Slob

fought all of his life. His name was Tree. It was his street name. Little Tree, or Tree, they called him. Mr. Tree. He truly did not remember his own name. It was a name like Tree. His first name, his real name, was Buddy but nobody called him that. He had not been Buddy since he lived at home.

He had run away from home when he was fourteen. After being confronted by his father about his frequent sexual attacks on his new stepmother he had beaten his father unconscious and left home. He was a sometimes- member of an outlaw biker gang called the Flames that was currently trying to muscle in on the Chicago Warlords for a piece of the lucrative market in crank, or crystal meth.

'Fuckin' Deuce is lame, man.' Deuce was the current president of the Flames and Tree was telling this to his only friend, another very short man who was known on the street as Leaping Lester. Lester was a cringing sort of a wimp who was always seen scurrying around the fringes of the outlaw gang members and groupies and hangers-on, turning up in the leather bars and redneck roadhouses and dope joints, trying to suck up to the Flames or anybody flying colors (wearing a biker-club jacket) and smelling rank. He was a biker buff. He was also frightened to death of Tree, and because Tree liked this attitude he allowed him to hang around. 'Fuckin' Deuce had any balls he'd . . . we'd be dealing, goddammit.'

'Yeah,' Lester agreed enthusiastically, 'that's right, man. That som'bitch's lame.'

'He's a lame, jive-ass motherfucker.'

'Damn right he's lame. I don't know why—'

'Got to kick his bogus Deuce ass out o' there and get somebody can deal real. We be dealing some fucking weight here, motherfucker.'

'Fuckin' lame Flames. Shit, man, fuckin' Warlord faggots dealin' big numbers goddammit and that's—'

'Fuckin' Whore Lards.'

'Yeah,' Lester agreed, laughing, 'the fuckin' Whore Lords.'

'The Whore Lards, you dumb, midget punk,' Tree said viciously.

'Yeah'—Lester giggled—'lard-ass Whore Lards.'

'I'm gon' to get that shit from Apache and Saturday we'll get the meth and the hydrochloric acid 'n shit and go out to the point and have us a fuckin' cookout, motherfucker.

'Yeah!'

'Man, soon's I can get me another two grand we're goin' to fuckin' Big A, man.'

'Huh?'

'Thas' right, motherfuck. Fuckin' Australia, man. That's where it is, pud. That's where the freedom's at now. Fuckin' Peter whatshisname, Peter-eater, remember that limey cocksuck?'

'Eh?'

'The limey, English fucker you pud. Well, anyway, that motherfucker says like it's wide open over there in motherfuckin' Australia, man. An' I'll take Debbie and you take that ugly bitch of yours and we'll go over there and live like fuckin' kings.' Debbie was his slave; a pathetic, morose, robotlike teenager who worked with them as part- time janitorial help. Physically unattractive and unwanted, she played out the parts of his twisted psychosexual fantasies because, at least so far, perverted attention was better than none.

'Fuckin' Australia? Gawddamn, I dunno where it is even onna' fuckin' map.'

'You dumb li'l runtcunt, you don't know where your shitty ass is either but you can still manage to wipe it oncet in a while, cancha'?'

'Yeah, I rectum so,' he said, achieving for him what was a veritable Everest peak of wit.

Bunkowski had been watching them for about half a block, coming silently behind them, stalking them in the darkness. He could make out most of the absurd, moronic conversation as he drew closer now, and the light glinted off the chain that the one called Tree wore over his shoulder, the thing that had caught Daniel's eye in the first place.

Tree wore a huge chain, something off a motorcycle perhaps, an enormous thing that he ran through one of the shoulder loops on his leather jacket, and down into his pocket, to a heavy weight of keys, the other end of the long chain fastened to his belt. He liked to whip the keys out in a fight, and it was the silver chain catching the light that Daniel had seen.

He loved the idea of taking off this pair of drooling punks with his own chain, a yard of taped tractor chain that had killed and killed again, and he planned to smack these loud-talking, ignorant insects just as you might swat a pair of buzzing mosquitoes. He liked to kill any living human, but little people were his first love, little strutting cocky bantam-rooster braggart smart-aleck punk loud-talking, ignorant little people wearing chains were right up his alley.

'That shit we cooked up before was fucking decent, man. I mean it drummed on the inside of y'r head all fuckin' day. We can cook that shit and man, I'll be the fucking king of Australia.' Tree had begun his fantasy-obsession about Australia several weeks ago, how they could go over and sell crank free from any laws, and so deep was the structure of his psychosis that each day he built another imaginary layer onto the foundation of his Australian dreamworld. He really believed at that moment, that any day now he'd be buying his tickets for the big boat ride to a ripe, wide-open paradise without authority or law.

'They ain't hardly no big gangs ovah there, man. We can fucking control the crank market overnight. Brew up our own good shit. Be dealin three, four pounds a day. Be the fuckin' kings of—'

They smelled Chaingang before they heard him or saw him, which isn't hard to understand when you consider that he was now spending most of his time down in a specially built trap hidden in a submain of the Chicago sewage system. Tree and Lester were no fragrant flowers themselves, but this—this thing could be smelled, sensed, half a block away, and as he drew near to them coming up behind them on the street even the most desensitized dolt would instinctively turn and look at the looming apparition coming up out of the night. In-stink- tively.

Tree had the first syllable of his precious Australia in his mouth when he went down, appropriately, right in the middle of becoming the king of Aus—he caught the first chainsnap from the heavy, taped links that came snaking, snapping out silently and catching him along the hypothalamus and the medula oblongata and taking his dream down for good in a wet, scarlet sheet of blinding pain and smashed cells, tissue, vertebrae, cartilage, nerves, spine, brain. Lights out. And Bunkowski's tree-limb wrist snaps it back and out again in a lightning bolo throw; a vicious, unstoppable, furiously whizzing, deadly spinning chainsaw of certain death flung with incredible strength, and yet, amazingly, missing.

Missing! Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski didn't know the word. Missing was not a part of his comprehension. The vocabulary was new. It took a giant heartbeat to sink in, that his killer chain had spun by Missing MISSING this insignificant wimp crashing through the side window of a parked Ford Escort in an explosion of spider-tracked safety glass. And in that heartbeat Leaping Lester did the only thing the little nerd was any good at. He fled. He got up on those filthy tenny-runs of his and he flat out boogied. He booked like the wind. And he was goneski.

And Chaingang, killer of five hundred, killer of families, killer of professional mercs, killer of head-hunters, killer of hardcore soldiers, the assassin's assassin—stood motionless in his tracks. Chaingang stood there over the inert form of the Flames' fallen warrior Little Tree, and watched as a lucky wimp named Lester did the thing he did best. And for the first time he felt a nudge deep inside the bulky body somewhere, this man, this beast that knew no such emotions as fear or apprehension felt something and he could identify it, alien as it was. Because he had MISSED. Because he had been seen. Because he had made another mistake.

And Jack Eichord the cop would not know of this for a time. He was busy in the middle of a meeting where he was hearing was what shit-assed, bad, amateurish police work he'd been doing. Not him personally, you understand, just any warm body involved in Kasikoff, anybody who'd managed to let this ballbusting mother come turn around and kick the PC's ass, which in turn caused the chief to get his ass reamed, which is how come the deputy chief had the end of his dick stepped on, which is why all these cops were working a sixteen-hour day and still stuck in the cop shop at this late hour in an emergency meeting of the coppers in the Sylvia Kasikoff investigation.

Because this morning the package came. The package with the neat, block-lettered JACK ICORD, the one with the bad weight and the loose, harum-scarum feel; the one Jack was afraid of long before he examined the writing, long before he had them open it up in the bomb vault downstairs, long before he saw what was in the package the thing had sent him.