Butcher

41

New Madrid Levee

How long had the beast been asleep? How long had he been in these weeds? He clawed at filthy skin covered in dried blood and insect welts. He needed food, a hot shower, more food, a bath. Other powerful, gnawing hungers flowed through him with a heat that he could taste.

Daniel Bunkowski tried to assimilate. Concentrate. Motivate. Nothing operated. He peered, blinking like a bear coming out of hybernation, a one-eyed bear who'd definitely seen better days.

To see wildlife, to see nature in the raw, become unconscious in deep weeds. The wildlife will sense that you are no longer a threat and go about the routine business of survival, assuming the weeds in which you slumber are far enough from the beaten path.

He vaguely recalled regaining consciousness and seeing a mink, of all things. He remembered cattle egrets, abundant and ghostly, static across a pasture laden with mist. The word Presley in the distance—hallucinated? No. Simply a common local trade name. A rusty Delta Corn sign made of tin crowned a barbed wire fence. He saw rabbit sign nearby. All of this through a thick sleeve of serious pain.

Beaver are far below in a still ditch about to overflow its banks, but he intuits their presence and eventually sees the dam, testing his operational eye. He makes the first demands on his system, tries again to remember.

Squirrel nests sit high in old oak overhead. Deer sign, lots of game sign; the nearby water and food supplies draw animals, and abundant roadkill marks the proximity of wheeled traffic.

A couple of very young mockingbirds, one on a rock, the other on a post, cry for food in unison.

Mother comes, pokes something in one of the open maws, gone even as the food is transferred, already busy at first light, scrounging food for the babies. A good mother. Not like some—human ones for instance.

"Dan?” A voice echoes.

“Dan?"

A red wave washes through the fogbank. "How did it feel?" One of the imbecile shrinks at Marion. "How did it feel, Dan, to have your mother allow the Snake Man to sexually molest you in that way?"

"Dan? ... Why do you take their hearts, Dan?" Had he really escaped or merely hallucinated it? Presley's Farm Market was real enough.

He watched for signs of the monkey men in the immediate perimeter, and as he faded back into sleep, his battered topsy-turvy computer did its best to survey and report:

Mink.

Egret.

Cattle.

Beaver.

Squirrel.

Deer.

Roadkill.

Mother.

The folks back at Marion Pen ... Dr. Norman.

Breakfast, in other words, not to mention lunch and dinner.

His mindscreen fought itself, working overtime while the huge beast slept again, his gyro standing a death-watch for Dan.

The beating had been severe, and where he'd shrugged them off in the past, this one he could not. He'd escaped by luck, pure will, and raw animal power. Addled, suffering from a number of serious aspects of trauma ranging from blood loss to concussion, he realized it was miraculous his bumbling, wounded escape had got him out the sally port, much less this far.

His survival instincts were not those of a normal man, to be sure. Surviving was a religion about which Chaingang was most devout, and his drive was that of a fanatic. It was the part of his life-support system that had saved him countless times.

Spanish had tried to hurt him and been partially successful—no small achievement in itself. Daniel could not see clearly. The vision in his left eye, where he'd been struck, had suffered badly. In the rearview mirror of the stolen car he'd surprised himself by pulling his left eyelid down and watching a sudden spill of blood overflow the eye onto the cheek. He was injured, and the potential damage level was high.

He'd seen cattle egrets, rusty farm signs, nests high in century-old oaks through mashed lashes of the right eye, occluded oculomotor response, a haze, a foggy day in London town. Peering intently through the petroleum jelly of pain he misattributed the source.

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 requiring “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.