and devoted his attention to making it back through the deep water and, above all else, not driving off the road.
Once he was on the other side he tested the brakes. This time they held after a few taps. He stopped, backed to the water's edge, and got out, aching but with a strong sense of relief. His problems were almost over. When he was sure no one was observing him he took the Luger by the barrel and, with his good arm, flung the weapon out into the moving stream of water. He got back in the car and headed toward his house. He would give himself a chemical bath, patch himself up, and by the time the authorities came around with questions he'd have an airtight alibi scenario for them.
Sharon Kamen no longer thought of Dr. Royal or avenging her father. She felt herself turning cold, sculpturelike, coming unhinged at the pit of her stomach, abdomen, and chest, coming apart like one of Jean Ipousteguy's reclining bronze nudes. She knew she was fading fast, her arms raised, legs in an unladylike sprawl, too weak to stop the wounds that bled onto the hard surface. She could only think of the woman in
57
Wedged under the wheel of a four-year-old family Plymouth, Chaingang observed a spill of treasures in the seat beside him. His duffel and weapons case, a pile of packages bearing the high-concept imprint, “Porky's Big Fashions—elegance for the extra large, tall, and portly.” He made a few quick pit stops: behind a bustling gas station (Goin’ Fishin'? We Got Your Bait Here), where he loaded a hundred and forty pounds of innocent bystander into a dumpster, and at a tire-repair place (We Aim to Please so
He took a careless sponge bath of sorts using a piece of tarp for a towel and the lukewarm faucet water, then changed into strange long-legged boxer-jockeys that fit in the crotch like a massive diaper for an incontinent sumo wrestler, the largest bib overalls ever made, and a fresh T-shirt. When he left the men's room it looked as if someone had attempted to give his seal a bath in the wash basin.
These needs met, his thoughts turned to his growling gut. He was ravenous for decent munchies. He drove past Esther's Cafe (Home of Famous Bayou Catfish), only because he counted fourteen trucks in the postage-stamp lot and he wasn't sure he had that much ammo. Finally he wheeled into the drive-up lane of a Fastfood.
“Welcome to Fastfood. May we take your order?” the intercom rasped.
“Gimme six Swiss with mushroom, six triple curly-crisps, six mondo munchburgers, six hacienda grandes, six beef ‘n’ bean burritos, and six large conquistadores.'
“What would you like to drink?” the box asked, but he was already driving toward the food window, salivating like a bear coming out of hibernation and smelling salmon.
“That'll be sixty-six dollars and sixty cents, sir,” a girl announced through a small crack in the security window, getting a look at the leviathan whose arm, a massive, rock-hard, hairy-pelted thing with a skillet-size paw on the end, was extending payment even as she spoke. She had to force herself to touch the money. An arm roughly the size of a railroad tie rested on the sill, huge fingers drumming impatiently while she filled the security port with numerous sacks of food and his change. “Thank you, and come back,” she said, insincerely, as he stacked the food sacks across the floorboard of the Plymouth, where the corpse of its previous owner had recently rested.
She shuddered as the big thing drove away, a hand shoving mushroom-'n'-Swiss-triple-curly-somethings into its gaping maw. Snaggleteeth meant to wrest meat from bone and bite the caps off beer bottles tore into six sacks of fast food in a salivating, frenzied greaseorama of feasting. Next best thing to a live one.
The watchers meant him no serious, permanent harm. They were not there to destroy him, and that was perhaps one reason why his sensors didn't nudge him. Also, he was feeding, and food was what he lived for.
They'd watched the pulse indicate two stops, but when a couple of minutes went by without any movement they did what they always did, they moved in close enough to eyeball the target through binocs.
“He's
“There you go,” the wheelman said, unnecessarily. She already had the door open and was on her way toward a nearby copse. The target was on the other side. Parked.
An observer watching the watchers would have seen, again, an ordinary looking, fairly attractive woman get out of a van and walk into some trees. She was carrying a case that might have held a musical instrument or a fishing pole, and was dressed in a way that would cause no raised eyebrows. She was moving at a trot, but who walks slowly in the rain?
She ripped a perfectly good pair of slacks but made her way into position and wasted no time getting the piece out and sling-wrapped against a tree trunk. At that range he was in the bank. The lady happened to be a world-class handgun, skeet, and rifle shot—SAUCOG's secret sniper.
Chaingang was chewing one minute, spitting food the next, fighting to get the driver's-side door open and then charging out on tree-trunk legs, the killer chain in his hand, looking for whoever shot him. Trouble was, she was far away, already running back toward the Dodge van, the expendable, silent air gun still lashed to its indigenous firing stanchion.
“Call it in!” she shouted from the edge of the trees, and the wheelman was instantly on the radio, speaking the code phrase that let the meat wagon know their package was ready. She got in the van and they took off, as she gave specific directions.
He'd pulled up behind a discount store and ma ‘n’ pa grocer's to have his munchies. He'd almost made it to the stand of trees when the ultra-potent Alpha Group II hammered him to the ground like a felled water buff.
The surveillance team pitied the guys who had to load him.
58
“Dan?'
Nothing.
An immense, unforgiving hand picks up an imaginary ice pick and stabs it down into the center of a block of ice exactly the shape of a human brain.
“Danny?'
“Danny are you there?'
“Oh, Danny Boy, the ice, the ice is cracking,” someone sings in a thin, sissified soprano.
“Is anyone home?'
Cracks in the ice cobweb out and complete two perfect hemispheres that now split, revealing an object the shape of an egg, translucent and made of ice, at the center.
The egg is at the center of Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski's brain.
“ME me me me me MIMI MIMI MIMI mememememe mememememememememememememe ... mememe memem ... mememememem ... MEMEMEMEMEMEME MEMEMEMEMEMEMEME?'
The question echoes unmercifully and the egg of translucent ice cracks open.
CRUNCH!
A tiny monster with a face familiar to occupant slithers out, a newborn mutant, who squawks in a high voice filled with profound intuitive unsimplemindedness and profoundly intuitive simple Simonizedness, lists dangerously. Argh, matey, she's grocery-listing dangerfieldly to starboard. Fart up the shortarms and jerk off the yardarms you pedagogic poltroonish pusillanimous pussies of quotidian quiddity.
