Ghosts of Punktown by Dark Regions Press

Author:Dark Regions Press
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: horror, punktown

Into My Arms

1

The Scowling Buddha, on Golgotha Street, had been their watering hole come the weekend. Now, without her, it was Swift’s watering hole come almost every night. To reach it, Swift had to take a shunt line – spitting sparks in its wake over the clotted streets of Punktown – from the biotech company for which he worked. That was the point of it; the bar was distant from the clubs and pubs that most of the other employees tended to favor. The two of them had not wanted their coworkers seeing them together, because she had been married to another man.

The harsh violet light in the Scowling Buddha was like the glow used to entice and fry summer insects. They had always sat at the same little table, unless it was already taken, in which case they would sit at a second favorite little table, but now Swift hung over the bar as if it were a beer-sticky bit of shipwreck flotsam. He had a mug of Knickerson beer (“knickers off,” he would toast her) in front of him, and he alternated between glowering fuzzily at the VT and the laughing couple who sat at their primary favorite table. The couple were too loud, too cozy, as if they had been hired to sit there and mock him. They even had a bottle of Merlot between them, and Merlot had always been Talane’s drink.

The bartender had begun an automatic advance through the VT’s endless channels, but had been called away and forgotten, or else he simply liked the effect of the channels changing, the flash and flutter of light, the succession of faces like people remembered in one’s dying moments, the snatches of music and chopped off splinters of dialogue. Swift heard a mere second’s worth of the theme song from a children’s show called Wunderdumpling, but he knew the song well enough to recognize it, and it was like a cattle prod to his sternum.

They had watched Wunderdumpling in bed on a couple of occasions – his bed, in his flat, never her place because she didn’t live alone as he did – and with her long bareness pressed down the length of his side, Talane would jauntily sing the theme song, but change the words to say, “My name is Wunderdumpling, I love to go a-humping...”

That one-second blip felt like a signal to him, a single word spoken at a séance, cryptic but in a familiar voice. It made him feel that he was immersed in memory, as if he were a tiny bug drowned at the bottom of his own glass.

A tiny mechanical bug, he mused. Like the bugs they manufactured at their workplace.

An eruption of laughter made him crank his eyes, hard as billiard balls with the pain of his headache, toward the corner. Two large young men – like Swift, ancestors of the Earth colonists who had established Punktown here on the world Oasis – were having a boozily good time pitching darts.

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