Slob

Chaingang and the flames

It was not that Daniel was consciously aware of intruders coming. There was no isolated warning that flashed inside his head saying enemy approaching. It was only a sudden necessity for preparedness. An inner signal of some kind that prodded his bulk to move and do it quickly. On some level he sensed the proximity of danger.

As a physical precognate, that rarest of the presentient beings, these paranormal warning signals did something else. They forced him onto a plateau of concentration unknown to normal humans. The fierceness and single-mindedness of his powers of directed attention were beyond the level of understanding. They allowed him to compartmentalize his vision, isolate focus, refine scent, sound, vista. They sharpened his intuition and perception, honed his skills and abilities and tactile senses. The closest thing might be the ninja who would sit with his master in a closed and darkened room, sitting silently for hours waiting for sensei to drop a pin, listening to hear the fall of the tiny pin, concentrating so fiercely on that one sound, eyes closed, waiting for that jarring crashing metallic loudness amplified by sheer will.

As he prepared his ambush for whatever was coming Chaingang concentrated in a scary effluence of laserlike will and awesome power. No human creature on earth was so self-centered, in the true definition of the term, than Daniel was when the warning signals tingled. A doctor in the program at Marion had identified it but mislabeled the phenomenon.

He half jokingly told a colleague, "When you're that fat; your girth becomes the physical center of the earth and all decisions radiate out geo-centrically." They laughed because it sounded humorous in the context of their discussion but even as an exaggeration the identification of the core element glittered. The gift of the physical precognate was beyond ordinary identifications. Whatever name you applied to the supernormal power behind Daniel Bunkowski's presentience, you knew there was no joking about the frightening acuteness or the absolute pernicious resolve that guided him on a level where science had only begun to probe.

He was truly his own center. He was a human data-processing tool eating raw fact and observation, storehousing experiences, however deleterious, as a kind of pilot survey for future action, relating all movement and change and occurrence to the position of his own person in that part of the universe that touched his existence, measuring the changing data by an assessment of threat, time and space variables, and factoring all possible predictables. Noxious, hateful, even evil—yes. But brilliantly centered and incandescently deadly.

He sensed the necessity for speed now and he moved with surprising speed and agility. Laying out the rough elements first, propelling his great bulk through the pipes and making sure that his earlier work had been concealed from any prying eyes. Working only with the light of a powerful lantern's beam, he rigged his grenade ambush, a variation from "field expedient" materials . . . wire, cable, det cord, cannon fuse, stolen blasters, leads, igniters, tucking his traps out of sight in the manner of the best professional hunters. Then, coming down to the crucial time, carefully connecting the detonation devices to the various charges. Hand movements steady, precise, astonishingly sure, the huge cigarlike fingers connecting the explosive with a jeweler's delicacy.

And when the triple trap is in place, after a last quick check of his procedures, a final enumeration of his mental checklist, he is up and gone. But the huge man does not come up out of RY7/INLET 20, he comes up far away from the access catch basin that is his secret escape route because he knows there is danger nearby and he is nothing if not a survivor.

When he comes back, working his way through the alleyway in between an empty storefront and Flawless Laundry and Dry Cleaners, he sees people and he freezes, turns, slowly and carefully eases his way back down the alley and he is gone even as the one called Retard says to Billy:

"Hey, bro, tell Deuce I got the things," and he goes over to the saddlebags of a huge Hog.

"Deuce."

"Yo."

"Retard's got the stuff. You want a piece?"

"I'll get it," Deuce says moving down the street. "Don't—hey, hold it," he yells at the one called Retard. "Leave 'em in there a minute."

"Jew get the mother fuckers?"

"Yeah. I got six. That twenty-two ain't worth jack shit but I brought it. Fucking piece of shit."

"Give it to Larry, he can't hit shit anyway with the sonofabitch."

"I ain't got a piece," one of the bikers says, coming up to the men.

"Here." Deuce picks a revolver out of the bag and puts it in the man's hand.

"Fucker's loaded?"

"Yeah."

"Who else ain't got a piece? Find out."

"Huh?"

"Fuck it—never mind," the busy general. "Hey, Billy." The biker approached him. "Go ask around to see who ain't carrying somethin'. Tell Nitro and Jim come here."

"Hey, Nitro!" the man starts yelling.

"Shaddup you fuck," Deuce stage-whispers, "go tell the son of a bitch, goddammit, don't yell it. Shit, if I wanted that shit I could yell the fucking shit myself. Jesus." He shook his head as the large, bearded man shrugged and moved off.

"Deuce, Earl ain't got nothin' but a knife."

"Here." He handed a small foreign automatic to the man and stuck a western-style double-action piece in his belt. Then changed his mind and handed it to the man. "Give one to Earl and see who else ain't packin'."

"Earl ain't gonna' be packin' even after I give the motherfucker a piece," and everyone around close enough to hear began laughing hysterically, Earl having been notoriously short-changed in the masculine-equipment department.

"Where the fuck's Nitro and limbo?"

"They're comin. Jim's movin' the ten-wheeler like you wanted."

"Oh, yeah?"

"You need sum'pin, pard?" a hideously scarred face whispered in Deuce's ear, causing him to flinch, which made them both laugh. "Sorry about that."

"That's cool. Soon as Jim comes over we'll go over the shit. Everybody here?"

"Damn straight. Let's go get the motherfucker."

"Deuce," a young, long-haired biker said as he came running across the street. "I got the old Ford loaded with shit and it's up on top of the middle manhole."

"Let's go, Jimbo." Deuce gathered his lieutenants around him and traced a large cross in the dust of a car hood. "Nitro, you take Billy and them dudes and you start here." He pointed to one end of the line he'd drawn. From the air, if you could see through the street, you would know that the holes did not run straight at each other, parallel to the street itself, but were angled in a Y shape, but they saw it as a straight line from their street-level point of view. "Over there where the carrying somethin."

"Hey, Deuce. It's on down there. That manhole is on down over in the next block, way ov— "

"Who's fuckin' this goddamn chicken anyway, goddammit, you want to run this motherfucker?"

"Fuck no, I just— "

"Hey! Larry." A tall man yelled yo, and Deuce said, "Where's that old—what's his fuckin' name, Bugs Bunny or whatever. Woody, yeah—Woody, where's that fucker?"

"I'm right here, Mr. Younger," the wino said pleasantly, visions of three hundred dollars dancing in his head, with the promise of an elusive and coveted boner not far behind.

"Where'd jew say that big cocksuck comes up?"

"Right here." Albert Sharma pointed to their right, and down the block over there. "That manhole there. I'll betcha' he's down there right— "

"Yeah. Right. Cool, later. Goddammit, take 'em on down there, go ahead, when you get there start in toward this way, making sure it ain't one of us, goddammit. You see some shadows or some shit, don't just start fucking blastin' or some of us'll get hit in the cross fire. We'll start here—and we'll come toward you—and if his ass is in there, we'll catch him in the middle. Right, Jim, you've worked down in those whores—can he get out?"

"Naw. We'll box the motherfucking cocksucker up good and whack his fat ass out, man. He can't come up the hole here so he's gotta' go one way or the fucking other—right?"

"Yeah, okay, let's go!"

Someone shouts as he starts moving, "Deuce! Hold on."

"Now what?"

"Wouldn't it be better if we'd blow some fuckin' smoke or somethin' down in there, start fires at either end and burn his ass out."

"Yeah, we can SMOKE the motherfuck out."

"SMOKE the cunt out," somebody else offers. They're less than anxious to go down after him in the dark sewers and water mains but the fearless leader screams:

"Fuck that shit, take it to his ass!" And the Flames shout back to a man, chains, clubs, handguns ready, Nitro and Jim pry hooks under their respective covers, and nineteen men, the Flames MotorCycle Club of Oldtown, nineteen experienced, veteran street fighters, lanterns and flashlights casting spooky beams down into the inky black, lower themselves below the streets of Chicago to do battle and seek revenge.

And Dr. Geronimo and Woody Woodpecker, standing "safely" away from the action, are suddenly blown off their feet in a horrible, indescribable explosion that is really many explosions but so closely timed that they sound like one fantastic sublevel blast ripping through feet of concrete like an awful earthquake, cracking the city street beneath them in booming and deafening explosion and a violent shower of broken concrete and twisted steel pipe and ball bearings and cement and metal and blood and guts and all in a screaming catalysm that is all the more terrifying because it comes out of nowhere, comes from silent tripwires that trigger U.S. military waterproof/weatherproof ring-release fuse igniter that drives firing pin against primer which ignites a five component powder-core sparking cannon fuse, and comes from nonelectric chemical pyrotechnic ignition matches tripwired by a battery that causes the detonation of blasting caps, and comes from command-detonated claymores synched into a perimeter-attack mode, and imagine two loaded 12-gauge shotguns . . . Rack a shell into each weapon . . . Now drop nine cockroaches into one barrel . . . ten in the other . . . Put the guns in workbench vises facing each other and weld the two barrels pointing into each other's bore . . . Using a trigger-wired remote firing device, simultaneously pull the two triggers firing the weapons into themselves at the same precise millisecond. BBBBBBBBBBBLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMM-MMMMMMMMMMMM!

This is how you make nineteen cockroaches all fucked up.