by Rex Miller
"What?" She mouthed through the windshield. He appeared friendly somehow, and certainly not menacing despite his huge, bursiform appearance, and in fact stayed around in front of the vehicle as he continued to yell something to her, doing his usual complete and flawless little mini-job of method acting.
She had the window almost all the way down, still unable to hear what he was saying and she asked him loudly, "What? I still can't hear you."
"I'm sure sorry, ma'am," he was saying politely as he came waddling around by her side of the Datsun, "we've had a problem on down by the [something, it sounded like France Place] there." He spoke quickly, that deceptive took of great concern on his face, talking very fast as he came around the side and leaned down, and she was wondering if that road had washed out again when, as he was laying down his bland camouflage of conversation, speaking some gibberish to her, she felt herself immobilized as this hulking, giant presence froze her to the seat, reaching in and taking the ignition keys, switching off the engine as he did so, pressing her back, pulling on the hand brake, opening the door all in a smooth, practiced series of rapid hand movements.
"Listen," he rumbled as he reached for the seat adjustment below. "Listen to me very carefully and you won't be hurt or molested in any way. Listen—now," he admonished in a deep, rumbling, basso profundo, "don't scream or try to attract attention or I will hurt you. I do not wish to harm you or bother you in any way. Do you understand what I'm saying? Nod if you understand me." She nods like a trained Shetland.
"You must obey me or I will hurt you. Neither of us want this. First, I want you to push the seat back to the farthest position it will go. Now do it!" She is shaking so badly she can barely find the release and she jumps as she grabs his hand, which is covering it. He roughly shoves the seat back, slamming her with the impact like car-crash whiplash. Obviously he is just teaching her to obey his orders. "Very good. Now you will come with me and do exactly as I say. Follow me? Nod." She nods about twelve times.
In the few seconds it takes for him to look up and down the road and double-check the field beside the road he gives her a rumbling, terse set of instructions about following orders, not making a scene, all the usual things he says to a potential victim as they lock with fright. She is now nearing that fear-paralysis stage and he has other ideas for her so he snaps her out of it.
A paw closes about her thin wrist and encircles it like the jaws of a mighty, steel workbench vise. She is unceremoniously jerked out of the car and feels herself being transported through the air, dragged over into the road ditch where he retrieves a huge duffel bag.
The bag, one you or I couldn't even get off the ground, is lifted as you'd pick up a small stack of books. He grabs a blanket off the top of the duffel and hurls the big bag back into the ditch, and they are heading out across the nearby field, he is carrying her really, and her high heels touch ground only every fifth or sixth step.
"Smile," he commands her, and before it can register on her dazed brain she is snapped through the air like a helpless puppet. "Smile!" She plasters a ludicrous grimace across her face in compliance and they reach the near fence row.
"Now. You must listen to me very carefully if you want to survive this day." He is snapping a pair of steel and teflon handcuffs on her and fixing some sort of chain to a nearby tree trunk as he speaks. "I will not hurt you badly unless you resist me, scream, try to attract attention, or otherwise irritate me in any way. If you do exactly as I say, you'll be allowed to go home soon. Nod your head and tell me if you understand."
She nods again as a trained pony would paw the ground, with careful, methodical movements, and says in a dry hoarseness, "I—uh—understand."
"Good. Now you're starting to cry. I do not want you crying. Stop." She cannot stem the flood and bursts into tears.
WWWHHHHAAAAAPPPPP! She is slapped harder than she has ever been struck in her life. Smacked by a hand like a steel frying pan. It smashes her down to the ground and all but knocks her unconscious. She sees bright blue stars for an instant and then a shock wave of pain brings her back fully alert. She is crying openly now so he takes it down a peg and gentles her a bit.
"I'm very sorry I had to do that but you have to act normally. I do not like crying. If you start crying again now, I'm going to hit you again and it will hurt you. You are crying now. You must stop, do you understand?"
"Eh—I—uh—I'm sor—sorry."
"Stop!" She wills herself to shut off the tears in a snuffling, sniffing back of the flow. She tries to breathe deeply and concentrate.
"Do you know what I want you to do next?" He is peeling off his shirt and dropping his pants, which are as big as a large flag. She shakes her head no.
"Get over here and suck it. Do it now." She tries to obey, trying to take the hideous thing in her mouth, begins to gag, and draws back instinctively, involuntarily, and she is in lots of pain again. He has those steel fingers in her long hair, which is knotted into a ball, and he pulls her forward onto him. He is stiffening and growing as he gets rougher with her and she can barely take him in her mouth fully.
He rams his erect member back into her throat and she chokes on it but she can't get her head away to breathe and before she can stop her own actions she bites down reflexively.
"You bit me!" He screams. Holding her hair in that left-handed vise, he pulls his dick out to its fullest length with his right hand, pushing back his lower fat roll as he does so and trying to see if she has done any visible damage to his already-shrinking penis.
For a beat he is inert. Lifeless. Then his other persona emerges, springing like Frankenstein from out of whatever abiogenetic origin spawns living matter from nothingness. A backfist like a shotput rips through the air slamming into her face with the loud, resounding crack that is unmistakably bone. Her neck snaps from the mighty blow. He continues to twist her hair with his left hand as he begins masturbating into her inert, now-lifeless face.
He jacks his shrunken penis back into a semblance of an erection and finally is able to pound off, shooting his semen into her face. He wipes himself off on the army blanket, then wraps her body in it, and stomps the package down into a slight declivitous spot in a bed of poison oak. He does this out of habit more than anything else as he could care less when or if the body is found.
Making sure nobody is coming, he limps back down to the side of the road and retrieves his duffel bag from the ditch. He is slightly disgusted by what he considers poor behavior. He notices he has been acting more and more like a basket case lately. Allowing himself to run out of control uncharacteristically.
A Ford pickup truck comes over the top of the hill, and full of his rage and waddling around with a sore penis, he hurls his duffel into the back of the Datsun and flags down the truck.
"Say, friend, could you tell me where I can find the Frannis Scrace?" This is a slurred double-talk utterance, one of dozens he has mastered that produces the desired time lag.
"Find what place?" a tough-looking, hirsute individual asks, somewhat warily. Bunkowski smiles his disarming, dimpled smile.
"Sorry. What I said was, I was wondering if you can tell me how to find--" but by then he has the steel cable looped over the man's head and his massive hands are holding the crossed PVC-covered rings which he pulls out and down by the side of the truck's door on the driver's side, the driver's head coming out through the window, a circle of blood welling out through the beard and onto the truck driver's fingers as he claws at the strangling wire which is biting deeply into the man's neck.
He is oblivious to the man's wild struggles, but keeps a keen eye on the road, looking for more traffic. When he has held the wires for another thirty-count he lets some of his hot tide of rage subside, and begins quickly working the wire loose where it has bitten deeply into the man's throat. He wipes the garrote on the man's shirt.
Bunkowski opens the door and pushes the bearded man over into a kind of slump, ripping his pants pockets off and searching for a wallet. He examines a watc
h and rings which he deems of little value. He finds a money clip in the man's front pants pocket and is surprised at the hundred-dollar bills on the outside of the roll. At least $400 in the clip, which is a big haul for Daniel. He almost never finds any real sizable money on his victims, but then of course he kills for money only when necessary. Most of his kills are done for the sheer pleasure of taking life.
He is an astute observer, and he notices that he took no pleasure in either of these kills. This is not one of his better days, he thinks. He shoves the body over farther with some effort and squeezes himself up into the cab of the truck, grinding the ignition into life and pulling the vehicle up ahead of the Datsun and off the road into a nearby turn-row at the edge of the field.
He rolls up the windows and locks the doors of the Ford, wiping his paw prints automatically, and double-checking the glove compartment for goodies. He finds a small baggie of weed and pitches it back in. He doesn't smoke. He locks the truck and leaves, not even bothering to wipe his footprints out as he limps back to the other set of wheels. His mood is sullen and dark.
With a grunt he hurts his massive bulk into the Datsun, kicking it into life. He empties out the contents of her groceries, pouring everything out into the seat, and brightens slightly at the find of a group of candy bars. He rips the paper off a Mounds bar and inhales the candy at a gulp. It has melted and he eats a bit of paper with the chocolate. He opens the warm half gallon of milk to wash it down but it is already too hot to enjoy and he pitches the milk out into the ditch leaving a nice fat print or two on the plastic jug.
He sits sulking for a few moments, again not like him, then gets out of the vehicle with great effort and retrieves the milk jug, which he empties and tosses onto the floorboard of the backseat. Rummaging quickly through her purse, the glove box, the ashtray, feeling up under the dash, he takes an item or two of interest and dumps the rest of the contents into the empty grocery sack. He slips the brake off and trods heavily on the gas pedal.
The name that would appear on his Motor Vehicle license if he had one is Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, and even that would not be quite precise. He has killed more than any other living person, "as many as 450 humans" he once estimated when he was sedated during one of his many periods of institutionalization.
At the moment he weighs 469 pounds, and stands six feet, seven inches tall. He was originally "discovered" in the hole in The Max at Marion Federal Penitentiary, which means in solitary confinement in the maximum-security section. He was diagnosed as a unique blend of seemingly retarded psycho and genius-IQ-level killer. He had been the core for a government project. An experiment in the field, so to speak.
In Vietnam he had earned the nickname "Chaingang," hunting freely as a self-contained hunter-killer unit. He had foreseen danger to himself with the spike team during its covert operation, somehow sensing the betrayal that doomed the rest of his team members to destruction up in Quang Tri province, and he had deserted the unit shortly before it was destroyed by friendly fire.
For a time he had prowled the lowlands of Quang Tri's Echo Sector, growing less sane as he began to cannibalize his freshly slaughtered targets. Finally, at the breaking point, he'd summoned powerful inner reserves and managed to pull himself back.
He had been able to keep his grasp on whatever semblance of sanity remained and forced himself to begin the long and arduous return to the more civilized world. Eventually, through a brilliantly executed escape plan, he had been able to return, making his way first to Hawaii, finally back to the North American mainland.
He'd begun killing again shortly after his return to the urban landscape, although nowhere near the scale of his Southeast Asian activities, and he sometimes longed for the good old days, back when victims were a dime a dozen.
Everything about him, from his appetite for food to his proclivity for violence, was irregular and extreme. His body was a storehouse of odd tolerances and unusual metabolism. He warped every curve, deviated from every chart. Mentally abnormal, emotionally anomalous, he was that rare human called the physical precognitive, regularly experiencing biochemical phenomena that transcended the mechanistic laws of kinesiology and kinetics. Stir that in with his psychological imbalance and gigantic size and strength, and you had a human killing machine without equal.
Edith Emaline Lynch
Evening was the end of a day of physical catharsis. Lee Anne with hands washed, sitting at the table rather studiously avoiding her veggies and making neat, geometric segments of dinner in preparation for the evening meal.
Edie remembered how absurdly prosaic it seemed, whenever she thought of Ed, how he hated food that wasn't neatly divided on the plate. Some over-reaction to military chow, she supposed. Ed even ate in little sculpted layers and she could still visualize him scraping each edge of the ice cream or the mashed potatoes in meticulous, draftsman perfect lines.
It had been a Saturday that would not go down in history as far as she was concerned. A day of hard work done with a vengeance, a day of heavy clouds of depression and sorrow that followed her every move, refusing to go away even as she attacked tiny footprints, waxy build-up, and the assorted detritus that littered the kitchen floor, just Edith and her old pal Mr. Clean. A long Saturday that still wasn't over.
"Let's eat!" Lee Anne was ready to pounce on dinner.
"Would you like to say grace tonight?"
"God is good god is great thank you [mumble] on this plate. Amen."
"Dear Heavenly Father," Edie said, taking a deep breath and feeling the return of a killer headache, "thanks for giving us this food. Many will go hungry tonight.
"Lord, thank you for letting us have each other to love. Even though we are sad for those we miss, we know our loved ones are with you and are at peace now, Heavenly Father, and many will be lonely tonight. We have much to be thankful for.
"Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of life, and we ask you to guide us and be with us always, and help us to do more Thy way. We ask these things in Jesus's name. Amen."
"Amen let's eat."
"Amen."
"Mom, why isn't there any blue food?" Lee Anne asked, attacking her hot dog.
"Well, perhaps when the Lord made blueberries and blue potatoes, He decided that was enough blue food. And he thought it would be nice to have something green and yellow and orange, which is why you have those mixed vegetables on your plate that you're going to enjoy so much."
A mouth full of hot dog and bun said, "Yuk, I hate mixed vegetables. Are there really blue potatoes?"
"By coincidence that's what we're having for dessert tonight." Lee Anne laughed impishly, showing her missing front tooth space. Edie smiled and took a bite of food, chewing slowly, tasting nothing.
She'd thrown herself into a paroxysm of premature spring cleaning, after having woken up filled with some nagging paranoia in a bed that she could never quite get used to, and spent an hour dawdling over coffee and a piece of toast. She had read everything on the cereal box as if it had been written by Dostoevsky and by the time she forced herself into action she had memorized the entire nutritional contents of a dubious breakfast concoction that promised "all the essential vitamins and minerals," and the recipe for a highly suspect party mix that would allow one to consume even more of the product.
It was an exorcism. A physical cleansing in more ways than one. Ed's old ties had slipped down into a dark pile where they gathered dust, twisted together like snakes. An errant slipper. A hat lodged in the blackest, far corner of a closet, anything of his she'd overlooked or couldn't stand to touch in her initial, grief-stricken whirlwind of reminders gathered up for Goodwill. She emptied bottom drawers, too-tall shelves, catchalls and hideaways and rat-pack caches long forgotten.
A heartbreaking comb with its teeth still holding strands of a dead loved one's hair, a lost cuff link, a dog-eared family Bible—each of these memory triggers inspired ten minutes of wordless fantasy conversation with her deceased mother, husband, and a favorite aunt, as
she sat mesmerized by a framed bevy of family photographs, absentmindedly brushing her own hair with one of Ed's brushes. She was proud of her long hair, a luxurious abundance that he'd called her mane, and at thirty-eight it was still naturally dark and lustrous. Her skin was fair, with a light freckling, her eyes wide set and beautiful. They were darkly brown and hazel by turns, changing mysteriously in each light source. She had smile lines of wrinkling crow's feet at the corners of her eyes, and just the beginnings of lines at each corner of her mouth. Her nose was rather large, not straight, and in the center of another face it might have been unattractive.
She had never been pretty in the classic sense. She hadn't been an attractive child, but she was maturing into one of those interesting if somewhat forgettable looking women that other women describe as "poised" and "self-assured," and that men are sometimes drawn to partially because they seem so unapproachable. She was hot the snow queen she appeared to be.
In bed there was a natural lustiness and she had always secretly known that she was much the more—what's the word? Not carnal. But perhaps the more elemental of the two of them. She was closer to her genuine feelings. Edie was one of those rare creatures who didn't have an insincere or mean or malicious or selfish bone in her body. And she had given herself to the man in her life the same way she did everything else. Wholeheartedly. Honestly. With kindness and with the attitude that the real pleasure was in what you could give.
Sex had been pleasurable for her but not a wildly exciting or all-consuming thing the way it had been with so many of the kids she'd gone to school with. Edie had seen marriage after marriage crash against the rocks of divorce and sink. And many of those marriages were those in which the female had confided to the girls about the hot, burning flames of sex that kept the relationship with their spouse a thing of explosive, emotional extremes.
