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 G.o.d!

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 b.u.mped 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 gla.s.s.

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 s.h.i.t!" 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 pa.s.senger 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 f.u.c.king 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 gla.s.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 gla.s.s and slowly removed her clothing, then, as requested, began to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. 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 s.e.m.e.n thumping softly on the carpet as he stared into the gla.s.s.

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 pa.s.senger 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s and two kids were f.u.c.king 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. 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 p.o.r.n holographs to amuse himself with.

Sometime after eleven, when the bus was empty but for an old drunken lady snoring in the second row, it squealed as it came to a stop at the rain pavilion by Rumford Park. A single figure waited there, a young girl in jeans and a Kurt Cobain T-shirt. She couldn't be any older than twelve, standing there with scraggly blond hair and sleepless blue eyes.

Stan felt himself tense. They never did catch that other Veer... He turned to stare as she climbed up into the entry booth and fed coins into the register box. The weapon scan, in one of its finicky moods, beeped halfheartedly and Stan looked quickly to a screen in his booth. Did the screen show a small pistol tucked in her pants? The image flickered and then the "clear" message showed. The scan system did not seem terribly concerned, for it admitted the kid into the seating area.

The girl slipped into the front seat, just behind Stan, and gazed out the window. Stan considered hopping out and running off down the street, but instead, acting on the numb automated impulse that carried so many workers through their days, he put the bus in gear and drove on.

The lights in back flickered and the air conditioner let out a groan, sputtering its musty air. Pa.s.sing neon painted the walls red, then purple, blue. A police craft flew by, lights twitching, siren loud, then fading. Stan kept looking in the mirror at the girl but she was gazing out the window, sniffling. He wished that old lady would wake up and get the h.e.l.l off the bus.

When at last the girl faced forward, Stan saw that her eyes were red from crying and there were tears on her cheeks. Relief sighed through him. Veers did not cry...the kid was for real. She saw that he was looking and rapped at the plexi-door.

"Hey, mister, does this bus go to Folger Street?"

"Yes," Stan said. Folger Street! Why would a little girl want to go there?

"Thanks." The girl sat back and adjusted the top of her jeans.

"Hey, kid," Stan called through the plexi, "do your parents know where you are?"

"No parents."

"Sorry. Guardian? Somebody?"

"My father was a rapist, my mother's dead."

"Geesh. Do you live around Folger Street?"

The girl was scowling now. "Yeah, yeah, I live there, okay?"

Stan did not try talking to her after that. He could not handle anger from a female, regardless of her age.

The bus rumbled along, hissing through puddles, smearing through the lights. Dark buildings towered on either side and the drunken lady coughed herself awake. She stood up as if instinctually aware that she was nearing her departure point.

There was a small bench in a waiting port at the southern end of Folger. No takers, Stan was pleased to note. The bus hissed, stopped. The girl hopped up from her seat and thumped down the steps to the street, the old lady shuffling behind.

The bus moved away quickly and turned sharply at the nearest right, then parked. Stan climbed out and peered around the edge of a building. The girl was moving toward a structure of glossy black plastic, which, as garish red neon announced, was called The Poison Apple. Stan had heard of the place; a strip joint where the dancers were dead.

Reaching to remove something from under her shirt, the girl then reached up for the door k.n.o.b. Stan could move pretty quietly in his sneakers and the pulsing from the building helped to m.u.f.fle his approach. He swooped and grabbed the girl from behind, restraining her with a move his mother had taught him. The girl's small black revolver clattered to the ground.

"Let me go! Let me go! I'll scream!"

"Don't scream, it's me, the guy from the bus."

"I'll scream, mister, let go of me!"

"No, no, screaming is bad, talking is good. I just want to talk."

The girl kicked and struggled as he dragged her out of the red light and around the corner. She bit his wrist; human teeth only, thank G.o.d. Still, it hurt.

"s.h.i.t!"

He got her into the driver's booth of the bus and sat her down. Realizing he had been holding onto a female made Stan shudder and he backed up a step.

"Look, kid, I just want to talk for a few minutes, okay?"

"Talk about what? You made me drop my gun. I need that gun."

"What do you need a gun for?"

"Protection. This is Punktown; a gun is a girl's best friend."

"So what was that all about, back there? Why were you going into a place like that with a gun in your hand?"

The girl's eyes filled up. "Because my mother is in there."

"But you said your mother was-"

Stan understood. He remembered that the girl had said her mother was dead. The dancers at The Poison Apple were all animated corpses.

"Oh, I'm sorry. You were going to get your mother back..."

The girl folded over her own lap and sobbed. Stan wanted to reach out to comfort her but could not. After a minute the girl was able to talk, more or less.

"Last week my mom was up all night with some guy taking snap-dragons and drinking vodka. She OD'd. In the morning the man was gone and I found her on the bed. I called my aunt's house; she lives down the street. My uncle showed up; he made me wait in the car while he called the man from the funeral parlor. Then he showed up and they carried her out to the hea.r.s.e.

"They never called the police or anything, they just put her in the hea.r.s.e and the undertaker drove her away. But they didn't bury her, see? They must've had some kind of plan to sell her to that club, because I was at the wake and she was not in the coffin."

"The coffin was closed at the wake?"

"Yes."

"Did you look inside?"

"No, but I pushed it and it felt too light. I know she wasn't in it. My uncle goes to The Poison Apple. He's friends with those people."

Stan looked at his reflection, pale and ghastly in the window and hissed, "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

"My poor mother should be resting in the ground, not twitching around on a stage for a bunch of drooling losers. That's my mother in there!"

"Sick b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," Stan growled.

The girl stood up suddenly, as if she were going to walk right through Stan.

"Can I go now? I want my gun."

Riding up in the elevator to his mother's apartment, Stan could hear a soft tribal pulse of music coming from tiny implants in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the pretty woman standing beside him. What's next, he wondered? His expensively dressed co-rider got off on the twenty-third floor and he continued on to the thirtieth.

Stan's sumo-sized mother was bald, naked, oiled, doing slow karate katas in the mirror of her workout room when he arrived. She called over her shoulder, "Hi, hon. There's tea in the kitchen."

"No thanks," Stan said.

"Have some!"

"Right."

The parents had divorced when Stan was ten. His mother had pursued her dreams by having herself surgically altered so that she was the size of a sumo wrestler. A transparent half-dome in her belly looked upon a chamber of luminous green fluid where two squirrel-sized fetuses were perpetually locked in a wrestling embrace.

Stan came back in. His mother moved gracefully for one her size, her eyes on the mirror, never looking at her son.

"So what is it, hon?"

"Well, I'm sort of short on cash, Mom, and my rent is due..."