In theory, it was extremely difficult to engineer surprises for Dr. Norman, since he had an access to monitors that detailed Daniel's movements. But there were other ways to handle things: third parties, for example, who could be easily manipulated into doing his bidding. He needed to think, plan, and—when he'd done his homework—act.
First stop was the Kansas City Public Library, main branch. A glorious place full of tasty treats for the epicurean information addict. He took Dr. Norman's thoughtfully detailed dossier, replete with schematics, and dressed in his finery, he spent the morning researching. There was the matter of the OMEGASTAR mobile tracker, which he knew could be defeated, and the implant, about which he had no such confidence.
The overlarge fellow was an obvious student of some sort, the reference librarian observed. Clearly intelligent. It just showed you—you couldn't judge a book by its cover. But up in the hidden stacks, the quality of mansuetude and academic devotion was shrugged off, momentarily, while Chaingang licked a diagram, found it irresistibly delicious, and began eating it. It was a sight the gentle librarian would never have forgotten—Chaingang ripping a page from a library book and chomping down on it with those ugly, yellow fangs of his. My God! Such a thing had no possible earthly explanation. It fell outside of one's acceptance cone. Perhaps somewhere in the universe—beyond Mars, a few black holes away—maybe there they ate books. It just wasn't done here.
He was still hungry when he finished at the library, and—driving in the direction of a nearby mall—he spotted a fruitseller set up on a busy sidestreet. He pulled over and bought a half peck of Heartland Orchard Red Hearts. "Fancy sweet yellow flesh" had caught his eye. They were great for canning, the crate assured him, and he thought of his pleasant days spent in the home of a woman named Mrs. Irby, whose extensive canned goods he'd once ravaged.
As he thought of her, he demolished the fresh peaches, his system crying to him for more fruit, and he vanished them in a continual, wet sucking. His huge hands would grab a peach and he'd appear to swallow it whole, a three-part noise accompanying the ingesting of the fruit and skin, and the spitting of the pit: slurrrp-fwahp-ptttht! Slurrrp-fwahpptttht! He sucked them down, inhaling the delicious meat, biting into their bloody hearts, slurping them down with juice running from his chin, sucking peaches, spitting pits, wiping the sticky blood from his face with the back of a huge hairy paw. He noticed someone watching him from across the way—an old man—and he spit a peach pit at him, plopping back in his ride with a groan. Twenty-one peach pits littered the sidestreet. So much for his appetizer. Now he needed to go get some red meat. Chaingang's hunger rumbled in his massive gut like summer thunder. He mashed the radio dial, trying to take his mind off food, and some monkey man was raving about "the game next weekend in Arrowhead Stadium." He smashed the noise off, hating the monkeys for their childish fascination with the trivial and mundane.
He could not go back to the unsafe house and he was weary of motels and hotels. He needed isolation. He needed many things—Dr. Norman, chemistry, math, and the general sciences. He let his mind scan freely, allowing anything to come to the fore as he digested and rechewed his mental cud.
You must understand that Chaingang Bunkowski, in moments such as these, cannot drive through Hardee's and order a dozen mushroom-and-Swiss burgers and hope to satisfy the craving inside. The need for a human heart was so strong he almost stopped and took one at random, but whatever remained of his good sense prevailed.
His strange mind scanned a world of languages as he drove, searching for acceptable desolation—if not wilderness—remembering Assamese, Breton, Baluchi, Catalan, Dutch, Faeroese, German, Haitian Creole, Icelandic, Judeo-Spanish, Konkani, Hashmiri, Kafiri, Khowar, Kurish—or was it Kurdish? Had he forgotten Frisian? Irish Gaelic? He thought about implants and how little he'd gleaned as he subconsciously scanned Marathi, Nepali, Ossec, Oriya, Punjabi, Portuguese—he was vaguely irritated at these lapses—Persian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Rajasthani, Scottish Gaelic, Sardinian, Slovene—what about Sanskrit? Tajiki, Urdu, Venetic, Welsh, Wendish, X-lac-tian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Zanzkritian. He played games with himself, seeing the image of a spotted dog named Duke that one of the guards at Marion owned. Dalmation?
He would kill someone and eat their heart and take their car and then he'd get something for dessert, and there were nearly twelve million medical implants in living North American surgical patients: he sorted through the diagrams of screws, plates, wires, pins, joints, lenses, valves, silicone tits, and collagened lips. He thought of chewed peach hearts, mangled maniocs, calabashed cassavas, squashed spurge, ruptured rootstock, somatic mutation of peach pit, necrotized nectarines….
From nowhere, inside his mind, he pictured blood geysers streaming from Mrs. Nadine Garbage-belly's severed lifestreams. Old Faithful spewing from that neck as the ticker pounded. Half a million human monkeys had pacemakers implanted in their shithouse skins. He saw fake surveillance monitors; barking dogs; sensor-controlled lights; magnetic switches; electric eyes; window foil; closed-circuit cameras; sound, movement, and heat-sensing detectors; infrared ray receivers; Chaingang could bypass them all. From Ma 'n' Pa kitchen-table business alarms to the underground repeater station hookups for Ma Bell, Holmes, national ComSec ops, Newton Secure Systems, Brinks, Pinks, tiddlywinks. Tagalog! Another forgotten language.
How-who-why-when-where did he learn about Irish Gaelic, peach pits, Newton Secure Systems, and silicone tits? He learned them the old-fashioned way: at the "lie-berry," very often. He learned from eating libraries full of books on chemistry, math, and the general sciences, reading the books, sinking them down into the deep, fat wrinkles in that remarkably weirdly eidetic memory and eating the best parts.
That same gray matter mass fires a warning shot and he slows, brakes, pulls into a mall. A fairly busy shopping complex that he loves the instant he sees it. It pounds at him, screaming the V-words he loves so much: vulnerability and victim. He sees victims everywhere he looks. He can victimize a mall, for God's sake—take it down from one end to the other with any luck at all. But that is for later. What stopped him is a toy store. He parks, lurches out of the Olds, and waddles across the hot parking area.
"Hi," a friendly salesgirl says, "may we help you, please?" He does not like her tone. He makes a poem to her inside his head as he looks for the toys he needs.
I wanna meet you, defeat you, eat you. Learn you, churn you, burn you. Overpower you, deflower you, devour you. Chain you, brain you, drain you. He spots a toy robot thing.
Robyn Brock has worked here for two years come November, and this is the first time the person has not answered her. It is insulting and confusing and she is frightened in some way she cannot understand. Oh! It dawns on her. He is hard of hearing. She walks up to his immense back and touches him lightly on the arm, spinning this beast around and mouthing in an exaggerated way so he can read her fucking lips, "Can I help you with something?"
Five hundred pounds descends on her instep and she screams in pain. Nearly eight hundred dollars' worth of well-designed and cleverly boxed plastic junk cascades from the shelves.
"Oh. I've hurt my back," the man moans in his sissy voice.