Chaingang

10

NORTH OF WATERTON, MISSOURI

“Magic Silo. Crossing plowed ground to barnyard. Repeat. Magic Silo. Crossing plowed ground to barnyard.” The words register deep in the lion's brain salad. A radio spits noise.

“That's a rog, Charlie Charlie November. Magic Silo out.” Trying to fight his way out of the haze of tranqs. Wordscreen wrestles for information. Sorts through call signs: Wicked Trade. Mad Rover. Mud Puppy. Magic Silo does not connect.

Sees the steel. Chains. Feels the cold. Senses loss of equilibrium. Turbulence of some kind. Perhaps he is in Vietnam, on the way to an unknown LZ with the call sign Magic Silo. A bumpy ride, in this UH-1. The slick shudders in a loud eggbeater machine-gun flatulence of turbine whomp. But if this is a bird, where is the cocky pilot? The absentee door gunner? The copilot? No arrogant crew chief speaks. He replays a night insertion: unmarked skinships approaching LZ Quebec-Tulsa, filed as LZ: field expedient.

His body shrugs through layers of fog. Tests the chains reflexively. He is immobilized, but he can hear a radio and a single voice. If the pilot is tantalizingly alone, this is golden data—a neck snaps like rotten wood in his memory and he wants to smile, but the huge face is frozen.

There is the ruck. He realizes he must be hallucinating. His duffel and weapons case! A rush of joy surges through his bloodstream.

The presence of something else washes over him and he is back at Quebec-Tulsa, drag man on a squad-strength spike team. Grabbing ass through the sawgrass. Ten ground-pounders double-timing into the bad bush: trip flares, mines, frags, ammo, det gear, web gear, warm bods sheep-dipped (sanitized), night-fightered in camouflage, every jingly thing taped down.

Daniel Bunkowski is loaded for bear. A backbreaking ruck, X'ed bandoliers of ammo, det cord, wire, and assorted gear for his precious “pies,” streaming blast-furnace sweat and killer karma, death out the bazonga.

“Chaingang” he is called—out of earshot—existing nowhere on paper, core name-taker for USMACVSAUCOG, a ghost unit created in the pages of an NSC “action memorandum” to the Joint Chiefs, a “NONSKID JACKS” in jargonspeak: the verbalization of National Security Council Directive to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It was sanctioned by a few words found amid the verbiage of the National Security Act, which mandated an outfit of its type to perform “such functions and duties affecting the national security as the National Security Council may direct."

The benign-sounding tongue twister of an acronym was said to stand for the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam/Special Advisory Unit of the Combined Operations Group.

No Army 201. No MOS. No unit clearance. No name, rank, serial number on file. Not even the tradecraft lie of a civilian cover or private sector gig for a legend. Just this huge loose and evil cannon to pull pitch and plow any time the mood strikes.

Dr. Norman's Alpha Group II has frozen his brain. He is back in the Nam, and deep inside his own madness:

Life drips. It drips down through the tertiary foliage of the triple canopy, nourishing, feeding the teeming green. Day slowly comes with time's passage, and yesterday's heat, still trapped down in this leafy, hot world, rises to a boil as the plant life radiates intense warmth out through the stink of rotting vegetation. More warmth builds inside the moist, living greenhouse, catches, builds, cools with the coming night, but never cooling enough, layering heat upon itself, baking again, feeding, dripping, nourishing. Nightfall again, coming soon.

The spike team enters this blast furnace of green heat, moving carefully through the alien world. It reeks with rotting plants, sweltering jungle, an oppressive and stifling humidity index that cannot be described, and a thousand and one organic perils. Heat prostration and deadly dehydration are among the more benign life-threatening dangers.

They eyeball pathways and cart trails and streams, busting jungle, working their way up-country.

“Beaucoup VC,” the point man whispers. The man who walks his slack moves his index finger closer to the oily trigger of his piece, whispering to the man behind him.

“Victor Charles.” This man turns to the RTO and warns him as he points. The radioman looks.

"Charlie."

The word filters back through the spike team, but they do not tell the drag man. He is far behind, busting jungle at his own pace. Stopping now beside a cart trail where the smell of the little people fills him with thrilling anticipation. He starts moving backward, waddling away from the trail, his huge body atingle with excitement as he covers his tracks, backing into seemingly impenetrable jungle.

Invisible now, motionless, he stands and begins the slowing, stilling of his vital signs. Breathing in the killer heat like some enormous jungle plant, thriving on the suffocating humidity, drinking it in as he shifts down into an almost subhuman stillness, a wide and frightening parody of a grin distorting his features as he listens to the noisy bumblers move farther away.

The spike team breaks through the triple-canopied green, following the cart trail through truck gardens and a ruined villa, moving toward a rubber tree wood line.

“Yo, Rodriguez."

“Say?” Rodriguez is the last man.

“What happened to Chaingang?"

“Fucked if I know, Sarge.” He shrugs. “He's back there somewhere. Back in the jungle."

“Fuck,” the team leader says with disgust, spitting his chaw into the nearby foliage. They drive on.

With his vital signs slowed to a crawl, slowly he fills his immense body with teeming jungle air, holds it, wills his life support system to chill him out. Listens to the sounds of the deep green coming back to life now that the bumblers are gone. Birds. Animals. Insects. Slithery, slimy things. Creepy crawlers. The thud-bump, thud-bump of his strong heart roaring in his ears.

He is relieved they are gone. Hates their cloying, maddening proximity. Knows they will meet their doom up ahead and thinks it, precognates it in just those words, relishing the phrase: they will meet their doom. It is a pleasant thought that entertains him as he slows his vital signs in preparation for readying his ambush.

He thinks of himself as Death. Death, very still, tired and favoring his weak ankle from the insertion (but happy), lets himself envision the little people who he knows will come. With a massive effort he wills his body to move, his strange brain directing the opening of the “pie box,” which is how he thinks of his mines.

Vaguely pie-cut shaped, at least in his mind, there are six to a container, which weighs nearly twenty-two pounds. He carries a full load of claymores the way one might carry a carton of cigarettes. Each one of the three-and-a-half-pound mines, roughly the size of a curved shoe box, is marked M-18A1 ANTIPERSONNEL, and these are but part of his mobile arsenal.

Death is a walking hunter-killer machine: M-26s with the four-second and shortened one-second fuses, M-15 Willie Peters, 25A2s with CS, and an MK-26 Model O Haversack for his “wet work,"—part of the arsenal that supplants his primary killing tool, the M-60.

Death senses something now. It jars his mental gyro and he freezes. Sees men—moving—silhouetted against the night, speaking, a flurry of hands and arms, and he snaps out of the haze as he feels his massive bulk being pushed down a slide of some kind.

He hears their voices clearly now. Grunting. Laughing. Swearing men who struggle to move his enfettered dead weight. They strain, and he is moving again. Sliding from the chopper?

No! He is being offloaded from the back of a truck. Huddled in chains and restraints.

“Go! Take off. Go!” the man in charge shouts, and the truck starts moving. Chaingang's thoughts are clear. He is being freed for some reason. Even though he sees the truck, he wonders why they did not insert him by Huey, then he realizes the Nam thing was hallucinated. Dr. Norman did this to him—for that one instant he feels the hot red desire to rip the sissy doctor's body apart—then he remembers he is about to get free and he's too excited to think of anything else.

There is a horizon of dark tree line. Beyond it he senses a river, and the wordscreen feeds “disembogue": to flow or come forth as from a waterway or channel that empties into a stream. He is near a river and some kind of a canal or waterway, he intuits, then the beast's mind reminds him he heard a distant barge.

He is not in a watery paddy marked LZ Quebec-Tulsa, but he smells truck crops and goat heads. Early bean stalks cut. Cockleburs. Goldenrod, creeper vine, thistle, dog fennel. Poison ivy. Assessment: a desolate piece of farm ground.

Norman's admonition replays: “You will be safe.” His mental sensors do not warn him otherwise. One of the monkey men speaks in harsh tones from out of a moving jigsaw.

“Map.” He throws a plastic case at the huge bata-boots. “You hear me all right?” Chaingang listens. “Equipment. Everything's in the two cases. Compass.” He drops something on the map.

“Everybody mounted up?” There is a shouted reply. The scent of freedom and that of running blood mixed with vengeance is like the loam of the richest bottomland, an earthy, alluvial perfume, fueling what only base feeding will appease.

“Hey!” he shouts, unnecessarily. “Keys!” It obviously frightens the man to say this as he throws them. They hit in the dirt beside the huge bulk of the bound beast, and the man is running before they strike the ground. The trucks disappear into the darkness.

Is it a trick? Possibly. But what would justify the effort? He files the possibility and tries to scoot his body closer. It is not as easy as he thought.

He is able to finally get close enough to snag the keys. Huge paws carefully test each key in the two main chain shackles, first the cuffs, then the leg chains.

By luck he hits the handcuff key on the third try with the tinier keys, but it takes a lot longer than he wants it to before the proper key unlocks the leg shackles.

Chaingang crawls to the massive duffel bag and finds a flashlight and tries it. Batteries are strong. Paws through till he finds his big fighting bowie.

The dreaded biter and the other restraints are sliced and he is standing. Armed. Free.

He knows not to linger in this field. Swooping up the heavy duffel, the two cases—also extremely heavy—and having pocketed the compass and map, he begins a fast waddling trot in the direction of the deepest darkness.

There is some moonlight, but rain-cloud night blankets him. The gigantic beast moves surefooted as a huge, fat cat, the proximity of human beings acting as his biocatalyst, activating and accelerating the mysterious processes that have always protected and guided him.

Instinctively he moves in the direction of isolation and concealment, away from humanity for the moment, away from danger, his mind a seething maelstrom of hatred, relief, and kill-hunger.

There is no one in the darkened field to witness the sight as Chaingang Bunkowski's immense, doughy face stretches wide into its broadest approximation of a smile, and the coughing noise that is his imitation of human laughter is swallowed by the night.

It seems to take him forever to reach the safety of the tree line. He drops his heavy load and rests, reflecting on his lack of stamina. His brain supplies dates of confinement and reminds him of his astounding recuperative powers. He has a dull headache and rubs the back of his head, which is very sore. Perhaps he was struck while unconscious, or hit his head being transported to and from the truck. He arches his big head back and gingerly feels the wrinkles at the back of his muscled rock of a neck. What are those ridges? Fat, he supposes. He massages the back of his head gently, then forces himself back into action.

Chaingang lifts the duffel and the cases, and starts out across the field, again at a fast waddle. He notices he is favoring his leg and promises his weak right ankle that it won't be long.

He hates being weak like this, and his irritation pushes him faster. The load weighs a ton—even for him. He cannot understand this lack of strength and finds it maddening. He'd like to destroy someone before he goes to sleep, but he knows he must rest.

Finally—into another pitch-black tree line. Sees an opening. Starts toward it and almost blacks out.

The drugs slam into him for a second, and their power nearly knocks him off his feet. He knows he must find a place to hunker down for the night.

With a mighty will of effort he shrugs off the mental haze and keeps moving slightly downhill—apparently the tree line is on an embankment.

He must go a few more meters. He wills himself not to drop the cases, fights the fog that threatens to seize his brain again, pushes himself forward, one foot after another. He knows he will be all right now.

He drops heavily into the nearby opening in the thick tree line, seeing now that it is a deep slough, waddling quickly down the embankment. In dark shadow a huge drainage culvert, overgrown with weeds, beckons.

The strangness of his mind tells him many things at once, reminding him that there is also a transitive form of disembogue, that it means “to pour out,” and that this slough with its wet and muddy bottom has not held enough rain to flow, come forth, empty into, or pour out into the culvert. The bottom of the culvert will be relatively clean and dry.

Reptiles are not a factor. This culvert will be teeming with its share of arachnidan life, but he is at home with spidery anthropods, mites, ticks, scorpions, and the lesser creepies. The mental computer registers the presence of larvae silent in their silken cases, of the phyllophagous insects that feed on the leaves, the leaves of leguminous trees, the dicotyledonous, angiospermous plants, and the insectivorous creatures that hunt in them. He is fully at home in this swampy, dank world.

The culvert's floor is cool and damp, but contains only that terrigenous sediment formed by the erosive action of time and tide, and the residue of whatever elongated segmented invertebrates and related annelidan forms may have burrowed into it. To some the putrescence of this decaying organic matter would be an unbearably foul stench, but to him it is merely reassuring.

But because he knows, he also knows that larvae hatch. Vermiform feeders and mutant flies, gnats, mosquitoes, nameless winged things, will buzz and swarm and come to life; headless, eyeless, legless flying minimonsters of the order Deptera will mutate and metamorphose out of the ultraslime. And in the early morning he will be gone.

Massive vehicle tarp and poncho spread out to cover the culvert floor. He uses the last ebbing reserves of strength to pull out his weapons, LURP dinners—"Long Rats"—canteen, spoon, netting. The cammoed mosquito netting he pulls over him for a roof, pouring what could be doped water into his freeze-dried spaghetti and meatballs packet, and devouring it cold.

It goes against his grain to sleep without setting up a rudimentary nighttime defensive perimeter of some kind, but before he can consider it, he collapses, falling instantly into deep sleep.

Inside the strangeness of his mind the computer continues to function: counting seconds, minutes, hours on his flawless inner clock; measuring temperature, humidity, wind velocity, other externals; auditing and carefully analyzing the sounds of the night for the presence of possible threat. In the absence of significant changes, it appreciates.

(SLOUGH: noun, meaning ditch. Deep mud. Mire. Swamp. Backwater area. River inlet. Tidal basin ditch. Tide flat. Marsh creek. State of moral decline or spiritual dejection. Cast-off snakeskin. Dead tissue mass. Extreme depression literally or figuratively. Deep bog. Marshy place. Muddy creek bed.) His mind flashes itself a picture of the RSSZ, picturing his image of a slough where he hid in the Rung Sat.

There, too, he was betrayed by those who used him as an executioner. There, also, his masters would have placed him in the gravest peril, telling him he was free to take his pleasures against humans, and—but for his gifts and skills—they would have allowed him to perform their bidding and then exterminate him.

For the first time since the drugs were administered to him in the penitentiary, he appreciates the possibilities, and the body of the beast makes an involuntary coughing noise in its slumber.

Early morning. Daniel is awake in a buzz that is partially caused by the teeming culvert that is a breeding ground for insects, and in part by a massive headache—a throbbing, pulsating thing that robs him of his powers of concentration.

He gathers up duffel and weapons cases and clomps away from this place, the radio call sign “Magic Silo” echoing as he passes a pair of Butler Grain Silos, then three more, standing like a kind of mini-Stonehenge at the edge of an adjacent field. He would ordinarily just flash a mental picture of them and file it in the computer, but does not trust himself in this addled state, and he takes time to dig out his Boorum and Pease Accounts Receivable Ledger that has been with him since his last prison bit. He calls it UTILITY ESCAPES, and it is nearly filled with maps, plans, charts, meticulously rendered drawings of safehouse structures and traps—his idea book which he treasures as one draws comfort from a family Bible.

Long ago he memorized all the material in it, but he derives sustenance and inspiration from it—it is The Word. He reads it for solace, for pleasure, for renewed power, for positive reinforcement; he has faith in it.

He finds a felt-tipped pen, obviously brand-new, removes the cap, and with a reasonably firm, steady hand adds the appropriate landmarks to his ledger, marking them on map as well. The silos are of interest. It is very lonesome here in the boonies, and there are truck and tractor marks, but nothing else since the last rain, he sees. The galvanized sheet metal tells its own story. From these signs he sees safety. One of the doors begs him to bust its easy lock, step up, squeeze in, and pull that door to. Magic silos? Maybe so. An emergency home away from home.

The deep slough where he'd hunkered down in the culvert for the night bisected thick woods, and in the center of it, not fifty meters from the overgrown, leafy ditch banks, a pond of stinking mud and stagnant rainwater hid like a surprise. It was also added to both the scale map and the ledger page. He looked on field expedient burial sites as presents.

Fifty meters. Let's see—what was that in feet? He tried to recall the key from a military map. Was there one on the map he'd just looked at and folded up incorrectly? He unfolded it and refolded it slowly, weaving back and forth a little. His huge feet looked very far away for a second and he felt light-headed. He rubbed at his eyes, shook his head, tried to shake the cobwebs loose. He poured water from his canteen, splashing it in his face.

That was better. He walked a few steps and decided he'd better sit down a moment and dropped to the ground heavily, as puzzled as he was angry. Bees and hornets and wasps and mud daubbers built nests in his head.

He forced himself to think. His entire life had been a triumph of will over matter, and he would think his way out of these ... horse latitudes that would render him impotent.

Fifty meters: ten meters, a decameter, would be 32.81 times 5, or 164.05. Was that feet or yards? Feet. Divide by 3: 54.68333333. Half a hectometer? Fifty meters—109.3666666, the number of the great beast. The inside of his head felt like a honeycomb. He pushed himself to his feet.

By afternoon he had reached the large body of water that encroached from the western edge of the map they'd given him, and he was in a bad way. Something was wrong. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe something else. He fought to think and to keep moving.

The blue features each had a number. This one was numbered thirty-one. He knew it was the river long before he saw the fast-moving current.

He froze at the embankment and saw the man. He looked like one of the little people, waiting down in a tunnel, a cleverly designed hidey-hole. One of the ghost warriors. He waited.

If you could have ridden by on a log at that moment, letting the river current pull you, you'd have seen quite a sight up there on the bank. There was a little bite-size chunk, a gouge, in the bank, and sitting squarely in that hole was an old man. An old man in faded work clothes, who had a couple of lines out, bank-fishing for cat.

But above him and to the right as you floated by, you would have seen a huge, grinning fat man, carrying a massive load of some kind, looking down at the old man who was contentedly fishing.

The giant was not jolly, but he was green—part of him. He wore green-and-brown jungle fatigue pants—big as a wall flag—and down where they bloused out of gigantic, custom-made 15EEEEE boots, the trousers were duct-taped into the boots, sealed against leeches. (Old habits die hard.)

He had on a voluminous jacket of some kind, which was open, and a T-shirt underneath, and in his right hand, which was the size of a frying pan, he now held three feet or so of heavyweight tractor-strength chain. The cases and large duffel bag were on the ground.

Each big, hardball-size link had been carefully wrapped in black friction tape, as was the case with all his equipment, and it had been rendered as operationally silent as he could make it.

He would chain-snap this one, he thought, silently easing closer to his enemy.

Their underground was an incredible, vast spiderweb of interlocking tunnels and served as command and control, medevac triage, R & R center, whatever was needed by way of supply /resupply. It was all down there in the tiny tunnels where the little people hid by day, sometimes in groups as large as battalion strength, subsisting on diets of rice and a bit of rat meat, fish, and nuoc mam; tough, wiry, hard-core team players—man, woman, and child. Ghost warriors.

It pleasured him to watch them near the blue features where he found their hidey-holes; tiny ratholes he couldn't begin to get a massive tree trunk leg down in. He'd wait silently, watching for the ones who would come after nightfall, either to leave or enter from the tunnel mouth.

Many times he'd been given treats this way, a small, dark figure popping out of the hole beside the blue feature, gasping for air perhaps after an underwater swim. They liked to dig a shallow chamber first, below the water table, and this flooded chamber then acted as a protective perimeter float. But if you knew where the inner entrance was, you could hold your breath, dive, and pull yourself through the inner opening into breathable air, and you'd be safely inside the tunnel complex.

He liked to kill them when they first emerged from the water, quick and dark little people whom he frankly admired—as much as he could admire any human, admiring them for their tenacity and singular meanness of spirit.

The secondary effect of the drugs smashed him and he dropped the chain, stumbling and falling like a felled tree.

The old man heard a loud noise and turned, startled to see a huge figure on the ground up on the bank behind him. He scampered back to give a hand.

“You hurt yourself?” Chaingang looked up into the face of an old man who had his hands on him. Where was his fucking chain? “You took a heckuva spill there, feller. I was busy fishin', and I didn't even hear you a-comin', you know? I hear this loud crash—you really took a fall! Can ya’ get to your feet?"

“Nn.” Chaingang found he could not speak. It occurred to him he had not used his voice in some time. The lion coughed. It sounded far away inside his head. He fumbled around and got the canteen off his belt and took a swig.

The old man stayed next to him petting him like he was a huge dog.

“I'm worried about you, son. You ought to go to the hospital and let ‘em take a look at you. You might have something broken."

Chaingang wanted to tell this idiot he was going to have his fucking neck broken if he didn't get his hands off him. He hated to be touched.

The old man continued to peer into his face. He had a dark stain from a chaw of tobacco that dribbled from one corner of his mouth. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, mass murderer, had never itched to destroy someone so much in his life. But when he started looking to see where he'd dropped his chain, it occurred to him that such an act would be wrong.

The old man watched him running his hands over his face. After a moment the immense figure managed to get back to his feet, and the old man stood. The giant towered over him by a couple of feet and probably outweighed him by over three hundred pounds. He stared up at the vision for a moment, shook his head in amazement, shrugged, and ambled on back to his hole, leaving Chaingang gaping after him.

“Guess you're okay.” The old man smiled. “Come on down here, big ‘un, and set a spell.” He patted the ground beside him and turned his back on Chaingang, who started down the bank. He'd fucking choke him to death and be done with it.

But when he got to the edge of the hole, he just stood there, looking down at the swiftly moving river.

“Hop on down here, big ‘un. There's plenty of room. I'll move over a little.” He did so, and Chaingang found himself sitting beside this fool, his brain feeling as if it had been encased in ice.

“What's your name, son? I'm John Oscar.” He was holding out his hand to shake hands. Chaingang blinked. The old man was not the least put off, he'd been around the retarded all his life. It wasn't a problem. They was just like anybody else. He patted the big leg of the giant wedged next to him. It was the second time a man had put hands on him like that in recent memory. The next time it happened, that offender would lose those digits.

“I don't know my own name sometimes, son. It's my age. I don't know for sure how old I am, but I'm old enough I can recall riding the rods in the Great Depression. You have no i-dee what I'm talking about, do ya, boy?” Daniel blinked again. Swallowed. Finally managed a monosyllabic grunt. “Don't worry none."

“You ever fish below here? Slabtown? I use rank liver on big ol’ game-fish test. And look here, son. Homemade sinkers. You know what I make ‘em out of?” The big feller didn't seem to be interested, so he reached for his other pole. “Here.” He jabbed it at Chaingang. “Take this. Go on. Don't be afraid. Take holt of it real good."

Daniel opened a fist, and his big fingers swallowed the end of the bamboo pole.

“That's it, big ‘un. Now, keep that end of the pole pointed up more,” he scolded. “That's right. Soon as that pulls, you hold on real tight and we'll catch us some fish. How's that sound?"

Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, his mind in icy pieces, sat quietly, obediently, on the edge of Blue Feature Thirty-One, fishing with John Oscar. Happy as two peas in a pod.