Norman's admonition replays: “You will be safe.” His mental sensors do not warn him otherwise. One of the monkey men speaks in harsh tones from out of a moving jigsaw.
“Map.” He throws a plastic case at the huge bata-boots. “You hear me all right?” Chaingang listens. “Equipment. Everything's in the two cases. Compass.” He drops something on the map.
“Everybody mounted up?” There is a shouted reply. The scent of freedom and that of running blood mixed with vengeance is like the loam of the richest bottomland, an earthy, alluvial perfume, fueling what only base feeding will appease.
“Hey!” he shouts, unnecessarily. “Keys!” It obviously frightens the man to say this as he throws them. They hit in the dirt beside the huge bulk of the bound beast, and the man is running before they strike the ground. The trucks disappear into the darkness.
Is it a trick? Possibly. But what would justify the effort? He files the possibility and tries to scoot his body closer. It is not as easy as he thought.
He is able to finally get close enough to snag the keys. Huge paws carefully test each key in the two main chain shackles, first the cuffs, then the leg chains.
By luck he hits the handcuff key on the third try with the tinier keys, but it takes a lot longer than he wants it to before the proper key unlocks the leg shackles.
Chaingang crawls to the massive duffel bag and finds a flashlight and tries it. Batteries are strong. Paws through till he finds his big fighting bowie.
The dreaded biter and the other restraints are sliced and he is standing. Armed. Free.
He knows not to linger in this field. Swooping up the heavy duffel, the two cases—also extremely heavy—and having pocketed the compass and map, he begins a fast waddling trot in the direction of the deepest darkness.
There is some moonlight, but rain-cloud night blankets him. The gigantic beast moves surefooted as a huge, fat cat, the proximity of human beings acting as his biocatalyst, activating and accelerating the mysterious processes that have always protected and guided him.
Instinctively he moves in the direction of isolation and concealment, away from humanity for the moment, away from danger, his mind a seething maelstrom of hatred, relief, and kill-hunger.
There is no one in the darkened field to witness the sight as Chaingang Bunkowski's immense, doughy face stretches wide into its broadest approximation of a smile, and the coughing noise that is his imitation of human laughter is swallowed by the night.
It seems to take him forever to reach the safety of the tree line. He drops his heavy load and rests, reflecting on his lack of stamina. His brain supplies dates of confinement and reminds him of his astounding recuperative powers. He has a dull headache and rubs the back of his head, which is very sore. Perhaps he was struck while unconscious, or hit his head being transported to and from the truck. He arches his big head back and gingerly feels the wrinkles at the back of his muscled rock of a neck. What are those ridges? Fat, he supposes. He massages the back of his head gently, then forces himself back into action.
Chaingang lifts the duffel and the cases, and starts out across the field, again at a fast waddle. He notices he is favoring his leg and promises his weak right ankle that it won't be long.
He hates being weak like this, and his irritation pushes him faster. The load weighs a ton—even for him. He cannot understand this lack of strength and finds it maddening. He'd like to destroy someone before he goes to sleep, but he knows he must rest.
Finally—into another pitch-black tree line. Sees an opening. Starts toward it and almost blacks out.
The drugs slam into him for a second, and their power nearly knocks him off his feet. He knows he must find a place to hunker down for the night.
With a mighty will of effort he shrugs off the mental haze and keeps moving slightly downhill—apparently the tree line is on an embankment.
He must go a few more meters. He wills himself not to drop the cases, fights the fog that threatens to seize his brain again, pushes himself forward, one foot after another. He knows he will be all right now.
He drops heavily into the nearby opening in the thick tree line, seeing now that it is a deep slough, waddling quickly down the embankment. In dark shadow a huge drainage culvert, overgrown with weeds, beckons.
The strangness of his mind tells him many things at once, reminding him that there is also a transitive form of disembogue, that it means “to pour out,” and that this slough with its wet and muddy bottom has not held enough rain to flow, come forth, empty into, or pour out into the culvert. The bottom of the culvert will be relatively clean and dry.
Reptiles are not a factor. This culvert will be teeming with its share of arachnidan life, but he is at home with spidery anthropods, mites, ticks, scorpions, and the lesser creepies. The mental computer registers the presence of larvae silent in their silken cases, of the phyllophagous insects that feed on the leaves, the leaves of leguminous trees, the dicotyledonous, angiospermous plants, and the insectivorous creatures that hunt in them. He is fully at home in this swampy, dank world.
The culvert's floor is cool and damp, but contains only that terrigenous sediment formed by the erosive action of time and tide, and the residue of whatever elongated segmented invertebrates and related annelidan forms may have burrowed into it. To some the putrescence of this decaying organic matter would be an unbearably foul stench, but to him it is merely reassuring.
But because he knows, he also knows that larvae hatch. Vermiform feeders and mutant flies, gnats, mosquitoes, nameless winged things, will buzz and swarm and come to life; headless, eyeless, legless flying minimonsters of the order Deptera will mutate and metamorphose out of the ultraslime. And in the early morning he will be gone.
Massive vehicle tarp and poncho spread out to cover the culvert floor. He uses the last ebbing reserves of strength to pull out his weapons, LURP dinners—"Long Rats"—canteen, spoon, netting. The cammoed mosquito netting he pulls over him for a roof, pouring what could be doped water into his freeze-dried spaghetti and meatballs packet, and devouring it cold.
It goes against his grain to sleep without setting up a rudimentary nighttime defensive perimeter of some kind, but before he can consider it, he collapses, falling instantly into deep sleep.
Inside the strangeness of his mind the computer continues to function: counting seconds, minutes, hours on his flawless inner clock; measuring temperature, humidity, wind velocity, other externals; auditing and carefully analyzing the sounds of the night for the presence of possible threat. In the absence of significant changes, it appreciates.
(SLOUGH: noun, meaning ditch. Deep mud. Mire. Swamp. Backwater area. River inlet. Tidal basin ditch. Tide flat. Marsh creek. State of moral decline or spiritual dejection. Cast-off snakeskin. Dead tissue mass. Extreme depression literally or figuratively. Deep bog. Marshy place. Muddy creek bed.) His mind flashes itself a picture of the RSSZ, picturing his image of a slough where he hid in the Rung Sat.
There, too, he was betrayed by those who used him as an executioner. There, also, his masters would have placed him in the gravest peril, telling him he was free to take his pleasures against humans, and—but for his gifts and skills—they would have allowed him to perform their bidding and then exterminate him.
For the first time since the drugs were administered to him in the penitentiary, he appreciates the possibilities, and the body of the beast makes an involuntary coughing noise in its slumber.
Early morning. Daniel is awake in a buzz that is partially caused by the teeming culvert that is a breeding ground for insects, and in part by a massive headache—a throbbing, pulsating thing that robs him of his powers of concentration.