Savant

within the vast host body. As it feeds and evolves it strengthens.

Death feels the changes and vibrates with the power. Hums with the virulent malignity that makes it stronger, more noxious and fatally toxic, more impervious to antidote.

Beneath the part that hungers for beef and cheese burritos by the bagful, visceromotor-nerve response quickens, sensations heighten, systems accelerate as they electrify and zap the phrenic controls.

Beneath the surface of the beast, there are the tiny paroxysms of microelemental transmutation that Dr. Norman would have given his eyeteeth to understand. With each quivering electrocharge there occurs down inside the core another subtle transformation.

Beneath the skin of the monstrous anomaly that the doctor persists in calling a physical precognate, the godless and godforsaken macrogrossness mutates. Modifies. Powertrips. Nurtures.

The mutating giant was born for the stalk. Its repulsive goals are abhorrently simple: vengeance and annihilation.

On its back, inert, it thinks of burritos, and of death-dealing. Its pleasant daydreams are of those upon whom he'll feed. The other food—that is a mundane biological need that intrudes on his deeper motives.

A massive mound of man sprawled on a filthy camouflage tarp, he turns the pages of Utility Escapes, seeing the name of the cruel stable owner, the daughter of a man who performs certain lab experiments, the father of the boys who killed the animals in the petting zoo, the man who joked of bleeding hearts, the buyer, the clown who keeps creatures in his trailer, the freaks he will ultimately find and dissect.

Look inside the wrinkled obscenity that is his mind: you will see a landscape so alien that it will shock you. What do you recall from the age of seven? Think back. Memories of Daddy? Begrimed in oily dirt, toiling in the garage, as you watch from the safe haven of Mommy's lap? Remember your sixth year? Watching Aunt and beloved Granny planting hollyhocks, Grandmother amid the larkspur? Can you conjure up a vague remembrance of age five? Perhaps you were alone in your crib and you made a noise with your mouth. Mommy and Daddy rush in to confront the early whistler. 'It's baby!' Mother says. 'He whistled!'

Look inside at the beast's first memory: darkness. Warm, soft, liquid darkness. Heat. Critical mass. Pain. An explosive force. Jarring shock. Sudden light. Dazzling, shattering, soul-rending brightness.

What can you ever hope to understand about such a being? From his first memory there is only pain.

He recalls the roar of madness and noise, the inundation of horror, the whiplash of overpowering reality, and he remembers being torn, thrust from his mother into the blazing world, ripped from a dark and warm womb of a screaming woman.

He remembers soaring aloft in the inescapable clutches of a powerful giant who holds him like a dragon, in long slimy claws, soaring into the blinding sky in a sudden nightmare of birthing cataclysm. Pictures the red deluge. The violent, concussive beginning in bright light as he was wrenched from the hot current of his mother's blood.

He can go back to the beginning but he chooses not to do so. Superior Court of Kansas…in the matter of setting aside the adoption of Daniel…vague fuzz of details blur. Mommy—dead at birth? An adoption that fails to take. A foster mother who says the baby must be disciplined The word inches across his mindscreen as he gazes, unseeing, at the pages of his Bible.

Around the word disciplined the edges are seared, blackened, where the child was subjected to the intense heat of a stove burner, cigarettes, matches, lighters, soldering iron—oh, the list is long and memorable. And those are his good memories. He has had enough of this. He has mutated to the power edge. Chaingang is up and moving to the Buick, which he has come to rather appreciate, now that he's made his peace with the seat controls. It is close enough to the hotsheets to make him continually wary, but when he first went back and moved his Olds from the parking lot of the mall, he affixed homemade plates to the Buick, which effectively protect it from the casual 'wants and warrants' DMV check, or from the zealous officer or trooper who matches it to a recent sheet.

The assembly of a fake tag is remarkably simple—child's play, in fact, so long as you have the regional prefix key codes, which are changed each license-renewal period. Once the codes are known, fabrication of a plate is a few minutes handiwork. The easiest way to buy a couple of days' time with a spurious tag is to find a matching model in the area in which you wish to operate, fake their tag, and replace their plates with the fakes, putting theirs on your vehicle. And Chaingang knew a hundred more sophisticated variations on that theme.

But for all of that, he was sure that within twenty-four hours he'd be in another ride. The thing that watched over him kept him, in most instances, from taking imprudent chances.

The Buick cruises on a jagged northeast course, the Missouri River to the north, the Kansas City Stockyards a distant stench to the northwest.

Madison.

Belleview. H 11.

Tarkio. H 12.

Holly

Mersington. H 13.

Overpass.

Viaduct.

Hard eyes scan the rooftop vantage points. He sees a complex of industrial buildings that tug at him. At such times he is wide open to the inner clockwork that ticks within the nervous system, and he stops the car. Pulls his poundage from behind the wheel with a grunt of effort and scans.

The rooftops would be ideal for a sniper. A weapon with an effective range of two miles could smash down monkey men from Kansas to Missouri in an are of gunfire. His face beams at the pleasant contemplation of an unimpeded, wide swath of death cutting down the monkeys. He sees a beauty parlor—talk about bizarre misnomers, a dog kennel from the sound of the barking, an arts 'n' crafts store which appears to be closed. No sense of danger, but he is tugged forward and goes with it, moving closer.

There must be fifty or sixty dogs barking. Yet he sees no kennel signs.

Chaingang walks around the building. Sees what appears to be a private residential entrance to the building. It is a small, stale-smelling entranceway. There are wooden stairs. The loud barking of dogs is coming from behind the door to the right. He knocks—the gentle tap of a sledgehammer-size fist—more out of curiosity and irritation than anything else.

'Whatever it is we don't wa—' The man, more effeminate than Tommy Norville could have ever hoped to be, yet oddly macho in his demeanor, was taken aback. He looked up at Bunkowski's size and regained his composure instantly. 'What is it?' he snapped.

'I was looking for a place to board my little pup. Is this a private kennel?'

'It most certainly is not.'

'Oh, I'm sorry. I heard the barking and thought—' The man was starting to push the chipped wooden door closed and Chaingang slapped the door with the flat of his hand. It ricocheted off the man's chest, knocking him backward into the room.

'You bastard!' the man shrieked, charging at his huge adversary.

'Stop,' Bunkowski commanded, giving him a firm backfist in the face, but pulling it so as not to hurt him badly. Had Chaingang known what he was about to find, he would have broken his spine in half instead of trying to be easy on the fellow. But at the moment he had gained entry, he was still thinking the occupant might be an individual who cared for animals. This was sufficient cause to spare a monkey's life, in Chaingang's twisted world.

The hard fist only made the man mad, and he came at him again, scratching, kicking, a whirlwind of hands clawing and striking out, cursing the intruder: 'Fat fucking shit ass bitch pig fucking cocksucker—' Chaingang simply pinioned him in a pair of arms that were meant to do only one thing: crush.

He held the man immobile, one hand over his mouth and nose until it would kill him to continue to do so. He dropped the man, who weighed perhaps 225 pounds, in a limp pile, and as he fought to stay conscious, Chaingang bound his wrists with a cord from his pocket, did the ankles with a nearby extension cord, and—as soon as the fellow had stopped blowing like a whale—gagged him with a shirt found on a nearby chair.

He was immediately aware of the stench, which had been overpowering the moment he burst in, but which was now so stingingly potent as to put him on guard as he moved toward the barking.

There is no smell quite so overpowering as that of sewage, and on more than one occasion he had opted to live down below the streets in various sewers and catch basins. Second only to the raw poisonous odor of