Savant

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?