He gathers up duffel and weapons cases and clomps away from this place, the radio call sign “Magic Silo” echoing as he passes a pair of Butler Grain Silos, then three more, standing like a kind of mini-Stonehenge at the edge of an adjacent field. He would ordinarily just flash a mental picture of them and file it in the computer, but does not trust himself in this addled state, and he takes time to dig out his Boorum and Pease Accounts Receivable Ledger that has been with him since his last prison bit. He calls it UTILITY ESCAPES, and it is nearly filled with maps, plans, charts, meticulously rendered drawings of safehouse structures and traps—his idea book which he treasures as one draws comfort from a family Bible.
Long ago he memorized all the material in it, but he derives sustenance and inspiration from it—it is The Word. He reads it for solace, for pleasure, for renewed power, for positive reinforcement; he has faith in it.
He finds a felt-tipped pen, obviously brand-new, removes the cap, and with a reasonably firm, steady hand adds the appropriate landmarks to his ledger, marking them on map as well. The silos are of interest. It is very lonesome here in the boonies, and there are truck and tractor marks, but nothing else since the last rain, he sees. The galvanized sheet metal tells its own story. From these signs he sees safety. One of the doors begs him to bust its easy lock, step up, squeeze in, and pull that door to. Magic silos? Maybe so. An emergency home away from home.
The deep slough where he'd hunkered down in the culvert for the night bisected thick woods, and in the center of it, not fifty meters from the overgrown, leafy ditch banks, a pond of stinking mud and stagnant rainwater hid like a surprise. It was also added to both the scale map and the ledger page. He looked on field expedient burial sites as presents.
Fifty meters. Let's see—what was that in feet? He tried to recall the key from a military map. Was there one on the map he'd just looked at and folded up incorrectly? He unfolded it and refolded it slowly, weaving back and forth a little. His huge feet looked very far away for a second and he felt light-headed. He rubbed at his eyes, shook his head, tried to shake the cobwebs loose. He poured water from his canteen, splashing it in his face.
That was better. He walked a few steps and decided he'd better sit down a moment and dropped to the ground heavily, as puzzled as he was angry. Bees and hornets and wasps and mud daubbers built nests in his head.
He forced himself to think. His entire life had been a triumph of will over matter, and he would think his way out of these ... horse latitudes that would render him impotent.
Fifty meters: ten meters, a decameter, would be 32.81 times 5, or 164.05. Was that feet or yards? Feet. Divide by 3: 54.68333333. Half a hectometer? Fifty meters—109.3666666, the number of the great beast. The inside of his head felt like a honeycomb. He pushed himself to his feet.
By afternoon he had reached the large body of water that encroached from the western edge of the map they'd given him, and he was in a bad way. Something was wrong. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe something else. He fought to think and to keep moving.
The blue features each had a number. This one was numbered thirty-one. He knew it was the river long before he saw the fast-moving current.
He froze at the embankment and saw the man. He looked like one of the little people, waiting down in a tunnel, a cleverly designed hidey-hole. One of the ghost warriors. He waited.
If you could have ridden by on a log at that moment, letting the river current pull you, you'd have seen quite a sight up there on the bank. There was a little bite-size chunk, a gouge, in the bank, and sitting squarely in that hole was an old man. An old man in faded work clothes, who had a couple of lines out, bank-fishing for cat.
But above him and to the right as you floated by, you would have seen a huge, grinning fat man, carrying a massive load of some kind, looking down at the old man who was contentedly fishing.
The giant was not jolly, but he was green—part of him. He wore green-and-brown jungle fatigue pants—big as a wall flag—and down where they bloused out of gigantic, custom-made 15EEEEE boots, the trousers were duct-taped into the boots, sealed against leeches. (Old habits die hard.)
He had on a voluminous jacket of some kind, which was open, and a T-shirt underneath, and in his right hand, which was the size of a frying pan, he now held three feet or so of heavyweight tractor-strength chain. The cases and large duffel bag were on the ground.
Each big, hardball-size link had been carefully wrapped in black friction tape, as was the case with all his equipment, and it had been rendered as operationally silent as he could make it.
He would chain-snap this one, he thought, silently easing closer to his enemy.
Their underground was an incredible, vast spiderweb of interlocking tunnels and served as command and control, medevac triage, R & R center, whatever was needed by way of supply /resupply. It was all down there in the tiny tunnels where the little people hid by day, sometimes in groups as large as battalion strength, subsisting on diets of rice and a bit of rat meat, fish, and nuoc mam; tough, wiry, hard-core team players—man, woman, and child. Ghost warriors.
It pleasured him to watch them near the blue features where he found their hidey-holes; tiny ratholes he couldn't begin to get a massive tree trunk leg down in. He'd wait silently, watching for the ones who would come after nightfall, either to leave or enter from the tunnel mouth.
Many times he'd been given treats this way, a small, dark figure popping out of the hole beside the blue feature, gasping for air perhaps after an underwater swim. They liked to dig a shallow chamber first, below the water table, and this flooded chamber then acted as a protective perimeter float. But if you knew where the inner entrance was, you could hold your breath, dive, and pull yourself through the inner opening into breathable air, and you'd be safely inside the tunnel complex.
He liked to kill them when they first emerged from the water, quick and dark little people whom he frankly admired—as much as he could admire any human, admiring them for their tenacity and singular meanness of spirit.
The secondary effect of the drugs smashed him and he dropped the chain, stumbling and falling like a felled tree.
The old man heard a loud noise and turned, startled to see a huge figure on the ground up on the bank behind him. He scampered back to give a hand.
“You hurt yourself?” Chaingang looked up into the face of an old man who had his hands on him. Where was his fucking chain? “You took a heckuva spill there, feller. I was busy fishin', and I didn't even hear you a-comin', you know? I hear this loud crash—you really took a fall! Can ya’ get to your feet?"
“Nn.” Chaingang found he could not speak. It occurred to him he had not used his voice in some time. The lion coughed. It sounded far away inside his head. He fumbled around and got the canteen off his belt and took a swig.
The old man stayed next to him petting him like he was a huge dog.
“I'm worried about you, son. You ought to go to the hospital and let ‘em take a look at you. You might have something broken."
Chaingang wanted to tell this idiot he was going to have his fucking neck broken if he didn't get his hands off him. He hated to be touched.
The old man continued to peer into his face. He had a dark stain from a chaw of tobacco that dribbled from one corner of his mouth. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, mass murderer, had never itched to destroy someone so much in his life. But when he started looking to see where he'd dropped his chain, it occurred to him that such an act would be wrong.
The old man watched him running his hands over his face. After a moment the immense figure managed to get back to his feet, and the old man stood. The giant towered over him by a couple of feet and probably outweighed him by over three hundred pounds. He stared up at the vision for a moment, shook his head in amazement, shrugged, and ambled on back to his hole, leaving Chaingang gaping after him.