Savant

20

Bobby Price had slept on the floor of a deserted office and woke up stiff in most of his joints, no pun intended. He could not force more than one push-up out of his muscular bod, so gripped he was by a languorous, listless, languid, lovely, lethargic lassitude. He was up on those hard, extended arms, toes erect, frozen in midpush, thinking of lazy words that began with L: lazy, languishing, lambasted, lard-assed, latency. Latent—couldn't that suggest dormant? He was latent. A fucking latent. This lonesome longhorn, this lithe and lank lad was lamentably limp in the lap. Was he a motherfucking latent? Lordy, lordy, lock and load.

The shooter was a neuter, nude and unscrewed, and he had a need to see folks bleed. Bobby Boy had gone bye-bye yesterday evening, and a deliveryman in white coveralls had conned his way into the Kansas City Convention Center, pushing a large, heavy white box (marked FRAGILE) on a dolly. Bullshitting his way in with a big, foxy grin, getting into the building's knickers, finding a floor with nobody home, finding a place that was just the right space.

The deliveryman's costume was on the floor next to the box and the dolly. Hello, dolly, how's your box? He had the case open, his lady screwed together, his tool kit out. He decided to pull his clothes on—the carpet had left his skin with an itchy feel. He needed a hot bath, and a long shower. He felt unclean, and the stink of chemicals from the carpeting was strong in the room. Nanny li'l Bobby don't feel so good today. Tan I stay home fwom school, pwease?

He used the glass cutter and popped a good-size chunk of glass out, with some effort, keeping low and close to the corner. "Red Rock Match Grade Ammunition is available in two classifications of sniper rounds: Super-Hard-on and Anti-Pussy." He forced his mind back into the groove. "Super-Hardened ARmor-penetrating Projectile, High Explosive cartridges." He loaded a SHARP-HEX round into his sweet baby. Eye to the Laco. Careful to keep the tip of the silencer and flash attachment nearly flush with the glass. Far below, he saw a man driving a shiny new car and he blew the fucking thing to kingdom come.

"They consist of an incendiary detonator, a high explosive charge, a super-hard-on tungsten-carbide penetrator…" He snicked the spent shell case out onto the stinking carpet and slid an APEX(X) into her. Eyeballed the Laco. Red Nissan it looked like. Bus. Dizzying pan of vision. Woman in white shirt in front of a self-service gas station pumping her gas. A young girl getting out of her car. Why not? Squeeeeze. Ooh, grue.

Businessman in shirt and tie. Watch him die. Yeah! Reload, Paunchy man in green shirt, blue cap—time for your nap…surprise!

Keep this up all fuckin' day. Man on cherrypicker, two guys beside a truck but they move and spoil the shot. Billboards for the Missouri lottery and the virtues of diesel. Man walking. Squeeze…blood in the trees.

Load and look. Another dizzy arc as he searches for targets. Creme Pontiac Grand-Am. Distant image of a kid on a bike—a good two miles away. He sees a man and woman coming out of a building. Hallmark Greeting Cards, Inc. Imagines them talking about Hallmark signing Shaquille O'Neal of the Orlando Magic; the woman—she's into basketball players, the guy—he writes those sentimental verses inside cards. Roses are red, crosshairs on your head, here comes the lead…now you're dead. Hold still Sam, alakazam…wham, bam! Guts and jam.

To Shooter, at this moment, those who'd warned Columbus of a flat earth were dead right. It was flat, and the end of the world was marked by the horizon line in the far distance. Squinting into the 40X sighting scope, rubbing a sleep cinder from the left corner of his right eye with a thumb, he was amused to feel himself trembling.

The sun had come up the color of blood: a bright red fireball rising in the dark gray beyond the flat edge of the world. Blood red against gray. Far down below him, over a three-and-a-half- to four-mile radius, people were screaming, sobbing, hollering, becoming panic-stricken, telling other people what they'd seen or thought they'd seen, calling the police, calling for the doctor, calling for the nurse, calling for a lady with an alligator purse. But none of this was why he was trembling.

He saw a sign of movement near the locus of his focus and the word lollygag came back into his head after thirty years. He could recall nasty Nanny telling him "not to lollygag." Lollygag? He couldn't spell the fucking thing—but it was another lazy L word. Lollygag!

In Fort Worth, you heard folks talk about how they was gonna "sashay" over to so-and-so. He hadn't heard the word sashay in a hundred years. Sashay, lollygag, traipse. Traipse! There was a dandy. He hadn't traipsed in a coon's age. Traipse? He hadn't traipsed in a month of Sundays. He felt himself jerk, watching for the bright flashes from the mortar tubes. Shit! This was gooder'n sex. But he looked back to rub his eye again and saw all the empty brass on the floor and it snapped him into action.

He took his honey apart and put her back in the fitted case, and began to strap the whole shebang onto the dolly. He was out of there.

Chaingang had started to go roaring after Shooter Price to find him and kill him, but he'd immediately felt his governor stemming the hot tide of fury before it washed over him beyond the point of return. His legal wheels, the precious previously owned Oldsmobile, was a perfectly street-clean ride with sanitized, checkable title. The endless unnecessary aggravation he'd put himself through replacing the vehicle initially stopped him. He needed to take a car that he could dump after he was through with Shooter. Trade his Olds for something a bit more upscale. The implant kept intruding on every plan he made.

In theory, it was extremely difficult to engineer surprises for Dr. Norman, since he had an access to monitors that detailed Daniel's movements. But there were other ways to handle things: third parties, for example, who could be easily manipulated into doing his bidding. He needed to think, plan, and—when he'd done his homework—act.

First stop was the Kansas City Public Library, main branch. A glorious place full of tasty treats for the epicurean information addict. He took Dr. Norman's thoughtfully detailed dossier, replete with schematics, and dressed in his finery, he spent the morning researching. There was the matter of the OMEGASTAR mobile tracker, which he knew could be defeated, and the implant, about which he had no such confidence.

The overlarge fellow was an obvious student of some sort, the reference librarian observed. Clearly intelligent. It just showed you—you couldn't judge a book by its cover. But up in the hidden stacks, the quality of mansuetude and academic devotion was shrugged off, momentarily, while Chaingang licked a diagram, found it irresistibly delicious, and began eating it. It was a sight the gentle librarian would never have forgotten—Chaingang ripping a page from a library book and chomping down on it with those ugly, yellow fangs of his. My God! Such a thing had no possible earthly explanation. It fell outside of one's acceptance cone. Perhaps somewhere in the universe—beyond Mars, a few black holes away—maybe there they ate books. It just wasn't done here.

He was still hungry when he finished at the library, and—driving in the direction of a nearby mall—he spotted a fruitseller set up on a busy sidestreet. He pulled over and bought a half peck of Heartland Orchard Red Hearts. "Fancy sweet yellow flesh" had caught his eye. They were great for canning, the crate assured him, and he thought of his pleasant days spent in the home of a woman named Mrs. Irby, whose extensive canned goods he'd once ravaged.

As he thought of her, he demolished the fresh peaches, his system crying to him for more fruit, and he vanished them in a continual, wet sucking. His huge hands would grab a peach and he'd appear to swallow it whole, a three-part noise accompanying the ingesting of the fruit and skin, and the spitting of the pit: slurrrp-fwahp-ptttht! Slurrrp-fwahpptttht! He sucked them down, inhaling the delicious meat, biting into their bloody hearts, slurping them down with juice running from his chin, sucking peaches, spitting pits, wiping the sticky blood from his face with the back of a huge hairy paw. He noticed someone watching him from across the way—an old man—and he spit a peach pit at him, plopping back in his ride with a groan. Twenty-one peach pits littered the sidestreet. So much for his appetizer. Now he needed to go get some red meat. Chaingang's hunger rumbled in his massive gut like summer thunder. He mashed the radio dial, trying to take his mind off food, and some monkey man was raving about "the game next weekend in Arrowhead Stadium." He smashed the noise off, hating the monkeys for their childish fascination with the trivial and mundane.

He could not go back to the unsafe house and he was weary of motels and hotels. He needed isolation. He needed many things—Dr. Norman, chemistry, math, and the general sciences. He let his mind scan freely, allowing anything to come to the fore as he digested and rechewed his mental cud.

You must understand that Chaingang Bunkowski, in moments such as these, cannot drive through Hardee's and order a dozen mushroom-and-Swiss burgers and hope to satisfy the craving inside. The need for a human heart was so strong he almost stopped and took one at random, but whatever remained of his good sense prevailed.

His strange mind scanned a world of languages as he drove, searching for acceptable desolation—if not wilderness—remembering Assamese, Breton, Baluchi, Catalan, Dutch, Faeroese, German, Haitian Creole, Icelandic, Judeo-Spanish, Konkani, Hashmiri, Kafiri, Khowar, Kurish—or was it Kurdish? Had he forgotten Frisian? Irish Gaelic? He thought about implants and how little he'd gleaned as he subconsciously scanned Marathi, Nepali, Ossec, Oriya, Punjabi, Portuguese—he was vaguely irritated at these lapses—Persian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Rajasthani, Scottish Gaelic, Sardinian, Slovene—what about Sanskrit? Tajiki, Urdu, Venetic, Welsh, Wendish, X-lac-tian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Zanzkritian. He played games with himself, seeing the image of a spotted dog named Duke that one of the guards at Marion owned. Dalmation?

He would kill someone and eat their heart and take their car and then he'd get something for dessert, and there were nearly twelve million medical implants in living North American surgical patients: he sorted through the diagrams of screws, plates, wires, pins, joints, lenses, valves, silicone tits, and collagened lips. He thought of chewed peach hearts, mangled maniocs, calabashed cassavas, squashed spurge, ruptured rootstock, somatic mutation of peach pit, necrotized nectarines….

From nowhere, inside his mind, he pictured blood geysers streaming from Mrs. Nadine Garbage-belly's severed lifestreams. Old Faithful spewing from that neck as the ticker pounded. Half a million human monkeys had pacemakers implanted in their shithouse skins. He saw fake surveillance monitors; barking dogs; sensor-controlled lights; magnetic switches; electric eyes; window foil; closed-circuit cameras; sound, movement, and heat-sensing detectors; infrared ray receivers; Chaingang could bypass them all. From Ma 'n' Pa kitchen-table business alarms to the underground repeater station hookups for Ma Bell, Holmes, national ComSec ops, Newton Secure Systems, Brinks, Pinks, tiddlywinks. Tagalog! Another forgotten language.

How-who-why-when-where did he learn about Irish Gaelic, peach pits, Newton Secure Systems, and silicone tits? He learned them the old-fashioned way: at the "lie-berry," very often. He learned from eating libraries full of books on chemistry, math, and the general sciences, reading the books, sinking them down into the deep, fat wrinkles in that remarkably weirdly eidetic memory and eating the best parts.

That same gray matter mass fires a warning shot and he slows, brakes, pulls into a mall. A fairly busy shopping complex that he loves the instant he sees it. It pounds at him, screaming the V-words he loves so much: vulnerability and victim. He sees victims everywhere he looks. He can victimize a mall, for God's sake—take it down from one end to the other with any luck at all. But that is for later. What stopped him is a toy store. He parks, lurches out of the Olds, and waddles across the hot parking area.

"Hi," a friendly salesgirl says, "may we help you, please?" He does not like her tone. He makes a poem to her inside his head as he looks for the toys he needs.

I wanna meet you, defeat you, eat you. Learn you, churn you, burn you. Overpower you, deflower you, devour you. Chain you, brain you, drain you. He spots a toy robot thing.

Robyn Brock has worked here for two years come November, and this is the first time the person has not answered her. It is insulting and confusing and she is frightened in some way she cannot understand. Oh! It dawns on her. He is hard of hearing. She walks up to his immense back and touches him lightly on the arm, spinning this beast around and mouthing in an exaggerated way so he can read her fucking lips, "Can I help you with something?"

Five hundred pounds descends on her instep and she screams in pain. Nearly eight hundred dollars' worth of well-designed and cleverly boxed plastic junk cascades from the shelves.

"Oh. I've hurt my back," the man moans in his sissy voice.

"Don't try to get up," she says, doing her best to wiggle out from under him. "I'll go get help." She tries to walk, wondering if her foot has been broken.

"No!" His voice freezes her in her tracks. "Never mind. I'm going to go. I'll go get off my feet. I'm sure I'll be all right."

"What happened?" All she can think of is the huge lawsuit against the store.

"You just threw me off my balance—I don't know—I slipped. My fault." He began to mince his way out of the store, almost limping. His right ankle was weak and he sometimes limped when he was tired, so it was quite easy to fake.

Back in his wheels, he watched her, after having repaired the stacks of fallen toys, taken her shoe off, and inspected her sore foot. A barking cough of amusement escaped his gut as he turned his attention to the three items he'd shoplifted. Two of them were worthless and he pitched them out of the window into the parking lot, but one was going to do.

The robot, designed to move along a black line drawn on white paper, was guided by a photo interrupter. It was the eye and the preassembled printed circuit board he wanted. The thing was only seventy-five dollars, but she'd irritated him.

He had other stops to make and when he'd assembled all of his purchases he drove to a nearby spot that was sufficiently secluded and began unloading items from the trunk. He carried his digger, a poncho half, and his fighting bowie knife. In the small thicket of trees and bushes that backed against the mall, he began digging. It only took him a few minutes, as he didn't go too deeply. When he was finished, he used the outer berm of displaced dirt to pack down two edges of the poncho cover, and with his big knife hacked down a couple of heavy tree limbs to weight the other sides. In his pocket was an aerosol spray which he used to cover the entire area. It was a scent that was extremely offensive to dogs. He didn't want this grave tampered with.

Chaingang returned to the parking lot and cruised, watching for easy targets. He saw an older woman in a silver Lincoln Continental Mark VI and followed her, pulling into the slot near her. He watched her get out and almost made a move but the warning system kept him off. She had too much savvy in her movements. Something. He had to get those strong victim vibes or he'd usually pass. This time he passed. A lucky woman who was shopping for a bridal shower, who wore too much perfume, and used too much spray on her hair—a fortunate gal who moved as if she know what she was about would not go to meet her maker. Not today.

He cruised slowly out of the lot, looking for mall cops in unmarked cars. Perhaps that is what drew him to these shopping complexes. The ones that felt empty of prying eyes titillated him. He cruised slowly, staying away from the shopping area for a while, driving leisurely as he looked for a sweet victim.

The Olds rolled past a carpet store, a small paint shop where he'd recently made a purchase, a framing company, a large supermarket, a cleaning establishment, a photo kiosk, a religious bookseller, a woman's clothing shop, a mall restaurant, any number of potential targets.

She was driving a new red Buick and he wanted to trade up anyway. There was no question she'd do nicely. Attractive. Although that was not a factor. He'd read up on his condition. Perhaps the implant had touched near whatever stimulates such responses to sexual impulses. His sex drive might have been short-circuited. Or it might be that he was merely off his feed, in the same way a recently divorced or otherwise separated person will not have that immediate desire for a while. It was nothing to be worried about. Rape, after all, was such a piddling violation when compared to taking an involuntary organ donation.

Red was in her twenties. He bad parked across from her and had been careful to scope out the presence of any possible observers.

"Hi! 'Scuse me a second?" Still in his nice clothing, but not as faggy now. Booming voice all hail-fellow, hearty, maturity, and purpose. "I've got a problem." He certainly did.

"See this?" It looked like a folded map. "Would you have any idea how to gradis Thornbill from hocken flanner? Can you go right across or is that no longer cut through?"

"Pardon me?" Indeed.

"See?" Forcing her eyes to that damned map. Meanwhile, he looks all around, rubbernecking, positioning himself just so. Blocking off any other possible observer, his huge meaty slab of a back shielding the action from his weakest point of cover. "Thornbill." He points. The huge finger draws her eyes.

In a situation such as this one, comfortingly in full sign of people, broad daylight, and a busy mall, how worried does one get? After all, nothing's going to happen to you.

But if you scream, he tells you he is going to shoot, and these words are funny at first because he is so comical and they are the words to TV and movie scenes seen and remembered, but the Colt Woodsman he has tucked into the map does not look like a toy, and he is not playacting. All those fictional crime shows have educated you. You know a silencer when you see one—that's the long thing on the end of the pistol…and if it was a piece of hacksawed pipe with a bushing on the end, how could you be expected to detect that?

The point is you move. He is obviously afraid of nothing and you are very much afraid. You don't wish to die-someday, maybe, but not today. You beg. He doesn't like this and now you are in a moment of extreme pain and on the floorboard of your own car. Not unconscious but very near. The mundane and commonplace seem so important, suddenly, so you file away the fact that the monstrous apparition is moving your seat backward, sliding it and clicking it into place, then rummaging around, finding your car keys, touching you. Your purse is gone. You drift, mercifully, into blackness.

Chaingang drives away in the smooth-riding Buick, experimenting constantly to get the seat back. There isn't enough room for his gut. Piece of crap!

The toadstool world is filled with midgets, small-minded dwarf monkeys for whom all clothing, furniture, and vehicles are designed.

His Olds sits locked and legal in the mall lot with 150 other sets of wheels. Has anyone observed and, if they did, what did they really see?

His warning system is not blinking at him. Well, perhaps a nudge, but only a very vague, general sense of discomfort. He finds the grave site. Pulls her out. Gets his bowie knife.

Three deep cuts. What he calls "the Y," the autopsy Y. Two from the titties to the center and then straight down. Much blood and he's in such a hurry he has his good clothes on. He strips, comes back to the body, stepping in the bloody mud and ripping the heart from this monkey woman and sinking his teeth into it. Oh, my goodness, that tastes good. She is rich and sweet.

Eileen Todd, twenty-six, an employee of Gale's Print Galleria, drives her parents' Buick, he learns from the contents of her purse. He covers her corpse with dirt, using her ripped clothing remnants to clean himself as best he can. In his pants pockets are small premoistened towels, which he also uses.

He sprays the grave again, scatters rocks around, and heaves his quarter-ton back into the red car. He knows this thing costs over twenty thousand dollars, list price—how can it not be roomier? Tsk, tsk! A world designed for scaled-down Lilliputians, it was. He had thought about wiring a couple of shotguns under the hood and making it into a war wagon but he was too bummed out by this car. He was disappointed. He'd been all set to trade for a Buick. Surely there must be something on wheels built for a man and not a fucking monkey?

He decided he'd feel better if he'd go kill that little faggot sissy Bobby Price. Drove back and loaded the duffel, with mobile tracker unit inside, secured the Olds again, and took off in the direction of the white blip. Already he was getting more used to the position of the wheel. There was no question about it, he decided. He was a real GM man.

He had the tracker up on the dash and the passenger seat of the Buick was covered in papers: the Kansas City map enlargement, the SAVANT and OMEGASTAR specs, Shooter's dossier and current likeness, all of which had been duly memorized, but remained there for inspiration. The goony- bird face of tightly wound, psychotic Shooter staring at nothing from a street-van surveillance picture, no doubt. Shooter's mouth open, speaking to someone, looking like a jock on his way to the tennis court. Chaingang remembered that Price came up to his bellybutton—the little midget piece of trash. He'd kill him and pinch off his pusshead right there in the fucking street. . . . He found this car intolerable.

Chaingang was parked at a stop sign, waiting in the traffic, experimenting with the seat and the air conditioning. He had it on sixty degrees—cold. Somebody was walking between the cars. If it was one of those bagrags who wash windshields, Chaingang would pull out the .22 and drill the monkey just for practice.

"Paper!" the guy was screaming. Chaingang hit the button that lowered the window, after a few misses, and told the monkey to give him one. Gave him pocket change. Flipped through the wrong section first, then turned it and saw a small front-page headline: Six More Killings, Police Admit Serial Killer. That little fucking shit! Killing on his ground. Who the fuck did he think he was? Someone honked in back of him and he started shifting into reverse to ram them, but then better judgment pulled his sleeve. He had to stay on track and take care of this.

In that moment, he saw through a window in his rage—he was a different person. Celibate! Losing his temper when it could hurt him. He was behaving uncharacteristically. It sobered him and he bit down on his thoughts about the implant, screaming out of the line of parked cars in the direction of Shooter Price, tearing around a beige Oldsmobile and a white Dodge Caravan, driving around a muscle car as if it weren't there, the white blip growing larger and stronger in the center of the OMNI device.

He was locked down now. Concentrating fiercely, with all his energy on the act of destruction, slicing through traffic—five hundred pounds mashed down on the gas pedal, floorboarding it through teenagers and retirees alike, around a kid in a Pontiac Bonneville, a woman in a brown Chrysler LeBaron, a kid in an old Roadrunner, a couple in a Jap thing—zooming out of nowhere to loom larger than life in Price's mirror.

Shooter had been tracking him, he was going to whack Big Petey with his baby, who was in her case in the seat in back of him, and he'd been parked on a side street, but when he saw the blip—the blimp-size blip—coming nearer, he turned the car to follow him and take a shot, but suddenly Chaingang was on his ass, driving a different set of wheels, roaring down on him with a vengeance, and he was scared almost to the point of going sane.

He saw the car come out of nowhere, moving way too fast—he knew cars—they were gonna hit. He floored the accelerator and shot out into traffic and some poor devil in an Ace Trucking Company job smashed into the little M30 with a resounding crunch of chrome, metal, fiberglass, plastic, shit, and shinola. Shooter grabbing SAVANT and shagging ass as the glass— already cracked—shattered under a hail of lead.

Shooter just went—fuck the mobile tracker—and he was running fast— zigging through honking motorists, zagging away from the hail of terminal saturnism—that's your basic Beaumont-Port Arthur lead poisoning—splattering around him. There wasn't but two things Shooter Price could do besides pull a trigger and both of 'em was run, and he flat out ran for his crazy life as Chaingang Bunkowski stood flat-footed, next to a wrecked M30 and an Ace who'd been in the wrong place, glass all around his fat ass, oblivious to the waft of distant sirens, a Chinese copy of a submachine gun cradled in his arms as he cursed his slowness and ran one more magazine through the pipe just for luck.

Bat-batta-bat-bambambam,- popping rounds came across the traffic in the direction of disappearing Shooter, the felt-padded bolt clattering as the weapon blew smoking cartridge cases into the broken glass and car parts.

He had to make himself squeeze back into the car and get in the wind. After all, as his dearest mommy used to say, there was a time and a place for everything.

He made a U-turn, swung around, reached into his duffel and plucked out one of his remaining grenades, and after determining that it didn't have a file- notched spoon (the way his luck was going he'd blow his fat ass up with a short-fused frag!), he took the pin out and tossed it into the M30 convertible, tromped the gas, and watched it blow in the Buick's rearview mirror.

Some days were like that. No matter what you did you just couldn't get arrested.

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