Punktown: Shades of Grey (28 page)

“I lost ma leg fightin’ for this goddamn province,” a gray-haired Choom was saying to the bartender. His face was a mess. The scars were indistinguishable from the wrinkles.

“An’ now all I got is a half-assed government check, once a month. After I pay the rent, I barely got ’nough to buy myself a goddamn beer.”

Murphy studied them with an emotionless mask.

“Yep.” The Choom wallowed in his drunken wisdom. “I lost my leg for my province, but the damn screwball part about it is, I’d do it again t’morrow. Not for the government’s sake, but just for somethin’ to do.”

Dreams,
concluded Murphy with stubborn military certainty. Dreams and nightmares ran together in that lurid green-lit chamber. His eyes drifted slowly across the far wall and focused on red digital numbers: 00:00.

“Let’s go.”

Kloud, hunched over an empty mug, snapped his spine back straight.

They rose simultaneously. Inebriated eyes followed them to the door. Murphy paused and turned.

“Five, c’mon, boy,” he said, voice casual and deep.

The black dog sprang to attention from its curled-up state.
 
It was tall and muscular, athletic. Its eyes had the same detachment as its master’s. The “kamikaze” followed the four veterans out into Punktown’s night; its left hind leg was jointed parkerized plastic, a crab’s leg.

««—»»

For lunch they went to Dennison’s small eastside shithole. The walls wore little more than cobwebs. A captured, bullet-teased Klu-Koza flag hung across an ugly plaster gap. Fuck Rock music twisted from a portable. Beers and sandwiches cluttered a card table.

“Hey, Murph, you gonna eat?” Dennison asked in his Outback Colony accent.

Murphy was lost in thought, gazing out the window with a beer at bayonet level. He studied the leaves as invisible specters lowered them to the ground.

“I love the fall,” he said pensively, softly. “It’s the only time when death is beautiful.”

“Peanut butter and jelly,” Kloud said, disheartened, peeking between two slabs of bread. “My life revolves around peanut butter and jelly.”

“Isn’t it strange how trees look more beautiful in death than they do in life?”
Murphy said, eyes glued.

“The trees aren’t dying, Captain,” Kloud said, tossing his sandwich down and replacing it with a beer. “Just the leaves.”

Murphy dismissed the correction
;
insignificant.

Dennison was paging through his scrapbook. It was full of newspaper and magazine articles.

“According to Joseph Marcelli, we don’t exist,” Dennison stated, pointing to an article in a monthly VFW publication entitled VET.

“Who’s Joseph Marcelli?” Kloud asked.

“He’s the top guy in the Veterans Administration.”

“Oh yeah? According to my wallet Joe Marcelli doesn’t exist. We didn’t get the short end of the stick—we didn’t get any of it.”

“We got it up the ass, that’s where we got the stick,” Dennison said. “He says here that since only four men survived the entire Klu-Koza war, that it would be a waste of time to push legislation that would give us a pension. No benefits. ’Course we could spend the rest of our lives and the rest of our paychecks in court trying to change that.”

“Not me,” Kloud said, sarcastically, “we fight for the government, not against it.”

“Nobody wants to remember Klu-Koza,” Dennison said. “We’re nothing but bad reminders.”

“Ghosts,” injected Murphy, eyes still lost in the silent rain of foliage.

“The fuckin’ asshole government’s spending millions to rebuild the planet we nearly got killed trying to destroy,” Dennison bitched in disbelief. “Imagine that. The mother pluggin’ ghouls got a nice big embassy right down on Central Street. Big bucks, man.”

“One day we’re warring ’em, the next we’re bein’ buddy-buddy. Doesn’t sit right in my head.”

“The Klu-Kozi have valuable resources to be exploited by the Choom and Earth governments,” noted Murphy.

“
We’re
bein’ exploited,”
Kloud
mumbled, beer shining in his mustache.

“Ditto, man,” Dennison said. “Ditto.”

Casper, peering over his sunglasses, nodded.

««—»»

Zevnor Rimbachus Jr. slid out from under the elevated hovercar, rubbing at his eye with a greasy paw.

“Fuckin’ slide shaft is caked with rot,” he proclaimed.

Wrenches hung like medals on the wall’s great chest. Dennison, Kloud, and Casper (Murphy’s satellites) stood in front of it. They looked to the Captain.

“Well, Murph, she’s your baby now.”

Rimbachus Jr. only analyzed the problems. Murphy’s gang did the real dirty work. The Choom walked out into the office area, wiping his hands on a rag.

Murphy gave a quick, nearly indistinguishable hand signal.

Dennison nodded with, “Yessir.” He chose a wrench and climbed under the sickly vehicle. Before taking his remaining crew out into garage C, Murphy gave his final orders. “We’ll be going to the Post for a few, after work.”

“Yessir,” came a voice from under the hovercar.

««—»»

The blue thrown off by the
small elevated
vid-screen mixed with the traditional green-filtered air to cast them all further into unreality. The Klu-Koza vets sat in their usual place and, as usual, dismissed the usual stares.
Stares of fear, stares of misunderstanding, stares of hate.
Stares.

Under his sheepskin coat, Murphy wore a vest of those short curved tusks, the type that Dennison wore about his neck. This amplified the stares.

“The Cardinal, in his war against starvation today…”

A smartly dressed Choom newswoman was giving a bland report.

Dennison watched intently, unconsciously drumming his right hand’s three-and-a-half fingers. Kloud was listening to old men’s old war stories. Murphy was contemplating his eighth beer, and no one could tell what Casper was up to behind those glasses.

“When we were invading Clanton,” one old sailor was saying, “our number two gun blew up. Charge defect, knocked the gunner’s head clean off. Never seen such a mess. I had to mop him up.”

“Shit, that’s piss, Bram,” retaliated another forgotten soldier. “A buddy of mine, Clem…Clem Druva, I think, yeah, Druva. He was crawlin’ under some barbwire when a grenade on his backpack got hooked. The pin came out but the grenade stayed on him. Blew him to bits.”

They looked down into sour yellow reflections.

“That’s nothing.”

They looked in awe at Kloud. These renegades never spoke to them.

“We used to use kamikaze dogs,” the young man with bloated sideburns said. “We’d strap a vest of bombs around their middle, then send ’em into an enemy camp, then hit a remote control and totally mow their rocks off. Well, once this guy was strappin’ this dog up with fifteen pounds of explosives. The dog was bitchy though and it jerked away from him. So the guy went after the dog and he dropped the remote control, right on its button.”

There was no emotion in Kloud’s words. “Blew up half our camp; took the nearest medical tent too. I was sittin’ a good distance away and it knocked me right out. I woke up with this nurse’s torso right in my lap.”

The old-timers looked away as if they’d only thought they’d heard something.

“Economic advisers gathered today to discuss the—”

Dennison blew cigarette smoke; it obscured the newswoman.

“So, Murphy, you want me to get that seaweed tomorrow or what?”

Murphy looked at Dennison with languid eyes. “It’s your money.”

“Okay, I’ll get it. We’ll get it after work, then go over to my place after and get toasted. What do ya say?”

“Sure, man.”

“The Prime Minister approved a two billion munit aid grant to King Syphos-Sans of Klu-Koza today,” the VT-woman said. “That makes a total of ten point six billion since the reconstruction began last—”

“Fucking shit.” Murphy’s eyes were beads of distaste.

“Fucking hell,” Dennison echoed. “Hey, Kloud, you hear that?”

“What?”

“The P.M. has given the grape-guts over ten billion to redo what we undid.”

“Oh, that’s real dandy.
Typical, typical.
Doesn’t sit too well with me, I’ll tell ya.”

“First they send us out to cut down the trees, next thing you know we’re planting new seeds.” Dennison was awed.

“Anything for the holy munit,” Murphy said, once again projecting his silky cool. His long dark hair framed a face without distinguishable opinion, the face of a ghost.

««—»»

The autumn breeze tempered the thickness of the city’s pollution-dense air. The trees in Desmond Park rustled like rattlers. They rained their transitional colors, mutated by the neons of shops across the street.

Murphy sat beneath a graffiti-carved oak, with his men sitting in his aura. Kloud was watching the nearest bench where a couple was partaking of some intense physical action. Exhibitionists and
voyeurs,
like his favorite: peanut butter and jelly.

Casper rolled ancient rock tunes in his head as he observed the nightlife through dark lens eyes. Neon shone on his high forehead and played across his bearded face of stone. His feet tapped.

“Where is he?”

Murphy looked back over his shoulder. Dennison mimicked the movement, adding a shrug.

“He said ten hundred.”

Murphy puffed up his face and blew out.

“He’ll be here,” Dennison assured him.

“Anybody feel like getting fucked t’night?” Kloud asked, looking to Murphy. “Captain?”

“Nah.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

Two dozen
bikies roared past the park’s outer rim…they drove off the road to swerve in and out of the trees. Murphy smirked with distaste. Smirking stone.

“Every night is Halloween in Punktown,” he said dully.

“Really,” replied Kloud.

A thin brown car came slinking out of the mouth-like gap between Phil’s Liquor and The Twist and Shout Torture Spa. The ratty vehicle drove halfway across the park and paused.

“That’s him,” Dennison said, standing abruptly and ramming his hands into the pockets of his brown coat. He started across the field-like park center.

“Cover him, Kloud,” Murphy said, not looking.

Kloud was off in a microsecond, casually ducking behind a tall leafless clyse tree.

“Hey, Jasp.”

“Dennison.”

Goods and cash traded hands.