’s bullets. Again, how long it took to break down the body of a submerged insect he couldn’t say, but the plant’s digestive juice had an effect like hydrochloric acid on human skin. Huck began to laugh again. What kind of idiots made their shelter in the middle of a field of plants that bled acid? If it weren’t for their numbers, it wouldn’t be sporting killing them at all. Huck stepped closer to the boy, and instead of shooting him fired the Panzer into the stalks clustered around him. More digestive fluid spilled and spattered, and the kid’s jabbering turned into incomprehensible howls.

     Stupid…he’d let his fun distract him…a hammer blow in the back of his right thigh, followed quickly by a deep hot pain, and he knew that a bullet had pierced him. He turned and crouched at the same time, but several more solid projectiles smacked him in the right side of the chest, and although his jacket’s gel padding protected him it was just enough of a push to send him onto his back. So not all these kids were totally dumb after all – one of them, at least, had been smart enough to hide in the tall weeds and shoot at him from there. As the shooter adjusted his aim to follow Huck to the ground, the hookah was hit and shattered.

     Huck had fallen beside the boy with the assault rifle, but now all that remained of him was a puddle of liquefied matter and two legs melted down to the calves. Huck dropped his Thor, reached to the assault rifle and dragged it to him. It was a nice model, actually, a coilgun using electromagnetic acceleration to fire ferromagnetic bullets at a high rate without the need for explosive cartridges. It had an automatic feature, and this was what Huck used as he opened fire toward the concealed shooter. Several more shots from the weeds kicked up dirt near Huck’s head, and he squinted and averted his face but depressed the coilgun’s trigger and strafed it back and forth blindly. The gun hummed, without recoil, fed magnetic bullets from a big box magazine. Huck cut down the weeds all around the shooter, and cut down the shooter, too.

     He rose to his feet, grimacing at the burning in his leg. Leveling the assault rifle from his hip, he once again turned in a circle -- firing around the perimeter of the clearing until the box magazine ran empty. He stopped just short of strafing the complete border of the clearing.

     Huck discarded the coilgun and retrieved the Thor, but he tucked this back in its holster and instead walked over to the boy who’d been sitting cross-legged, helping himself to the fallen shotgun. A primitive but classic pump model. He lifted it, racked the slide to feed in the first shell, then took a quick survey of the clearing.

     Ten dead bodies, and probably a few more in the weeds. Two kids were badly wounded and moaning. Huck walked to one, and then the other, and discharged the shotgun at their heads at point-blank range. Between killing the two of them he passed beside the shattered hookah and noticed the freed jellyfish pulsing in a pool of fluid. He experienced a marginal stirring of sympathy that he hadn’t felt for the wounded boys, and squished the creature under his foot to put it out of its suffering.