Savant

had this thought it seemed to center in the rolls of fat at the back of his huge tree-trunk of a neck, and shoot up the skull. He wondered if he'd had brain damage, or if perhaps he had some sort of brain tumor that was becoming malignant.

One thing he knew without question: Something was wrong. He knew his system like the inside of a ticking Swiss watch, from his thought processes to the regularity of his bowel movements. He was, for all his screaming abnormality and oversize bulk, a well-oiled human machine. He knew he was having 'mental problems' of some kind. He was also certain that—by logical standards—he was not insane. Not by his criteria.

Bunkowski separated these mental problems into two parts: first, there was a vague torpor—as he thought of it; second, there were those physical manifestations that he could isolate as having begun sometime during his last period of drugged incarceration. When they'd prepared to let him out for the killing spree in Waterton, they had done something—either overdosed him in some form or struck him on the head while he was drugged. This was the hornet's nest, which was his way of thinking of the buzzing, dizzy sensation he had experienced a time or two since his release from the hole in Marion.

The torpor thing was what tugged at him. It was interfering with his day-to-day business, and affecting decisions. Making him act weirdly in his own eyes. He was doing things that made no sense—giving Miss Roach two hundred dollars unnecessarily, for example. Why hadn't he simply buried Miss Roach and put her out of her misery? Very disturbing.

It wasn't torpor at all, when he thought about it. For one thing, he never seemed to be horny anymore. Not that he was such a randy goat to begin with—it's just that he had normal desires for sex, at least in his mind they were normal. Another thing he'd noticed besides his unusual celibacy was that he didn't seem to find killing so much fun anymore. Sure, it had been pleasant, doing the bikers in their clubhouse, but there had been no true exhilaration as he'd felt in the past, no genuine sense of satisfaction.

There was nothing good that would come of thinking along these lines, he decided, and jerked his mind off of the subject—or tried to. He saw a rib joint, decided he was hungry, and pulled in. But as he got out of the car he was quite shaken by the realization that the act of killing was not acting as a catharsis, if indeed it ever had. This knowledge did not keep the desire for revenge from rumbling inside his gut like physical hunger for food, but he knew it was a bad omen. He was tasting something he could never completely eat. Like a drug addict who gets off the first time like a skyrocket, and then spends his life searching again and again for the perfect high he experienced with his initial experiment. He'll never find it, and perhaps inside he knows he'll never recapture it—but addiction (if only to selfrewards) supersedes logic.

Was he condemned to go on killing and killing, forever searching for the big release that would bring him peace of mind? When he destroyed the bikers, would that give him relief? Was there satisfaction waiting for him in the steamy red geyser that would pump from Mrs. Nadine Garbella's severed neck? Or was the only satisfaction in slaking his bloodthirst and heart hunger?

The taste of an enemy's life force did sound good. In fact, the thought of sinking those shark teeth into the hot, coppery, salty meat of a nice fresh heart made him so hungry he felt positively lightheaded.

A waitress or hostess welcomed him, asked him if he wanted a table for one, and he had to nod—he couldn't speak, his mouth was salivating so badly.

'Would you like a menu?'

'No,' he said, swallowing. 'Bring me ribs. How many in a side?'

'A side is a dozen ribs.'

'Bring me six sides.'

'Right away, sir,' she said with a smile, hurrying off in the direction of the kitchen.

Ribs, hot and mouth-watering, and smothered in famous Heart of America Barbecue Sauce, was what this place did. So for the folks who came in and ordered ribs and nothing else, who didn't sit schmoozing over appetizers or drinkies from the bar, there was almost no wait for the food. If you were a table of twelve drunks, or a table with a couple of crying kids, you really got fast service—they wanted you to eat and run. It was all of a minute and a half before Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was presented with his six steaming sides of Heart of America barbecued beef ribs.

Picture the sight: Mavis Strayborn of the Olathe Strayhorns, seated at the south side of table station eight, facing her husband, Herbert, whose back is to the door. Their dear friends of many years, Dora Lee and Monte Brown (Monte works at the bank), are at the east and west sides of the table, so when Mavis sees the thing and her mouth drops open they all look—naturally—and the three of them see the beast come waddling over and flop down right there beside them, bold as you please, talking in a big loud voice and ordering six sides of ribs. My God!

Monte snickers and says something across the table, longways, to Dora Lee, and Mavis gets the giggles, and Herbert Strayhorn says, 'What? What's so funny?' in that dry voice of his. Monte says something else and the four of them laugh, and Herbert kind of turns and tries to get a peek at this vision, which just about convulses Monte and Dora Lee, but which Mavis somehow manages to stifle. Pretty soon they go on about their business, and get back to eating their rib dinners.

The waitress who has his station hurries with the ribs, all seventy-two of them, a six-tier stack of delectable-smelling platters in hand, sits them on the table, and says, 'Will there be anything else for you, sir?' But he can only shake his head slightly in response, or maybe that isn't even a shake-perhaps he is just moving that big head around in an involuntary physiological reaction to the smell of the barbecue. My God, he's hungry for meat! The waitress seems to sense danger and jerks her hands away the second the platters of ribs are on the table. She tears off a page from the pad she carries and places it surreptitiously at the far edge of the table, moving away from the station as quickly as she can, away from the implicit threat. Sharp teeth, brutal strength, fingers like steel cigars, knives that slice, forks with tines that pierce flesh—this table where the behemoth sits is like the dissecting table in a busy morgue.

The beast has no awareness of the waitress or the people around him, not at this moment. He is too busy eating, chewing, swallowing, too occupied now to speak or even nod as she thanks him in a faraway, fading voice. A faint red mist rises from the smoking, pungent meat as the beast tears at the ribs in a feeding rampage. How many writers have swiped the phrase 'feeding frenzy' from Jaws? But that is what one sees—Chaingang over the ribs, crunching tooth against hard bone, devouring the food with ugly misshapen teeth meant to gnaw at chunks of flesh, cleaning each rib bone like a shark hitting bloody meat, or a starving carnivore over its kill. Ripping every speck of meat, gristle, fat, then sucking the tiny bones held in those huge, viselike paws. Methodical. Orderly and mad at once. Eating each beef rib in the same way, in a grisly, ghastly, gross spectacle of bestiality.

Picture what Mavis Strayhorn sees: the mountain of hard blubber and ugly muscle holds the rib just so, an expression on his dimpled face like an animal with its prey, taking the four sides of each rib in order, sucking the bone in a quick, wet, nasty slurp, throwing it onto the platter. Five, six, eight ribs. Gnaw. Suck. Slurp. Swallow. Gnaw. Suck. Slurp. Swallow. Cleaning the ribs bare. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. The pile of bones beginning to resemble a carcass plucked by buzzards and stripped by maggots.

Not a scrap of edible food clings to a bone. The feeding machine is an efficient one and leaves nothing. Four fast ripping bites in each series, the loud sucking, the sound of the bone hitting the pile. The routine punctuated only by an occasional cracking sound as those sharp animal fangs penetrate bone.

Mavis and Dora Lee and Monte have stopped eating now. Herbert is still valiantly chewing away, their humble family platter sits between the four of them, untouched. Herbert keeps craning back to get a look at this palpably horrible thing that has brushed up against their orderly and clean lives of genteel normalcy.

The slob inhales the seventy-two Heart of America Barbecued ribs, 'hickory smoked in our famous Heart of America Barbecue Sauce—hot or mild,' and as he swallows the last of the meat wrested from the final naked rib he looses a gassy, wet, explosive belch that causes Mavis to begin to throw up—the nausea rises in her throat but she manages to catch it before it escapes and she swallows.

Herbert has turned and they're all watching this disgusting beast now, genuinely disturbed by his vomit- making presence. Grease and vestiges of sauce drip from his face as he languorously casts his eyes toward Mavis, appearing to notice the people beside him for the first time. He eyes Mavis's thigh, something pleasant to consider while dining. A lethargic, amusing consideration plays through his weird mind as he sucks a morsel from a tooth: belching again, wiping his greasy face, dropping the filthy napkin on the floor between them, standing heavily,