their ceiling sockets. He replaced Mr. SanDiego's cheap light fixture and the threaded retainer that held it in place, spat, tried to fart again but drew a blank, hoisted his ruck and left the disgusting crib.
He waddled back to the car, heaved his tonnage in, and drove a block and a half away, where he killed the engine, sprawled back across the front seat, and waited. He wanted to be near enough to watch the fireworks when Jesus returned, blundered into his cave, and hit the living room light switch.
He'd taken the three bulbs out of their sockets and made a tiny aperture in each, just so, using the small file. A glass cutter would have worked better, but he was able to make do with the rattail. Utilizing a fragment of stiff paper for a funnel, he ever-so-delicately filled each of the penetrated bulbs with Nitrolite, which was an explosive substance roughly ten times more powerful than C7H5N3O6, and maybe a hundred times that of black gunpowder.
The handling of Nitrolite is not for amateurs. The stuff has a well-deserved reputation for instability, and he did not know how long it had gestated in four-mil wraps under Meara's rundown barn. But if necessity is the mother of all invention then field expediency is its wayward daughter. He managed to get the Nitrolite in the bulbs without
Unfortunately Daniel had fallen fast asleep and did not get to watch Mr. SanDiego come home for the last time. He was not able to get his jollies in those seconds of anticipation before Jesus entered his domicile and went to his ultimate reward. His chainsaw snores were interrupted by a concussive force roughly that of—well, imagine being at ground zero in an arc-light B52 strike. Even a block and a half away it hammered the soles of his feet, his bladder, his lungs, his teeth. He tasted it like a mouth full of garlic. It deafened him.
He'd used way too much Nitrolite,
Oh, well, Chaingang thought, swallowing to get his hearing back, starting the car, shit happens.
He had the radio on low. He dug at his ears, twisting his huge bull neck back and forth, trying to get his hearing to kick back in. The words, “Royal Clinic in Bayou City,” got his attention, faraway-sounding and scarcely audible, and he cranked the volume up enough to catch the end of the news item.
“—Dr. Royal is in satisfactory condition and resting comfortably at—” he paid great attention to the hospital name.
One more loose piece of business and he'd leave this low-rent shithole. He jerked his head savagely and the second and third vertebrae cracked like whiplash.
68
The nurse on station 3 at Delta General answered her phone. “Oh, yes, Dr. Howard.” It was the chief of staff of the hospital.
“Has the specialist from Barnes showed up yet?'
“No, sir,” she Said, having no Idea what he was talking about.
“His name is Dr. Fine. He has lost his identification but if, er, when he shows up, it's all right. I can vouch for him. It's all right for him to see Dr. Royal.'
“Okay,” the nurse said.
“I don't think I've ever seen Dr. Fine. Could you tell me what he looks like?'
“You won't have any trouble recognizing him. He's very large. Big man. I want him to take a look at Dr. Royal.'
“All right, sir, we'll watch for him,” she said.
The doctor thanked her and handed the receiver back to the enormous beast that held a giant blade over his left nipple.
“Excellent job, Dr. Howard. You may take the rest of the night off,” Bunkowski rumbled, circling around in back of the thin, balding man and smashing a bottomfist to the gleaming pate. As the chief of staff of Delta General fell forward, Chaingang grabbed the man with his left hand and sawed through the carotids with the right, then cleaned the massive fighting Bowie on the doctor as a crimson pool spread.
With the big blade tucked away out of sight, he waddled unerringly toward the elevators, having been briefed on the layout of the hospital, and on Dr. Royal's room location, by the head man himself.
Chaingang was in a positively radiant mood. He was leaving Turdburg, Misery, and the world looked simply delightful. If there was anything he loved, it was professional men: doctors, lawyers, chief executives, and such— but doctors foremost. He loved them. He loved to kill them. They represented monkeydom at its zenith. He loved to waste them randomly, to make their deaths as ignominious as possible. Once, in a similarly buoyant mood, he'd killed a dentist with his own floss.
Daniel's primary goal in life was to hurt the monkey people until they died, but since his own operation his focus of rage always returned to one man, Dr. Norman, who'd supervised the Walter Reed implant team. The bull's-eye on which he concentrated was the sissy in charge of the bonebreakers at Marion. He would force Norman to remove the fucking implant and then he'd ... He had to jerk his mind off the feast, he was salivating badly, drooling like a Neopolitan mastiff watching poodles at the dog show.
Seeing Chaingang up close could be a devastating experience if one weren't prepared, and the nurse on station 3 had been expecting big, not super-gigantic. She almost soiled her panties when something freaky large and rather sour-smelling suddenly towered over the desk, telling her it was Dr. Fine.
“What?” she almost shouted in panic. “Oh, yes! Dr. Fine. We're expecting y—” She was starting to get up but the huge monstrosity was telling her he knew where Royal's room was, thanking her in this booming basso profundo, waddling off down the hall as if he owned the place, the largest white coat she'd ever seen flapping open in his wake.
Had she inspected that coat closely she'd have been alarmed to discover a regular doctor's coat, size XL, split under the arms and up the center of the back, and spliced with white sheet that had been neatly glued in place. It wasn't Brooks Brothers but it got the job done.
The patient in 394 was half awake, when a mastodonsized person in a white coat, with the nametag Fine, intruded upon his thoughts.
“You must be Dr. Royal,” the stranger bellowed, an idiotic smile across his ugly countenance. “I'm Fine, and how are we this lovely evening?” He moved near the prone man, taking what appeared to be strips of cloth from his pockets.
The man started to tie strips of cloth to the sideguards of the hospital bed, as if he were preparing restraints. All of Shtolz's defense mechanisms were instantly attuned. He knew whatever this was about it was bad and he made an effort to leap from the bed, but although he was strong and in excellent condition for a man of his age, the heavyweight towering above him could not be measured by any ordinary rules of biornechanics or biokinesiology. Inhuman paws the size of bedpans forced him back in their steely grip, and he felt his wrists being imprisoned by the strips of stout cloth as he struggled.
“There, there, now, Dr. Royal, please don't excite yourself. You're going to need all your strength.” As the second wrist was being secured Shtolz decided he'd try a bloodcurdling scream, but it was as if the gigantus had read his mind. “Take two of these and call me in the morning,” Chaingang said, stuffing a couple of the strips into the man's mouth.
The scream for help came out a muffled “Nnh!'
“What's that? Oh, don't be alarmed at the precautions. I don't want you flailing around during the operation. Surely you must have had to tie the dogs and cats and little babies down before you worked on them, right? Well, old boy, same deal. Just relax, and look at the bright side,” he said, affectionately, reaching under his T-shirt and pulling out the largest knife Emil Shtolz had ever seen. The bright side of the blade glinted frighteningly.
The surroundings, the sounds of a busy hospital, the pervasive smell of Betadyne, all the ambient elements that had been so reassuring to Shtolz a moment before, were now threatening to him.
“How do you feel about discorporation, Dr. Shtolz?” The word hung in the air between them, rank and offensive as the beast's smell. “Personally, I don't see a future in it. Oh—hey! You're not Jewish, are you? Good. I
