Chaingang

by Rex Miller

  He could have dropped down the bank and nudged this pitiful skin-sack of nothing into the river with no effort, and the corpse might float a good distance before some fisherman would gag on his Budweiser and notify the authorities. He patted the big canvas pocket for his chain and recalled that it was somewhere on the bank behind him.

  Perhaps it would be better to bring the body back up the embankment and just stuff him down in this hole where he was now sitting. He could tamp in the sides of the hole, and find some broken pieces of slab to drop on the impromptu grave.

  Cottonwoods, ash, and willows grew out of the riverbank. Backwater marks of tide, slime, and flotsam had written history in the bark of the mighty trees. He could select one of the younger trees and fell it with his big fighting bowie. He could see himself bringing down a small tree with a few angry chops, swinging a steel-muscled arm that wielded a blade sharp enough to sever hanging one-inch hemp. He'd checked the blade when he first got loose, and it had been recently honed. It was razor-sharp. They'd not only given him his old survival tools and weapons, they'd upgraded his munitions. Why? He didn't buy any of Dr. Norman's explanation for a moment. Why had the monkey people set him free with weapons?

  He stood up and was grateful not to feel any dizziness, but suddenly the old man wasn't worth planting. He had the strangest sensation as he went back up the bank to retrieve his chain: There was a sense of something touching him—a thing he could not begin to isolate, much less identify. He only knew that the idea of killing the old bum was not one that gave him pleasure. He gathered up his load and departed, but as he made his way through the slabs, keeping to the river, being careful not to leave an obvious trail, he thought about the old geezer, remembering the way he'd been kind to him. He found it all decidedly uncomfortable.

  By dark he'd found another suitable spot and, after stuffing himself on freeze-dried rations, had slept soundly and uneventfully, sleeping for ten hours. When he woke up he was starving for something he could sink his teeth into, but except for slight soreness, he felt his powers returning.

  He resumed his journey along the edge of the river slabs, heading in the direction of the waterfront place called Butchie's. It was the nearest point of interest according to the map. His duffel and weapons cases felt comparatively light—which was a good sign.

  Dr. Norman's dossier played inside his head:

  “Police removed nine pit bulls from an establishment on Willow River Road ... animals had been abused.” There was a lot more, but he allowed his mind to shut his systems down as he walked. He would turn it back on when he reached Butchie Sutter's, letting it enrage him and course through his system in the manner of poison.

  The rage would wash over him like a hot red tide, and he would abuse Butchie Sutter, he thought, smiling ferociously. One of his big boots stepped over a pile of drift at the edge of the field he had just crossed, and he visualized the face of the man in the dossier as he stepped down into pulpy, squishy-soft log fungus, crushing it the way he would crush a face. He stomped the log into wood slime, and it glowed under his boots with the potency of poisonous mushrooms.

  He read an image in the wet slime, much the same as one would read an omen. Butchie, for his dog crimes, would be left with less than sickly phosphorescence for a human face.

  Chaingang Bunkowski was already a veteran of juvey incarceration when he entered the prison system for the first time as an adult. At 475 pounds, over six feet seven, the look of him alone was unique. But then—to look inside the mind of Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was to look into the frightening darkness of a creature who was both man and monster.

  Dr. Norman had chanced upon his workup sheets, drawn by the outsize statistics and his own clinical needs of the moment. He spoon-fed his special computers the results of the quotient and behavior tests, profiles of biochemical and psychological reactions, the measurements of the unique appetites and weird metabolics, and gathered in the results like golden treasure.

  Although it was marginally possible that the power of this man's mind was such he was able to pretend to be in a drugged, hypnotic state, there was a sufficient body of evidence from repeated interviews, interrogations, debriefings, examinations, and drug-and-hypnosis sessions that confirmed Daniel had killed more persons than any other living human being.

  His own best guess had been “over four hundred, maybe,” a rumbled estimate from the heart of a Pentothal-induced chat, which had given rise to the grapevine legend that he'd taken a life for every pound of his weight.

  Oh, if only Dr. Norman could have had Daniel for study for, say, ten years without interruption. Imagine the possibility of serious breakthroughs! Daniel was the ultimate lab animal.

  Aspects of the individual's behavioristics begged to be probed. How, for just one example, had he consistently evaded authorities for such an extended period, murdering wantonly and—at first glance—randomly, without thought of being captured?

  What were the keys to Daniel's presentience? Was he, as the doctor postulated, a physical precognate whose childhood horrors had produced the ultimate death-dealing machine?

  There was little question, after drug-induced hypnosis sessions, that the insatiable hunger that compelled him to commit the most vile acts of mutilation and murder had been fed and nurtured by his childhood and adolescence.

  Daniel feared and hated his vicious “stepfather,” who left him locked in pitch-black closets for days at a time, who chained him into a suffocatingly hot punishment box, bringing the little boy out only to feed, water, or abuse him, beating him with fists, electrical cord, rubber hose, torturing him with matches, wire hangers, a soldering iron, anything that would inflict sudden and excruciating pain. These were the things that had given birth to Chaingang Bunkowski.

  The will to survive had been another formative element. Most abused children, when faced with such a degree of relentless abuse, might wish that they were dead. But something in Daniel's makeup made him fight to survive. Dr. Norman thought it was raw hatred mixed with terror. Locked in total darkness, fearing for his life and for the life of his puppy imprisoned beside him in that stinking, urine-filled closet, the boy had stepped out of this imminent danger and into another room.

  The door was inside the room of his imagination, where he had so often gone to fantasize, but there had been another door inside this room, and somehow he had learned—in a moment of screaming terror—how to unlock it.

  Inside this room within a room, all things were possible: the slowing and stilling of the vital signs, the breath of death, will over matter, eidetic recall, mental photography, the acceptance and knowing of premonitions, the pathway to superhuman strength.

  But in this secret room he'd also learned brutal things: how to plumb the depths of abject hatred, and to feed on unspeakable desires that had shaped the thing they called Chaingang.

  The beast—bigger, stronger, smarter than any adversary—still had the mental and emotional equilibrium of a child. He was a child who could only trust another animal “like him.” A dog, in fact, had been the only thing that had ever shown him love.

  If you should abuse a dog, or a cat, or any animal, and he sees you—this towering behemoth of hatred and madness—God help you. You are dead. The only question is—how slow will be your dying. How much screaming will he want to hear as he pays his childhood torturer back, again and again? What grand opera of pain will satisfy him this time?

  From where he is hidden in the trees, his first glimpse of the river shack called Butchie's registers an immediate prickling, tingling feeling on the back of his hairy, steel-muscled forearms and shoulders. That initial vision calls up the dossier photograph again, and the momentary feeling he experiences, which he knows is called paresthesia, a creeping sensation felt on the skin that has no objective cause, is often the precursor to his most extreme violence triggers.

  He hears a barking dog and wills it back down, to sit and burble on hold, feeling the ambience of the place as the bad vibes wash over him.<
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  Graceful cypress boughs, river oak, and huge cottonwood trees bend their leaves out over the water in the direction of the morning sun.

  If Daniel Bunkowski stepped into the tree line, it is another thing that steps out now, moving in a brisk and purposeful waddle in the direction of the back door of the shack. This back-door man smells richly of open fields, and sweat, and something else. An ordurous thing that will resist identification.

  He sees the watchdog and lets the red tide pour through his senses. A starving, badly mangled pit bull, short-chained to the corner of the shack, barks at him. He will deal with it later. He doesn't let himself look at it. He has his syringe kit in the duffel bag. If the monkeys have run true to form, they will have replaced the animal tranquilizers he always carried prior to his incarceration. He drops his load a few feet from the building, and a fist like the business end of a huge sledgehammer pounds on the back door.

  Cursing inside.

  “We're closed till eleven,” a voice screeches from inside. Again. Hammer time.

  Curses. Movement. Slam of door. A woman, hair wild, face a snarl of anger and disarray.

  "...closed, goddammit! Don't you fuckin’ speak English?" Daring him to offend her.

  He tries to speak. To do what he normally does in such instances, which is to manipulate with his voice and speech. He is a master of the mumbled nonsense phrase, the double-talk aside that buys an extra moment of time from the unsuspecting.

  He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. The drugs, perhaps, or the long time in the hole—over two years since he was in the field like this. All these elements, combined with his rage, render him speechless. All he can do is roar and growl and it explodes right there and he is carefully chain-slamming her and waddling past her moving into the shack, moving quicker than anyone alive has ever seen him move, silently, a deadly killer who only wants one thing—to destroy! He opens a door ready to strike.

  Another starving dog! This one is muzzled. Their house pet, no doubt. These fucks. His rage is a blinding thing, and behind him a voice snarls, "Who the fuck are—” But this serious threat is negated as the bearded gutter face is split open, a yard of tractor-strength chain links smashing down at it, upside Butchie Sutter's ugliness. Nice ‘n’ easy, by Chaingang's standards.

  He goes through the shack. No more human filth. No more pit bulls. He turns. Goes back the way he came, getting his bag from beside the door, getting leather gloves, this and that. Dragging the woman into the main area of the barroom beside her employer.

  He finds identification. Connie Vizard is her name, William Sutter the oaf's handle. He binds the man's wrists in a wet bar towel, searching for things, people, goodies. He turns up a length of stout clotheline, tests its tensile strength, binds Butchie with a vengeance, stuffing another wet rag in the man's mouth.

  Gets bottles from behind the bar. The gasoline container from the back room. Pours, soaking Butchie and assorted rags, papers, flammable stuff. He wants Butchie awake when he lights him up.

  Examines both pit bulls again. Should he feed them? Then what? He checks his kit—he has the tranquilizer. He could knock them out, leave them at a vet's with money and a note. Both dogs look beyond help. He destroys them quickly, as humanely as he can.

  It angers him to do so, and he puts his silenced firearm back in the duffel and returns to the woman. Grabs her hair, pulls her face close to his. She is groggy but conscious when he tenses from the diaphragm and hauls up a monstrous regurgitation of foulness, belching residue of freeze-dried Long Rats, halitosis, and the clump of hot wild garlic he munched on the way to Butchie's, into the face of Ms. Vizard. She gags on the breath of death and he snaps her neck while Butchie struggles, showing them his disdain for them as he takes them out.

  He trails the last few droplets of gasoline to the door. Leaves. Outside he lights the matches and tosses them into the nearest trail of dripped gasoline, holding the door open to watch the fast tongue of flame shoot into the house toward the pile of burnables. The papers, rags, paint buckets, curtains, Butchie—the mound of soaked shit catches fire with an angry thwomp!

  He could be anywhere now as he moves away from the burning shack. The leaky rowboat and tippy dinghy at the crude pier could as easily be junks or sampans. Just another Zippoed hootch.

  Heading down through the waterfront woods that border Willow River Road, moving away from Slabtown, Daniel's face is a ferocious, crinkled smile. The air is crisp. The day is sunny. It is pleasant listening to the crackle of the flames. A good day to be alive.

  13

  WATERTON

  Royce Hawthorne felt like a ten-ton weight had been at least partially lifted from his shoulders. A weight in keys, actually, but it could have gone ten tons worth of bad.

  The special unit would have been proud. It was so typical of their ways. As he drove in search of Happy, the memories of the two nightmare years he'd spent “away from home” played in his head like bad dreams.

  Mary wondered if he'd been doing “detective work of some kind.” Sam telling her he'd joined the CIA. How could he tell anybody about what he'd been through? A world as far removed from the covert ops planners and need-to-know poli-sci majors of Langley as one could get. Yet, oddly, such a similar world, where case officers and informants and blackmail and twisted motives were a way of life.

  He shrugged off the thoughts. Nothing would spoil his mood. The “Package” was now wrapped. In the care of the United States postal system and—presumably—safe and sound. His sinuses were aching and he pulled over and did some snort. So good. Good for me. Good for you. Umm good. Feel good. Real good.

  Royce pulled off Quarry Road, northbound, and followed a dirt-bike trail for about half a mile. The roadhouse had been built to resemble a saloon in an old B-western: hitching posts, covered step-up porch, extended front wall, swinging doors—now permanently nailed open against the outer wall—and more bullet holes than a county road sign.

  Called “2 Daze 3 Knights,” this place had begun life as a gay bar for rough trade, drawing patrons from as far away as Memphis. But the isolated location and access made it the perfect biker bar, and the guys on the two-wheelers promptly took it away from the gays. Now it was where the people of color hung. Jamaicans, Cubans, Colombians—mostly Latinos frequented the roadhouse now, with an occasional black of two in their company. The original cutesy name had long since been deep-sixed, and the only name now was a large painted CANTINA over the entranceway.

  Royce made sure that Mary's dough was well hidden in the stash and he locked his ride, feeling very pale as he entered the bar with all those greenbacks in his pocket.

  Happy and Luis were at a table in the corner with two other men, in a heated discussion. Royce went to the end of the bar and nursed a tequila until Happy made eye contact. Royce nodded. The man got up, Luis beside him, and sauntered over to the bar, leaving the other two at the table.

  Happy, a.k.a. Fabio Ruiz, was twenty-something going on a hundred. Five feet one, but on a good day, Cuban heels with lifts brought him up to maybe five four. Long hair in a choppy, little-boy haircut that covered his forehead and most of his ears. Sulky mouth and cokey nose. A real hard-on.

  “Yo, homes. Ju a long way from Wallyworld.” They all laughed.

  “I hear ya."

  “So. Ju wanna cold one?” Happy's accent had thickened perceptibly.

  “I'm good. I brought something. You want it in here?"

  “Less see—whatchew brought me.” Luis Londoño was on the other side, and real close—Royce realized. If he came out with something in his hand they didn't like...

  “Here ya go.” He slid a thick package out of his pocket and into Happy's hand. Royce was surprised to see him casually open it right there. The guy behind the bar was making a show out of not looking anywhere near them.

  “Nnn-hm.” The man made a little two-note humming sound of satisfaction.

  “Happy?” Royce said in a quiet, hoarse voice, lowering it more and whispering, “I
got a dude—really moving for me, mano."

  “Uh-huh."

  “You know I'm for real now, huh?” He felt like everybody in the bar was looking at his back.

  “What's not to love?” it sounded like he said.

  “I can move serious weight, if you can set me up."

  “Whatchew call serious, amigo?"

  Royce whispered a number in the crow's wing of oily hair over his left ear. He could see the kilos tumble into place like cherries on a one-armed bandit.

  Happy made a little whistling sound. “Thass—"

  “Same quality."

  “—no prob-lemo."

  “How much you nail me for?"

  Happy did some mental math and whispered a figure in his ear. They haggled a little. Happy redid his math. Royce nodded, watching himself sell it in the mirror of the back-bar.

  “Let's do it, then,” he said.

  “Whatever makes everybody happy."

  “How soon?"

  “Whatever, bro. I set it up ASAP. Whatever it takes. All right?"

  “Hey, Happy,” he said, pushing it a little behind the cocaine, “I ain't no ounce-pouncer now, am I, señor?"

  “Chit no, jefe,” Happy laughed. “Ju drivin’ the heavy Chevy."

  They said their good-byes, slap-dapped, and Royce patted Luis on the back and left. It was like patting a large tombstone.

  “Hi, Royce. Come on in,” Mary told him, turning away when she saw who was at the door.

  “Thanks, hon. I owe you big,” he told her, handing her the envelope of cash.

  “Oh, sure,” she said, absentmindedly, but pleased to have her five thousand back. She glanced inside the envelope but didn't check it. “Any time.” She appeared to have no further curiosity about his bizarre loan.