Punktown: Shades of Grey (19 page)

The small girl was admitted into the passenger section and skipped down the aisle in her little summer dress, then plopped on the seat next to the pretty
red-head
, who looked up and smiled politely. Her cheeks looked round and soft when she smiled and Stan longed to touch them, softly, with his fingers, or to place a quiet kiss…

The bus jerked back into traffic and the air conditioning hissed. There were sirens somewhere and the shadow of a pollution sucker passed over the road as it floated overhead like a gray metal cloud.

Stan scrutinized some of the girls on the sidewalk as he sat at a light. An injectable fad known as Orb-it was appearing with greater frequency these days. A luminous substance with a life of several days would be shot into the desired body part (usually the breasts) and radiate out with varying degrees of intensity. Two young females, perhaps fourteen, walked in front of the bus, crossing Hudson. Both wore black leather pants and white T-shirts. One’s breasts glowed a soft mystical blue from under her top while the
other’s
were announced in neon red. The girls sauntered over to an older-looking Hispanic boy clad only in baggy shorts who lounged outside a music store. Something purple glowed from within his trunks.

“That’s all I need to get a girl,” Stan muttered to the sun-bleached windshield ghost that was his reflection, “a neon dick.”

He glanced at the rearview mirror, at the plump college student sitting there with a book in her lap, her neat perky hair cut with cute bangs. He liked to think that she too would frown upon such vulgar trends. He reached over to the dash and worked a small lever to guide one of the inconspicuous cameras mounted back in the passenger section. He zoomed in on the cover of the book she was reading:
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
. Now Stan beamed. If only she had seen.

The light turned green and the bus moved forward. It sped up significantly as it headed over the Sumner Bridge toward downtown. Sporty little business bastards wove in and out of traffic and—narrowly avoiding several collisions, as was par for the course—Stan moved over into the passing lane to compensate for the fact that he was behind schedule. His time-recorder would register when he made his stops and drivers’ paychecks were docked a munit for every time they made a stop later than scheduled. This, of course, made many of the pilots drive like madmen, risking their own lives as well as those of passengers and fellow drivers, for the sake of a few munits. While no enemy of money, Stan only drove fast where it was safe to do so.

Stan heard the first scream when he was midway across the bridge, with its great walls of gray metal, pressed to resemble stone. Eyes flicking to the rearview, he saw that the little blond girl had clamped her mouth onto the soft round cheek of the college student and was shaking her head like a dog with a toy.

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

It was only later, following his
dismissal, that
Stan would learn that two of the Veers had survived the deadly smuggling episode and had made their way into the general population. As clever as they were hungry, the creatures used powder to make their skin appear less glossy and employed special marker pens to draw fake teeth divisions onto
their
biting beaks. Who’d have known?

The Veer had half the college girl’s face off before Stan could even punch the stun button. There was an electric cough sound and a blue flash and everyone
except
the Veer collapsed limp.

“Shit!”

The Veer looked up at Stan and gave him a big, grateful, red smile and turned away from the unconscious college girl, who slumped over, her head banging against the window. Stan hit the stun button again and the passenger chamber lit up like a teenage girl’s breast, but still the Veer was unphased. It lunged at an old woman and latched onto her neck. Blood erupted onto the child-like face of the alien, beading its Goldilocks mane.

The bus was bearing down on a
compact which
was driving too slowly in the fast lane, the oblivious occupant busy on a portaphone. Stan tried to swerve into the slow lane, so as to pull over, but a
business woman
there held her ground, giving him the finger—no one was going to cut her off! Stan hit the police button: this would alert local authorities of an emergency and even tell them his exact location. Then he hit it again to indicate that an ambulance was needed.

Stan looked back in the mirror as the old woman’s detached head flew at him and thumped against the plexi-door, leaving a big red Rorschach. He remembered that one of the passengers had been carrying a legal pistol, as revealed by the weapons scan system. If he could pull over, maybe he could get back there and take it off the unconscious man…

The Veer was now standing on the lap of a bald fellow in (unfortunately) a white business suit. Having chewed off the man’s lips and nose, it now had the man’s gray beard tight in its mouth and was jerking his head around and Stan thought of a cat toying with a mouse before the kill.

Sirens—thank God!

Static came over the voice-com. “This is squad car M-Seven; we’re right behind you. What’s going on?”

Stan yelled into the dashboard, “There’s a Veer on board—it’s killing people! Do something—hurry! It looks like a little blond girl.”

“Can you pull the bus over and stop?”

“I’ll try.”

Snarling, Stan jerked the bus so that it bumped the side of that gesticulating
business woman
’s car. She made a stupid face and swerved off into the breakdown strip. Now Stan was able to maneuver into the slow lane, and from there, pull off the road. A police hovercar came up fast from behind and stopped behind the bus. The Veer looked up and growled, then ran for one of the windows, diving through it with nightmarish grace. Two officers had sprung from their craft and were moving up on either side of the bus when the Veer blasted out in a nimbus of shattered glass.

The monster stopped and glared when it saw one of the helmeted policemen. Before it could turn, a slim beam of cold green fired from the enforcer’s pistol. The ray slipped into the Veer’s chest and it let out a shriek that shattered the remaining bus windows and even rattled the plexi-door. The second shot made it stumble back.

“Holy shit!” the cop said.

The third shot was the charm. The Veer’s pretty blue eyes rolled up and it fell back, dead.

Inside the bus, Stan grabbed his med-kit and rushed back into the passenger compartment, tripping over the old woman’s head. The stunned travelers were beginning to awaken. He stood trembling, staring at the wounded student, unable to touch her. He would never forget the look in her eyes when she reached up to feel where her cheek had been.

««—»»

“Sounds like you’re the fall guy, my boy,” Stan’s father remarked, drifting through the long tunnel-like jungle of his living quarters.

Stan hated this, coming to beg money, but what else could he do? His rent and frozen dinners had absorbed his meager savings, and he was still waiting to hear from Travis Transport about his job application.

The tunnel was filled with strange noises, clicks and mumbles, slurping and eerie feathery laughter, all emitted by the green and otherwise denizens of his father’s sound garden. There was even a parrot
plant which
would perform as one might suspect. Stan, pacing, brushed a trumpet-like protrusion and it blew him a perfumed whistle.

“Yeah, Dad, they fired me because I did what I was supposed to do. How was I to know that the fucking little monster could take the stun?”

Stan’s father closed his eyes. “Oh, please don’t use that language, and call me Mommy, won’t you, son?”

Stan’s portly father was wearing thigh-high black stockings, and a lacy black bra showed in the v of his green silk robe. He carried a martini glass as he floated amongst his treasured friends.

“Sorry,” Stan mumbled.

“So how much do you need, Stanley?”

“A couple hundred, for now? Like I said, I think I have a good chance of getting that Travis job…”

“Oh, you’ll get the job, son, I’m sure of that. You’re a master when it comes to vehicles. I remember you on your tricycle; dang, you could’ve done brain surgery with the thing!”

««—»»

It was drizzling out and Punktown was shades of gray and neon. Stan treated himself to dilkies and a burger at a greasy little place beside the wax museum. He was tired of eating frozen food in his lonely little flat overlooking the parking lot of a bowling alley. He even ordered a couple of beers.

Following the feast, Stan took the dangerous way home. Soft luminous breasts peered out of the murk like the ghost eyes of giant insects. The drizzle stank of perfume and shadowy women moved spider-like in shadowy doorways. Hands in his pockets, Stan approached one.

“I’m Stan,” Stan said.

“I’m Sweetie,” the girl said.

She had straight dark hair and shadow eyes and black lipstick.
Short black skirt, cleavage.
Stan liked her because her breasts were breast-colored and appeared to be real. He asked if she made house calls and she nodded.

He followed her up the stairs to his room, watching her thighs, hating her perfume, hating her, wanting her. Inside he kept it dark, gave her his only beer, reserved for a special occasion. He told her what he wanted and she smiled.

“That’s all?”

Stan nodded, looking down.

“Okay, Stan,” she said, “cash before flash…”

Stan handed the girl several bills, flinching when their fingers touched.

There was a tall upright mirror in the dark room. Sweetie stood in front of the glass and slowly removed her clothing, then, as requested, began to masturbate. She groaned; she knew men liked groaning. After some time Stan’s thin, pale reflection floated up behind hers and he stood stroking himself.

“Ready?” Sweetie whispered.

“Yeah, okay,”
Stan
breathed.

Sweetie reached out and ran the fingers of one hand over his reflection, focusing on his erection. She came, or pretended to, and then he went, his semen thumping softly on the carpet as he stared into the glass.

««—»»

It was summer and now he had the Travis Transport job. The bus was an ugly gray, like the streets where he drove it. The electrical system was not quite right in the bus; the
weapon scan
only worked part of the time and only half the lights in the passenger chamber were functional. The air conditioner made more noise than cool air and the emergency door at the rear had the unsettling habit of flying open if he went over fifty. The maintenance guys claimed that they’d get to it when they had time.

Stan’s first night out for Travis Transport, a mutant OD’d. It had mixed a combustible collection of chemicals into its mouth and blew half its teeth out. Some of them were stuck in the wall like shrapnel.

Even the bad neighborhoods were getting worse, Stan concluded. The bus smelled like vomit and seaweed cigarettes. Girls from the leather bar licked their pierced tongues against the plexi-door and winked mockingly. Gang boys and their Nubian princesses spray painted things like DIE PALE-FACE on the door and laughed at him. Maybe it was time to get a gun.

Friday nights were the worst. The bus was full of glowing breasts and two kids were fucking in the third row. Stan thought about looking for Sweetie again, but he couldn’t afford to treat himself.

The drugged and drunken stumbled onboard, zombie-like, and staggered to their seats. The weapon scan was on the blink again, coming and going. Too bad it could not detect drugs, too bad he didn’t have a super-stun feature to fry the bastards. Maybe bus driving was not the right career after all. Maybe he needed a healthy hobby to help rinse the job out of his head, something other than porn holographs to amuse
himself
with.