Slice (2 page)

That lucky,
lucky
hype who had only minutes earlier cursed his luck had fallen asleep in his crate, and it would be much later that he'd recall seeing something about a fat killer who lived beneath the streets, and he'd know he had lucked onto a fucking score. Lord knows it was his turn for a break. So far, without bad luck, he'd had no luck at all. And now—shit fire and put out the matches—he'd seen a GHOST!

This was no ghost. This was Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, six foot seven, 460 pounds of serial killer. A battered and molested child who had managed to survive, then grown into a two-fisted payback machine “bigger than a fucking truck,” institutionalized nearly half his life, pulled off death row and sent overseas so he could kill for Uncle Sam, surviving—always surviving—escaping deactivation by friendly fire, returning to the world to do murder and mutilation, tracked down and shot by a cop, only to survive again. He was Chicago's Lonely Hearts killer, the one who liked to rip his enemy's heart out and
eat
it. The one they called Chaingang.

Chaingang was alive. He had one shot, as he saw it, sitting in a freshly stolen car. He needed $10-to-$12,000 cash and he needed to get it now. Then he needed to completely vanish into fat air. Lay chilly and bite the bullet. He would have to dramatically alter his appearance in some way.

Having run through all the plastic-surgery and disguise scenarios and not liking any of them, he was left with only a couple of possibilities that held any promise; massive weight loss and then the acquisition of a partner. Either male or female would do, but upon consideration he decided a woman would be preferable. He was facing certain biological needs. He would proceed. He'd get money and then a woman. Then he'd lose weight. When the time was right he would make Jack Eichord pay.

First—money. He ruled out banks because of the surveillance cameras. It was vital that nobody know he'd survived the shooting. He considered grocery stores. Too busy. He stole fresh plates, changed clothes, and began casing successful small merchants with big cash flow and moderate in-store traffic.

Sam's Meats was perfect. He watched the store for an hour and saw thirty-seven customers. Not bad. He knew what meat cost. He drove up the alleyway and parked near the back entrance. He tried the door. It was locked. He knocked with a fist like a huge rock. Movement inside. The door opened.

“Yeah?” A young man's face showed in the doorway.

“Sam want those ribs rena cranus in back here or what?” That's what it sounded like to the employee of the meat market.

“Huh?"

“I said do you know if Sam wants me to bring those...” But by then Chaingang was inside and upside the head of one Tommy Crockett, now bleeding on the concrete floor, and the massive, bloodied chain is beside his leg and he looks inside. Nothing. A large, dark, and empty room with office to the left, swinging doors in front that obviously lead to the market. He steps forward cautiously, locking the door his wide girth had just squeezed through, and peers into the market. Two butchers working. A woman buying something. Ring of cash register. Voices. And he pushes the door open where the other butcher can see him but where he's still hidden from the woman and the other man and he says softly, “Hey, bud?” The big dimpled smile in place, showing the uninjured, right side of his face, cleanly shaven, grinning, trustworthy, he says, “Can you come help us a second? Need somebody to hold that door open.” A vaguely nodded head. The butcher coming in to see who the hell this guy is and suddenly a world of pain and he is unconscious and Chaingang opens the door and says, “Yo. Give us a hand here a second."

And the owner of Sam's Meats, holding a sharp cleaver at the moment, looks at the stranger and starts heading back into his storeroom. But a meat cleaver isn't enough and he is on his face in some blood that is not his, a chain wrapped around his throat and a great weight on his back.

“Where is the money?"

“Cash register. Hey, shit, you're breakin’ my damn back, man."

“THE REAL MONEY, not that chickenfeed."

“I don't know what you—"

“Watch. Here. Over to the right.” And the butcher looks to the right and feels the weight shift and a thunk, a wet splat a horrid soggy sound of crunching blade into bone, and there is a hand. It is Tom's hand severed from his arm.

“Yours next,” the basso profundo rumbles calmly, “if I don't like the answer. Where is the REAL money.” Said without a question mark.

“My office. Lower left-hand drawer. Black metal box."

“How much is in there? Don't lie."

“I dunno. Day's money—ready to go to the bank. Over ten thousand, I know that."

“Where's the key?"

“Key to the drawer's the small gold key on my ring. Right pants pocket.” The lights go out.

Very quickly, faster than most human beings have ever seen him move, he hurries into the office. Second key works. Fits. The drawer opens. He takes the black box. Back into the doorway to the market. He sees two women and a child waiting, looking around the store for the butchers. Quickly he slices each of the three throats with his huge cleaver, stepping carefully around the blood, wiping the prints off both doorways and the bloody cleaver, keys in the sack with the black box, all of this in a cardboard box, out the back door again with handkerchief over the handle, pulling it shut and hurling his bulk into the front seat of the stolen Dodge Charger just as the woman opens the door to the back room and sees the bodies and screams. Soon he pulls over to the side and counts the money in the box. He has $15,825 in cash. Another $3,800 in checks, which he shreds and lets blow out the open window as he starts up and wheels the Charger back into the traffic flow: $15,825 for less than ten minutes’ work. He never knew there was so much profit in fresh meat.

To you in your safe nest of a world his murderous actions are the bestial acts of a madman. Throats being slit with a knife is an image you won't ever have to deal with. Not up close and for real. Only the catsup splatter of Hollywood gore. The real feel of the cut, the way you slice first, then pull it roughly through, ripping on down quickly to sever the artery of a human, this is something you'll fortunately never see or feel. But to Chaingang it is a movement as natural as slitting an envelope flap with a letter-opener.

And if you insist on teasing, taunting, tormenting your babies, abusing and using and confusing and sexually misusing your children, battering and splattering your youngsters for perverted kicks, you risk creating one of these boys. Or girls. One of these two-legged monsters who will seek organic payback in the form of the torture, degradation, and slaughter of as many of your kind as the fates will allow them. And the ones who become highly proficient at the death arts, they will seek your brothers and sisters and sons and daughters out in their quest to destroy your likeness again and again and a hundred times over.

H
e spent a couple of hours resting in the Charger, with the car parked on a quiet industrial side street. Then he had a nudge and started the car and drove out to the nearby town of Cicero. He found a fairly secluded home. Lawn overgrown but no for-sale sign. He parked a block away and checked out the house. Nothing. He drove in and parked out of sight in the garage area in back, slipped the lock easily, and penetrated the dusty stillness of the dark home.

Furniture. Clothes in closets. Food in the refrigerator. He gorged. Went in and showered. Ate again. Relieved himself. Put the television on without sound, a flickering ghost in the next room. Prowled through the house on those huge, splayed feet. Touched things and wondered. Decided to take another shower. Found a bottle of cooking sherry and tried to drink some of it but spit it out onto the living-room carpet. Finally found a small decanter of something that proved to be brandy and poured himself a large goblet full, not finding a proper snifter.

He sat in the darkness in front of someone's TV, his naked body drying in the still, warm house in front of an electric snow screen. He shook his head at the miraculousness of life. Trying to assimilate all this new data. Only hours before he had been dead. Beneath the streets with the old sewer woman who had found him and nursed him back to health like her three-legged dog, the pet that hobbled gamely wherever she went. Now here he was. In some monkey's living room watching the tele-snow. He sighed and got up with a grunt of effort.

Chaingang changed his dressing and went back in to finish the brandy in front of the TV, but he felt the hairs on his arms prickle and something was out of tune. He quickly gathered up his clothing and out of habit wiped surfaces of prints, hid the obvious signs of his penetration (only much later would the family discover that Goldilocks and the Three Bears had raided their refrigerator), and drove away from this darkened house that no longer “felt safe” to him.

Within ten minutes he was parked in a field between a building that appeared to be abandoned and a thick hedgerow, and he sat there calmly in the darkness trying to remember what had gone wrong, what had brought him to this state of wounded confusion. The last thing he could remember vividly was being in the sewer and the cop Eichord coming down after him, shooting at him, and he remembered him putting that gun to him and the way he jerked his head quickly as the gun fired, and then the lights went out and there was nothing. And when he awoke he was dead.

Had it all been a dream? Had he imagined the old woman who lived in the sewer? Was she like the old woman who lived in the shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do? Or was she a real person who had found him floating up on the filth-covered concrete shores of her mad world, this phantom hulk of bloody being who at first appeared dead to her? She found many such things in her underground world, but they were almost always dead.

At first he too believed that he was dead and that the song he heard was the song of angels from some half-forgotten story wrenched from the guts of his tortured childhood. But it was not the sound of angels, and it was then he felt an alien sensation of fear. It was fear of the unknown, as he understood that he was being held submerged below the surface of the sea, deep in the black cold, far removed from the noisy, burbling, human wave above, far above him somewhere in the living world.

He smiled when he recognized the source of the noise, amused and pleased that he would have a chance to study the sad, strange, haunting, melancholy, squeaking, undecipherable, gentle song of the whales. He was listening to the courting song of the killer whales.

Daniel E.F. Bunkowski who had torn the hearts from countless victims and left their poor, terrorized, mutilated cadavers strewn across Southeast Asia and much of North America, was at peace. In harmony with his surroundings. Because if Daniel loved and hated, his love of nature and mammal and animal life was at least the equal of his fierce and abiding hatred for humans. So his frightening and massive death mask of a face crinkled in pleasure at the sound of the singing whales.

And a chill slowly crept over his enormous bulk like a dark shadow, and the mysterious song of the whales intensified into an electrical sound, not unlike a human scream, and then he slept.

Do we really know what it is to experience fear, horror, terror and awful, mind-paralyzing shock all at once? Few of us ever have such an experience. We might survive a car wreck, adrenals pumping, heart pounding, and we pull over by the side of the road, and tears streaming down our faces, we begin shaking uncontrollably in the preamble to emotional collapse. This is only aftershock. This is nothing. But to know the terrible and numbing fear that Eichord felt that time in the sewers of Chicago as he confronted the wounded killer, is to come face to face with your limits and thresholds—physical, mental, and emotional.

The monstrous killer had emerged from his manhole to destroy Jack Eichord, the serial-murder expert, but Eichord had shot him, and the huge madman known as Chaingang had fallen back down into the depths. Eichord missed with the next two shots, then climbed down into the stench, and seeing a woman and a child he cared for, both miraculously alive, there was that cruel moment of relief. And when he let up for just that half-second, the monster came alive again, coming up out of the puddle of slime and charging him like a wounded rhino.

To know and taste and feel the emotions and fears and sensations that ravaged Eichord in those moments, as he shot him again, firing point-blank at the wounded killer, is to understand the fragile balance of the human gyro. From the proximity and the blood and noise and impact, Jack thought the beast was dead, but he was not thinking clearly. He'd just been shaken to his core by the bellowing, seemingly unstoppable onslaught of the man whom he'd just thought he'd killed. And when he bent over the inert form of the huge heart-ripper, up close and with a shaking service revolver, imagine his total terror, the woman and child huddled nearby, as he places the barrel in what's left of Bunkowski's mouth and fires again. Two more rounds. The shots echoing like cannons in the dank, foul enclosure. Eichord shaking so badly he nearly drops his weapon as he jams it back in his holster and tries to get the survivors out.

But it was pitch-black down below the Chicago streets, and Eichord, frightened half out of his mind, had failed to mortally wound the beast called Chaingang. Lady Luck still hovered over the killer. What Jack had done was give him a severe head wound, graze his skull, and turn his cheek into a sieve. Because when he bent over the killer's form he had placed his weapon into the shattered mouth and fired more rounds through the side of his face. And a cheek is quick to heal. And Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was no normal human being.

He had recuperative powers, tolerances, immunities, appetites, defense mechanisms, involuntary reactions, reflexes, tactile skills, sensory gifts, and cognitive powers that were partially biochemical and physical compensations for a lifetime of deprivations and subjugations and inhuman treatment. Where others might have perished, he built scar tissue, and developed weird immunities or strange receptors that could counter the most painful injury or violent attack. He was not an easy man to destroy.