by Rex Miller
He could not go back to the unsafe house and he was weary of motels and hotels. He needed isolation. He needed many things—Dr. Norman, chemistry, math, and the general sciences. He let his mind scan freely, allowing anything to come to the fore as he digested and rechewed his mental cud.
You must understand that Chaingang Bunkowski, in moments such as these, cannot drive through Hardee's and order a dozen mushroom-and-Swiss burgers and hope to satisfy the craving inside. The need for a human heart was so strong he almost stopped and took one at random, but whatever remained of his good sense prevailed.
His strange mind scanned a world of languages as he drove, searching for acceptable desolation—if not wilderness—remembering Assamese, Breton, Baluchi, Catalan, Dutch, Faeroese, German, Haitian Creole, Icelandic, Judeo-Spanish, Konkani, Hashmiri, Kafiri, Khowar, Kurish—or was it Kurdish? Had he forgotten Frisian? Irish Gaelic? He thought about implants and how little he'd gleaned as he subconsciously scanned Marathi, Nepali, Ossec, Oriya, Punjabi, Portuguese—he was vaguely irritated at these lapses—Persian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Rajasthani, Scottish Gaelic, Sardinian, Slovene—what about Sanskrit? Tajiki, Urdu, Venetic, Welsh, Wendish, X-lac-tian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Zanzkritian. He played games with himself, seeing the image of a spotted dog named Duke that one of the guards at Marion owned. Dalmation?
He would kill someone and eat their heart and take their car and then he'd get something for dessert, and there were nearly twelve million medical implants in living North American surgical patients: he sorted through the diagrams of screws, plates, wires, pins, joints, lenses, valves, silicone tits, and collagened lips. He thought of chewed peach hearts, mangled maniocs, calabashed cassavas, squashed spurge, ruptured rootstock, somatic mutation of peach pit, necrotized nectarines….
From nowhere, inside his mind, he pictured blood geysers streaming from Mrs. Nadine Garbage-belly's severed lifestreams. Old Faithful spewing from that neck as the ticker pounded. Half a million human monkeys had pacemakers implanted in their shithouse skins. He saw fake surveillance monitors; barking dogs; sensor-controlled lights; magnetic switches; electric eyes; window foil; closed-circuit cameras; sound, movement, and heat-sensing detectors; infrared ray receivers; Chaingang could bypass them all. From Ma 'n' Pa kitchen-table business alarms to the underground repeater station hookups for Ma Bell, Holmes, national ComSec ops, Newton Secure Systems, Brinks, Pinks, tiddlywinks. Tagalog! Another forgotten language.
How-who-why-when-where did he learn about Irish Gaelic, peach pits, Newton Secure Systems, and silicone tits? He learned them the old-fashioned way: at the "lie-berry," very often. He learned from eating libraries full of books on chemistry, math, and the general sciences, reading the books, sinking them down into the deep, fat wrinkles in that remarkably weirdly eidetic memory and eating the best parts.
That same gray matter mass fires a warning shot and he slows, brakes, pulls into a mall. A fairly busy shopping complex that he loves the instant he sees it. It pounds at him, screaming the V-words he loves so much: vulnerability and victim. He sees victims everywhere he looks. He can victimize a mall, for God's sake—take it down from one end to the other with any luck at all. But that is for later. What stopped him is a toy store. He parks, lurches out of the Olds, and waddles across the hot parking area.
"Hi," a friendly salesgirl says, "may we help you, please?" He does not like her tone. He makes a poem to her inside his head as he looks for the toys he needs.
I wanna meet you, defeat you, eat you. Learn you, churn you, burn you. Overpower you, deflower you, devour you. Chain you, brain you, drain you. He spots a toy robot thing.
Robyn Brock has worked here for two years come November, and this is the first time the person has not answered her. It is insulting and confusing and she is frightened in some way she cannot understand. Oh! It dawns on her. He is hard of hearing. She walks up to his immense back and touches him lightly on the arm, spinning this beast around and mouthing in an exaggerated way so he can read her fucking lips, "Can I help you with something?"
Five hundred pounds descends on her instep and she screams in pain. Nearly eight hundred dollars' worth of well-designed and cleverly boxed plastic junk cascades from the shelves.
"Oh. I've hurt my back," the man moans in his sissy voice.
"Don't try to get up," she says, doing her best to wiggle out from under him. "I'll go get help." She tries to walk, wondering if her foot has been broken.
"No!" His voice freezes her in her tracks. "Never mind. I'm going to go. I'll go get off my feet. I'm sure I'll be all right."
"What happened?" All she can think of is the huge lawsuit against the store.
"You just threw me off my balance—I don't know—I slipped. My fault." He began to mince his way out of the store, almost limping. His right ankle was weak and he sometimes limped when he was tired, so it was quite easy to fake.
Back in his wheels, he watched her, after having repaired the stacks of fallen toys, taken her shoe off, and inspected her sore foot. A barking cough of amusement escaped his gut as he turned his attention to the three items he'd shoplifted. Two of them were worthless and he pitched them out of the window into the parking lot, but one was going to do.
The robot, designed to move along a black line drawn on white paper, was guided by a photo interrupter. It was the eye and the preassembled printed circuit board he wanted. The thing was only seventy-five dollars, but she'd irritated him.
He had other stops to make and when he'd assembled all of his purchases he drove to a nearby spot that was sufficiently secluded and began unloading items from the trunk. He carried his digger, a poncho half, and his fighting bowie knife. In the small thicket of trees and bushes that backed against the mall, he began digging. It only took him a few minutes, as he didn't go too deeply. When he was finished, he used the outer berm of displaced dirt to pack down two edges of the poncho cover, and with his big knife hacked down a couple of heavy tree limbs to weight the other sides. In his pocket was an aerosol spray which he used to cover the entire area. It was a scent that was extremely offensive to dogs. He didn't want this grave tampered with.
Chaingang returned to the parking lot and cruised, watching for easy targets. He saw an older woman in a silver Lincoln Continental Mark VI and followed her, pulling into the slot near her. He watched her get out and almost made a move but the warning system kept him off. She had too much savvy in her movements. Something. He had to get those strong victim vibes or he'd usually pass. This time he passed. A lucky woman who was shopping for a bridal shower, who wore too much perfume, and used too much spray on her hair—a fortunate gal who moved as if she know what she was about would not go to meet her maker. Not today.
He cruised slowly out of the lot, looking for mall cops in unmarked cars. Perhaps that is what drew him to these shopping complexes. The ones that felt empty of prying eyes titillated him. He cruised slowly, staying away from the shopping area for a while, driving leisurely as he looked for a sweet victim.
The Olds rolled past a carpet store, a small paint shop where he'd recently made a purchase, a framing company, a large supermarket, a cleaning establishment, a photo kiosk, a religious bookseller, a woman's clothing shop, a mall restaurant, any number of potential targets.
She was driving a new red Buick and he wanted to trade up anyway. There was no question she'd do nicely. Attractive. Although that was not a factor. He'd read up on his condition. Perhaps the implant had touched near whatever stimulates such responses to sexual impulses. His sex drive might have been short-circuited. Or it might be that he was merely off his feed, in the same way a recently divorced or otherwise separated person will not have that immediate desire for a while. It was nothing to be worried about. Rape, after all, was such a piddling violation when compared to taking an involuntary organ donation.
Red was in her twenties. He bad parked across from her and had been careful to scope out the presence of any possible observers.
"Hi! 'Scuse me a second?" Still in h
is nice clothing, but not as faggy now. Booming voice all hail-fellow, hearty, maturity, and purpose. "I've got a problem." He certainly did.
"See this?" It looked like a folded map. "Would you have any idea how to gradis Thornbill from hocken flanner? Can you go right across or is that no longer cut through?"
"Pardon me?" Indeed.
"See?" Forcing her eyes to that damned map. Meanwhile, he looks all around, rubbernecking, positioning himself just so. Blocking off any other possible observer, his huge meaty slab of a back shielding the action from his weakest point of cover. "Thornbill." He points. The huge finger draws her eyes.
In a situation such as this one, comfortingly in full sign of people, broad daylight, and a busy mall, how worried does one get? After all, nothing's going to happen to you.
But if you scream, he tells you he is going to shoot, and these words are funny at first because he is so comical and they are the words to TV and movie scenes seen and remembered, but the Colt Woodsman he has tucked into the map does not look like a toy, and he is not playacting. All those fictional crime shows have educated you. You know a silencer when you see one—that's the long thing on the end of the pistol…and if it was a piece of hacksawed pipe with a bushing on the end, how could you be expected to detect that?
The point is you move. He is obviously afraid of nothing and you are very much afraid. You don't wish to die-someday, maybe, but not today. You beg. He doesn't like this and now you are in a moment of extreme pain and on the floorboard of your own car. Not unconscious but very near. The mundane and commonplace seem so important, suddenly, so you file away the fact that the monstrous apparition is moving your seat backward, sliding it and clicking it into place, then rummaging around, finding your car keys, touching you. Your purse is gone. You drift, mercifully, into blackness.
Chaingang drives away in the smooth-riding Buick, experimenting constantly to get the seat back. There isn't enough room for his gut. Piece of crap!
The toadstool world is filled with midgets, small-minded dwarf monkeys for whom all clothing, furniture, and vehicles are designed.
His Olds sits locked and legal in the mall lot with 150 other sets of wheels. Has anyone observed and, if they did, what did they really see?
His warning system is not blinking at him. Well, perhaps a nudge, but only a very vague, general sense of discomfort. He finds the grave site. Pulls her out. Gets his bowie knife.
Three deep cuts. What he calls "the Y," the autopsy Y. Two from the titties to the center and then straight down. Much blood and he's in such a hurry he has his good clothes on. He strips, comes back to the body, stepping in the bloody mud and ripping the heart from this monkey woman and sinking his teeth into it. Oh, my goodness, that tastes good. She is rich and sweet.
Eileen Todd, twenty-six, an employee of Gale's Print Galleria, drives her parents' Buick, he learns from the contents of her purse. He covers her corpse with dirt, using her ripped clothing remnants to clean himself as best he can. In his pants pockets are small premoistened towels, which he also uses.
He sprays the grave again, scatters rocks around, and heaves his quarter-ton back into the red car. He knows this thing costs over twenty thousand dollars, list price—how can it not be roomier? Tsk, tsk! A world designed for scaled-down Lilliputians, it was. He had thought about wiring a couple of shotguns under the hood and making it into a war wagon but he was too bummed out by this car. He was disappointed. He'd been all set to trade for a Buick. Surely there must be something on wheels built for a man and not a fucking monkey?
He decided he'd feel better if he'd go kill that little faggot sissy Bobby Price. Drove back and loaded the duffel, with mobile tracker unit inside, secured the Olds again, and took off in the direction of the white blip. Already he was getting more used to the position of the wheel. There was no question about it, he decided. He was a real GM man.
He had the tracker up on the dash and the passenger seat of the Buick was covered in papers: the Kansas City map enlargement, the SAVANT and OMEGASTAR specs, Shooter's dossier and current likeness, all of which had been duly memorized, but remained there for inspiration. The goony- bird face of tightly wound, psychotic Shooter staring at nothing from a street-van surveillance picture, no doubt. Shooter's mouth open, speaking to someone, looking like a jock on his way to the tennis court. Chaingang remembered that Price came up to his bellybutton—the little midget piece of trash. He'd kill him and pinch off his pusshead right there in the fucking street. . . . He found this car intolerable.
Chaingang was parked at a stop sign, waiting in the traffic, experimenting with the seat and the air conditioning. He had it on sixty degrees—cold. Somebody was walking between the cars. If it was one of those bagrags who wash windshields, Chaingang would pull out the .22 and drill the monkey just for practice.
"Paper!" the guy was screaming. Chaingang hit the button that lowered the window, after a few misses, and told the monkey to give him one. Gave him pocket change. Flipped through the wrong section first, then turned it and saw a small front-page headline: Six More Killings, Police Admit Serial Killer. That little fucking shit! Killing on his ground. Who the fuck did he think he was? Someone honked in back of him and he started shifting into reverse to ram them, but then better judgment pulled his sleeve. He had to stay on track and take care of this.
In that moment, he saw through a window in his rage—he was a different person. Celibate! Losing his temper when it could hurt him. He was behaving uncharacteristically. It sobered him and he bit down on his thoughts about the implant, screaming out of the line of parked cars in the direction of Shooter Price, tearing around a beige Oldsmobile and a white Dodge Caravan, driving around a muscle car as if it weren't there, the white blip growing larger and stronger in the center of the OMNI device.
He was locked down now. Concentrating fiercely, with all his energy on the act of destruction, slicing through traffic—five hundred pounds mashed down on the gas pedal, floorboarding it through teenagers and retirees alike, around a kid in a Pontiac Bonneville, a woman in a brown Chrysler LeBaron, a kid in an old Roadrunner, a couple in a Jap thing—zooming out of nowhere to loom larger than life in Price's mirror.
Shooter had been tracking him, he was going to whack Big Petey with his baby, who was in her case in the seat in back of him, and he'd been parked on a side street, but when he saw the blip—the blimp-size blip—coming nearer, he turned the car to follow him and take a shot, but suddenly Chaingang was on his ass, driving a different set of wheels, roaring down on him with a vengeance, and he was scared almost to the point of going sane.
He saw the car come out of nowhere, moving way too fast—he knew cars—they were gonna hit. He floored the accelerator and shot out into traffic and some poor devil in an Ace Trucking Company job smashed into the little M30 with a resounding crunch of chrome, metal, fiberglass, plastic, shit, and shinola. Shooter grabbing SAVANT and shagging ass as the glass— already cracked—shattered under a hail of lead.
Shooter just went—fuck the mobile tracker—and he was running fast— zigging through honking motorists, zagging away from the hail of terminal saturnism—that's your basic Beaumont-Port Arthur lead poisoning—splattering around him. There wasn't but two things Shooter Price could do besides pull a trigger and both of 'em was run, and he flat out ran for his crazy life as Chaingang Bunkowski stood flat-footed, next to a wrecked M30 and an Ace who'd been in the wrong place, glass all around his fat ass, oblivious to the waft of distant sirens, a Chinese copy of a submachine gun cradled in his arms as he cursed his slowness and ran one more magazine through the pipe just for luck.
Bat-batta-bat-bambambam,- popping rounds came across the traffic in the direction of disappearing Shooter, the felt-padded bolt clattering as the weapon blew smoking cartridge cases into the broken glass and car parts.
He had to make himself squeeze back into the car and get in the wind. After all, as his dearest mommy used to say, there was a time and a place for everything.
H
e made a U-turn, swung around, reached into his duffel and plucked out one of his remaining grenades, and after determining that it didn't have a file- notched spoon (the way his luck was going he'd blow his fat ass up with a short-fused frag!), he took the pin out and tossed it into the M30 convertible, tromped the gas, and watched it blow in the Buick's rearview mirror.
Some days were like that. No matter what you did you just couldn't get arrested.
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21
Victor Trask was supposedly out taping bites for a piece on miscegenation for "Inside America." He was inside his car, taping hallway conversation from a parked car in the eleven-hundred block of Locust, scared all the while he'd be busted and thrown in jail for illegally recording the cops, and getting zip for his chances.
The logistics alone of such a thing were beyond him. He'd not used a voice-activated recorder, so when he couldn't personally monitor he'd had to go back and skim-check hours of random tape, hoping to catch a tiny fish in this enormous sea.
He'd caught nothing but a worse cold, which was now, he thought, settling in as a virulent strain of summer flu. What had he learned? A man—the lieutenant who occupied the bugged office, presumably—had a real hard-on for the Jackson County medical examiner. He was addicted to mixed metaphors. He spent his day on the phone or away from his desk; the long, confidential talks he'd imagined overhearing were nonexistent in this office. What Victor did hear was a bunch of career-related shit about how Sergeant so-and-so should get people to solve their own problems instead of coming to him, and a lot of platitudes about work delegation, keeping options open, prioritizing tasks, and stuff he'd obviously picked up on at a seminar. He kept talking about his "Masters in Advanced Death Investigations," "Project Assignments in Criminalistie Factfinding," and various other subjects that sounded as if they should be in capital letters. He heard nothing about blacks, drugs, serial killings, lab findings, or anything of relevance.