He could make out a sip for the Happy Time Day Care Center. A billboard. The Laco brought an orange-and-white warning sip up close:
"Dumping oil or waste in parking lot violates state and federal laws. Offenders will be prosecuted. Fines can be up to ten thousand dollars. Please help us Stop Pollution" He loaded another APEX (X) in and did his part.
He swings over the parking lot of the truck stop. A figure on a nearby slope catches his eye from the middle of a half-acre garden plot. Flapping arms, large brimmed hat, his crosshairs touch the image of a garden scarecrow and he squeezes.
Moves, scans. "Under emergency conditions clean water can be substituted for bore cleaning fluid…" He's back in the sniper hide on Hospital Hill Park. It is a bad mistake. Chaingang is there, too, and this time when he squeezes, he is observed.
Price sees another college girl. SAVANT kisses the curve of breast, gentle swell of tummy, and he imagines a pouting bulge of unshaved cat under that pair of blue jeans and he squeezes one off for the commandant. Yeah!
Chaingang feels the danger claw at him but he cannot see any evidence of Shooter. The first thing he sees is a flight of sparrows who jump when the sign far below them explodes. He hears the noise of impact. Sees the sign—or rather sees where the sign was. Target practice. Shooter is up on the hill somewhere, the little fuck. He stares with full bore concentration, double-barreled vision trying to spot the sniper.
The hide is well done—he'll give him that. Had Shooter not popped the cap on another round be probably would not have found him. But he saw something. A puff of smoke or a branch disintegrating as another high explosive round blew through the shrubbery. He could see the gun pit. He was moving fast, those big hard tree-trunk legs churning moving him faster than anyone alive had seen him move.
Unfortunately, Shooter saw him as well. Caught the elephantine killer lumbering up the hill at him and yelled with delight as he slid the empty brass out, inserted a round, and firmly snicked the bolt closed. Eye to the Laco. Crosshairs on the humongous target, which was too fat to even zigzag, like shooting ducks on a pond—an easy squeeze and his worries were over.The big weapon gave him a satisfactory thump as it tooked Chaingang Bunkowski off the count. All Shooter could see on the grass was fresh blood!
Daniel had been shot several times, including a couple of up-close-and-way-too-personal incidents. He wasn't a virgin, as these things go. But there had never been any pain like this.
It was chain pain. The sort of pain he had inflicted many a time—where there's nothing for a few moments and then, as the numbness begins to wear off, it's such a screaming terrible hurting that you think you'll pass out from it. Imagine the pain from a hundred chain whippings.
He had to bite down on it or it would kill him. He had been hit by SAVANT, but his warning system had jerked him to the side just in time, and he'd taken a bad shoulder wound, high on the left shoulder just above the Kevlar vest. Three inches to the right and it would have blown his head off. In his mind, he fixed all his powers on that one point of focus, as he worked his way, on his right side, back to the car and his duffel.
The body is divided into four quads, subdivided again. The small section where he'd taken the hit was walled off inside his brain. He had to stop the pain. Isolate it there. He imagined the shoulder floating above him, freezing the rest of his upper torso in ice. Cutting off the flow of blood from the pain, slowing his vital signs as he made it to the Buick.
There was an up side. He was alive. Functioning. He didn't have the dogs with him—they'd been left at his hideout. This mess was going to be over. He would now do away with a long-time enemy. Battle dressing. Fighting to keep his mind chilly. He had to stay calm. There was a lot of blood but he liked blood. No problem. Bandaged himself and then wrapped some duct tape over the dressing—he was going to be doing some heavy work, he felt sure.
Got the line tracker out of the duffel. The photo interrupter eye had been tampered with. The robot was now a slightly modified toy. It no longer resembled what the store had sold; It was now rather deadly. He got out his coil. Det cord. Clacker. Three-in-one.
Keys. No problem with the right side of his body at all. Experimented with the left as he started the car. Not bad. He could stand it.
He bit down on the pain as if it were a big, mean steak sandwich. Chewed up the hurt and swallowed it. Drove away from the scene of this accident, around the hill that led to the street above the gun pit.
Parked. Got out. Shooter was still scanning the brush below with the weapon. Biding his time on lock and load. Patient and ready.
Chaingang got out and put the line tracker in place. Doused the can of oil on the wheels and bearings. Put it in place and started off to get an angle on the hide which was less than a hundred feet away. If Shooter had seen him crawl to the car he would feel another shot hit him soon. But he made it to the nearby trees and nothing struck him down.
He was close now. He gritted his ugly shark's teeth and switched on the remote control. The line tracker started forward, and momentum carried it straight ahead, tracking no line at all but moving silently on the oiled wheels, rolling in the direction of the gun hide, a Claymore mine wired to the base of the tracker. As the killer robot neared the gun hide, Chaingang triggered the clacker, and the commanddetonator fired out nearly seven hundred steel balls in a sixty-degree forward arc. Shooter was down in the hide when it went off, and the projectiles missed him, but his reflexes were lightning fast and he whirled and squeezed one off in the direction of the blast.
That was what Chaingang wanted—that one moment when Shooter Price was caught with an empty weapon. Chaingang, came charging and puffing and screaming like a rhino of death, and Shooter was scared shitless, trying to eject the shell and jam that next round in the mouth of his bitch before the fucking son of a bitch could reach him, click—the bolt back, the expended brass flying into the dirt, fumbling for a round, the rhino almost on him. Got it! Big cartridge in the chamber, snick! The bolt closed. Just in time to take the shot and cancel this fucking target out, but his hands were stinging and the rifle was fifteen feet away—ooh, man, that chain was big… and hard.
It only took an instant for Chaingang to throw a yard of tractor-strength chain at his target. But an instant can be quite long. This particular one was of sufficient duration for Robert Tinnon Price to register the reality of the chain that was probably going to end his life.
The image snaked into his field of recognition with blinding speed, so as the moment of shattering impact occurred he had time to realize what had come whirling out at him. He did not have time to reflect on it as it smashed into his weapon.
And then there was the big boy himself doing something he would not have thought possible—dropping down beside him and picking up the weapon, not the chain, and roaring like a crazed animal and bending the super-tough tungsten carbide barrel with his bare hands, blood seeping through the wound near his shoulder, putting an L in his lady's throat.
"I'm glad I didn't kill you," Price said to his old comrade of sorts. No longer afraid. "I admire you very much, you know?"
Chaingang, bloodlust coursing through him, only wanted one thing then, and words had no meaning.