Butcher

Bunkowski made it to the outside once again. Slick as Big Mr. Dick.

Chaingang had stolen a car.

Now, hidden in deep weeds, his brain malfunctioning, his enormous poundage shook with the tremors of fever and shock.

The diminutive Latino guard had hit him many times, using things that would addle, but that would not break the skin.

The stolen car came in and out of view, racing across his mindscreen. He began to remember—to really remember for the first time.

The beating from the guard was two, three years back in time. It held no relevance. He hadn't escaped, and there was no escape now. With Dr. Norman's technology Chaingang lived in a perpetual prison. Even through the pain he could feel the implant back in the rolls of fat that cushioned his skull and unique brain. They controlled him, Norman and the others, by means of an implanted locator.

His hearing popped in and out as if he were experiencing pressurizing and depressurizing aboard an aircraft or submarine, and, similarly, the car roared into view again. What was it about that car?

Bunkowski concentrated fiercely and saw the other car coming. He'd been in Kansas City, fucking Kansas City! The mindscreen fed him his map, fighting for clarity of recall: I-70 east for two hundred fifty-two miles from K.C. to St. Louis. I-64 east to I-57. Then on to Marion for his rendezvous with Dr. Norman. But in St. Louis, where construction had detoured all the major roads, he'd somehow found his itinerary bollixed by the rerouting, and he was southbound on I-55 suddenly, when he noticed a light bar on the roof of the vehicle two cars behind, and no legal place to turn, without exiting into a knotted jumble of crowded exit lanes, underpasses, overpasses, and who-knows-what impasses. He was doing the speed limit plus two. He went around a car, the cop went around a car. He became ultra-cautious, and by the time the heat turned onto an exit lane he was too far south to go back.

The map was a familiar one. He'd played in killing fields in Missouri's hinterlands once before, in Waterton, and he decided to hang tough on 55 until he could cross the river, then head back over to 57 and up to Marion. He was looking at his map, in fact, when the drunk driver in the Olds 98 swung out into his lane. Not even Chaingang's lightning hand-to-eye coordination was quick enough to swerve completely out of harm's way, and the two cars slamdanced off the interstate, rolling, bouncing, crashing; steel, glass, plastic, fiberglass crumpling, shattering, tearing ass every which way.

Chaingang remembered lights on and off, a mob of hands lifting, hearing himself laugh as he was dropped rudely, coming to in a cramped ambulance, and he recalled parts of the memory coming back, earlier, bass- ackwards and out of kilter.

He remembered being offloaded. Many hands. Curses. Jokes about dead weight, “eat your Wheaties,” paramedic banter—something about him being his own driver's-side air bag.

There was food, garbage so disgusting even a gourmand with a penchant for the odd, uncooked pulmonary artery was repelled. He recalled thinking what the cops would do as soon as they I.D.'d him; relived the cool air on his rear rotundities as he waddled through a hallway of protesting voices; recollected his impromptu exfiltration. A purloined ride, cramped of course, minutes or hours of driving while he fought against blacking out, and then, much later, regaining consciousness.

But for the first time in battered memory there was a desire that burned even more than hunger. At least hunger for the ordinary fast-food sustenance. The image of the sissy doctor who was at the root of all his troubles was an itch he couldn't yet reach. As he recuperated he would think on the sissy and come up with something appropriate. He never underestimated enemies, however; Chaingang was a planner.

There were those within the penal system and the tentacles of intelligence, the military, and law- enforcement communities, who seemingly answered to no one. Norman appeared to be such an individual, at least on the level of their quasi-scientist/guinea-pig relationship.

Inside Marion there were whispers of ties to DDI, CIA, other national security outfits. Bunkowski was part of the far stranger truth. In the mid ‘60s, Norman had been recruited by a component of the mil-intel network then calling itself the Special Advisory Unit/Combined Operations Group. Just who they advised was never totally clear, but for a brief time USMACVSAUCOG, their full nomenclature, was the lash-up responsible for “sensitive wet ops in Southeast Asia.” Assassinations and terror campaigns run against Laos and Cambodia “across the fence'—illegal ops. It meant clandestine executions of South Viets, allies, at least on paper, whom someone had marked bad. It meant trips north into the Z and beyond, hazardous sanctions requiring “sanitized” (untraceable, unidentifiable, unattributable) bods. The most expendable form of covert grunts undertook actions so bizarre and surreal that the nature of the missions could never be made public. A stateside school for sanctioned killers had been one of the wet dreams that almost eventuated.

Dr. Norman was in charge of finding certain candi-dates whose histories, talents, and proclivities suited them to the work and who could be sacrificed without undue fuss. He had told underlings, “As distasteful as the program was, it was necessary for our country's prosecution of the war effort.'

Enter Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski: four hundred and sixty to five hundred pounds, six feet seven inches to six feet nine inches, depending on which dossier you believed. Born in 1950, 1951, or 1952. An abused and tortured child who'd lived and evolved into the strangest, most monstrous killer in American history; a heart eater and serial murderer of despicable vileness, who had an intelligence quotient so high it warped every curve. A man mountain of hatred who was presentient, who'd learned somehow to sense impending danger.

Norman termed him, “That rare form of human being, a physical precognate.” He thought Chaingang could sense danger before it occurred.

The awesome devourer of hearts had supposedly told his captors, under drug-and-hypnosis therapy, that he thought he'd probably taken “about four hundred and fifty to five hundred lives,” a human life for every pound of his weight.

Chaingang Bunkowski had fit the program's profile to a Tyrannosaurus T. Skilled assassin, stalker supreme, with a built-in survival system and network of defense mechanisms beyond peer, he was a man who hated everybody. He killed out of pure pleasure. These factors made him the ultimate hunter- killer unit.

Norman saw in Bunkowski his own link to immortality. His discovery and experiments would stand as a unique cornerstone to the work being done in his field of medicine. And when the technology had permitted it, he'd supervised the first brain implant of its type. Laser surgery had been performed successfully, and a sophisticated piece of microelectronics was inserted. It linked Daniel to the Omni DF MEGAplex Secure Transceiver Auto-lock locator Relay unit and movement detection monitor—OMEGASTAR.

But Chaingang would not be so easily controlled. He knew, now, that he would be all right. The leviathan closed its eyes, content and relaxed again, and slept restfully, gathering its great strength. This time the beast dreamt of a spider.

42

The golden orb was back. It had spent the summer in a web that was visible from the small hinged port that was sometimes left open to provide air for the windowless enclosure. A beam of light regularly found its way to the underside of the duct where the web had been spun, and in the evening this light attracted its share of bugs, so the golden orb could dine on found objects at its leisure. Two days ago the golden orb had vanished. It was either a sign of approaching winter, he reasoned, or the spider had fallen prey to something else. But now it had returned.

Her significant other had never been in evidence. Presumably he had been destroyed after the mating process, or had gone south for the season. Through the long days of summer she had managed to engineer a magnificent pouch nearly as large as her own body, an egg sac, so if she survived the coming months, by spring she would deliver.

A distant cousin, Loxosceles recluses, gave the occasional nasty lesion to inmates, who were routinely treated with cortisone IVs.

Daniel had a vested interest in mastering the identification of such insects, not only their appearance, but the symptoms of and treatment for the lesions they inflicted. This was golden orb intelligence if you lived in the land of killer spiders and queens who ate their men.