Slice

ONE MILE FROM I-57

He drove through the congested traffic with a tenth of his mind, not even that, a fraction of his brain channeled on what he was seeing with his eyes and the rest of him out on some faraway level.

He noise in the car was sufficiently disconcerting that it might have disturbed some lesser being. The radio was blasting a big-beat tune straight from the heart of old time rock-'n-roll—thumping, toe-tapping, undeniable kind of music—and it was the sort of non-formula rock that came from the most real point on the musical compass forcing the listener to either love it or leave it. You had to get with it or get away from it. You couldn't be indifferent. Chaingang was the exception. It didn't exist for him.

The girl on the seat beside him was running her mouth as she always did, and with perhaps the bottom hundredth of his awareness he was able to follow some vague semblance of her meandering tale of woe about a jealous suitor who had followed her everywhere, and he would hear snatches of her voice pop in and out of his consciousness.

“...him if he kept following me around I'd have to get the law on him and he said okay, but then when I went to...” And getting enough of a sense of it that he knew it was of no danger to him, nothing he had to correct or stifle or steer back on track, and though for many it would have been disconcerting or annoying to the point of distraction, to him it was less than the buzzing of a fly. He found her voice somewhat pleasant.

She spoke in a kind of babyish, controlled, soft-spoken way that made a person want to lean forward and listen until he realized she wasn't saying anything of importance.

“...and she said he'd been over at her house parked outside waiting for me for about two hours and so I said to her that if he ever—” It was sort of like chewing gum with words, a reflexive thing some people have in the proximity of others; a need to constantly fill anything resembling quiet with noise. The sportscaster syndrome: the need to keep talking.

Daniel found the girl's voice bearable. He liked the fact that it was soft and always respectful and low in volume so that his powers of concentration could easily tune it out. In a way he supposed that it was better she had plenty to say to him, because they would be together a lot and he had absolutely nothing to say to her. Nothing. They had a grand total of zero in common. He might have come down from Mars for all he was able to relate to her world of mundane troubles and nothingness.

“...when they came and they just warned him and a’ course he told them he hadn't been following me, which was nothing but a lot of lies, and so me next time he called me up I just said...” A lulling kind of not unpleasant, soft, background noise to let him know she was still alive and functioning beside him.

He could not look at the traffic without being amazed by it. It fascinated him, so alien the sight of masses of human beings was to his nature. What were they all thinking? Where were they all headed? A dirty, long-unwashed, grimy gray used car of some kind swerved into the lane immediately in front of him. Daddy and Mommy, with a kid between them. Three more in the back seat and hanging out the windows waving and laughing and screaming maniacally like a family of chimps. God, how he detested the sight of them. A family “having fun.” It pleased him greatly to think in that instant how close they all were to death. They were a whim away from the Reaper.

How easy it would be for him to take them out. He was so experienced at it, he knew all the tricks of the trade, the techniques to put people at his mercy to lead them by the nose into the dark places where they could cry for help at the top of their lungs to no avail, where no prying eyes could see the horrors they would be subjected to in their closing minutes—or hours, if he was lucky.

His experience at this was unparalleled. He knew just in that second, all the dangers, all the possible permutations, the accidentals, serendipitous happenstances, fortuitous lucky breaks that might save them. He knew by instinct and lust and long, long experience how to make that quick, instant assessment of their level of threat to him.

And in that fleeting second, as he looked at the screaming monkees and the weary Ma and Pa with their brood in the old car, even a lawn-mower handle or something protruding from the filthy trunk lid which was tied down and flopping back and forth as the old car bounced along, in a big hurry to what? Go mow their lawn? They fascinated him. What could they be thinking, these monkees.

How easy it would be for him to tap their bumper, and the twine would break and the lawn mower would do whatever it would do and the trunk lid would pop up and the man would panic and brake and pull over and Chain would be on top of them in a heartbeat. And instinctively his mind planned a scheme whereby he could insert himself into their peaceful, nothing, alien lives. Saw their monkee reveries apart with a nasty, serrated steel edge. Hammer into their plans and boring lives of predictability with a fury that would leave them bloodied and screaming from pain and terror. Rip apart their lawn-mower lives of weed-eating, water-sliding, tractor-pulling ignorance and blissful stupor. Make them beg for merciful death to take them under. And the heat of the fantasy kindled an old familiar hunger.