to mortally wound the beast called Chaingang. Lady Luck still hovered over the killer. What Jack had done was give him a severe head wound, graze his skull, and turn his cheek into a sieve. Because when he bent over the killer's form he had placed his weapon into the shattered mouth and fired more rounds through the side of his face. And a cheek is quick to heal. And Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was no normal human being.
He had recuperative powers, tolerances, immunities, appetites, defense mechanisms, involuntary reactions, reflexes, tactile skills, sensory gifts, and cognitive powers that were partially biochemical and physical compensations for a lifetime of deprivations and subjugations and inhuman treatment. Where others might have perished, he built scar tissue, and developed weird immunities or strange receptors that could counter the most painful injury or violent attack. He was not an easy man to destroy.
We all know of cases in which individuals have survived the most bizarre wounds and the most extreme and apparently fatal traumas. A man recently survived for weeks without food or water. A child recovered from a long immersion in freezing water and nobody could explain it. A woman fell from forty stories, suffered two broken ankles, but lived. Every day the headlines carry a tale of someone who would not die. And these are ordinary persons, not Chaingang Bunkowski.
Bunkowski floated off in the rising tide of water that flooded into the submain. The water made his huge bulk buoyant and carried it off into the black recesses of the subworld. And that was it. Hours became days. There was brief, flickering consciousness, then only more cold, gathering darkness. But Daniel's body was like no other. A massive storehouse of inexplicable tolerances and virtually inhuman powers. A uniquely self-sustaining death machine. And slowly the great bulk began to heal.
His first memory was of trying to see. He opened up his one eye as much as he could and saw only Vaseline. It was like the time he was a kid and had been in the reform school and caught “pink eye.” He remembered his eyelids seemed stuck together. One eye was like that now. It refused to admit light. The other one saw only a smear, as if someone had taped one eye tightly shut and smeared a couple of pounds of petroleum jelly over the other. And it was such an effort to try to see up into the jellied covering that he let the deep sleep take him again.
The next memory included sound. He had come awake shivering. Stone icy cold to the bone. Frozen to the marrow. Freezing to death, he thought, and he struggled to move and could not. And struggled to open his eyes again and saw only the jelly. And, freezing, he shivered and made a kind of whimpering noise. And he heard his mother say, “Now, now. You just lay right there like a good boy.'
“Nnnnnnnn,” he tried to tell her, and reassured by the sounds of his beloved mommy, he fell back into the arms of Morpheus.
Finally, he came to for longer than a couple of seconds. He was awake for perhaps two minutes this time. Once he had tried to instinctively open his eyes and went through the Vaseline routine again, but he stopped struggling and just trembled. Not from fear so much as from the cold.
“There, there, Baby Boy.'
“Nnnnnn,” he said to his mommy
“Good boy.'
“Mmmmmmmm.” Beloved Mommy.
“Big Boy. Good boy.'
“Nnn.'
“Rockabye, Big Boy, in the treetop,” the woman sang tunelessly.
“Ooooooh.” The huge man made a shuddering sound as he trembled from the cold chill that had penetrated to his core.
“Lah dee dah dah, the cradle will rock.'
“Nnnnnn.'
“Now, now. Good boy.'
“Mommy.
“Big Boy, Momma's big boy.'
“
“Oh! You scared me. Such a big boy,” she crooned to him. She was holding his wounded head in her lap.
“Ooooh.” So cold. He would never get warm again.
“You go back to sleep now, my big boy.” She loved to care for things. Doctor things back to health: small animals, cats hurt in fights, dogs run over by cars, derelicts, junkies. She'd never cared for anything as big as this one, though.
“Mmmmmm.” He made another moaning noise and snuggled against her and passed out. She wondered if it would live. Well, it won't get done with me sitting here, she thought as she got up, letting Daniel Bunkowski's bloodied head splash down unceremoniously in the filth.
And he was close to death for a time. The dark angel who he knew so well from hundreds of previous encounters, the ominous angel of death hovered over his body, freezing him as it blew the icy breath of mortal coil's cessation across him. And Daniel slept. And in the sleep of death he dreamed of his own murder. Of a policeman who threatened him with the symbols of his tortured childhood and then came and hunted him down in the sewers and shot bullets into him, blasting him apart in a screaming hot blinding deafening explosion of fiery pain. Then he opened his eyes and saw the black angel settling on him and he died in his nightmare—this beast who had caused so many nightmares he renewed his acquaintance with the ultimate bad dream.
He is cold. Inert. Unmoving. He does not seem to breathe. Although his great bulk is covered in a mound of rags and newspaper placed there by the old lady to allow the dying one to retain its body heat, he feels like he has been entombed and packed in ice. His tactile senses have finally ceased to exist. Hearing, deafened by the up-close blasts of Eichord's service revolver, shuts off, leaving a ten-decibel electric hum like the buzzing of a faraway bee. Sight, blinded by the gunshots into his face at point-blank range, winks out. He sees nothing. Even in his imagination he cannot conjure up the image of the blues and brilliant reds and yellows that one sees when you “see stars.” His sense of smell long since vanished from the assault of his environs beneath the Chicago streets. His taste is dead. In fact, he wonders idly if his jaw has been shot away. And in this altered state the huge man realizes that, by definition, he no longer exists. So this is what it is like, he thinks, to be dead.
And that is when he sleeps the longest sleep of all, the one that takes him to the brink and beyond, and then he escapes the sharp talons and the chill and the black, and one of his eyes tries to open but it cannot but at least he knows he is not dead, and he is drenched in his own foulness and bathed in poisonous sweat and the flood of perspiration beneath the mound of impromptu covers unglues his eye and he sees his mother there—MY GOD HE SEES HIS MOMMY—and he tries to speak her name and the old woman hears the dead thing go “Nnnnn.” And she whirls around, nearly jumping out of her skin in fear.
“Big Boy is alive,” she says to him. Mommy says to her baby boy. “Whaaaaa. You gave me such a start, I thought you was dead.” She comes down near him and be sees the outline of Mommy's face and imagines the warm smells of her as she takes him and coos and comforts him and holds him and rocks back and forth talking gibberish to herself and she tells him her name.
“
Chaingang just lies there and lets his mommy hold him.
“I'll bet you've never heard that name before. Isn't that a pretty name? Old Pipper is taking care of you now. Making you big and strong again. Pippy found you all dirty and bleeding. You was in baaaaad shape. But you're a fine sight now, oh sonny boy yes indeedy you're a fine sight now,” the old woman tells him as he shakes with pain and sickness, his body racked by infection and fever.
“You best get your rest now. Go back to sleep. Get your forty winks. And then pretty Pippa will make you a nice hot bowl of soup. But right now, Big Boy, just have to go night-night and live off the fat of the land.” She pokes him gently in the center of the huge mound to emphasize her point and cackles like a cartoon witch. And, grateful for his mother's comforting nearness, his head in the folds of her skirts, Chaingang Bunkowski lets himself drift off again, racked with pain, sweating like a pig, on the lap of his long-dead mommy.
He is starving to death when he wakens the next time and he feels a tide of relief wash across him as he pops his eye open and sees the woman looking down on him.
“Wake up now, Big Boy. Pippin must get some soup into your jib. Ready for your nice soup?'
Feed me, he thinks.
“Okay,” she says as if she was reading his mind, “here we go.” And she splashes something liquid across his
