Slob (25 page)

"You shittin' us, man?"

"Fucker was in the middle of a six-year bit. Had three years left and this asshole talks him into makin' a move. Three years. He boogies. That's why we never saw the cocksuck. They nailed him up here runnin' around." The board members thought this was quite humorous.

"Anyway, his brother gets a letter from Algoa. He says he's getting married. Brother writes back that's cool, let's see a picture of the bitch." A knock at the door interrupted the story.

"We're in the middle of a meeting," Deuce hollered out at them through the door. "Yeah?"

"So he says, send a picture of the bitch." Laughter. "And his brother sends him one. It's Greasy's bitch awright. He's got him an eighteen-year-old faggot named Ronnie." Hysterics in the room. A moment of gay abandon in the workaday drudgery of a busy corporate staff.

"Believe this shit? Said he looked like a wife awright. Looked like a pussy'd bend over 'for you could get its pants off." Screaming in the room. "Any fucker'd boogie in the middle of a fucking six-pack in fuckin' Algoa! Shit!"

"What a fuckin' dummy." Roars of laughter finally recede to the point they can hear the loud, insistent pounding.

"What the fuck is it, goddammit,"
Deuce asked.

"Yo, Deuce." Door opens and they can see a lot of faces. Mingus' goes, "Think you'd better check this shit out." He comes in and shuts the door on the others. "Jigaboo calls hisself Geronimo or some fucking shit. Got some old wino with him. Claim they heard you put three bills on the street for anybody give us something that would get the one did Tree. They swear they can give the fucker to us." Very quiet in the shack and all eyes on the door as Deuce nods to let them in.

"You two get y'r butts in here," Mingus commanded as Dr. Geronimo and Woody strode through the door with as much dignity and poise as the occasion allowed.

"Mr. Younger," the cannonball-like man said, "this gentleman knows where the man you want lives. He can show him to you, take you right there."

"Yes, sir," Woody Woodpecker said. "I know where the man who kills people stays."

"You do, eh," Deuce said softly.

"Yes, sir. If I show you, do I get the three hundred dollars like they say?"

"Where is he?"

"In the sewers. He stays in the sewers."

"Get these fuckin' bums outta here f'r chrissakes," one of the corporate vice-presidents suggested gently.

"No. Hold it." Deuce smiled. "I go with my vibes. My vibes never lie. I feel good about these two." He looked at the Wood Man with a pair of eyes like the business end of a double-barrel shotgun and smiled after a few moments. "I say hold the calls. I think we got us a winner."

D
aniel Bunkowski is asleep. RY-7/INLET 20 is a rectangular storage tank approximately twelve and a half feet below the city streets, and situated at the intersection of pipes that lead to a system of storm drains that connect to a main catch basin. If you could see the pipes from the air, they would look like a large letter
Y
with the bottom stem connecting to the
O
of the storage facility. The larger facility is very deep, and it is into this area that the overflow ultimately goes from those rainstorms that would otherwise fill the low-lying areas with the spillage from rains, melts, or flood backwater. Bunkowski is asleep in the smaller storage tank that feeds the water into a channel that opens at the center of the letter Y.

He is asleep in the trap he has constructed in the neck of the storage tank, but that is only his physical bulk. Danny boy is far away, dreaming, of another time and place. A place known as Echo Sector, in the lowlands of Quang Tri province, Republic of South Vietnam, where a kamikaze truck full of men roars along a very dangerous stretch of road. The truck, by coincidence called a deuce-and-a-half, is driven by a sullen, acned, sneering youth with bad teeth who drives at one speed, accelerator to the floorboard, and stops by running into things.

"Stop," Chaingang yells around the side. Nothing. A fist the size and solidity of a solid steel pineapple begins pounding huge dents in the truck. "Pull over!" Chaingang has seen something. The truck slows marginally, the sullen kid looking for something to drive into to get the wreck to quit moving, but Chain is already limping back toward his ruck.

"Get some," they yell, and there are other taunts and names shouted at him as the truck roars off. He smiles as he thinks how easily he could have tossed a frag in their direction, just for luck, counting it very close for a nice and deadly air burst—just so—and in the dreamsleep he grins at the imagining of the exploding charge and the screams of surprise.

He waddles off in the direction of the nearby treeline with an M-60, and a ruck that weighs more than any of the men on the truck.

He is carrying an M-60 LMG, and wearing six crossed bandoliers. Each holds over a hundred rounds of ammo. He is literally covered in fragmentation grenades. His-taped chain bulges from a special pocket. He wears a bowie the size of a small machete. His ruck is a mobile home.

It is packed in this manner: ponchos (2), liners (2), tarps (2), his special extra-large mosquito netting cover which is folded as carefully and methodically as a chute, then packed inside a four-millimeter Mylar sleeve, cammie cover, detonation equipment, wire-cutter pliers, det cord, fuses, an M-18 smoke grenade, igniter, John Wayne (opener), utensils, extra socks, extra bug juice, pills, matches, C-4, and on and on—many small items.

Then there are his "pies." He calls them the little pies and they are vaguely pie wedge in appearance. He loves them. He knows how the little people like to come in at night slithering through the ridiculously easy-to-penetrate wire protection of the sissy soldiers, how they like to turn them around so that when they are detonated the enemy gets an unexpected present of flying, killer steel. They are called claymores, each weighing three and a half pounds, and Chaingang carries six of them.

His mobile home carries everything from a coil of rope to a special plastic box holding the swivel rings he will use to fig his grenade trap.

Across the layer his ruck is crammed with thirty meals of instant rice and shrimp, beef, pork, spaghetti, which are the top-grade freeze-dried lrrp (LRRP-Long-Range Recon Patrol) rations called Long Rats. They are prepared simply by adding ordinary cold water. He then carries small Tupperware containers full of salt, sugar, coffee, and other staples that can be used to expand his rations by the usual diet of rice and fish and native groceries. The back of the ruck is covered in plastic bottles containing twenty-two liters of water and two liters of Wild Turkey. He also carries several items of gear in miscellaneus belts, pouches, and the like such as bug juice, battle dressings, and the other impedimenta that will allow him to rove as a self-contained hunter-killer unit.

He is a six-hundred-and-some pound one-man mobile fighting unit, loaded for grizzly, and carrying everything from Tobasco to toothbrush to toilet tissue in a ruck you couldn't get off the ground. Then there's what he carries by hand. In his left hand, or on his shoulder over a special pad, the M-60, and in his right hand, a huge plastic spool of wire. This is his one-man ambush wire.

He knew when he saw the dense treeline's edge even from the distance that he would kill humans again tonight and many, many of them. He can feel it and sense it in a moist, white-hot swirl and blur that washes over him before he can control it. Not yet. He holds himself in check as he thinks how it would have been so easy to waste the occupants of the deuce-and-a-half as it sped off.

It is getting dark fast and he walks faster, not limping now, a huge smile plastered across his countenance. Dimples and grins. This is his thing. He was born to do it. He will go for a big kill tonight, if his luck holds. His goal is to take off a whole platoon of the little people single-handed. He knows ways it might be done.

He hopes someone will come tonight. If it is only one or two, he might kill one slow, play with him a bit before he puts him under. Make his lights go out real slow. He remembers the one he lit up the other night and almost laughs out loud. He shifts his 60 to his shoulder and takes the wire spool for a second as he pats his pocket for chain, then rings, what did I do with the swivel rings? Ah yes, in the ruck.

Moisture drops from the foliage. It hits the ground, soaking into the Vietnamese earth, making the trees grow taller, coming back up into the trees to water them, so they'll have bigger leaves to drip, to catch more moisture and on and on it goes in the never-ending, self-regenerating cycle that always stirs his interest. He thinks of trees as people. When he spends a lot of time in the jungle in one location, he becomes so familiar with the major aspects of the trees and grass and vegetation and everything that it is as if he had lived there all his life. He names his trees, gives them identities, and holds conversations with them in his mind. Sometimes he feels the trees talk to him with their thoughts.

The red ball has gone under again. He has reached the place he imagined he would find there on the road. Perfect. He will set up in the trees, at the apex of a footpath and what appears to be an overgrown supply pipeline.

He will run his plan tonight if they come. He has a plan that could work for up to eight, perhaps even ten of the little people if he takes care and thinks the thing out carefully, and of course if luck is with him. He thinks he can kill even a dozen dinks using his well-researched and carefully constructed ambush.

This is Chaingang's grenade ambush. First, he unloads his M-60, ammo bandoliers and his frags, setting everything down carefully beside his spool of wire. Next he removes his ruck and digs down for the wire-cutter pliers. The important swivel rings. He pats his pockets down. Now to set it in motion. He picks up the frags and a broken branch and limps a bit as he negotiates the footpath.

A wave sweeps through him again, washing his brain in a red-hot kill lust. He will take many lives before the night is over and he doesn't much care whose. But these are the moments when he realizes he must use the greatest care. It is in the times right before he does the bad things that he must execute his plans with the utmost caution and with great concentration.

It is dark as he finishes putting the grenades in place on either side of the footpath, and in front and back. The frags are "canned" in place, that is, he has jammed them into cans before he loaded up, and the cans are just big enough to hold the 'nades in with the spoons depressed but not so tight that a pull won't jerk them loose. Parallel swivel rings are placed and camouflaged as well as possible.

When they are all wired tightly into position and covered, the wires are all laid and pulled back to the ambush control point, as Chaingang takes up the slack in the wires just enough, but not too much; this is very painstaking and he would prefer to accomplish this with daylight. But the darkness is also to his advantage. He can tell just what is visible and what is not here in the last minutes before it is totally black.

Now he hurries back and beginning at the reverse end, covers all signs of the wires with earth and twigs and leaves. He is expert at this. He has done this hundreds of times. Now he pulls the pins on all the frags and, giving the wires and swivel rings a final check, retraces his footing, this time moving backward as he brushes out any sign that he might have left.

He spreads his mosquito netting out beside the ambush position control point, lays his tarps down, quickly scoops up a big pile of leaves, twigs, and other camouflage material, bringing it over from other spots in the darkness and brushing behind him each time. There is no light now.

He goes down the footpath one last time, to the hardball that is completely overgrown in vines and brush. Once he almost trips and falls on his fat ass but he catches his balance in time. Finally he gets the mines set out, after what seems like an eternity. He is using a new system on the claymores this time, a wire pull to detonate the clacker device involving a complex system of parallel rings, but most of this was all rigged in advance. There is no more time now. He leaves it as it is, ready or not, and returns to the ambush spot.

He stands and breathes deeply, thinking. He retraces his movements. He has set out eight fragmentation grenades and two of the claymores. All the slack is out and it all runs back to the two master wires, all running to the swivel rings that will blow the mines back in the hardball trail and the frags along the footpath, which is where he thinks they will come from tonight, if and when they show.

He is a thorough craftsman at his work. It isn't quite right somehow. One thing is missing or incomplete or wrong. Something does not feel quite right. There is no room for error.

Painstakingly, he begins the whole procedure again in his mind, concentrating fiercely, taking each move a step at a time from the moment when he chose the ambush site to the unpacking of his ruck to the placement of the parallel-positioned swivel rings and the wiring of the canned grenades. He rethinks the camouflage, the setting of the claymores, the brushing out of the trail and pathway, the gathering of the foliage and materials. He remembers he has the grenade pins and rings in his pocket and he puts them away.

It is in the master wires. The problem is in the way the master wire to the pathway frags is attached to the wires that lead from the grenades to the swivels and through the rings so that when the master is yanked, the grenades pop out of the cans, thus releasing the spoon levers and blowing. All of the grenades but two are short-fused. The other two, with hacksawed spoons, are just an added insurance variation.