Chaingang

“Police removed nine pit bulls from an establishment on Willow River Road ... animals had been abused.” There was a lot more, but he allowed his mind to shut his systems down as he walked. He would turn it back on when he reached Butchie Sutter's, letting it enrage him and course through his system in the manner of poison.

The rage would wash over him like a hot red tide, and he would abuse Butchie Sutter, he thought, smiling ferociously. One of his big boots stepped over a pile of drift at the edge of the field he had just crossed, and he visualized the face of the man in the dossier as he stepped down into pulpy, squishy-soft log fungus, crushing it the way he would crush a face. He stomped the log into wood slime, and it glowed under his boots with the potency of poisonous mushrooms.

He read an image in the wet slime, much the same as one would read an omen. Butchie, for his dog crimes, would be left with less than sickly phosphorescence for a human face.

Chaingang Bunkowski was already a veteran of juvey incarceration when he entered the prison system for the first time as an adult. At 475 pounds, over six feet seven, the look of him alone was unique. But then—to look inside the mind of Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was to look into the frightening darkness of a creature who was both man and monster.

Dr. Norman had chanced upon his workup sheets, drawn by the outsize statistics and his own clinical needs of the moment. He spoon-fed his special computers the results of the quotient and behavior tests, profiles of biochemical and psychological reactions, the measurements of the unique appetites and weird metabolics, and gathered in the results like golden treasure.

Although it was marginally possible that the power of this man's mind was such he was able to pretend to be in a drugged, hypnotic state, there was a sufficient body of evidence from repeated interviews, interrogations, debriefings, examinations, and drug-and-hypnosis sessions that confirmed Daniel had killed more persons than any other living human being.

His own best guess had been “over four hundred, maybe,” a rumbled estimate from the heart of a Pentothal-induced chat, which had given rise to the grapevine legend that he'd taken a life for every pound of his weight.

Oh, if only Dr. Norman could have had Daniel for study for, say, ten years without interruption. Imagine the possibility of serious breakthroughs! Daniel was the ultimate lab animal.

Aspects of the individual's behavioristics begged to be probed. How, for just one example, had he consistently evaded authorities for such an extended period, murdering wantonly and—at first glance—randomly, without thought of being captured?

What were the keys to Daniel's presentience? Was he, as the doctor postulated, a physical precognate whose childhood horrors had produced the ultimate death-dealing machine?

There was little question, after drug-induced hypnosis sessions, that the insatiable hunger that compelled him to commit the most vile acts of mutilation and murder had been fed and nurtured by his childhood and adolescence.

Daniel feared and hated his vicious “stepfather,” who left him locked in pitch-black closets for days at a time, who chained him into a suffocatingly hot punishment box, bringing the little boy out only to feed, water, or abuse him, beating him with fists, electrical cord, rubber hose, torturing him with matches, wire hangers, a soldering iron, anything that would inflict sudden and excruciating pain. These were the things that had given birth to Chaingang Bunkowski.

The will to survive had been another formative element. Most abused children, when faced with such a degree of relentless abuse, might wish that they were dead. But something in Daniel's makeup made him fight to survive. Dr. Norman thought it was raw hatred mixed with terror. Locked in total darkness, fearing for his life and for the life of his puppy imprisoned beside him in that stinking, urine-filled closet, the boy had stepped out of this imminent danger and into another room.

The door was inside the room of his imagination, where he had so often gone to fantasize, but there had been another door inside this room, and somehow he had learned—in a moment of screaming terror—how to unlock it.

Inside this room within a room, all things were possible: the slowing and stilling of the vital signs, the breath of death, will over matter, eidetic recall, mental photography, the acceptance and knowing of premonitions, the pathway to superhuman strength.

But in this secret room he'd also learned brutal things: how to plumb the depths of abject hatred, and to feed on unspeakable desires that had shaped the thing they called Chaingang.

The beast—bigger, stronger, smarter than any adversary—still had the mental and emotional equilibrium of a child. He was a child who could only trust another animal “like him.” A dog, in fact, had been the only thing that had ever shown him love.