by Rex Miller
Butcher
( Chaingang - 5 )
Rex Miller
Once again, Daniel "Chaingang" Bunkowski is on the loose. After a seemingly endless term is prison, he is hungrier then ever to get his teeth into some bloody violence. The opportunities for mayhem were pretty limited in the maximum-security prison where he was being held for so long. Now that he's out, his keeper, Dr. Norman, is anxious to put him to work. He has given Chaingang an important task: hunt down and destroy theone man who is more savage than himself. Doc Royal has been living quietly in rural Missouri, successfully hiding his secret youth as a death-loving nazi. However, his past is about to come and haunt his present, just when Chaingang arrives to distract him from his troubles...
Butcher
Rex Miller
Copyright ©1994 by Rex Miller
Other Works by Rex Miller
Butcher*
Savant*
Chaingang*
Iceman
Stone Shadow*
Slice
Profane Men: A Novel of Vietnam
Frenzy
Slob
*available in e-reads
"What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death."
—Otilia de Koster
1
Kansas City—1959
The Snake Man was drunk and slobbering mean, and the child feared what might be next, as the man who was his foster mother's current live-in companion hammered out the breathing slits in the Punishment Box. It was a metal trunk, just large enough to hold the eight-year-old child. The shirtless drunk, whose hairy upper torso and arms were writhing nests of serpentine tattoos, cursed and hammered. He'd made crude slits with a small cold chisel, and was in the process of pounding the razor-sharp steel edges of the openings more or less flat.
“I'll teach you to talk back to me,” the man ranted. The boy, cowering with his mongrel pup on the urine-soaked floor of the locked closet, tried to swallow back his abject terror. The sound of the metal trunk slamming shut was followed by heavy footsteps. The door opened. Blinding sunlight. A rough hand squeezed his arm, jerking him painfully forward as the little dog whined in fear. The Snake Man, which was how the child thought of the monster with his blue skin-map of jailhouse serpents, held the boy in steely claws.
“Danny gets scared in the dark,” the man mocked him in a harsh voice. “Little Danny cries for his mommy.” He shoved the frightened boy into the metal box. “Let's see how he likes this. A nice hot, dark Punishment Box.” The words made the child's skin crawl, as the lid slammed down on him. There was no air. He would die in the suffocatingly hot box. The metal seared his skin where it touched him.
The bright sunlight illuminated a crudely-made opening, and he put his face as close as he could to the lid of the box without actually touching it, supporting his little body so that he could breathe the foul air in and out, and he fought with what was left of his sanity to survive.
He had learned about the thing he had, which one day he would know was termed claustrophobia, while he'd been kept for hours in the pitch-black closet. To keep himself alive he had first learned to communicate with the little dog, whom the man also hated, and it was but one of many mental gymnastics Daniel would ultimately master.
For the sake of his survival, he'd learned about the secret room inside his head: how to enter it at will, where the trap door was, how he could mentally key it and walk down the long flight of black stairs that led into the core of the imagination, where his teachers lived. Crosshairs, the Buzzsaw, Big Sister, the Doctor, they were all there to hold his mind, to give solace and strength, to stanch the flow of tears, to teach him the ways of the dark places.
They'd taught him that claustrophobia, which he'd felt acutely that first day in the stinking closet, was at the front and back of the mind. In the center, one could escape it. Was there enough air in the closet to breathe? Yes. Was there not a crack under the door? Yes. Breathe the air slowly, the doctor told him, and as you take each breath into your lungs freeze the front and back of your thoughts.
He tried it, and it worked. He learned to slow ... still ... slow his vital signs, to freeze the panic, to control his thoughts, and he tried to teach Gem, but the dog never quite got the hang of it. He learned to comfort the animal with soothing, slow strokes, and whispered gentlings, which he communicated inside his head. His ability to speak to the dog, to make it understand, using only his brain, was quite real. Deep in the center of encroaching madness, he found his neural key, and unlocked secrets of the mind few would ever know.
Buzzsaw, the fearless one, the killer, taught him, as the child reached out for his comic-book friend in the screaming fear of the stifling metal box, what payback was. He would survive the Punishment Box, he would be strong, and then Buzzsaw would help him do what had to be done.
“The Snake Man will kill you if you do not do what I say,” Buzzsaw snarled at the child.
“I'm so afraid,” the boy said, crying inside the hot, airless trunk.
“Fear nothing,” the killer said, and he showed Daniel how fear existed only as thought; it was not real. Heat was real, yes. Air was real. But the heat would not destroy him if he remained calm. The man would take him out of the box soon, if only to use him again. There was air.
“What can I do? He is strong, and I'm small."
“All is known to you, Daniel, all of the things that are. All secrets are in plain sight, you must look for them with your mind. You must remember. Where is there a weapon?"
“In the basement ... downstairs?” Daniel remembered a room of mysteries in the cellar of the old tenement building.
“Yes."
“A hammer."
“No."
“The smoky bottles?"
“Yes,” Buzzsaw said, helping the boy visualize the small pharmaceutical bottles with skull-and-crossbones warning labels. “Acid,” he snarled.
Not long after that, Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, age eight, was sent to a Kansas correctional institution for children for blinding his stepfather. The boy was said to be incorrigible.
Then
Daniel Bunkowski
and Raymond Meara
2
Vietnam—1969
The hunter-killer unit of Operation Green River hid in deep woods roughly ten klicks north of LZ Mary, a forward base for clandestine ops on the Ca Mau. The official parent of record, Alpha Company, carried three platoons on its books. Each of these subdivided into three squads, a squad being, theoretically, three four-man fire teams and a squad leader. That was on paper.
In reality, one of the forty-three-man platoons, Alpha's recon outfit, was a cover for a two-squad insertion probe being run by the mysterious USMACVSAUCOG, a group mandated in the secret pages of a National Security Council directive to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or a “non-skid jacks” in the spook parlance. Sensitive wet work was their specialty of the house: over-the-fence deals and “special” actions such as Operation Green River, which were meant to stay off the books.
The hunter-killer unit, a fire team in itself, was unique. It consisted of only one man: a sociopathic, heart-eating behemoth named Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, a serial killer and mass murderer who'd been turned and set free in the field to take care of Uncle's dirty laundry. He was happy in his work.
The “unit” was approximately the size of a large freezer stood on end and rounded off, six feet nine inches tall, four hundred sixty-odd pounds of unrelenting hatred, an abused and tortured child who'd grown up with a talent for destruction, and owned a well-earned reputation for having taken a human life for every pound of his weight.
Chaingang Bunkowski, whose jailhouse nickname had derived from his killing tool of choice, a three-foot, tractor-strength ch
ain wrapped in friction tape, did not care who died just so long as someone did. He was an equal opportunity destroyer, and he would waste a human without regard to race, color, or national origin. At the moment, hiding in the deep woods near an intersection of map grids designated Snake Eyes, he was enjoying a scene of bloody carnage. Two dozen of SAUCOG's finest were getting their asses lit up, and he was enjoying it fully. He hated his own men as much as he did the little people. They were all human—his natural enemy as he saw it. It pleased him to watch them die.
This was Charlie's AO, a dangerous place of twelve-foot tides and stinking mangrove swamps, and the night had come full of spooky moonlight, fog, mad moths, and kamikaze mosquitoes the size of tarantulas. The previous day, a hellish time of fear and ceaseless bug swarm, Mr. Charlie had stalked the insertion team and suckered them into an ambush, and Operation Green River was now merely one more fucked-up Vietnam disaster.
Inside the strange mind of the beast, Snake Eyes stared out of his memory. The grids were so named because, on a military map, the intersecting features, a river and canal, vaguely resembled blue eyes on either side of a long nose of rice paddies. The mission had brought men in on foot because the passage of watercraft was made impossible at each low tide.
Chaingang was slightly to the southwest, in woods that bordered a ridge bank and slough parallel to the nearest canal, which was where the two squads had been ambushed. Only their tail man, who lagged behind the column and moved at his own snail's pace, and one other hardy camper survived the ensuing firefight, such as it was.
As a secret spectator, Bunkowski's only interest in the swift and unilateral contact was, first, in surviving, and then perhaps in assessing the degree of vulnerability to whatever easy targets might present themselves.
The other Caucasian to live through the ambush was a grunt named Meara. He was alive, but badly injured. Terminal screaming pain, the kind of eschatological stuff that surrounds and hurts without mercy, had him in its lock. Deceptive, coming first as smoke, wispy and bearable pain snaked out at him like the tendrils from a flame. Then it became dangerous and oily and it frightened him with its unforgiving nature. Billowing, dense, impenetrable clouds of pain choked him; suffocating end-of-the-world pain blanketed Raymond Meara, half-assed mercenary.
He felt it next as fire. It lingered in his throat and lungs, a double-barreled burn that one bit into like a chili pepper, a thing so hot that a single seed tasted like sucking on the end of a flame thrower. He felt it deep in his military fillings; tasted the scorching pain on his tongue. It enveloped him with the intensity of turbs, after-burners, blast furnaces, refinery flame-off, back-blast, this oilfield-Armageddon-hot pain.
He began to lose it with the heat mirage shimmer of agony. Ray Baby Meara, cut off from his fellow ground pounders, who were lost somewhere back behind him, swallowed by the earth, was befuddled by the pain that burnt him as it screamed in his ear.
“Callsign to handle, you copy? Over.” It shrieked at him over the radio.
“Bounty Hunter, Pallbearer Six Actual,” crackled through the fierce heat.
“Most frigging affirm, Pallbearer Six.” The Command Post. Six Actual, the Man his own self. Dai Uy (Viet for captain) McClanahan, who lived in a trailer called Der Bunker. Twelve feet below ground level, within B-40 range of Monster Mountain, Dai Uy held Meara's life in his hand. Dai Uy would work the magic for Raymond Meara and save him.
3
The beast sensed something, another presence, a thing that went unidentified, but these were the important nudges that he always listened to with the greatest care. The thing that had saved his life innumerable times poked him again, and told his life support systems to saddle up and hustle.
He moved, an apparition in the darkness of the woods, a freezer-big thing in a cammoed tarp the size of a small vehicle, loaded with a ruck most men would not be able to lift. In one enormous gloved hand he carried a belted M60, the other held his master blasters and det gear. His huge, meaty chest was covered with grenades, many of which were short-fused and meticulously taped to him. A massive fighting Bowie hung upside down from his Alice unit, and everywhere you looked there were claymores strapped to him. One custom-made 15EEEEE bata boot sprouted its own “hush puppy"—a silenced .22 sentry-duster, and across the back of his humongous duffel a sawed-off twelve gauge topped off the ensemble. Unlike the usual combat loads, Chaingang's twelve was filled with a curious mix of sabot-sleeve and fleshette loads. The first shell was a power-load behind a hardened lead slug in polyethylene—it would penetrate an engine block at close range—and the next capped a hot load behind twenty needle-nosed nails. They fanned out at three thousand f.p.s. Tree-cutters.
Bunkowski was literally armed to the teeth: Part of his arsenal was a martial technique he'd perfected during long, hard time in the slams, a vile thing called the Breath of Death. There was no more deadly hunter-killer team than this lone assassin.
Stocked with enough freeze-dried long rats, the so-called LURP rations that were a specialty of the house with recon patrols out in the superbad bush, Chaingang could go for weeks without resupply, living off the fat of the land, so to speak, taking a bit of protein here and there ... roving and killing.
The big death dealer silently blended into the blackest pocket of shadows and was gone.
4
Time shifted. Tenses commingled and became confused. Then was now. Past was future. Raymond imagined that he keyed his radio and whispered for blessed relief from those nagging aches and pains.
Bounty Humper One, he thought, calling in air support, we got mystery aggressors. Phrases wobbled and curved grotesquely in the heat, and Meara's imagination distorted them like the visions in a funhouse mirror.
They're on the way, Bounty Mountie One. Gut up and hang tough! The phantoms were coming. Phantoms streaking out of Udorn; fast movers that would come and get some. Light up slopes. Kick dink butt. Take serious names and dig big gook graves. It was blazing noon inside Meara's head.
He fought to get his bearings. He knew that he must prepare precise coordinates. He tried to think. He thought he was roughly northwest of the VNSF compound, home of the dreaded Look Deep Duck Back. To the south was the buried trailer of Dai Uy McClanahan. No, that wasn't right. Southeast? He and these other fools, they were proudly lost. Pathfinders, Rangers, Airborne, headhunters, and assorted scouts, all wearing the double-bad bloody skull patch of Deathsquad Recon, lost to the mothering world.
A quartet of specks materialized in the sky of Raymond Meara's imagination, shattering his fantasy with pain as noise, the noise of a hundred earthquakes and a thousand sonic booms. They brought pain as smoke, heat, discord, and, the worst of all, pain as napalm. Hell-hot, death-black, stinking petrozap of oxygen-sucking napalm exploded Raymond's world. It killed Look Deep Duck Back, Pathfinders, Rangers, Airborne, headhunters, scouts, brave soldiers, cowardly lions, and buried the Dai Uy dead in his air-conditioned double-wide beneath twelve feet of concrete, steel, sandbagged berm, rubble, and Monster Mountain real estate.
Pallbearer Six Actual? Anybody? Only pain remained to answer him in the stinking petrochemical afterbirth. Snake Eyes.
He shivered, captured by the misery of icy, intimidating silence. Pain so terrible and cold that it made him forget the hottest flames, isolated him, shocked his brain into numbness, and paralyzed its victim for the slow kill.
Imprisoned, gripped in the chilling claws of death, caught inside the heart of agony as formidable and unassailable as a sheer ice cliff, frozen immobile like some fossilized, prehistoric biped, Meara's fantasy of pain allowed him to whisper but not to breathe, and he knew it would make him die slowly, as it tortured him inside the freezing mass of glacier-like hurting.
Help me, he begged, into the darkness of his imagination. But no one responded. The phantoms were gone. The captain was gone. All his good buddies were gone. From whence would cometh the magic? He had never felt so alone, trapped and terror stricken inside the ice-cold walls of silent, crushing
pain.
“God Six Actual, this is Bounty Hunter One,” he whispered in desperation. “Do you have a copy on me, God?” Heavenly Father, who gave your only begotten son, Jesus, please forgive me for my sins.
Staunchly devout agnostic Raymond Meara prayed that God would make the magic happen, that He would forgive him and save him.
He wanted to hear the thunder crack, see the clouds speared by shafts of gold, hear God's majestic voice shatter the block of pain.
“Ray!” he wanted God to say “I didn't recognize you."
Meara tried to attach some thread of reason to this newfound ability of his to suddenly suspend all disbelief. For the first time he was quite prepared to believe in the power of prayer, and that one might obtain a miracle. What about the weeping religious icons? Those magical pictures that teared up and cried on cue? Weren't these miracles? He thought about the power of secret incantations. The shroud. The ark. The mystery of the robe. The laying on of hands. The dark virgin of the basilica of Guadalupe, whose fabled tears had been witnessed, impossibly, in the cornea of the Virgin Mary's weeping eye. Surely not all of these inexplicable miracles were ecumenical hoaxes.
A man doesn't think about getting shot. Sure, he thinks about it, but he never believes a projectile will really hit him. Maybe that other dude, that guy over there, maybe he'll catch a bullet. But nobody thinks it will actually happen to them. Certainly not to that closet Christian, Raymond Meara. Fight it, ace, he thought. Don't slip away yet.
The monsoons had cut through the woods like a giant backhoe and there was a good-size slough, there at the edge of what would have been called a deep ditch bank back in the little Missouri country town he was from.