Chaingang

27

NORTH OF WATERTON

Doyle Genneret, the belligerent, rich, and ruthless “cattle rancher” who was the owner of the “World-famous Genneret Ranch and Exotic Animal Farm,” was in the main office with a bookkeeper, Sally Peebles, and his hirsute foreman, Dean Seabaugh.

Genneret's background had been in livestock and farm machinery. He'd made a killing in the market and sensed an undeveloped category of stock sales: “exotics.” Giraffes, camels, lions, tigers, bears, kangaroos. “Lordee!” he was fond of saying. “If you don't see it here, it don't shit."

His main customers were farm boys who wanted to show off for a good year in wheat, or play one-up against the neighbors, something for the grandkids to ooh and ah over. He was aware that a lot of these old boys were turning around and selling exotics themselves, some of them were in the breeding game. But he didn't mind—he knew what the market could stand, and it was fat and juicy. You could turn on the radio or the TV and hear what hogs was a-bringing', but they didn't have a quote on leopards or honey bears. He knew where the roof was on the prices—there flat wasn't one.

The primary cash producer was the Genneret auction, a monthly “Exotic Animal, Livestock, Gun Show and Auction."

They'd had a few problems with some of them humane society dingbats, but nothing to worry over. He didn't even call ‘em animals, he called ‘em his “stuff.” He kept his stuff in a series of twenty-three overcrowded barns and corrals which required a staff of nearly two dozen hands. More when he went on the road with an exhibit.

His rule of thumb for hiring was simple: you got to be smarter than the stuff. Dean Seabaugh, his foreman was a like mind. He was infamous, even on the ranch, for having whipped a lion to death. He has a slight temper. He shared the boss's view that if them animal rights assholes want to worry about something, “let ‘em go take a tour through the freakin’ slaughterhouse. Whey do they think them streaks, ‘n’ belts, ‘n’ shoes ‘n’ crap come from?"

Magic Silo had come to the edge of the Genneret property line and flashed on a tubular opening in the thick, junglelike wooded area. His storehouse retained the images of masses of gigantic verticillate leaves, looped and whorled like huge fingerprints, that papered the walls of the jungle conduits similar to this one.

He looked closely. Something nudged him. Déjà vu? The floor bore the signs of trail. He'd seen incredible “hardballs” inside natural tubes such as this one, ceilings with precisely carpentered dink bamboo. He touched a great leaf with a midrib like the rigid blade of an epee and saw his sign.

Saw the man-tracks the way he'd spotted trip wires and traps and deadfalls—saw the sign, felt the presence of some human intrusion. He, Daniel, was the grandmaster of concealment. Nobody could track a human being like him. He read sign in bright moonlight—but how?

He froze. Chilled those vital signs. Waited. Listening. Reaching out for the enemy who was somewhere near. Would the Genneret outfit have a security unit? At night? Working the woods?

He remained very still for a long period—motionless—barely breathing. He heard something and his face broke into a wide and dangerous grin. Slowly he eased into the pipeline, with the focused concentration that had kept him alive so long, moving through the shadows.

The Genneret outfit was forgotten the instant he saw the watcher and identified him. The farm and the cruel men would have provided him with a smorgasbord of wildly delicious opportunities. Another time—perhaps.

When he saw the movement in deep shadow, he froze again. The huge links of the yard-long, friction-taped killing chain dangled at arm's length.

Now he knew what the sound of the human voice he'd heard represented; it was a watcher whispering into some kind of microphone. A headset thing, maybe, with a transparent tube-type mouthpiece and connected earplug.

“Negative,” he heard the shadowman whisper, “Blue Leader, I do not have a visual.” Chaingang moved forward as the man spoke into his tiny plastic mike, the powerful right arm in motion as he moved, the massive tractor-strength chain moving through the air, propelled by a wrist and forearm and upper bicep of steel, a blur of snaking chain whirling into the deep shadow and connecting.

The chain made more noise crashing into the bushes than the man did falling. Only a hard splat, an off of air, a relatively quiet clump of dead weight—two hundred pounds plus machine gun—falling in a crumpled heap, marked the kill. It was a far more merciful extermination than Bunkowski would have been preferred, but this was no auction house security guard. This was one of them—the invisible eyes. If they were this close, and in the numbers that they would have to be, logic dictated that he expedite his plan's final stages.

He checked the fallen man for life signs. Quickly searched for ID and found neither vital signs nor identification. The weapon was ID enough. That and the commo gear. He was very still again, listening, his sensors scanning for the presence of a partner.

Satisfied after several moments, he eased his great bulk down to the ground beside the man, carefully inserting the earpiece, which he'd found near the watcher's bloodied head. The umbilical cord that connected the headset to the guts of the radio apparatus was too short to facilitate much slack, but with his head beside the inert man's, he was able to insert the earplug.

There was nothing. He waited. As the seconds ticked by, he wondered if they had decided to move in and take him. Were they though with him now? Had he fulfilled his function? Was this experiment or operation now to be aborted with extreme prejudice?

“Blue Leader to Blue Tracker Five—do you read, over?” He grinned into the dark silence, stifling a coughing explosion of mirth. He could utter words now, and the watchers would hear him. What of it?

“Blue Leader, this is Blue Tracker, did Five confirm a visual on Side Show?” The other voice was less clear, but he could hear it.

“Uh—Negative, Blue Tracker, stand by one. Blue Tracker Five, do you copy this transmission? Over."

Chaingang removed the small earpiece and took the high-impact microphone between his thumb and index finger and squeezed. Crunch!

He silently backtracked his way through the pipeline to his vehicle, fighting to keep a damper on his rage, but boiling with irritation at having his plans for Mr. Genneret so rudely interrupted.

Chaingang was gone. Inside the office of the show and auction company, mean Dean Seabaugh, Sally Peebles, and Doyle Genneret shuffled papers and talked of a workaday things, oblivious to their luck. They should have run to their wheels, driven to the nearest airport, and chartered the first thing that would fly them to Vegas.

Lady luck was smiling on them this night. They'd come this close to riding the Genneret Exotic Animal, Livestock, Gun Show and Auction on the midnight red-eye straight to hell.

There are those to whom solitary confinement, isolation, and the horrors of restricted movement would be a nightmare. Others, perhaps, might find solace in the heart of private darkness. If it is all you have know, your escape can be a kind of exquisite pleasure—even the severe challenge of the biter.

He is wonderfully alone now, and the night is chill, but he relishes the feel of it on his enormous body and stands—nude and gigantic—the cold breeze somehow pleasant as it cools his skin. He thinks about monkeys. The lights in the distance twinkle and beckon, as his mindscreen scans poisons and toxic drugs in preparation for John Wayne Vodrey, the amputator of children's pets.

What care he will manifest in his application of extended pain to Mr. Vodrey. Curare, Pavulon, Succinycholine, and Venticol all cross his field of thought. Paralysis, respiratory malfunction, pain enhancement, each widen the travesty of a smile that distorts his doughy face.

Who is this strange, poor, genius, idiot, clown, killer, animal lover, people hater? Is he Lucifer, Gilles de Rais, Iago, or Frankenstein's monster? Whoever he is—he can hate. God on high, how can he hate! To him you are less than a microscopic mote, less than the smallest, slimiest elongate, less than a whiff of puke-stick, less than frog-spit on stagnant water, less than the sum of your parts which he will cheerfully render into blobs, clots, gouts, of bloody clabber and gure-deck. So imagine, if you will, how much he feel about Mr. Vodrey?

No evil will suffice. No screaming, splatter-drenched revenge will begin to palliate, abate, or atone. He cannot show Jones Wayne Vodrey the blunt chain-kiss of his great disdain or the Poe-fear of premature burial (paralyzed by rare poison and made insane by drug-enhanced awareness of pain) and the awful anticipation of the unknown. But he will come up with something.

Having identified the problem, his unique mind will collate and assess the product stored, produce a working hypothesis, test and reassess, forming in the anomaly that is his cerebral cortex a procedure and course of action.

Even now as he examines data retrieval, something tingles on his skin. Perhaps it is only the cool of the November night on his vast nakedness. As always, he does not ignore the pinpricks that have touched him.

He shivers as a leisurely lizardly slithery leathery feathery thing causes him to shudder in the darkness, while he watches the Tinytown lights across the flat field.

From the road one can see nothing, but from behind the ruins of the sharecropper shack—from the empty field—one would see the bright stab of light in the mouth of the thing, and know that a hot fire burned in the belly of the beast. It scared his innards with the unexpected intensity of the sensation that something, a factor out of his grasp and beyond his field of vision, was wrong.

Travel down Whitetail Road far enough in a meandering northwesterly direction, circling around the pond and through the surrounding cotton fields to the northwest, and you come to 771, a county blacktop that runs back toward the river. Right before you hit Market Road there's a little job to the right, nothing more than a gravel run, and it will take you through a pit stop known locally as Finch Hollow.

There's a café and general store that doubles as the post office drawer for the thirty or so inhabitants of the tiny farm community, a gas station, a feed-and-seed operation, and an out-of-the-way pay phone located over by an MFA oil sign.

The same phone had been used the day before by a “Mr. Norman of General Discount Stores, calling from Scottsville, Kentucky.” He had reserved a room at the Tennessee Motor Courts of Maysburg, for their sales manager, “Mr. Conway.” They thought he would be checking in within the next couple of days. They'd call and cancel if he was going to be late. “He'll bill it to his Visa or MasterCard,” the sissified voice of Mr. Norman proclaims to the motel clerk. The line rang.

“Tennessee Motor Courts, Good Evening."

“Good Evening. This is Mr. Conway. I believe my company made a reservation for me—General Discount in Scottsville, Kentucky?” The rumbling basso profundo resonated in the motel clerk's ears.

“One moment, sir. Yes. We have your reservation."

“Well, I'm sorry. I'm not going to be able to get there for a couple of days. I'd like to change my reservation accordingly. May I do so?"

“You certainly may. Any how long will you be staying with us?"

“Just one evening, the way it looks now. Say, listen, I've got a package that I've had forwarded to me there at your motel. And I'm afraid it's going to get there before I will. Is that going to cause a problem?"

“No, I don't think so. I'll make sure the other clerks on duty know that a package will be coming for you, and we'll just hold it at the front desk for you. Okay?"

“I appreciate that. Thanks. That'll be a big help."

“The package is coming addressed to you here?"

“Yes. It's from a clothing store out East, East Coast Big and Tall. And I also have a fellow sending over some petty cash, which I would like the front desk to hold for me—the reason I'm doing that, the package is being delivered by taxi cab, and I want the clerk to pay the driver out of my cash envelope. Can that be arranged?"

“Well...” The clerk was suddenly on his guard. They'd never had to do anything like this before, and he wasn't sure. “I'd have to ask my manager."

“Listen—that's fine—but there's no problem. It's very simple. You'll be getting an envelope in tomorrow's mail, and I'll check back by phone to make sure the cash is on hand. It has fifty dollars inside—in cash. I doubt if the cab driver will charge more than twenty dollars, and I want to give him a least twenty dollars for a tip...” the deep voice rumbled on, confusing the clerk with a stream of details. The clerk had to break away twice to answer calls and deal with the desk traffic.

During the telephone call the name Conway and General Discount Stores became identifiable in the clerk's mind. When they finally saw the envelope with the return address “Mr. W. Conway, Scottsville, Kentucky,” with the big red GDS logo, it would all be an official paid-for transaction. Nothing solves problems like crisp new ten-dollar bills and corporate name. The motel would “sell” the transaction, in turn, to a taxi driver who would be asked to pick up ad deliver a package that had arrived in care of general deliver.

The cab driver would already have his cash in hand. If he was asked to leave a package atop a certain pay telephone kiosk or booth, he might think it weird, but he would be likely to comply. Mr. Conway was going to be born again—born out of the box—and no one would see the delivery.

Mr. Conway, who would materialize at some far-flung location, might or might not remember to cancel his reservation at the Tennessee Motor Courts of Maysburg. And the busy clerks would never think it a bit odd that the envelope containing fifty dollars cash had been postmarked “Finch Hollow, Missouri."

Nor would they know that the corporate envelope was one of several that had been retrieved from the bottom of a company dumpster.