Slice dje-5

by Rex Miller

  Chaingang changed his dressing and went back in to finish the brandy in front of the TV, but he felt the hairs on his arms prickle and something was out of tune. He quickly gathered up his clothing and out of habit wiped surfaces of prints, hid the obvious signs of his penetration (only much later would the family discover that Goldilocks and the Three Bears had raided their refrigerator), and drove away from this darkened house that no longer “felt safe” to him.

  Within ten minutes he was parked in a field between a building that appeared to be abandoned and a thick hedgerow, and he sat there calmly in the darkness trying to remember what had gone wrong, what had brought him to this state of wounded confusion. The last thing he could remember vividly was being in the sewer and the cop Eichord coming down after him, shooting at him, and he remembered him putting that gun to him and the way he jerked his head quickly as the gun fired, and then the lights went out and there was nothing. And when he awoke he was dead.

  Had it all been a dream? Had he imagined the old woman who lived in the sewer? Was she like the old woman who lived in the shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do? Or was she a real person who had found him floating up on the filth-covered concrete shores of her mad world, this phantom hulk of bloody being who at first appeared dead to her? She found many such things in her underground world, but they were almost always dead.

  At first he too believed that he was dead and that the song he heard was the song of angels from some half-forgotten story wrenched from the guts of his tortured childhood. But it was not the sound of angels, and it was then he felt an alien sensation of fear. It was fear of the unknown, as he understood that he was being held submerged below the surface of the sea, deep in the black cold, far removed from the noisy, burbling, human wave above, far above him somewhere in the living world.

  He smiled when he recognized the source of the noise, amused and pleased that he would have a chance to study the sad, strange, haunting, melancholy, squeaking, undecipherable, gentle song of the whales. He was listening to the courting song of the killer whales.

  Daniel E.F. Bunkowski who had torn the hearts from countless victims and left their poor, terrorized, mutilated cadavers strewn across Southeast Asia and much of North America, was at peace. In harmony with his surroundings. Because if Daniel loved and hated, his love of nature and mammal and animal life was at least the equal of his fierce and abiding hatred for humans. So his frightening and massive death mask of a face crinkled in pleasure at the sound of the singing whales.

  And a chill slowly crept over his enormous bulk like a dark shadow, and the mysterious song of the whales intensified into an electrical sound, not unlike a human scream, and then he slept.

  Do we really know what it is to experience fear, horror, terror and awful, mind-paralyzing shock all at once? Few of us ever have such an experience. We might survive a car wreck, adrenals pumping, heart pounding, and we pull over by the side of the road, and tears streaming down our faces, we begin shaking uncontrollably in the preamble to emotional collapse. This is only aftershock. This is nothing. But to know the terrible and numbing fear that Eichord felt that time in the sewers of Chicago as he confronted the wounded killer, is to come face to face with your limits and thresholds—physical, mental, and emotional.

  The monstrous killer had emerged from his manhole to destroy Jack Eichord, the serial-murder expert, but Eichord had shot him, and the huge madman known as Chaingang had fallen back down into the depths. Eichord missed with the next two shots, then climbed down into the stench, and seeing a woman and a child he cared for, both miraculously alive, there was that cruel moment of relief. And when he let up for just that half-second, the monster came alive again, coming up out of the puddle of slime and charging him like a wounded rhino.

  To know and taste and feel the emotions and fears and sensations that ravaged Eichord in those moments, as he shot him again, firing point-blank at the wounded killer, is to understand the fragile balance of the human gyro. From the proximity and the blood and noise and impact, Jack thought the beast was dead, but he was not thinking clearly. He'd just been shaken to his core by the bellowing, seemingly unstoppable onslaught of the man whom he'd just thought he'd killed. And when he bent over the inert form of the huge heart-ripper, up close and with a shaking service revolver, imagine his total terror, the woman and child huddled nearby, as he places the barrel in what's left of Bunkowski's mouth and fires again. Two more rounds. The shots echoing like cannons in the dank, foul enclosure. Eichord shaking so badly he nearly drops his weapon as he jams it back in his holster and tries to get the survivors out.

  But it was pitch-black down below the Chicago streets, and Eichord, frightened half out of his mind, had failed 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."

  “Roc
kabye, 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."

  “OOOOHHH.” Another massive shudder racked his body.

  “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.

  “My name is Pippy. What's your name, my big boy?"

  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 face.

  “Now, now, boy. Now, now. Big Boy is a bad boy. Big Boy mustn't bleed for Pepper. We'll have to fix that, won't we?” And she goes and gets something and then Mommy does an unspeakable thing to her trusting baby boy as Chaingang's eye opens wide in horror at the sight of his mother coming to him and plunging something sharp some awful stabbing sharp silver thing into his face. Oh don't, Mommy, I'll be good I swear I promise I won't ohhhhhhhhh nooooooooooooo, and the woman hears the thing grunt “NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN” as she takes the huge needle and begins sewing the side of the man's wounded face together with sailcloth thread she retrieved from a garbage dump.

  He begins to wonder if he has hallucinated the injury to himself as he once dreamed that he might have hallucinated the rape and murder of an exquisitely beautiful woman. He was not given to many hallucinations. But trauma, pain, illness, some powerful disease, had shaken his iron resolve. Was he alive? Yes. Was he dead? No. Was he a dying man? Perhaps. He ran it through his malfunctioning computer. He smelled—no, that isn't the right word—tasted a foulness that permeated every waking breath he took. At first his computer told him it must be coming up from diseased lungs. He thought he had lung cancer. He wondered how long he would live and what he should do next.

  “Waaaaaaahhhhhhh.” He coughed and spit the foul taste out in a hawking effort that racked him with a convulsive pain spasm and a woman's, voice said, “Bad Big Boy.” Which made no sense to him whatsoever. He knew he was alone. He tried to open his eye wider but the light was so bright and he shuddered with chill and yet he was soaked in sweat, and the side of his face felt pinched shut.

  “Bad, bad doggie,” the old witch cackled, but Chaingang Bunkowski did not hear the voice and he was taken down again into trauma and unconsciousness. He did not hear her say “Bad, naughty puppy dog. Bad boy spit and make him face bleed for pretty Pip. BAD boy.” The crazy old bag lady watching him as he passed out again.

  Much later he awoke and it was all black and he thought the cancer had killed him and he assumed he was dead, but the thought was but a fleeting awareness as he was sucked back down into sleep and then the bright light and the noise, and he made an effort to open his eyes but one seemed swollen shut and something was wrong with his face and it was the old woman saying something: “You was never gonna get up, boy. Are we hungry?"

  He tried to nod his huge head and the massive effort almost took him down. He tasted feces, coal oil, death, stale fish, an awful stench beyond the worst halitosis from acute gingivitis becoming the worst peritonitis and then the ultimate case of death breath on record. He tried to spit and could not, and then tried to swallow and the voice said, “Here, open wide for Mommy."

  “Mmm.” It was his mommy? He tried to assimilate the information.

  “Eat."

  “Nnnnnn.” He agreed to eat. He was ravenously hungry.

  “There.” It tasted like hot water but he was able to swallow the liquid and for the second it took to swallow it the awful tas
te in his mouth was gone.

  “MORE,” he rumbled, and the old woman dropped her spoon, then laughed.

  “Baby boy can TALK. Boy's first word to Mommy: MORE. All righty, we've got plenty of good, nourishing soup here. Yes indeed, pretty puppy, Pipkin has plenty of good soup.” And she fed him another spoonful of hot water.

  “More,” he said.

  “Yes. You'll get more now. You can talk. What is Big Boy's name?” He said nothing and she got another spoonful down him. “My name is Pippa. Do you think Mommy is pretty?"

  “More."

  She obliged him. “Feeling our old selves now, are we?” He blinked. “Is Peppy's big doggie going to be up and wagging his tail soon, eh?” She cackled madly.

  “Mmmm.” He tried to make her give him more again but it was just too much work to get the word out. Fortunately she understood and nodded and dipped the soup spoon back in to the can.

  “MMM-ummm, good,” she sang tunelessly, and he managed another swallow. And the small nourishment was sufficient to pull him back off the edge. He turned his head and felt the pull at his face. What had happened? He remembered the blinding gunshot. He wondered if he was blind in that one eye—perhaps from the point-blank explosion? No. He knew on some mysterious level that he was all right. He was going to be all right.

  “More,” he rumbled.

  “At's a fine, Big Boy. We'll have you up an’ at ‘em in no time now.” And he saw her dip the spoon, which was silver and marked Palmer House, into the can that said Campbell's Minestrone Soup, and his brain told his arm and his hand to move and he reached out and took the can and tilted it up and swallowed the soup.

  “HA!” She was pleased. Another stray being nursed back to health. “Big Boy ate allll his soup."

  He smelled it now and knew that he was wrapped in foul rags, and he realized for the first time that he was lying in his own filth. Why hadn't he been cleaned? What sort of a nurse was she? This wasn't his mommy. This was ... what? He saw where he was then. He was down in the sewers. And this creature who had given him soup had done something to him. He remembered her plunging something sharp into his face and hurting him, and Chaingang looked at the old lady and thought how easily he could snuff her out like a dirty candle but the thought washed over him like a dark and heavy cloud and he could only swallow, a major effort, and he let his upper torso and head fall back down into his nest of rags and he slept again, feeling himself pulled down into the black sleep whirlpool as the woman's voice sounded far away, “Rockabye, Big Boy, in the treetop” and something about something breaking, and he was gone again.