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.