Chaingang

by Rex Miller

  What in hell was he going to do? Call the cops? Sue Drexel? He couldn't move that kind of weight for that kind of dough. And giving it back to Happy was out. There had to be a way to save the deal. He blinked his glazed eyes, massaged his aching temples, ran his fingers through his long, stringy hair, and put his shades back on.

  The edge of Waterton Cemetery was visible from where he stood. Just the extreme northeast fringe, where they buried the paupers. Unlike its manicured, golf-course green sister burial ground to the southwest, this edge was over-grown with weeds, and covered in a carpeting of dead grass and rotting mulch. There was a thick tree line to the right.

  Looking down at the pauper's field, he was suddenly conscious of his aloneness. The empty mud of the hillside baking in the hot sun, the desolate fields below—flat from tree line to horizon—the look of the forgotten burial place, all hit him. He thought of his family's grave concerns, pun intended, their unanswered prayers, the countless families like his own whose forgotten histories were etched in dated stone.

  Just as he put his sunglasses back on, he saw the movement. It had taken a couple of heartbeats to register. He caught a fleeting glimpse of something—a man in motion coming through the tree line? Brown clothing, so he wasn't a hunter. Not a game hunter, anyway. Although, Royce told his paranoia, some of these idiots around here were dumb enough to go out in the woods in their macho camouflage gear. “He didn't have no orange on, Your Honor” was a manslaughter defense around these parts.

  Royce's sinuses hurt. He felt like he might be coming down with a cold. Well, that could be fixed. Coke paranoia pulled his mind back off the lines and he concentrated on the tree line. He saw him clearly. He was conscious of the fact that his firearms were all in the pawn shop.

  He'd taken to wearing a little Legionnaire Boot Knife in a sheath tucked down in his boot. It was inside, naturally. He went in and got it and rolled his left sleeve up and quickly duct-taped a small black leather sheath to the inside of his left arm. He taped it very tight, but a hard pull and seven inches of razor-sharp 440-Stainless, Made in Japan, would be in his hand. He rolled the left sleeve back down, left it loose, and eased back into the doorway. He'd lost the man.

  He stood and watched, feeling like Lionel Hampton was pounding out “Flyin’ Home” on his face, and just about dirtied his britches when the man came out of the wisteria fifty yards down the hill from him.

  “Howdy,” he called to him.

  “Hi.” It was a kid. Maybe twenty, nineteen—empty-handed. But he reached inside his jacket when he was twenty feet away. Mentally, Royce was planning the dive to the deck, figuring how he'd time the throw. The kid pulled a square of paper out. “Mr. Hawthorne?"

  “Yeah?"

  “Um—Mrs. Perkins is tryin’ to reach you on the telephone. She called Daddy when she couldn't find your number. He told me to give you the message.” He took the smudged paper. A country hand had printed, “Mary Perkins. Reel important,” and the number. “Daddy said bring it up here.” He shrugged and turned, moving away.

  “Oh, hey. Thanks. Uh—don't I know you? Aren't you Beaudelle Hicks's boy?"

  “Yes, sir."

  “Well, would you please tell Beaudelle I really appreciate it?"

  “Okay."

  “Thanks for making the climb."

  The kid nodded and disappeared in the wisteria vines. The kid could walk. Beaudelle lived on King's Road, in the field next to the cemetery. Hawthorne didn't have a listed number because, in fact, he didn't have a phone.

  Mary Perkins. “Reel” important. He went inside to get his keys, wondering if somebody they'd gone to school with had died.

  8

  "THE HOLE"/CELL TEN

  MARION, ILLINOIS

  In a hard pool of saffron light, locked within the bowels of the “Max,” bound, chained, shackled, tethered, and restrained, the beast sits. Waiting.

  Deep inside D Seg, Disciplinary Segregation Solitary Confinement—called “the hole"—America's only level seven inmate sits in heavy chains; silent and unmoving.

  Huge. Beyond anything you can imagine. Arms and legs like steel tree trunks. Butt, belly, and upper torso heavy and ugly with great rubbery tires of hard fat over the body muscle. Scarred, dimpled face partially covered with a mouth restraint, a “biter,” the head appears to sit directly on the torso. The gigantic boulder of a neck is not visible. That part of the face that shows is not unlike a mound of wrinkled dough, but for the eyes—which are tiny, hard, black, and unblinking. There is no life in the eyes of the beast. They are unmistakably a killer's eyes. But these eyes see nothing.

  He is far away, inside the nightmare of his strange and amazing mind. Deep within his head he is lost, as free and unbound as a wild dog running through the hills. Several levels of the beast-man's complex brain are at work.

  His first books were encountered while he was in a foster home. He learned something that gave him an edge, and the book, which happened to be an adult instruction manual and not meant for the eyes of children, discussed in clinical detail certain vulnerabilities of the human body. He seized on this scrap of information as if it were the Rosetta Stone, using it to decode one of the mysteries about death. He saw that books and other printed matter, when applied to actual experimentation, could further enhance one's ability to destroy an enemy. He began reading for self-defense.

  Where are books kept? In public libraries. Logically then, that was the next step: to penetrate the libraries and obtain all the relevant information he could lay hands on. Already adept at swiping toys, comics, candy bars—kid stuff—he graduated to library books. He preferred stealing them to checking them out, on principle, and so Daniel began his lifelong affair with the library system.

  Reform schools and adult jails did not offer the wealth of literature one could find in Kansas City's public libraries, but there one could attend impromptu classes taught by street professors of B & E, armed robbery, escape and evasion, identity change, disguise, unarmed combat (from street-fighting to sophisticated martial skills), demolition, and a thousand other nasty subjects from con stings to murder modes.

  He would use this information to get better data, since he was aware that these were failed exponents of their respective spheres of expertise, but in many cases their experiences could point the way for him. He soaked up information like an immense sponge, always seeking more.

  By the time he'd done his second bit in prison, he had probably ingested (sometimes literally!) twenty-five thousand stolen library books. He once computed his total of overdue fines, and it was in seven figures. He'd swiped everything—from elegant, rare, quarto-size volumes of arcane subject matter to massive coffee-table books which he smuggled out under voluminous shirts and overcoats. He left many a little old lady gasping at the sudden downdraft of noxious sewer stench as he clomped loudly through dusty reference rooms in his gigantic 15EEEEE combat boots.

  What did he do with the books? Think of a huge, wrinkled desert that stretches across the mindscape of the imagination. This is the monster's brain. For thirty years or so he's used this desert as his private dumping ground for information.

  Every wrinkle is deep, like a chasm; a dangerous, deadly repository filed with stolen library books. He reads the books, sometimes eats pages that he particularly likes—one of his weird and inexplicable habits—chewing the corners, sucking the foulness out of them, devouring special passages that somehow imprint themselves on his remarkable memory.

  His memory banks are not the same as yours and mine. At the heart of his brain there is something akin to a mental computer, and it is this oddly efficacious organ that retains data for him.

  His is no “photographic memory,” which he knows to be a misnomer, but is a freak of nature known as eidetic recall. Perhaps a part of the gift of physical precognition is the essence of this ability: to retrieve those shreds of seemingly forgotten knowledge that become input relevant to specific situational confluences.

  At the moment he is reading from
the pages of a scientific quarterly he once scanned for pleasure: “Massim Matrilineal Reincorporation and Kula Ring Rituals.” He is reading, mentally, about his favorite subject. Rereading and savoring the bizarre anthropological studies of Massim mortuary practices. Considering, with the greatest pleasure and fascination, the cultural implications of eating the dead.

  But his mind does not work the way an ordinary man's does. As he mentally screens the retained word groups, graphs, sometimes entire pages at a time, he brings to the reading greater focus, concentration, and specificity. When most of us read, it is a passive act, but in the beast's labyrinthian brain recesses, his computer searches for stored data. Searching his spectacular knowledge of the clinical disciplines and general sciences, he probes for hidden gold: some piece of information that, when retrieved and applied to the subject matter at hand, will give him—once again—that sharp and lovely edge.

  A remembered and reread phrase has triggered a flow of images, and he scans them, letting them flow through his subconscious as he reads the now familiar word blocks: he senses blood pouring from extremities, secondary anatomical targets, superior vena cava, pathology of death fetishes, inferior vena cava, theoretical fluid mechanics and applications of Cartesian and general tensors, right auricle, hydrastatic wave-effect stress in surface flow, right ventricle, molecular symmetry in abiogenetics, pulmonary artery, aliphatic open-chain structures.

  And as the subconscious triggers open-chain structures, yet another level of his brain considers the chain—his “flexible killing club"—and the chains that bind. Considers tension, specificity of heavy-metal laws, kinematics of motion, vector algebra, angular momentum theory, quasi-conformal variationals in isometrics, self-mastery practiced as a physical or engineering science, elliptical intuition, aura-manipulation and wish-fulfillment application to the loosening of bindings, essentials of quantitative prediction and advanced muscular control. These assert themselves. Test the bonds. File automatic situation reports.

  The beast is aware of these intrusive thought associations only in the most subliminal way as he senses severing of pulmonary artery, raw umbles, mucoprotein absorption, human and animal spoor, application of nonmetric affine geometry to the healing arts, pulmonary veins, geodesist survival vaults, left auricle, fundamentals of vertebrate rhythmic contraction of life-support pumps, sevenfold man in phylogenetic transition, left ventricle, involuntary organ donations, oracles and auricles, dimensional space and karmic mythologizing of physical nonspace, the human aorta, images that flow by as he scans and senses related possibilities.

  Good enough, the beast thinks, mentally reading those words, the closest he comes to telling himself a joke, letting his thoughts run free in lost wordplay through the mortal ritualistic eating of the dead on an island that bears the name. A pun—for someone else. For him it is a fantasy trigger, and he thinks of a heart he took, fantasizing, as he has ten thousand times before, about the boundless pleasures he recalls from the consumption of his enemy's life force.

  The beast makes an involuntary noise under the facial restraint, coughing loudly into the biter. A harsh and frightening sound like the attempted ignition of a cold engine. The sound of an outboard motor's initial cough as the starter lanyard is pulled. The barking, metallic noise of a recalcitrant lawn mower. It is the sound of “occupant” laughing.

  Does the sudden sound jar him or is it something else? Whatever early-warning system protects this strange, anomalous creature suddenly shuts down all his thought processes. He no longer reads, puns, fantasizes, or scans the bloodied, inexplicable darkness of his mind. He is back in the now, physically and mentally in Cell Ten of the hole, in Marion Federal Pen, and inside his head he pours blackness into his mind until it is absolutely empty and black as night.

  Slammed down tight in solitary confinement of one sort or another, beyond the fringe of sanity, Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski has become master of his own inner wellspring. Calling on deep paranormal reserves, forcing himself through the walls of normalcy, he has learned to control his vital signs: to slow and still his breathing and the beating of his strong heart, and to freeze his mind into a state of perfect calm.

  The beast-man has almost stopped breathing. This human who can hold his breath for four minutes, this monster who can bring his own powerful pulse-beat almost to a standstill—he closes his mind to the absolute blackness, imagining a black balloon dropped into an ocean of ink.

  Imagine the balloon floating in the dark, inky sea. Now prick a tiny hole in the top of the balloon, and as it sinks, pour into it a stream of white milk. White pouring down into black, sinking, pouring, falling, the thump of his heartbeat now virtually stilled. His mind filling with bright, white milky essence. White as purest snow. Blank paper. And on the blankness of his receptor screen his presentient warning system keys a single word.

  It prints a word across the blankness of his thoughts, bright red neon letters on dazzling white:

  WATCHER

  He feels the surveillance in the way that a hunter's prey will sometimes intuit another presence, perceiving intangible cross hairs of a silent gun. The awareness, the survival instinct, causes the hairs on the back of his massive neck and head to stand straight up. His hard, cold eyes blink open, and he looks in the direction of the observation window above. Where he senses human eyes watching.

  Dr. Norman and the team from Walter Reed hover around an immense prone form, as they monitor the deep drugged state of the subject. One more time—after the brief recuperation period and final interview session—Alpha Group II will be employed as the insertion phase is accomplished.

  “He's ready.” An anesthesiologist checks vital signs as they make certain the life-support units are functioning perfectly. It is warm in the maximum-security or. The chief surgeon asks for a wipe, and a nurse mops perspiration from the man's brow below his surgical cap.

  “What I want to know is how it managed to swim this far inland.” An explosion of laughter. Norman's cheek muscles clench under his mask, but be has been forewarned. All great surgeons have their own style. This one indulges his flair for operating-room comedy. But he is the top man in the ultrahigh-tech field of laser implant work.

  No blood from a cranial saw will paint Jackson Pollock—like artwork across the surgical gowns. The subject may not even discover that an incision has been made. Only the tiniest portion of the head is shaved, and care will be exercised that this will not be visible to the subject.

  The small patch of bare skull is washed. Anointed with alcohol and other mysterious solutions. Meticulously dried.

  The senior cutter examines the results, nods his approval, and holds out his gloved hand for the marking device. Takes it. Makes marks. Drops the object in a tray. The laser is in readiness.

  “Let me see that X ray for a second.” He looks through it, makes a show of holding it to the light. “Yes. Just as I thought. This mammal has anthrax!” They all break up again. Dr. Norman grits his teeth.

  “Okay.” Without further jocularity he burns his way in through the skull. “Jeezus!” he says. The stench is overpowering. Even through the tiny “window,” the subject's brain stinks.

  Driven hard by a powerful wind, a loose bank of vapory clouds scuds swiftly across the sky of his mind. He feels his face in a gust of wind, misty rain, spray driven by the wind, and inside the beast's mind, his eyes open.

  A row of corpses stiff as window mannequins, eyeless store-window dummies, their waxy faces liquefied and melting. Blue, Catch, Hardname, and Pluck, eyeless corpse mannequins, faces dripping, sit up and begin a centuries-old ritual, the ballet of pain.

  Something alien courses through him.

  Melting dummies jerk in the frenzied spasm of the devil dancers, tapping call to nightmare, epileptic seizure of the snake people, deathdance of the voodoo drums.

  He has been drugged, he realizes.

  The clouds churn and scumble, tossing into a cold, thick, white mist that keeps moving faster and faster, as window ma
nnequins, time-compression film of dizzying sky.

  The pull of the drug is strong.

  Mortuary ritual and kinship in Bwaidoka, obesity as promiscuity viewed by therapeutic-statist praxeologists, Sudest Island Death Rites, themes that harden into book titles. Data retrieval. Wordstream.

  A stream of vapor clouds his thought processes momentarily, as the voice cuts through the icy mist of drugs:

  “—am your friend. You will be—” Identification of the voice. It is Dr. Norman, head of the program. Sodium Pentothal? Perhaps the new one he's been experimenting with; the one he calls Alpha Group II. An ice mass splinters, showering its shards through his mind.

  “Daniel, it is Dr. Norman."

  Daniel. Dr. Norman. Names. The name is filed. Dr. Norman has spared him discomfort.

  Dr. Norman is retrieved through the haze of drug-induced confusion. The Physical Precognate: Stimuli and Response Beyond Self. Other titles.

  The voice has been identified.

  Inside his mind he sees the doctor saying, “I recommend a thyroid function test for Mr. Bunkowski to see if he needs some thyroid replacement medication.” The nurse makes a joke, and the doctor sharply rebukes him. He sees Dr. Norman telling the suits about him. Saying a word he does not know.

  “Daniel, it is Dr. Norman. Your friend. I have good news for you, Daniel. Can you hear me?"

  A lion coughs, and he hears it through the blocks of ice that are freezing around his brain.

  “Good. Very good. Daniel, soon you will be free again. The program is a success. Soon you will be free, as I promised. You will be free to do the things you like, my friend. The things you are so good at."

  He retrieves the alien word: Algolagnia. Sees the doctor telling an audience, “Occupant is algolagnic.” He knows now that this means he takes pleasure in inflicting pain.