Butcher

23

New Madrid Levee

He sees the white line through fever, aching jaw, tooth, squinting and hurtling through the night in purloined iron. The broken white line, the yellow line, something about the car. Probably its figurative heat. It was on a hot sheet, maybe that was it.

It held the day's heat like a kiln, and he breathes in stuffiness, keeping his conscious mind on track with whatever hard grit is left to him.

He does not remember wandering away from the car, nor the protective vibes that pushed him to seek cover. He will not recall camouflaging the ride or the force of concentration it took to persevere.

A huge, injured monster lies in thick woods, his superhuman life-support system working overtime to save him.

Illinois seems galaxies away. He is a dying man, drowning in deep, black water. The whirlpool pulls him back under before he can sort his situation out.

Just as Dr. Emil Shtolz was a monster, he is a monster. Daniel Bunkowski had killed, some said, more than any other living human, but some said that about the good doctor. Each had taken hundreds of lives. Shtolz might have won had the body count included animals.

Neither man had a normal conscience. Each considered himself to be far above rules or laws. Each had only disdain for mankind. Each man was, in his own way, of superior and, in fact, unmeasurably high intellect. Each had enormous talents. Each found pleasure in the act of mutilation. Each had murdered in terrible ways and performed the vilest acts imaginable.

The psychiatric bibles, the continually revised diagnostic statistical manuals, found ways to describe such men. They were “sick.” Such descriptions reflected society's lack of willingness to define, quantify, or even recognize, the existence of clinical evil. It underscored a massive oddity: many of the same human beings who believe in God refuse categorically to believe in the devil.

But perhaps there are good monsters as well as bad.

A clear image drifts past the battered memory banks: seven paramedics, cops, monkey men and women, straining to roll his dead weight onto a gurney. The barking noise that is somewhere on the audio scale between a loud lawnmower and a powerful outboard motor starting—the closest sound he makes to a human laugh—escapes his throat. Two of them drop their handholds in fear and this convulses him further, even though the result sends his immense bulk to the hard surface.

Black clouds of pain relent, he hears a siren wail, sees an unfamiliar vehicle roof He is crammed into an ambulance. The authorities have found him—had he not escaped? It must have been after the beating—his head roared and one eye was firmly shut. The muddled chronology is all too confusing. His monitors sign off.

The darkness puddles into dappled green and gold fuzztone. The wounded bear is curiously mortal feeling, trembling, but from neither fear nor trauma. Cold? Surely not. Time nudges a sticky inner clock and one hand ticks through coagulated fogsleep, moves the inert gigantus forward one square, back two.

"Are we awake?” A nurse, black as his mood, and wide as a living-room sofa, white teeth smiling. “You gots to eat. Keep up your strength, big boy!” This convulses the room and he hears several persons laughing. He studies a blur in front of him. “Eat, now,” she says, trying to poke something in his maw. He is ravenous and inhales the puny portion and part of her meaty hand and arm. He would like to barbecue her and pork out. Chaingang Bunkowski, gravitationally challenged by a quarter ton of baby fat, is not what one might term a picky eater. Even he will not swallow this trash and he spits it in the fat chocolate face. She growls at him, which he ignores, focusing in on a plate of overcooked liver, something that might have been Jell-O, a tapioca-like puke. He hurls the plate in the direction of humanity.

“Food!” he demands, in a Hammond organ bass. He wants a couple of dozen pizza supremes, a few hundred blueberry pancakes swimming in hot butter and sweet syrup, a couple of sides of ribs, nurse-kabob, a hundred of those little White Castle bellybombers. He could eat wood.

He careens to his feet and against some hospital crap, bounces heavily off a wall, people are shouting, pawing at him, one massive arm knocks fools this way and that as he stumbles out into the hall. A woman recovering from cataract surgery peers out into the hall through her good eye. He sees her with his good eye. Turns, bends over. The hospital gown that barely covered his balls, much less his behemoth flanks, is wide open. The hairiest back and nastiest nether regions she has ever seen on anything, man or animal, shoots her the grossest moon in Christendom, as he shakily waddles through the screaming hospital personnel, pushing his tonnage full steam ahead, moving in the direction of vulnerability.

He grabs a small doctor, his ticket out, and together they find the biggest XXXL white coat in the building. With that halfway covering his butt, and the gown halfway covering his nuts, he and the frightened man negotiate the steps to the parking lot.

A parked vehicle feels right. The driver gives off the proper victim scent; the beast reacts, acts, locks onto the heartbeat, strikes, and drives.

Daniel dreams all of this—in deep limbo.