Slob

by Rex Miller

  He will run his plan tonight if they come. He has a plan that could work for up to eight, perhaps even ten of the little people if he takes care and thinks the thing out carefully, and of course if luck is with him. He thinks he can kill even a dozen dinks using his well-researched and carefully constructed ambush.

  This is Chaingang's grenade ambush. First, he unloads his M-60, ammo bandoliers and his frags, setting everything down carefully beside his spool of wire. Next he removes his ruck and digs down for the wire-cutter pliers. The important swivel rings. He pats his pockets down. Now to set it in motion. He picks up the frags and a broken branch and limps a bit as he negotiates the footpath.

  A wave sweeps through him again, washing his brain in a red-hot kill lust. He will take many lives before the night is over and he doesn't much care whose. But these are the moments when he realizes he must use the greatest care. It is in the times right before he does the bad things that he must execute his plans with the utmost caution and with great concentration.

  It is dark as he finishes putting the grenades in place on either side of the footpath, and in front and back. The frags are "canned" in place, that is, he has jammed them into cans before he loaded up, and the cans are just big enough to hold the 'nades in with the spoons depressed but not so tight that a pull won't jerk them loose. Parallel swivel rings are placed and camouflaged as well as possible.

  When they are all wired tightly into position and covered, the wires are all laid and pulled back to the ambush control point, as Chaingang takes up the slack in the wires just enough, but not too much; this is very painstaking and he would prefer to accomplish this with daylight. But the darkness is also to his advantage. He can tell just what is visible and what is not here in the last minutes before it is totally black.

  Now he hurries back and beginning at the reverse end, covers all signs of the wires with earth and twigs and leaves. He is expert at this. He has done this hundreds of times. Now he pulls the pins on all the frags and, giving the wires and swivel rings a final check, retraces his footing, this time moving backward as he brushes out any sign that he might have left.

  He spreads his mosquito netting out beside the ambush position control point, lays his tarps down, quickly scoops up a big pile of leaves, twigs, and other camouflage material, bringing it over from other spots in the darkness and brushing behind him each time. There is no light now.

  He goes down the footpath one last time, to the hardball that is completely overgrown in vines and brush. Once he almost trips and falls on his fat ass but he catches his balance in time. Finally he gets the mines set out, after what seems like an eternity. He is using a new system on the claymores this time, a wire pull to detonate the clacker device involving a complex system of parallel rings, but most of this was all rigged in advance. There is no more time now. He leaves it as it is, ready or not, and returns to the ambush spot.

  He stands and breathes deeply, thinking. He retraces his movements. He has set out eight fragmentation grenades and two of the claymores. All the slack is out and it all runs back to the two master wires, all running to the swivel rings that will blow the mines back in the hardball trail and the frags along the footpath, which is where he thinks they will come from tonight, if and when they show.

  He is a thorough craftsman at his work. It isn't quite right somehow. One thing is missing or incomplete or wrong. Something does not feel quite right. There is no room for error.

  Painstakingly, he begins the whole procedure again in his mind, concentrating fiercely, taking each move a step at a time from the moment when he chose the ambush site to the unpacking of his ruck to the placement of the parallel-positioned swivel rings and the wiring of the canned grenades. He rethinks the camouflage, the setting of the claymores, the brushing out of the trail and pathway, the gathering of the foliage and materials. He remembers he has the grenade pins and rings in his pocket and he puts them away.

  It is in the master wires. The problem is in the way the master wire to the pathway frags is attached to the wires that lead from the grenades to the swivels and through the rings so that when the master is yanked, the grenades pop out of the cans, thus releasing the spoon levers and blowing. All of the grenades but two are short-fused. The other two, with hacksawed spoons, are just an added insurance variation.

  As he settles a bit now he becomes more aware of his surroundings and like a sort of metamorphic dissolve, the real Chaingang emerges from within the surface one. Danny is a lethargic presence. Inert. Not even peering any longer into the blackened gloom. Not seeing at all, in fact. Eyes half closed in a heavy-lidded relaxed state, calm as a rock, listening.

  The night symphony has begun. Insects. Animals. Birds. Everything from frogs to cricket noises begins to add layer upon layer to the nonhuman din. There are big cats out here. He likes them and bears them no ill will, although he likes to sometimes think about the few he has had to kill. He is listening patiently, still standing on his tired and sore feet. He is no longer aware of his physical being. He will soon become weightless. He will listen to the trees very soon.

  He realizes that he has a leech on him. He is not oblivious to pain or to the sting and itch, but it is a factor so totally under control as to be insignificant, much as you might be aware of a very slight pain in the back. He is aware he is being bitten by mosquitoes, but where you or I might be slapping at them, going nuts from their attack, itching, being driven crazy by it, it is meaningless to him. Less than meaningless. He will sometimes put a bit of repellent on but it will not be tonight. He takes no chances. He will be sniffing for nuoc mam and the little people smells.

  His inward composure is nearly complete. He sees himself as untroubled, at peace, and at one with the night. His ankle has ceased to concern him in the joy and prospect of the night ahead. In that way he becomes tireless and his alertness increases. He is aware that a thick, sticky mist has swirled in around him. Soon it will become fog. He loves it. He fucking loves it, wallows in it. He is not stupid. He has read of Jack the Ripper. In his mind he of course is Jack the Ripper, alone and safe in the swirling fog. Come now, little people, and let me kill you kill youkilllyoukillyou-killlllllll. He fights the hot surge. Not yet.

  The tide recedes once again. Not for long now, with any luck. He lets his body drink in the timeless rhythms of the trees and the fog and the night. He listens out beyond his hearing, as all nocturnal creatures do. He sees far beyond his visibility, which at the moment is near zero. All of no consequence.

  He pats his chain and nonchalantly pulls it out and recoils it, returning it to the special canvas-and-leather pocket he wears. He X's two bandoliers of ammo, then changes his mind and removes them. He places his M-60 with a loaded bandolier in position. He locates his other two frags. He remembers what he forgot to do, he meant to bring along his silenced pistol. Ah, never mind. Another time. He pats his huge bowie.

  For a moment he allows himself to think about grabbing that one from behind and twisting the chin to the left just as you'd pop the top on a drink can, even less energy than that, then pulling the head back and stabbing up with the sharp steel blade, feeling the blood gush back out on him and twisting, slicing across, severing everything. He had turned that one into a steaming, dripping load of shit in a fat heartbeat. Pleasant memories.

  He feels his face pinch slightly and relaxes his muscles, realizing that he has been grinning widely, and he smiles again at this. He lets just a little more of the warm rush begin and then he blocks it.

  He sprinkles the piled-up rubbish and cammie material around as he pulls the netting into position. As always, he has positioned himself with unerring confidence. He has all but impenetrable jungle to his back, a thorny impasse that affords him reasonably total security. To his front more of the same. He knows they will come from the left or right if they come at all tonight. Now he lets it begin.

  Little Danny turns it on like a faucet. He lets his mind be a vision of purest virgin white. It is blemishless, smooth, hot, a b
urning incandescence of white heat in a sphere of infinite roundness, and then he punctures it just so, there at the lower left, stabbing it with a tiny needle and puncturing it as you would prick a white balloon and allowing black to slowly fill the sphere, cooling it with its inky liquidity.

  He pictures the slow running stream of black as it fills the vision slowly like the ebb of black water rising and falling in a white vase, rising now as the white heat cools the water, letting the center of the curve of the blackness be their rounded, gleaming piano top that his mother played, and in the top of their piano sits a ticking metronome, his mommy's metronome.

  Danny breathes in the essence of the black as the metronome ticks back and forth.

  Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . .

  The subtle, imperceptible containment begins. Slower, with each measured tick he slows wills slows his heart-beat slowing it with each tick slowing willing slowing and as he feels his pulse throbbing he slows wills slows the pulsing, throbbing, beating tick of his life force.

  Danny takes deeper, longer breaths, stilling his heart and pulse rate, taking in longer, great slow measured inhalations of black essence and force as he watches his mother's ticking metronome slowing almost to a standstill.

  Tick . . .

  Tick . . .

  He is stilled and silent in the deep shadows as the patrol appears a few meters away, to the left, coming down on the high side of the pipeline in the foliage. They will not be in position for the claymores, which rules out his shot at a squad-size ambush. That will have to come another time. The claymores are now virtually worthless as an offensive weapon, unless . . .

  His mind comes to life now as the first man is approaching his position. They are very good, quiet. NVA regulars, he quickly realizes. They wear disparate, somewhat ragtag uniforms but Danny admires their quiet. They soldier well, he often observes, as compared with . . .

  No time now as they file by him in the darkness. He is quite dissociated from himself and there is only a slight sense of readiness but none of urgency. The men, and so far he can only see four of them, are carrying tiny jungle lanterns, giving the procession a surreal glow as the lights and shadows interplay. They wear pith helmets, which he regards as incongruous. Sneakers.

  His inner clock advises him they are walking a bit too fast and he may have to gunfight one or two, this isn't quite working out and oh another one, come on hurry that's five and then yes he sees a sixth man coming slowing for a second he prays that he will not urinate but he continues it is taking way too long the time element was what he had forgotten about this has to be timed precisely with the wires he thinks and then he senses that someone has seen the wire but the sixth NVA soldier is past him and he raises up his blunt, thick, huge cigar fingers lashing out with the links of lethal chain using that thick, muscled wrist with just the perfect snapping motion he's practiced until it is part of him making the chain uncoil and strike like a giant steel snake whipping out of his pocket to split his skull with a near silent strike as you might split a grapefruit and even before he involuntarily screams a deathscream and pitches forward Danny is hurting the chain out throwing it with all his force hearing a scream in Vietnamese as in a blur the black tractor chain snakewhips into the fifth man blinding him in a powerful, fierce, smacking wet bloodsmear of a steel bolo knocking him over on his back as Danny squeezes the trigger of the M-60 blasting a searing, exploding stream of jacketed slugs into the fourth and then the third soldier and missing the others as he falls backward in his carefully timed drop pulling that huge left hand with the tautly drawn wires wrapped around his leather glove in a massive jerk of arm and body weight just as the soldiers raise their weapons to fire and a huge, battering ram of blasts so closely in sync they sound like a bomb going off rips apart the night booming through the quiet of the jungle in a hot blinding storm of razor shrapnel and human offal and bone chip and viscera flying apart and painting the trees with another invisible layer of black, sticky wetness all in a deafening roar of exploding charges that leaves Danny on the ground still holding the master wires and an empty M-60 and he shakes off the concussion like a big Newfoundland shaking off water and struggles to pull himself up to his feet his ears stinging his head full of cobwebs and flashing stars.

  He lets go of the wires and the machine gun, dropping them without knowing it moving faster than anyone alive has ever seen him move with the bowie fighting knife out and in his hand hoping that one of them will still be breathing so he can take the heart then, oh, yes—still live don't die yet—all wild and insane with his surging red pressure cooker of a kill hunger blowing and overflowing and hungering for the taste of live human hearts again.

  There was once a time when Danny hated messy kills, nor would he even use a blade. But times lie. And now, unseen by human eyes, fresh hot blood drips from the trees like teardrops.

  "I'm winning hearts and minds," he mutters out loud, and he slashes with the massive fighting bowie, "but I'm leaving the minds and taking the hearts, leaving the minds, taking the hearts."

  As the dripping trees witness the act of madness Danny Boy hears the delicious, nourishing nurturing screams of the snake man echoing there in the darkness and the

  "AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" of the blinded snake man resounds and the thing grins and feasts.

  When he awoke in RY7/INLET 20 he was ravenously hungry and wolfed down the four cold tacos remaining from the two dozen he'd picked up the night before. He crammed the food into his mouth, devouring the congealed, greasy meat and cheese, bits of lettuce and broken shell and juice dripping from his whiskery chin, and washed it all down with tepid water from a half-gallon milk jug. His huge, obvoluted gut made a gurgling noise as it accepted the appetizer and he promised himself a big breakfast soon. But first he had the cold feeling inside and there was work he must do.

  He checked his arsenal and supplies methodically but somewhere inside his head he was still inside the dream. The ambush was as vivid in his mind as if it had actually taken place last night and he could still taste the salty, mouth-watering richness of the hearts, and smell the smoky, hot copper aroma of cordite, pepsin, freshly spilled intestines, the tastes and the smells of unspeakable carnage so pleasurable to him now.

  But it was more than sweet memories for Daniel. The ambush had been dreamed for a reason. And as he checked the arsenal it was with a sense of urgency and a perception of shadows drawing near. There were only five of the stolen claymores left. No matter. He would make do with four, he needed one for another plan he was about to spring, but with the dynamite he'd taken from a construction site it would suffice for what he wanted to do. Between the firecrackers and the pies he'd be able to arrange a suitable surprise party for the guests he was expecting.

  Chaingang and the flames

  It was not that Daniel was consciously aware of intruders coming. There was no isolated warning that flashed inside his head saying enemy approaching. It was only a sudden necessity for preparedness. An inner signal of some kind that prodded his bulk to move and do it quickly. On some level he sensed the proximity of danger.

  As a physical precognate, that rarest of the presentient beings, these paranormal warning signals did something else. They forced him onto a plateau of concentration unknown to normal humans. The fierceness and single-mindedness of his powers of directed attention were beyond the level of understanding. They allowed him to compartmentalize his vision, isolate focus, refine scent, sound, vista. They sharpened his intuition and perception, honed his skills and abilities and tactile senses. The closest thing might be the ninja who would sit with his master in a closed and darkened room, sitting silently for hours waiting for sensei to drop a pin, listening to hear the fall of the tiny pin, concentrating so fiercely on that one sound, eyes closed, waiting for that jarring crashing metallic loudness amplified by sheer will.

  As he prepared his ambush for whatever was coming Chaingang concentrated in a scary effluence of laserlike will and awesome power. No human creature on earth was
so self-centered, in the true definition of the term, than Daniel was when the warning signals tingled. A doctor in the program at Marion had identified it but mislabeled the phenomenon.

  He half jokingly told a colleague, "When you're that fat; your girth becomes the physical center of the earth and all decisions radiate out geo-centrically." They laughed because it sounded humorous in the context of their discussion but even as an exaggeration the identification of the core element glittered. The gift of the physical precognate was beyond ordinary identifications. Whatever name you applied to the supernormal power behind Daniel Bunkowski's presentience, you knew there was no joking about the frightening acuteness or the absolute pernicious resolve that guided him on a level where science had only begun to probe.

  He was truly his own center. He was a human data-processing tool eating raw fact and observation, storehousing experiences, however deleterious, as a kind of pilot survey for future action, relating all movement and change and occurrence to the position of his own person in that part of the universe that touched his existence, measuring the changing data by an assessment of threat, time and space variables, and factoring all possible predictables. Noxious, hateful, even evil—yes. But brilliantly centered and incandescently deadly.

  He sensed the necessity for speed now and he moved with surprising speed and agility. Laying out the rough elements first, propelling his great bulk through the pipes and making sure that his earlier work had been concealed from any prying eyes. Working only with the light of a powerful lantern's beam, he rigged his grenade ambush, a variation from "field expedient" materials . . . wire, cable, det cord, cannon fuse, stolen blasters, leads, igniters, tucking his traps out of sight in the manner of the best professional hunters. Then, coming down to the crucial time, carefully connecting the detonation devices to the various charges. Hand movements steady, precise, astonishingly sure, the huge cigarlike fingers connecting the explosive with a jeweler's delicacy.