Butcher (21 page)

Dr. Norman was in charge of finding certain candi-dates whose histories, talents, and proclivities suited them to the work and who could be sacrificed without undue fuss. He had told underlings, “As distasteful as the program was, it was necessary for our country's prosecution of the war effort."

Enter Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski: four hundred and sixty to five hundred pounds, six feet seven inches to six feet nine inches, depending on which dossier you believed. Born in 1950, 1951, or 1952. An abused and tortured child who'd lived and evolved into the strangest, most monstrous killer in American history; a heart eater and serial murderer of despicable vileness, who had an intelligence quotient so high it warped every curve. A man mountain of hatred who was presentient, who'd learned somehow to sense impending danger.

Norman termed him, “That rare form of human being, a physical precognate.” He thought Chaingang could sense danger before it occurred.

The awesome devourer of hearts had supposedly told his captors, under drug-and-hypnosis therapy, that he thought he'd probably taken “about four hundred and fifty to five hundred lives,” a human life for every pound of his weight.

Chaingang Bunkowski had fit the program's profile to a Tyrannosaurus T. Skilled assassin, stalker supreme, with a built-in survival system and network of defense mechanisms beyond peer, he was a man who hated
everybody.
He killed out of pure pleasure. These factors made him the ultimate hunter-killer unit.

Norman saw in Bunkowski his own link to immortality. His discovery and experiments would stand as a unique cornerstone to the work being done in his field of medicine. And when the technology had permitted it, he'd supervised the first brain implant of its type. Laser surgery had been performed successfully, and a sophisticated piece of microelectronics was inserted. It linked Daniel to the Omni DF MEGAplex Secure Transceiver Auto-lock locator Relay unit and movement detection monitor—OMEGASTAR.

But Chaingang would not be so easily controlled. He knew, now, that he would be all right. The leviathan closed its eyes, content and relaxed again, and slept restfully, gathering its great strength. This time the beast dreamt of a spider.

T
he golden orb was back. It had spent the summer in a web that was visible from the small hinged port that was sometimes left open to provide air for the windowless enclosure. A beam of light regularly found its way to the underside of the duct where the web had been spun, and in the evening this light attracted its share of bugs, so the golden orb could dine on found objects at its leisure. Two days ago the golden orb had vanished. It was either a sign of approaching winter, he reasoned, or the spider had fallen prey to something else. But now it had returned.

Her significant other had never been in evidence. Presumably he had been destroyed after the mating process, or had gone south for the season. Through the long days of summer she had managed to engineer a magnificent pouch nearly as large as her own body, an egg sac, so if she survived the coming months, by spring she would deliver.

A distant cousin,
Loxosceles recluses,
gave the occasional nasty lesion to inmates, who were routinely treated with cortisone IVs.

Daniel had a vested interest in mastering the identification of such insects, not only their appearance, but the symptoms of and treatment for the lesions they inflicted. This was golden orb intelligence if you lived in the land of killer spiders and queens who ate their men.

There might come a time when the ability to simulate a poisonous spider bite, or to inflict the semblance of such a wound, might give one the edge.

The scenario might go thus: coincidentally with Dr. Norman's absence on one of his frequent trips to D. C. orterra incognita, Dr. Hodge would be told by some lackey in the prison hospital that the occupant of cell 10 was desirous of communication. A heart-to-heart, as it were. (The spider would provide the hospital ticket.)

In Dr. Hodge's office, Daniel would dip into his tummy vault for the slingshot and water balloon game. One of the balloons would hold a sealed condom filled with Solution A. The balloon itself had a small quantity of Solution B. These, A and B, were inert until they were mixed. At that point...

The laboriously concocted dream of spider and balloon began to disintegrate, the bits and pieces dissolving into Chaingang's reality.

His only contacts were spiders, cockroaches, ants, mice, flies, Dr. Norman, Dr. Hodge, his feeders and inspectors, the D Seg violent-ward hacks, and Mousie
. There would be no trade this time. His hallucinated scenario, cooked up on a broken mental computer, had overlooked the fact that all incoming prison mail was inspected.

His powers were coming back, even as he rested. His flawless inner clock had repaired itself and was ticking again. The normally unflappable thermostat that regulated his temperature was back on the job, and he was ice cold. He snuggled down into the folds of the filthy bush tarp that encased him. The hunger that generally drove him was back with a vengeance, and would goad him awake soon, a raging and mad appetite that had a life of its own.

Chaingang's mighty mindscreen worked once again, and as it surveyed the ambient factors that affected or might chance to affect him, sensors filed sitreps to the computer terminal, as his brain examined shards of broken data through the healing neural system.

At the northernmost edge of the Mississippi alluvial plains, southeast Missouri's lowest point drops down in the shape of the devil's hoof, or, as the inhabitants prefer to analogize it, the heel of a boot. As vast ocean receded, glacial plains evolved into dense swamp, which grew large stands of timber. Much of this was cleared for farming as the Mississippi lowlands area became what is now known as the Bootheel.

The mindscreen imprinted lowlands, searched for trace and transfer cross matches, and printed the findings: “In the sandy fringe of rice paddies that borders the Annamese cordillera as it descends to the South China Sea, the lowlands shelter and feed the provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien.” It was odd, when one got down to it, one killing field was pretty much the same as another.

His hard black eye blinked open. A spider was crawling across him. He flicked it away.

Come into my webworld,

Said the orbster to the fly,

I'll fuck you apart,

And take your heart,

And watch you slowly die.

He thought of the very fly Dr. Norman, smiling hideously as, across a wet green rice field, he saw the ma ‘n’ pa bait shop.

He got up. Pain savaged him but he simply bit down and ignored it, concentrating on matters of consequence. He found the car, a Pontiac as filthy as he was, rather well hidden all things considered. He stowed the huge bush tarp and started to get in the car, but his sensors nudged him. Leave the vehicle for the moment, they told him. He hoisted a duffel heavier than two ordinary men could carry, and headed in the direction of food.

He could think of only one thing: Surely they must possess a microwave. He had a mental picture of himself stuffing microwavable ham-and-cheese-sandwich packages, one after another, dozen after dozen, into the microwave, cooking them for a few seconds, opening the little door, eating, spitting plastic. Consuming huge bags of chips, pork rinds, packaged crunchy-munchies of dubious vintage, shoving Slim Jim Beef Jerky sticks into his mouth, feeding them into his maw like edible pencils shoved into an automatic pencil sharpener. Gobbling, sucking, swilling down liters of cold brand X cola—he had to stop. He was salivating and blowing like a St. Bernard waiting for the Pavlovian timer to ping. He had to jerk his mind off the food before he choked on his own saliva.

He fed, instead, operational options and potential threats to his brain: the construction project, bright with blue Amoco insulation; the farmyard with its rusty red pump and part of a wagon wheel beside a fake well; For Sale—Wellman Realty on the front lawn of an obviously occupied dwelling; a private drive flanked by the halves of two black rubber truck tires; Garberg For Assessor, Reelect Joe D. Davis County Commissioner—old leftovers from a hickburg political campaign. A kid blew by him with Wilson Pickett blaring from the truck radio. Custom Welding, and the word that had caught his eye on the sign 4 Comers Gas
Eats
Bait Gun Shop.

This was not a town where men stared at one another, but even here they gawked at the apparition that quite suddenly materialized in their midst, a monster-sized thing that waddled in demanding food, paying for it with the dirtiest, funkiest pile of bills any of them had seen.

He resembled—what?—a cross between the Pillsbury doughboy on steroids and some mutation of Behemoth Wrestlemania that had gone terribly awry. Immense. Grotesquely ugly. A tower of hard, dirty, mean fat. Eyes that were like the heart of black marble, no dimension or soul. A killer's eyes in a baby's doughy face. Not a visage to inspire confidence.

Godzilla parted hillbillies and began snatching at racked foodstuffs, popping the plastic top and penetrating the foil seal of some Pringles with a finger the size and density of a steel cigar, then tapping out half an entire tube into a plate-sized mitt and consuming the whole thing in a single crunch, all but redlining on the ingestion of pure sodium.

They simply didn't know what to think. The monstrosity began tearing the wrappers off Mrs. Abner's egg salad and tuna melt sandwiches, not eating them but shoving them into the aperture in its face, sucking them down whole in nasty, wet glurps; opening a Dr Pepper on its teeth and chugging it; ripping open wax cartons of milk and orange and grape drink. They were experienced men, but this was beyond their experience. It eyed the guns, paid for the rampage of feeding, and waddled out the door in a noxious downdraft of sewer stench.

They were still discussing the apparition when, several minutes later, it reappeared, driving a battered, dirt-encrusted Pontiac the color of mud, lurching out into the parking lot and pumping unleaded into the car's gas tank. By the time he clomped back in to pay, they'd grown tired of speculating about him.

This was a place where hardworking men, or hardly working men in some instances, came to buy bait or ammo, swap guns or sea stories, drink a few brews, bitch or brag about crops and women, and they were not overly interested in their fellows. Chaingang would draw stares anywhere, but if there was a place he could halfway blend in, rather fortuitously he'd found it. The Gas Eats Bait shop had added its wares, as the sign outside showed, incrementally. Guns had found their way to this casual marketplace, and when the beast had calmed its hunger, slaked its thirst, and decided to chance tanking up the hot car as well, it was toward weaponry his attention was drawn.

The duffel was as much ordnance and firearms as anything else, but he never missed an opportunity to stock up on accessible tools when they were so easy to acquire off the books. There was a modest rack of shotguns and rifles for sale. He hated rifles and immediately dismissed them. A shotgun, properly reworked, could be a pleasantly effective up-close tool that was as disposable as such weapons could get. He passed over two expensive models for three used shotguns that could serve his needs: a Mossberg, a Remington, and a Winchester.

He asked to look at the Mossberg, and behind him a loud voice said, “That's a damn fine shotgun, son. That's my gun. I slayed me some damn birds with that sumbitch. If I hadn't got laid off at Ryker's I'd never sold it. Here I am doing $18,590, okay? This year Ryker's works me a hundred and seventeen hours more but they
pay
me $17,300. Are you
following
this shit? Can you believe this damn shit?” The man behind him had turned from the Goliath-size figure, no longer interested in what he believed, and was telling the other guys in the store the old complaint. A television played a soap opera loudly from a back room. Chaingang put the Mossberg down and examined the Remington's action. He didn't trust it at all. “I need $17,300 and a hundred and seventeen more hours like I need another crack in my ass, okay?” He was nearly as tall as Bunkowski, but trim and hard, sunburnt a deep rosewood color, white hair, with dark Elvis burns and Coors on his belt buckle. Everybody but Chaingang wore a cap with advertising on it.

The door crashed open and a young, wiseass-looking guy strode in, wearing metal-shod cowboy boots, slapping a long leather quirt against his leg. He looked like somebody spoiling for a fight.

“Gimme a pint a’ blackjack,” he snarled.

Two young men on horses were visible through the open front door. The three had ridden up and nobody inside except Bunkowski had heard them. He was examining the Winchester twelve gauge. The punk paid for his Jack Daniel's and stomped out, not bothering to close the door. Chaingang saw him leap onto the nearest horse and use the quirt on it, unnecessarily, as the trio rode off.

“Fucker killed two horses last year, I heard. Mean mutha friggin’ sumbitch. Anyway, Rykers is working me a hundred—"

“How much?” Chaingang asked in a deep basso rumble. The proprietor told him, and was rewarded with more filthy bills.

“I can always drive produce for Lamonica or the Wallace boys, but shit, they want you to go outside or run around them scales and you can't do that shit now and keep your friggin’ CDL."

“Give me a box of shells. Double 0."

This took the man aback. Nobody bought double 0. “I don't have an entire box. I got, oh, maybe ten or so.” He pawed through an open box of loose shells.

“I'll take what you have."

“You don't pay a damn speeding ticket they'll jerk your CDL now. Hell, I'd work for Lamonica but he's liable to tell you to go run outside the friggin’ scales, you know?"

Chaingang pocketed his change, and asked the proprietor in a quieter voice, “That kid on the horse? What's that boy's name?” His tone implying he'd known the fellow and forgotten his name.

“Jerry, you mean? The Rice boy?"

“Jerry Rice, sure. Does he still live in town?"

“Naw,” the man eyed him suspiciously. “He's never lived in town that I knowed of. He lives right down at the end of the gravel road where he's always lived.” The older man pointed.