Butcher

by Rex Miller

  Had he been driving when the wheel of whirling white light tightened into a shaft of brightness that short-circuited his surge suppressors, overloaded his mainframe, and transported him back inside?

  He dreamed he was inside looking out, but instead of towering walls, rolls of razor wire, and sharpshooters, he sees a distant highway billboard from another state, the state of misery: Southeast Missouri Farmers Have A Friend At Security Trust.

  The haywire computer sees it in his mind, registers the word security, and scans the words of a forgotten manual:

  “Possessing no offensive capability patrols must rely extensively upon security measures, both administrative and tactical."

  (1.) En route to area of operations: false landings, feints, and circuitous routes.

  This eludes him.

  (2.) In objective area: proper organization for movement, cover, concealment, camouflage; light, noise, and odor discipline.

  He tried to force a fart and could not.

  Odor discipline. He had practiced the martial technique known as the Breath of Death for many years, as it was particularly well suited to a man kept chained, manacled, and in a biter mask. He had learned controlled halitotic/periodontic-type exhalation, and various expectoration techniques.

  Every con in the Max, D Seg, had his own handcuff key. There was a guy who made them for dust, a pro who ran a metal lathe and could turn out a tiny steel key that would pop a Teflon Smith & Wesson set quickly as you could say it. Bunkowski had one fashioned out of hard plastic that he carried in his stinking hidey-hole crease under the blubber that overhung his groin.

  Chaingang allowed a blow to knock him to the cement floor where he released the key and palmed it. He'd practiced with the black box on a thousand times, and Spanish was getting so worked up he could have done anything with his paws so long as they were behind his back.

  When everything was in place and Rodriguez was catching his breath, Chaingang made his move. His brain held another fragment of gold: something he'd overheard about Captain Lawler and one of the cons, but he switched it to Rodriguez's sixteen-year-old sister, and, with the biter off, blood dripping into his mouth, he croaked out what the boss bull had done one day while he was strip searching her.

  Spanish lost his head and began punching wildly at the handcuffed man. Chaingang took what he had to, and allowed the tiny piece of plastic straw to drop into position from where he'd held it during the rain of vicious head blows. It was loaded with a fleshette made of melted sprue and feathered in rodent hair. Chaingang had personally eaten the mouse that he'd used for the fletching.

  Summoning up the Breath of Death from the center of his guts, hauling an immense tubful of air into the lungs with such force that it also caused his testicles to ascend, he spat the miniature dart into the left eye of Spanish Rodriguez, coming after him like an enraged rhino, Chaingang Bunkowski—loose! Immobilizing the guard in a reversed skein of cuffs and restraints.

  He had no intention of killing the man. No, he wanted to keep this boy alive. He knew the kind of dues that would be paid when they had to tell Dr. Norman his boy had broken out again. Shit rolls downhill, and Rodriguez would be in line for all of it.

  Other details of the escape blurred.

  There'd been another major piece of luck. The guy on the D Seg gate had been there about ten minutes, a transfer from the infirmary over on minimum security side, and what with one thing and another, Bunkowski made it to the outside once again. Slick as Big Mr. Dick.

  Chaingang had stolen a car.

  Now, hidden in deep weeds, his brain malfunctioning, his enormous poundage shook with the tremors of fever and shock.

  The diminutive Latino guard had hit him many times, using things that would addle, but that would not break the skin.

  The stolen car came in and out of view, racing across his mindscreen. He began to remember—to really remember for the first time.

  The beating from the guard was two, three years back in time. It held no relevance. He hadn't escaped, and there was no escape now. With Dr. Norman's technology Chaingang lived in a perpetual prison. Even through the pain he could feel the implant back in the rolls of fat that cushioned his skull and unique brain. They controlled him, Norman and the others, by means of an implanted locator.

  His hearing popped in and out as if he were experiencing pressurizing and depressurizing aboard an aircraft or submarine, and, similarly, the car roared into view again. What was it about that car?

  Bunkowski concentrated fiercely and saw the other car coming. He'd been in Kansas City, fucking Kansas City! The mindscreen fed him his map, fighting for clarity of recall: I-70 east for two hundred fifty-two miles from K.C. to St. Louis. I-64 east to I-57. Then on to Marion for his rendezvous with Dr. Norman. But in St. Louis, where construction had detoured all the major roads, he'd somehow found his itinerary bollixed by the rerouting, and he was southbound on I-55 suddenly, when he noticed a light bar on the roof of the vehicle two cars behind, and no legal place to turn, without exiting into a knotted jumble of crowded exit lanes, underpasses, overpasses, and who-knows-what impasses. He was doing the speed limit plus two. He went around a car, the cop went around a car. He became ultra-cautious, and by the time the heat turned onto an exit lane he was too far south to go back.

  The map was a familiar one. He'd played in killing fields in Missouri's hinterlands once before, in Waterton, and he decided to hang tough on 55 until he could cross the river, then head back over to 57 and up to Marion. He was looking at his map, in fact, when the drunk driver in the Olds 98 swung out into his lane. Not even Chaingang's lightning hand-to-eye coordination was quick enough to swerve completely out of harm's way, and the two cars slamdanced off the interstate, rolling, bouncing, crashing; steel, glass, plastic, fiberglass crumpling, shattering, tearing ass every which way.

  Chaingang remembered lights on and off, a mob of hands lifting, hearing himself laugh as he was dropped rudely, coming to in a cramped ambulance, and he recalled parts of the memory coming back, earlier, bass-ackwards and out of kilter.

  He remembered being offloaded. Many hands. Curses. Jokes about dead weight, “eat your Wheaties,” paramedic banter—something about him being his own driver's-side air bag.

  There was food, garbage so disgusting even a gourmand with a penchant for the odd, uncooked pulmonary artery was repelled. He recalled thinking what the cops would do as soon as they I.D.'d him; relived the cool air on his rear rotundities as he waddled through a hallway of protesting voices; recollected his impromptu exfiltration. A purloined ride, cramped of course, minutes or hours of driving while he fought against blacking out, and then, much later, regaining consciousness.

  But for the first time in battered memory there was a desire that burned even more than hunger. At least hunger for the ordinary fast-food sustenance. The image of the sissy doctor who was at the root of all his troubles was an itch he couldn't yet reach. As he recuperated he would think on the sissy and come up with something appropriate. He never underestimated enemies, however; Chaingang was a planner.

  There were those within the penal system and the tentacles of intelligence, the military, and law-enforcement communities, who seemingly answered to no one. Norman appeared to be such an individual, at least on the level of their quasi-scientist/guinea-pig relationship.

  Inside Marion there were whispers of ties to DDI, CIA, other national security outfits. Bunkowski was part of the far stranger truth. In the mid ‘60s, Norman had been recruited by a component of the mil-intel network then calling itself the Special Advisory Unit/Combined Operations Group. Just who they advised was never totally clear, but for a brief time USMACVSAUCOG, their full nomenclature, was the lash-up responsible for “sensitive wet ops in Southeast Asia.” Assassinations and terror campaigns run against Laos and Cambodia “across the fence"—illegal ops. It meant clandestine executions of South Viets, allies, at least on paper, whom someone had marked bad. It meant trips north into the Z and beyond, hazardous sanctions r
equiring “sanitized” (untraceable, unidentifiable, unattributable) bods. The most expendable form of covert grunts undertook actions so bizarre and surreal that the nature of the missions could never be made public. A stateside school for sanctioned killers had been one of the wet dreams that almost eventuated.

  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.

  42

  The 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.