Slice

I-75 EAST OF WINDER

“White-Merrimen,” the operator said crisply.

“Good morning,” the deep voice rumbled resonantly into the phone, eighteen-wheelers whizzing by not far away. “I need some information related to newborn infants for a piece we're doing for the Buckhead Advertising Guide, a new newspaper. Could I ask you just a couple of brief questions?"

“One moment please.” A busy receptionist passing the buck to somebody. A pause and then, “Yes? May I help you?"

“Yes, ma'am, we're doing a piece for a new newspaper here, and I just wanted to get a couple of answers about newborn infant care. Okay? I'll be real fast—know you're busy."

“Sure. Okay. Who's this now?"

“It's called the Buckhead Ad Guide. It won't be out for a couple of weeks but it will have a lot of information for newly marrieds, people moving to the community, that sort of thing. We won't quote you unless you want us to, okay?"

“What did you want to know?"

“What do you recommend for the feeding of a newborn child? Let's assume the mother doesn't breast-feed for whatever reason, and...” Chaingang in his three-piece suit, looking extremely large but quite proper, talking into a pay telephone within .22 range of the southeast lane of I-75, talking his line of con into a phone, looking into the window of a used maroon Sedan DeVille, amazingly legal, at the tiny, wrinkled monkey packed into a soft nest of covers.

“Yes,” he said, “uh-huh,” as he milked the woman for all the information necessary for the proper care and feeding of the newborn monkey.

“Thanks,” he told her. He hung up the phone and got back into the car. “Now, little monkey,” he said in soft tones, “we'll get you some goodies.” The child was fast asleep, and he slept through the closing of the car door and the starting of the engine.

Bunkowski drove to a nearby shopping area and was soon back in the car with formula, appropriate containers, bottles, boxes of diapers, and piles of things that he stacked methodically across the back seat. He pulled the car over into a shady area behind a building and told his son, “You're such a fine monkey. Monkey doesn't hardly cry at all,” and beaming with pleasure and amazement he gently lowered a nippled bottle of formula toward the wrinkled monkey, who gratefully began to feed. Daniel remembered something about how you were supposed to test the formula first by shaking some out onto your wrist to see if it was too hot. It made his smile even wider—the thought of putting formula on that huge, steel-hard wrist. Life was actually rather amazing.

“Good monkey, atta boy,” he said paternally. The monkey fed. Slept again. Daniel knew he must find a safe place for the baby. A nice, quiet motel where he could care for the baby while he marshaled his forces. There was a way he might even pay someone to rent him a small, secluded home or apartment for temporary quarters. He drove around the corner and paid for a newspaper. He would see what his options were.

He was scanning the paper as he always did, speed-reading blocks of words, his eidetic memory sorting chaff and wheat and saving only the survivalist data of possible importance to him. He saw the headline buried on page six: Bridge (contin.—Page 2)” and the words “southern Stobaugh County,” and he thumbed back to the second page and saw the big headline and the picture of the semi being hauled out of the water. There was a photo of the buried vehicle graveyard in a long shot from the road, a crowd of people milling around. The headline being 14 Bodies Found After Truck Drives into Creek, and he read:

Stobaugh County sheriff's deputies, aided by emergency workers and agents of the Major Crimes Task Force, pulled four vehicles containing bodies from the shallow waters of the New Cairo Creek, following an accident Wednesday morning in which a tractor-trailer rig was driven off a closed, abandoned bridge.

The tractor-trailer rig's driver, whose name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin, plunged from the long-abandoned bridge into the creek sixty feet below, instantly killing him. Passers-by noticed the truck in the water and notified authorities, who found the vehicles containing the other bodies while searching for additional passengers who might have been thrown clear of the truck.

“Some of the bodies have been identified but their identities are being withheld,” Stobaugh County Sheriff Bob Anderson said. Anderson would not speculate as to the cause of death of the thirteen other individuals whose bodies were found in abandoned cars and trucks that had apparently been placed in the creek over a period of many months.

“It is a scene out of hell,” one unnamed worker told reporters, “and I hope I never see anything like this again as long as I live.” Divers and emergency personnel were still looking for bodies as late as nine hours following the removal of the tractor-trailer rig from the creek. “In the first place, it was extremely dangerous to leave a bridge like that. Even with it closed on each side, there was always the chance somebody might have an accident here at night,” the worker said. “Nobody knows where these others came from."

The bridge is situated southeast of Mount Vernon, about twelve miles south of Hubbard City, Illinois. The Stobaugh County Army Corps of Engineers issued a brief statement blaming “insufficient funds” for the fact that the bridge over the New Cairo Creek had never been rebuilt.

The designer of the original bridge, which was built over forty years ago, said that flash flooding had originally been the cause of the erosion of the bridge supports which led to the bridge's collapse nine years ago. “I've built over six hundred bridges in my time,” B. L. Drake told one reporter, “and I never had any problems with any of the others.” Drake was head of the United Engineering Design Corporation of Chicago, the firm that built the iron bridge in the late 1940s. “It was extremely irresponsible not to rebuild the bridge,” he said.

Federal authorities on the scene would not speculate as to the nature of the—” Chaingang glanced over at the photo again, captioned with the bold title, “Bizarre Underwater Graveyard Holds 13 More Bodies,” and crumpled the paper savagely.

“This changes lots of things, little monkey,” he told the newborn infant. “We'll adapt accordingly,” he said, starting up the car and driving toward Buckhead. “We'll pay a little courtesy call on our good friend Mr. Eichord and then we'll find us a nice, temporary shelter. How does that sound, little monkey?"

As if in reply, the newborn baby did its best to smile and made a kind of contented gurgling noise.

“Monkey is a GOOD baby,” the huge man rumbled, thinking how much pleasure it would give him deep inside to rip the arrogant cop into shreds of bloody payback, how good the anticipation felt, how wonderfully his new life had come together, how bright the prospects were, how enjoyable it was to be alive and invulnerable.