by Rex Miller
The woman was fighting for her life but so was he. She'd lost a shoe, and managed to kick the other one off, but in doing so lost her balance and he got away and started up the ditch. She grabbed for his legs, trying to pull him back down, but he was able to kick her in the face and scrambled for the car as she ran up the ditch bank behind him.
Emil Shtolz was covered in mud. There was blood dripping from his left arm. His right shoulder felt as if it might be broken. He was limping. His glasses were broken. He was gasping as if he were about to have a coronary. But he made it to the car before she did and grabbed for the grip of the Luger just as she pulled him backward.
They were back on the pavement. Muddy and bloody and fighting like animals or little children, screaming and kicking and scratching, untrained combatants suddenly learning what it was like to battle tooth and nail. He kicked at her as he racked a shell into the gun, more frightened than he'd ever been in his life, knowing that if he dropped the gun she would kill him.
He fired as she leaped at him and, even as close as they were, he managed to miss. She grabbed for the gun and he shot her in the hand and wrist. She fell back, and he shot her again, but he got her with the next one. Hit her dead center.
He knew several things in that instant: he'd won, he knew that. He knew she was dead. He didn't need to check for vital signs, he'd seen innumerable Jews die, and one more had joined their ranks. He had to resist the temptation to blow her apart inch by inch, because he was going to have to do something with this meddlesome sheenie and her car as well. He knew he had chains in the trunk.
All of this flashed through his head like lightning as he wobbled around and somehow regained his feet. His right hand could scarcely hold the damned Luger, so he took it in his blood-encrusted but uninjured left hand and carefully moved around to where he could administer a coup de grace to her head. As he was starting to bring the front sight up even with her temple under its wet mop of hair, a truck appeared in the distance.
Why should he take the chance of moving her and the car as well? Suddenly it was all too much trouble. No one would be able to prove any connection between himself and the dead girl, no matter how much they cared to speculate. His reputation would protect him—these were his people, after all. He hurried to his car, got in, started the motor, cut the wheel as sharply as his condition permitted, and floored the gas pedal, roaring back in the direction he'd come.
Shtolz’ eyes were riveted on the approaching truck. Would the driver notice her? Would he stop to help, or assume that since no one was behind the wheel of the vehicle that the person had gone for a tow truck? Was it someone who would recognize his car? He sighed deeply when the truck turned as it reached the nearest corner, 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 La Femme au Bain, recumbent, weird, cold, unhinged ... and very still now in the rain.
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 Retire Here!), where he made more than full use of the rest room.
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 eating!" the woman said, the word loaded with unusual portent.
“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.
"Dan?"
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.
"Daniel?"
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.
Pedagogic: of or about teaching. Second G is hard J sound.
Poltroonish: characterized by cowardice.
Pusillanimous: lacking courage and resolution. Contemptibly timid.
Quotidian: commonplace, ordinary; daily occurrence.
You forgot Pussies, the computer tells him, chiding him, stabbing down into the hole in his unconsciousness.
A perfectly formed poem slithers out of this same black hole:
Gothic daymare
pallid daylight
quotidian quiddity
snake oil payoff
diffused sun
cracked ice
huckster transport
filtered images
poltroonish shucksters
monster Johnsons
misty shroud
master my johnson
frozen seaspittle
shadow phantoms
pusillanimous pussies
drenched doubleknits
silent stalk
submerged gravesites
heartsick castle
final reality
newborn icebrains
wet fog
distant ocean
pedagogic hardjays
dangerous cliché
screaming gulls
pussied bluejays
of secrets
gathering darkness
craven ravens
submerged reefs
obscene promises
sunken junkers
name translates
killer love
bloated humans
coughing bark
silken silver
contemptible cadavers
excessive consonants
razor bites
jungle catgrowls
600 steps
curving kisses
666 doubleburgers
sheer precipice
arcing flash
arctic brainjob
stone cliffs
sharpened steel
frozen blowjob
ancient rumors
snake oil daymare
freezing handjob
rumored horrors
heartsick cliché
freaking knobjob
icy exhaustion
shadow secrets
fucking oddjob
bracken green
wet gorse
flogging slobjob
Heather gorse
killer fog
dark perspectives
jackhammer heartbeat
icy horrors
nasty oneiromancy
last rays
huckster payoff
Nancy o-NI-ro-mancy
The disjointed phrases slither back down into the egg and it seals itself as it is swallowed whole by the black hole, swallowed hole by the black whole, hollowed hole in a holy bowl.
“Daniel? Can you hear me? It's your friend, Dr. Norman.” The tape will repeat many times.
He's visited these sunken cadavers many times before, a part of memory lodged at a particular juncture of the hippo's hippocampus that the drug probes first, a watery world of dead faces wired into his demolition derby for the deceased. He tries to slam the door on it and lacks the strength.
“Occupant is algolagnic,” the doctor told someone once. It was overheard by the beast, who set about to learn the meaning. It proved to be that he took pleasure in inflicting pain. The fat lady on TV said, “Them serial killers get boners hurting and mutilating people.” Well, that was a bit general and imprecise. He could not recall a time when he'd got a boner simply because he was inflicting pain or cutting something off.... Well, come to think of it, yes, there was one ... one time when it made him come to think of it.
A cold wind blows over the black hole that conceals his mass grave of underwater corpses.
“—a particular target that you will wish to dispose of, Daniel. He was a scientist who worked in a research program during World War Two. A dossier is available and we have prepared color slides of some of this man's experiments involving the torture of animals, babies, and young children. I know you will—” Norman's words floating in and out. “Dr. Norman is your friend, Daniel. He deeply regrets that you—” Oneiromancy: divination by means of dreams. “—allows you to have great personal freedom, and—” The voice coloring, the blackest part of the hole puddling now, taking on a new configuration and values, a field of red, the black outline of a cordiform, a black heart, on blood red.
“—dogs and monkeys, which were found like this. These children had also been mutilated while they were still breathing. The apparatus was hooked up to the brain before—” Chaingang would never forget the puppy with the top of its skull off. The infant cadavers, the looks on their helpless faces. The smiling man showing off his experimentation. The lion coughed and twitched, pushing at restraints that were not there.
“Here are more photos from his experimentation program. A mass grave ... one hundred and fifty cats, over eight hundred puppies, three hundred monkeys, an unknown number of...” A wave of nausea, partly from the powerful drug, partly from the subject matter, “Look at this little boy, Daniel. Who does he look like?” It could have been a close-up of Daniel, age eight, fresh from punishment by the Snake Man, his mouth agape in pain and terror, perfectly normal in appearance until one's eyes reached the sawn-open skullcap. Occupant is algolagnic.
“This man is revered by the community of Bayou City, Missouri, where you are currently located. Feel free to destroy him in any manner that gives you pleasure, Daniel. When you're done with him I hope you'll leave that state, and I'd like to suggest you take some time to rest and get your strength back after your accident. I was awfully sorry to learn you were injured. Remember always, Dr. Norman has your best interests at heart. He would never do anything to hurt his friend Daniel.” Norman had begun doing some experimentation of his own. Slowly, he was dropping third-person references when he spoke to Chaingang, although he still referred to himself in the third person about half the time. Bunkowski noted the changes in personal pronoun usage, the familiar you and your, in addition to the use of his first name. One day soon his friend Daniel w
ould dine on that forked tongue.
“Be very careful in dealing with this old man. He is resourceful and has many friends. Young men of a white supremacy organization called the New American-German Enterprise for Reunification and Solidarity, or NEW AGERS, sometimes help protect him.
“Remember, too, for your own good the drug we've employed is extremely powerful, so it will cause a brief period of disorientation as it wears off. You'll appear to return to a fully operational state, but you'll be slightly groggy and may not have total physical control. The grogginess may come and go. In addition to lack of coordination you may notice certain behavioral lapses ... low-key behavior that you'll find irritating when you initially interact with others. This will wear off quickly, so don't be alarmed. Soon you'll be able to behave as you normally do. Take care, my friend,” the voice said, lovingly. Inside the broken ice egg the mutant screamed in rage.
