Slowly, he moved back to the wheels and slid the suppressed SMG from his duffel bag, easing the bolt back and putting a ready round up the spout. He eased toward the back, listening, hearing nothing, carefully unlocking the back door and pushing it open without entering.
The first thing he saw was blood. Just a few drops. He flashed on his old dream. The hunter's dream. The stalk of a wounded enemy. The blood trail. The dream in which the target and the hunter exchange perspectives. Was this what the dream had meant to warn him of? He was not a man who thought in metaphors or symbols. Blood trails were blood trails.
There was an explosion of insight the moment he saw the animal affixed to the wall. A common Didelphis Virginiana, a lowly opossum, dead and mounted under a red banner. Pogo the possum, nailed to the living-room wall with his hardware nails, and across the wall, carefully printed in the animal's blood, D A N I E L. An envelope nailed to the wall beside it.
He froze. Accepted nothing for what it appeared. Stilled himself, forcing his vital signs to slow. Slowing, stilling, quieting his pulsing life source, calming himself. Gun up, finger on the trigger. He ignored the dead animal and eased through the house in search of intruders, although his heart wasn't in it. This already answered too many nagging questions.
They'd suckered him. It stung for a moment but his rage pushed it down. There was danger: thick; moist; in the air, as real as humidity. They'd been watching him all along somehow. But how? Why hadn't he seen the signs? The monkeys were never that good.
Nobody in the house and no signs of damage beyond the wall. He did not open the envelope but first examined the possum, which had a tractor-trailer-size tire tread through its middle, Roadkill, he noted. He saw no surprises, and he removed the nails and threw it into the back yard.
Chaingang wet some paper towels and made an initial attempt to clean the wall. He did the best he could, put the bloody towels in a grocery sack, took it out in back, and burned it. Still he did not touch the envelope.
He had become proficient at killing with nothing more lethal-appearing than a thick, Manila mailing container. But it was not a hidden bomb that caused him to pause. It was the hidden truth. He was not anxious to learn the bad news, which he knew would explain the out-of-sync personality shifts he'd undergone, the weird "normalcy" that he found so repugnant, the buzzing and the torpor that began in a roll of fat at the back of his neck, and that kept him from being all that he could be.
With a heavy grunt he took the thing and opened it and read. It was from his friend Dr. Norman, the prison doctor from Illinois. He read it as an out-of-body experience, watching himself read the pages of infuriating monkeyspeak. "Surveillance…brain implant…monitored at all times…every movement is known…no way to escape … Robert Tinnon Price/a.k.a./Shooter." Photographs of the sniper in the 1960s, and a recent shot of an averagelooking man with psycho eyes and a blondish buzzcut on top. A jock. Smallish. Wiry. He recalled the man from his spike-team days gone by. "Attempted to terminate you when mission was aborted…special weapon…motion detector and locator…tracking device…intends to assassinate you unless you destroy him first." Schematics and pictures of a strange-looking rifle with futuristic configuration and woodsy camouflage finish. Scope. Silencer. "Effective up to two miles." A dossier on the murder victims. Price was killing on his turf. He'd rip the little pissant limb from limb. He'd even spoiled his tableau at Mount Ely.
The dossier advised him to "open closet door by front door." A small version of the mobile tracker had been delivered for his convenience, the message concluded. He opened the door and found the thing, boiling mad the more it all sunk in. Those fucks, tampering with his brain. On one level, he was planning to turn Shooter into gristle; on another, he was promising himself that someday he'd eat Dr. Norman's heart for this unforgivable act. The notion that he had an implant, the towering humiliation of it, was almost more than he could bear. Thoughts of the biker in prison, and of dearest foster mommy Nadine Garbella, were now a million miles away. First things first.
He was a man who lived in the moment. True enough, Chaingang espoused the "plan hard, fight easy" militaristic dictum, but as far as analyzing the future, the grand scheme of things, his idea of planning didn't extend much beyond the boundaries of trench tactics necessary for his survival. Had he been motivated to examine his battle strategy, his long-range goals, he'd have probably found them extremely limited. On some level, he knew he would ultimately have to arrange a fitting demise for Dr. Norman, after—that is-he'd somehow negotiated the removal of this implant device. But battle plans…? He wasn't interested. There was never a creature more truly situational than Chaingang.
This, however, was an encroachment, an invasion beyond anything even he had experienced. Chaingang, the ultimate survivalist, took as much of the problem as he could immediately chew and digest, and the rest he simply stored. But where—in most persons—the information would have lain dormant, his autopiloted brain set about to deal with this danger to him, to resolve a seemingly unsolvable problem.
While the beast dealt with immediate details, his computer ingested, sorted, retrieved, and began to build a longrange order of battle—something hitherto alien to him-the climax of which was two-pronged. He would have to figure out a way to force Dr. Norman to shepherd the removal of the implant, and then he had to be totally eradicated, since he represented such an invasive and loathsome threat.
On the conscious plane of the banal, Bunkowski considered the initial problems, as he loaded the tracker unit into the back seat of his ride, packing it tightly beside the big duffel, and roared away from the safe house for the last time.
How does one correct an inflamed pustule? One squeezes it until it pops. He drove, unerringly, in the direction of Bobby "Shooter" Price, to squeeze and be rid of this festering pimple. But it would not be enough to simply squeeze the lifeJuice from the doctor, nor would the eating of his heart be sufficient.
The mindscreen offered his subconscious words of the surrealist Dali, whose description of popping blackheads seemed uniquely apt:
"All those aerodynamic, gelatinous…massive salivary" experiences, involving "exubeirant and sticky viscera"…the "apparitions aerodynamiques des etres-objets"… Dali's favorite expression: "There is nothing that cannot be eaten…" Ah, to eat everything! All awareness "transfomed into gourmandism…awareness of reality by means of the jaws." The dioscuric and aesthetic cannibalism, cosmically extended: "the wish to know devours me, but I devour that wish."
Mad as a hatter or the one sane man in an insane universe, Dali had—alone—sensed the dualism of eating and death that transcended the mortuary ritual of tribal funereal consumption. He intuited the reality of cannibalism.
Dr. Norman, too, may have sensed the connection in his paternal playacting, those tender moments when he strove to inculcate his beloved Daniel with the notion that he-Norman—would ensure his marvelous creation's safety and immortality. He would have given anything to be Daniel's literal maker, to be God, or, failing that, to be Chaingang's biological father.
As Dali wrote in How I Put My Father to Gastronomical Use, "the consecrated wafer of the paternal communion…became a sublime and delectable representation of my father…Thus I had the possibility of tasting my father…in small succulent mouthfuls." There was but one final solution. Dr. Norman must be allowed to become his own transcendent dream.
Chaingang had to dispose of him by eating him. Not just the heart, but all of him, so that nothing remained. He would eat his clothing as well. Everything. When he was finished there would be nothing left but perhaps a pair of eyeglasses and a name tag!