Slice

“Uncle! Help! Stop. I give. I'm not bored anymore.'

“Uhhhh. How about you, Tuffy? Are you bored?'

The cat wisely ignored him.

“Tell me the truth.'

“Yeah?'

“Who's the sexiest woman you've ever seen—and don't say me.'

“Don't say me? Okay. No problem. I won't say me.'

“You know what I mean. But I want to know. First one who pops into your mind. Not counting present company. The real sex goddesses. Marilyn. Those kinda girls. Who was your favorite?'

“Who wants to know?'

“I wants to know. Me and my pal Tuffkins want to know.'

“Marilyn.'

“Who else?'

“Bardot?'

“Yeah. I can see that. Brigitte at fifteen was unbelievable.'

“My favorite Bardot was at forty, if you're serious. One of the loveliest pictures of a woman I can remember seeing was that shot of her next to the baby seal, talking about the seal-killers. She was about forty as I remember, no longer the sex kitten, but doing something about animal cruelty. I recall she hugged this gorgeous seal and said whatever it was she said about the seal culls—the harvests or whatever those heartless assholes call them—and she said a line I still remember. She said they killed seals to make fur toys and coats for stupid women.'

“God'—Donna sat up in the bed—'you know, I remember that too.'

“She was one of the first big stars to say that. I don't know if it did any good. But it was such a strong indictment of those rich ... I don't want to say the word to you—you know the kind of woman—those hot-shit jet- setter Fifth Avenue sluts. Anyway, she went on to say to this little seal, she hugged it and said, But we'll get ‘em. Meaning the furriers or the stupid women or the guys who slaughtered the seals for a living. And I said right back to her, No baby, no you won't, but it's a lovely thought.'

“There's a lot more fake fur sold now. She may have helped, honey.'

“You don't fight city hall and win. You don't screw with human nature and prevail. You don't alter the course of evolution. We like to run everything out to the edge. Push it to the max. It's what will take us down. We'll find safe nuclear energy too irresistible. Or we'll keep building that first strike capability against the other guys and one day some nutcase will find a way to leave his or her mark on history with the push of a button. It's human nature.'

Donna wished she hadn't gotten this one started. He had seemed so gloomy and downbeat the last few days. He'd leave for the office, as she called it, in a good mood and come home that night bummed-out and depressed. She reached out and ran a soft band across the side of his face. “Ooooh. Barbed wire.'

“Yeah?” He smiled.

“Not shaving today, are we?'

“Just hadn't got the energy. I got a bad case of the lazies today,” he told her, scratching the kitten behind the ears.

“Do you know something?” she said, leaning very close. “I've never told you this, Officer, but I've never kissed a man with a beard before.'

“That's a coincidence,” he said. “Neither have I.'

And she laughed into his mouth.

STOBAUGH COUNTY

Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski's world was that strange and unexplainable twilight swamp in which there were moments of apparent normalcy. He was a madman, of course. Totally insane. But yet much of the time he functioned on what appeared to be a normal plane of existence. When he returned to the sharecropper's house, to get supplies from the hootch, he was still firmly planted in Southeast Asia and in the middle of a running mission. It was the high and tiny voice of his woman, the soft tones of Sissy Selkirk, now hugely pregnant, that pulled him back into the middle range between raving lunacy and what passed for humanity.

“What happened to you?” The voice somehow pierced the fog of murderous thoughts, pulling at his consciousness like a tugboat trying to move a battleship. She tried again, “You're hurt. Howdja get cut?'

“Eh?” He rumbled a monosyllabic grunt at her, then realized the battle dressing had come off and the wound was bleeding again. In just that second his twisted mind embraced three thoughts.

First, he realized how stupid he had been to inflict a wound on himself over here, even jokingly, because the severity of the bacteria problem was an ever-present danger in this environment and ... Second, he knew even as he thought the idea that “over here” was wrong, that he was flashing back again, that this was another time and place. And third, he must have her buy a car. Put it in his name, trade the Caprice immediately. Thinking this because he knew in just that moment she'd have to go before long, even as he answered her, his mind calculating what sort of a response this human expected, forming his lips around the B-sound of barbed wire, saying, “Barbed-wire cut. Just a scratch,” moving away from her before the red tide could wash over him and he'd kill her for the hell of it, drag her back to that place under the bridge, put her in the car and be done with it. He knew now that he would have to kill her soon.

“You want me to get some whatdya call it and put onnit?” the little voice said.

“Yeah,” he forced himself to say. He must not allow himself the great pleasure of exploding in a scarlet tide and stomping this cow and her unborn child out in one stomp of fifteen-quintuple-E bootprint. He had gone to all this trouble so he would be able to kill freely, and later so that he could safely approach the hated cop EICHORD and introduce him to the tearing and pulverizing delights of Chaingang's special world. He must not blow his cover now. At least wait until the idiot dropped her frog. Find the cop with a woman and baby as his shield.

“Okay,” she said, surprised and delighted that he would allow her such a privileged intimacy. She ran in to find something to put on his wound, which he noticed was beginning to coagulate again. She came running back out and he was gone. He had taken off back toward the big ditch and his nighttime business.

When he finally got back under the bridge that night, shining the underwater light on his grisly work, he was delighted to find that there was a mini-junkyard of rusting vehicles submerged under the bridge. At one time some back-yard tinkerer, or perhaps some thief in the spot-and-steal game, had used the bridge as a convenient dumping grounds for the stripped junkers that were not worth hauling off for their weight in iron. As he wired his three new friends in place as a precaution, then wiring the doors of the rusting enclosure itself, he decided that he'd come back and create a very special graveyard right here in what he'd think of as the final rusting place of the metal elephants.

For weeks he worked by day and killed by night. Each day quitting earlier and driving farther, ranging out more and more, but almost always bringing his victims back to be placed under his beloved wooden bridge. He was killing with a serious vengeance now, goaded by the annoying yet tolerable ambiguity of the girl's constant presence, an irritant he had himself caused to exist and that—for the time being—he could do nothing about.

He would see her only briefly. Occasionally at a mealtime, or when his biological needs would force him to notice her proximate presence and he'd summon her to her knees for a quick head job. Then he'd be out the door, slamming the thing in a rage, driving wherever his killer vibes took him. He'd come back after his night business, sometimes wet as if he'd sweated through his clothing, but back to her to sleep beside her in that placid, soothed state that always settled over him after he had slaked his angry hunger with a living human's heart.

Sissy thought he probably went out and “went into bars and got into fights,” as previous men in her life had done. She was beginning to find the last weeks of pregnancy unpleasant. It was hot in the sharecropper shack, and hotter still outside. Even in the shade she suffered. She had some swelling of her fingers and her ankles. The hotter