Nikes on, hand bundled in his shirt, Mick ran up the ridge. Granite scattered beneath his feet and his knees became thoroughly barked before a final spill dropped him near their Jeep, and the rifles. He had never been so frightened, quite.
Above him, the wooden horror crested the ridge. Even from there it reeked, it stank. But Mick was waiting. He blew splinters out of its chest, cast around for something with more clout, then fumbled with the key in the ignition.
The Jeep croaked to life. Momentarily, the Wulgaru seemed bewildered by the contraption thundering at it. Mick whooped, elbowed a steady bleat from the horn. Claws exploded the windscreen and tore the headrest off the driver’s seat. Mick ducked and brained himself on the wheel as wood smashed under the back wheels.
Mick braked as the Wulgaru got up, designs crushed and scored, the wicked jaw ripped off. It swung the severed left arm like a scythe . . .
That last Belfast summer, a shoelace had saved his life. He’d balanced against a lampost with blistered green paint and wished for more fingers or fewer jars of Guinness under his belt. Five minutes spent on the Gordian knot (ties were still insoluble) gave black fatigues with Heckler-Koch automatics time to cordon off his street. One scanned the crowd for a face in a Polaroid.
From Malone’s tobacconists, Mick could see the gabled bulk of his boardinghouse. Caitlin would have rung Malone’s if she’d escaped. Was she hiding under the widow’s walk? With the plastique?
It was quiet such a long time, Mick almost believed she’d surrendered . . . then the roof of the brownstone vomited into the street.
And such shameful peace swept over him! Mick had always imagined Caitlin O’Shea’s driving hatred as a separate entity, even a demon; how else could he love her? Her death opened cellars of his mind that loved Caitlin not at all. Love a black fire that devoured Dion and would have destroyed him? His heart rebelled against that cold vision and he’d run so far this time.
And the hate had found him, after all.
The brandy bottle tapped his heels. He screwed it open and watched the monster advance through the glass. He never took that swig.
The Jeep had bled oil and petrol over the wooden man . . .
Inspired, Mick bit a linen strip from his shirt and soaked it well. He wadded the rag down the neck and lit it from the Jeep dash. When he could smell the rot, Mick gunned the engine and threw the bottle. The Wulgaru was cloaked in blazing mist. Sinews of hair spat and melted as it smacked the flames in mute parody of a burning man.
Stones rattled the Jeep’s belly. The grade was too steep, the left wheels chewed into thin air. Mick jumped—his shirt was tangled in the roll bar.
The steel banshee crushed him.
Consciousness hurt.
The moon wept a rainbow tear that stung his eye and lip. Gasoline. The “moon” was the skewed lid of the gas tank. The Jeep had capsized, pinned him.
A giant eye hanging by its nerves, one headlight threw its beam down the broken slope. The Wulgaru hobbled through the light, blackened chest alive with fiery worms.
Only a flood of adrenaline kept Mick out of shock.
“You look like I feel, Woody,” he muttered.
Rotten wood crackled in answer.
Another drop of gasoline burned Mick’s eye and was ignored. That cold purpose Caitlin must have felt on the widow’s walk filled him. His free arm was nerveless meat; the cap of the gas tank was slick, jarred off its thread. He lacked the strength to turn it. He didn’t need to. As his hair sizzled in the wulgaru’s fist, Mick kept a death grip on that cap.
He didn’t feel the gasoline sluice over them.
Rex Miller
THE LUCKIEST MAN
IN THE WORLD
FOR the first time since Signet published his topselling, controversial first novel Slob (1987), Rex Miller’s slaughter machine, Chaingang Bunkowski, is back . . . in the following very aptly titled story.
Chaingang “boils off the page,” wrote reviewer Jim Van Hise in the June 1988 debut issue of Midnight Graffiti. “Not since Red Dragon by Thomas Harris has a maniac’s innermost thoughts been explored with such precision and such heat.”
Slob started what the jovial Missouri-born Miller, a former radio announcer and recording comedian, terms his Eichord Sextette. Frenzy, number two about the specialist in serial murder detection named Jake Eichord, was called a “bucket-of-blood suspense thriller” by Stephen King (from Onyx). Viper is next, and, in 1990, expect the return in novel form of mammoth, menacing Chaingang. But get ready, now, to duck away from the splatter—the beast hovers and hulks dead ahead of you!
THE LUCKIEST MAN
IN THE WORLD
Rex Miller
“ZULU SIX, ZULU SIX.” He could imagine the PRC crackling, the bored tone of somebody’s RTO going, “Dragon says he’s got movement about fifty meters to his Sierra Whisky, do you read me? Over.” And the spit of intercom garble. Guy in the C & C bird keying a handset, saying whatever he says. Fucking lifer somewhere up there generations removed from the bad bush. Yeah, I copy you, Lumpy Charlie, Lima Charlie, Lumpy Chicken. Whatever he says. Bird coming down. Charlie moving at the edge of the woods. Thua Thien Province. Northern Whore Corps. The beast killing for peace, back then. Dirty-Dozened out of the slammer by military puppeteers. Set in place by the spooks. Very real, however.
“Chaingang” his nickname. The fattest killer in the Nam. Thriving on blast-furnace heat like some fucking plant. He was the beast. He had killed more than any other living being. Over four hundred humans, he thought. A waddling death machine. “Gangbang” they would call him out of earshot. “Hippo.” He had heard them. Other names he ignored. These arrogant children who knew nothing about death.
He flashed on the woods, so similar to these, and to a pleasant memory from long ago. He was about two miles from the house.
“There goes Bobby Ray,” the woman called to her husband, who was bringing logs in, and watched a truck throw gravel.
“Nnn,” he grunted in the manner of someone who had been married a long time.
“He’s another one don’t have anything to do but run the road all day.”
The husband said nothing, loading kindling.
“Drive up and down, up and down, drive a daggone pickup like he was a millionaire.” She had a shrewish, sharp voice that grated on a man, he thought. He put a large log down in the hot stove.
“Now you gonna’ run to town to pick up that daggone tractor thing an’ you coulda’ got it yesterday when you was in there at Harold’s, but nooooooo.” She was a pain in the ass. “You couldn’t be bothered.” She was working herself up the way she always liked to do, he thought. He knew the old bitch like a damn book. “You waste a fortune on gas for that truck and—”
He spoke for the first time in hours. “Go get the boy.”
“Then you expect us to get by with the crop money bad as it was last year and—” She just went on like he hadn’t said anything. He looked over at her with those hard, flat eyes. She shut her mouth for a second then said “I don’t know where he’s at. He’ll be back in a minute. Anyway, you don’t seem to realize . . .” And she was droning on about how he always thought he could write it off on the tax and that. Christ on a crutch, if he hadn’t heard that a thousand blamed times, he hadn’t heard it once!
Wasn’t that the way of a woman? Worry you to damn death about some little piddling thing all the time! He sat down at the kitchen table and pulled out his beat-up wallet, opened it. She had the food money. He had the gin check and the check ol’ Lathrop had given him, what—three weeks back?—and he better cash that dude if it was any good anyhow. He’d dump the woman and the boy and he’d go cash the checks and make the deposit and there’d be enough left over to get some suds. He could taste the first one right now. Sharp bite of the shot and then that nice cool taste of the foam off the head of the beer.
She was running that mouth all the time, man couldn’t even count his money. Going on about Bobby Ray Crawford but he knew it was her
way of goading him. He’d get her in the truck and that would do it. She always shut up when they went someplace. He was getting warm in the kitchen with the hot fire going, but damn he couldn’t stand to listen to that shrill hen anymore, and he got up and pulled his coat off the peg and stomped back outside to find the boy.
The boy had just come out of the woods on the south of the house. Thick woods maybe ten meters from the edge of the fields in back of the house, and he and the dog had been kicking around in there looking for squirrel sign and what not. Shit, the boy thought to himself, fuckin’ Aders done killed off all the fuckin’ squirrel. Otis and Bucky Aders had hunted all this ground to damn death for ten years. You didn’t hardly see no sign at all no more. Once in a while where they cut but shit, they was plumb hunted out.
The dog was what the beast had heard as he entered the woods from the south side; just a faint, yapping bark that had penetrated one of his kill fantasies as he walked down the pathway that obviously led to a treeline. (Hearing the faint noise on another level of awareness and tucking it away in his data storage system for later retrieval.)
Life for the beast had been largely lived that way, in fantasy, daydreaming half the time, living out the fantasies the other time. Imagined flights to lift him first from his hellish childhood of torture and degradation, and mind games to alleviate the pain of suffering. Then, later, the thoughts to vaporize that claustrophobic ennui of long institutionalization. So it was not in the least unusual for the hulking beast to be fantasizing as he cautiously made his way through the woods.
For a time he had daydreamed about killing—the preoccupation that was his ever-present companion, the thing he liked the best, the destruction of the human beings—and the terrain had triggered pleasant memories. As he carefully negotiated the swampy area around a large pond, he imagined the vegetation-choked floor and green, canopied ceiling of a South Vietnamese jungle, and the shadows of tall trees and wait-a-minute vines, and the triggering of a daydream alerted him to the presence of possible danger.
There were always parallels to be found. This, for example, was rice country. Here in this flatland in between the old river levees you could easily imagine a field crisscrossed by paddy dykes. Where he would have been watching for traps, falls, mines, and the footprints of the little people, here he watched for hunters.
The beast loved to come upon armed hunters in the woods and he had been fantasizing about a dad and his son; shotguns he would later take; a dog. How easily he would do the man, then stun the boy and use him before he did him, too. The thought of the boy filled him with red-hot excitement that immediately tingled in his groin and plastered a wide, grotesque smile across his doughy countenance. His smile of joy was a fearsome thing.
How easy and enjoyable it would be to do the daddy first. Take the boy’s shotgun away. Lad, he thought. Take the lad’s shotgun, then bind and gag and hurt him. How easy and necessary it would become to cause the pain that would bring his relief. He had the killer’s gifts—the survival talents—but he’d learned that it was in those times of biological need when the scarlet tide washed through him, that he had to be particularly cautious. Sometimes when he did the bad things he became careless.
He was not an ignorant man and in some ways he was extremely intelligent. According to one of the men in the prison where the beast had been confined, a Dr. Norman, he was a sort-of genius. “A physical precognate,” Dr. Norman had told him, “who transcended the normalcy of the human ones.” He was grossly abnormal. He did not find this an unpleasant thought.
The beast saw himself as Death, as a living embodiment of it, and he had availed himself of all the death literature during long periods of incarceration, devouring anything from clinicians to Horacio Quiroga. And none of it touched him. Death was outside of these others. He thought perhaps Dr. Norman was right, in his rather bizarre theorizing. But it was of no consequence to him either way.
The beast knew nothing of presentient powers. It was simply a matter of experience; preparation; trusting the vibes and gut instincts; listening to the inner rumblings; staying in harmony with one’s environment; riding with the tide; keeping the sensors out there.
He could not fantasize because of inner rumblings that had intruded upon his pleasureful thoughts, but these were the demands for food. His appetites were all insatiable, and he was very hungry, had been for the entire morning.
Instinctively, he knew the small animals could be had. Their tiny heartbeats were nearby and he homed in on such vibrations with deadly and unerring accuracy, but this was not the time for game. He wanted real food and lots of it. He salivated at the thought of the cheese and the meat of the enchiladas he’d eaten the evening before. He was HUNGRY. It had been the last food he’d had in thirteen, maybe thirteen and a half hours, and his massive stomach growled in protest.
The beast was six feet seven inches tall, heavy with hard, rubbery fat across his chest, belly, and buttocks. Four hundred pounds of hatred and insanity. His human name was Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski-Zandt, although the Zandt part wasn’t even on the official dossiers or the sophisticated computer printouts. They also had his age wrong by a year, but the fact that he had weighed fourteen pounds at birth was quite correct. His powerful fingers could penetrate a chest cavity. He had once become so enraged that he had squashed a flashlight battery—so strong was his
grip-It would be incorrect to say that the beast hated humans. In fact, he enjoyed them. Enjoyed hunting them just as sportsmen enjoy killing game; much the same. He differed only in that he liked to torture his game first, before he killed it. Cat-and-mouse games with his play pretties. Sex sometimes. But then when the heat and the bright-red waves were at their highest ebb, he would take their hearts. He would devour the hearts of his enemy—die human beings—and that was what he loved.
The beast whose human name was Danny-Boy wished that it were summer or at least that the pecan trees to the west had something for him. There would be nothing on the ground, either, he knew. No sweet pecan nutmeats for Danny. But that was all right. He’d be out of the woods soon, literally and figuratively. And with that he stepped daintily over a rotten log in his big 15-EEEEE bata-boos, and he was out of the woods, in plain view of houses and traffic. With surprising quickness the huge beast dropped back into the cover of the trees.
“Them fuckin’ river rats done hunted out ever’thing awready. Pah-paw,” the kid whined as he patted the hound absentmindedly. “Fuckin’ Punk,” he said without malice.
“Them fuckin’ river rats enjoy life ten times more’n you ever will,” his father told him. Let him chew on that a bit. “Let’s go,” he said, and got into the Ford pickup.
Bunkowski saw the woman leave the house from where he stood, frozen immobile behind a massive oak. Watching the faraway tableau from his vantage point. He saw the boy climb over the side and get into the bed of the truck, for some reason. The woman came out, did something and went back inside momentarily, came back out and got into the truck. The gate was lowered and the hound jumped into the truck; the beast saw it pull out slowly, go out of sight, then reappear to the east of the tar-papered home.
The beast looked up and the sky corroborated his inner clock, which ticked with a frightening machinelike precision at all times. He saw that it was after 9:30 a.m. (It was 9:32, at that second. He had not looked at a clock or watch for over thirteen hours.) In a second’s camera-eye blink he saw that there was no corn in the field, saw the dangers of the road to his east and west, then turned and slogged through the woods toward the fence he’d seen.
Stepping over the rusting barbed wire he emerged cautiously from the safety of the woods, made his way in the direction of the house. He knew certain things and it was not part of his character to question how he knew there was a horse or horses pasturing close by, that traffic would be a light but continuous presence on the gravel road, that nobody else was in the house. He moved into the treeline that bifurcated the two fields and walked slowly toward the home, favo
ring his sore ankle a little.
There was a snow fence behind the barns, where a leaky-looking rowboat and an ancient privy rotted away, and he was behind the fence and sensed something, stopped, stood very still, slowing his vital signs to a crawl. Freezing motionless for no apparent reason.
“Oh, that’s real great,” the man was telling the woman in the truck, who whined.
“I’m sorry, I’d didn’t mean to leave it, I didn’t do it on purpose.” She had left her grocery list and her money in the kitchen.
“If ya hadn’t been runnin’ your mouth,” he started to say; but he just let it trail off and slammed the gearshift into reverse, backing out of the turn row. Just my luck, he thought.
“We goin’ back?” the kid hollered at his dad, who ignored him, put it in drive and started back in the direction of their house. The man was disgusted.
The beast knew the people were returning. He felt it and then, a beat later, saw the pickup coming back up the gravel road. He was in a vile mood and his ankle was bothering him and he knew he would enjoy taking them all down. He was very hungry, too, so it would be easy for him to do very bad things to this family of humans.
“I’m goin’ to the john,” the man told his wife as they went back into the house. “You goin’ to be ready to go?”
“I’ll be ready,” she said, and went into the kitchen. The kid was sitting on the tailgate as Bunkowski walked into the yard. The dog barked at him, the kid told it to shut up.
“Howdy,” the huge man said.
“Where’d you come from?” the kid asked him. Chaingang thought how easily he could go over and twist the boy’s head off. It would be like snapping a pencil in two.
“Over yonder,” he said. “Your folks home?”
“Yeah,” the kid said.
“Yes?” a woman said through the partly open back door.
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