Slob

with the snakes the serpents coiled around hairy muscled awful arms smash out knocking his mommy from the chair and the booze stink from a broken bottle and he sees the frightening blue writhing snakes and guns and scorpions and dragons and skulls and scarabs and eagles that coil, fly, crawl, levitate, creep, slither, stampede and explode around the smelly, rubbery, matted pelt of hairy flesh and scaly skin of the snake man whom he detests with a child's loathing, abominating and fearing him with all the contempt a little, tortured boy can feel in his bursting heart. And the snake man vows he will kill the little dog tomorrow and he will throw it out the window and maybe the punk too he laughs as he stomps toward the closet for something but in that instant as he starts to open the closet where the boy and the dog are cowering together the boy has stopped him somehow, and he tells the dog you will be safe speaking in his mind and all of this is happening on some inexplicable mental plateau that you and I will never travel in our comfortable chairs and clean, neat, orderly lives free from the mind-exploding childhood terrors that were the daily regimen of the little boy Daniel.

In the basement his memory lingers on the two bottles there in the row of dusty chemicals on the shelf down in the basement, the two bottles he always remembers as the smoking bottles because when they are unstoppered a dangerous, acidulous wisp emanates from the small, thick glass bottles and he takes them both and when the snake man is asleep, his eyeballs rolled back in his head, dead drunk, his small hands wrapped in rags take the bottles and his mind, HIS MIND oh, God, Jesus his mind warping the curves destroying the graphs lightning bolts of kinetic mystery, powerful energies on an uncharted level of will NOOOOOO THE ACID pouring the smoking liquid into the eyes and face of the sleeping blue snake man and knowing even at age nine what payback is and savoring it as the sleeping, drunken filth screams awake blindly plunged into an anguished world of mindless, unutterable horror.

'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! AAAAAAAAAA AAAHHHHHHi ACID' The snake man's screams have a lovely, nourishing echo even now. And he is in The Max again back in Marion hearing the two blacks go over the side hearing the screams as they plunge off D Tier. He is back with the most incorrigible bad asses in all of the entire federal system, back in the bull tank in D Block where a white effigy pincushion man hangs with BAAD sprayed on him, voodoo hoodoo admonition of the Black Afro-American Defenders who control D, and the two black bosses who run it brace him and light flashes on the knife and pipe and on some level of energy beyond understanding he destroys them.

Their arrogance to think they might threaten this force this presence who draws on a power source beyond any witless muscle or martial skill an all conquering, indomitable energy flowing out as an implacable physical law of mass and motion and will twists rips splits breaks rends cleaves destroys snaps maims mutilates ruptures tears through spines like twigs, crushing bones like dry limbs, chainsnapping them breaking their weight-lifter necks which to him are the nothing pencil necks of geeks fools hulking bull morons.

'DIE!' he screams.

'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! AAAAAAAAAAAA HHHHHHH!' The scream again the scream of the snake man as this human garbage goes off the high tier in a stinking blackness of deathscream smashing down into the dumb mass of guards, inmates, snitches, killers, sissies, wardens, hacks, cons, jailhouse lawyers, fish, rapos, short-eyes, jerks, parole boards, and then the other one, still remembering the sewer stink of him as he died, and then he is down in the hole waiting execution, bread and water and rotting food and his own filth and roaches and the occasional rat for pets.

And his mind takes him back to The Nam where he is waiting in a quiet, one-man ambush on the grassy hill above a crossroads, a huge X of bandoliers over his mammoth, obvoluted gut, waiting under a tarp the size of a bedspread with a beer-belly spare tire of deuce-and-a-half proportions, black stony eyes hard and obdurate in a doughy face of baby jowls. And he feels no insect bite, suffers no heat stroke, has no thirst, experiences only pleasurable anticipation as he sees movement coming from down below but not from where he was expecting it, coming along the roadway. Instead, this is a movement he senses oh so that is why he has not seen it—he feels in the first pinprick of intuition and animal awareness it is not below him he only assumed that because he 'saw' it as a physical precognate, sensing not seeing it and naturally concluding it was there in his field of vision but it was BEHIND HIM and he turns and sees the soldiers there next to him raising their AK-47 and whatever else and his weapon is blasting them without a quarter second's hesitation tearing through the tall grass in a strange noise as it spits its song of death out at the men.

'(THWOCK-KLLLAAAAAKKKK-THWOCK-KLLLLLAAAAAAKKK-THWOCK-KLLLLAA-AAKKK!)'

He fires carefully, firing on semi-automatic, and he feels the burning as he takes an inconsequential wound, his adrenaline pumping, concentration focus laserlike and relentless, taking them all down in the hundred ballpeen hammer strikes as the weapon shoots its deathstream puncturing and penetrating their bodies with nice red, wet holes as the NVA regulars fire and scream and it is the

'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH' of the snake man, eyes blinded by the acid, and he loves it he fucking loves it, only wishing he didn't have a suppressor on so he could hear the full, explosive power of the weapon as it fires its searing nails of pain into these arrogant, little men, the expulsion of gas blasting out in fast, anvil hammers, the hundred indistinguishable KLLLAAAAKKKKs of the bolt slamming another one into the spout in the metallic clatter, escaping gas, two-hundred-decible thwocks in one hundred strikes fired in four, five, six-round bursts so fast they sound like one long hammer blow echoing over a lake.

'(THWOCK-KLLLAAAAAKKKKKKK!)' Like a single, indivisible sound, and the metal smashes and explosions and the gas cracks and the screaming and the gunfire all mingling together in the scream of the snake man:

'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!' And he knows he must get out of here tomorrow, to the storm-drain catch basin he has prepared, and then he will go to the trap in the submain again. But he must leave the sewers before this smell drives him mad, he decides, not without irony.

Now the bourbon and the effort of the mind has tired him to the point where he can sleep, and he curls up under a filthy army blanket and a huge tarp, a humongous, deeply breathing mound snuggled down in the wooden trap, and he allows himself to dream of an LZ where the smirking pilot digs the skids into a paddy dike flipping him out and how he relished the moment of fear as the three men on board saw him almost pull the pin and toss one in, almost-catching himself just as he let them hold one for good luck, tossing in a short- fused grenade and telling them:

'Here, autorotate on this.' And smiling to himself from ear to ear as he fantasizes what it would be like to hear the bird explode in a bright red ball of flame and silver metalstorm and he dreams he can hear the delicious screams of the dying as it blows.

'AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!' And the screaming is a symphony that is music to his ears and he falls into a deep and lovely sleep, a great, snoring, beached whale, sleeping clown man, hybernating bear under the rising, falling mound of tarpaulin and blanket, asleep in the foul stench of the sewer, one massive paw curled around the thing in his special pocket just in case one of the giant rats might come near him while he sleeps.

The Jack and Queen of Hearts

He sat in Edie's kitchen drinking strong, black Yuban and running it all through the tangle of his head again, over and over, sorting the pieces. Rearranging. Trying to get some kind of a fix on this Bunkowski. He had the dossier memorized. He'd look at the photographs till his eyes burned from them. Now he was chewing it over. Sifting. Looking for the hidden common denominators. Mistakes. Feeling for the weird rhythms of the killer.

True to his word, Sonny had slammed all the doors down tight. The commissioner was about to tack somebody's chestnuts to a door over this thing. The brass couldn't believe that neither the top cops in Chicago nor the heavies on the Major Crimes hook-up could blast loose more background on a plague of heinous murders that had picked up this much national ink.

But that was because they didn't know from MAC-VSAUCOG and the tight, little band of hardcore headhunters who'd discovered Daniel Bunkowski in the beginning. It was a burned bridge. Tantalizing. Maddening.