Chaingang

If you should abuse a dog, or a cat, or any animal, and he sees you—this towering behemoth of hatred and madness—God help you. You are dead. The only question is—how slow will be your dying. How much screaming will he want to hear as he pays his childhood torturer back, again and again? What grand opera of pain will satisfy him this time?

From where he is hidden in the trees, his first glimpse of the river shack called Butchie's registers an immediate prickling, tingling feeling on the back of his hairy, steel-muscled forearms and shoulders. That initial vision calls up the dossier photograph again, and the momentary feeling he experiences, which he knows is called paresthesia, a creeping sensation felt on the skin that has no objective cause, is often the precursor to his most extreme violence triggers.

He hears a barking dog and wills it back down, to sit and burble on hold, feeling the ambience of the place as the bad vibes wash over him.

Graceful cypress boughs, river oak, and huge cottonwood trees bend their leaves out over the water in the direction of the morning sun.

If Daniel Bunkowski stepped into the tree line, it is another thing that steps out now, moving in a brisk and purposeful waddle in the direction of the back door of the shack. This back-door man smells richly of open fields, and sweat, and something else. An ordurous thing that will resist identification.

He sees the watchdog and lets the red tide pour through his senses. A starving, badly mangled pit bull, short-chained to the corner of the shack, barks at him. He will deal with it later. He doesn't let himself look at it. He has his syringe kit in the duffel bag. If the monkeys have run true to form, they will have replaced the animal tranquilizers he always carried prior to his incarceration. He drops his load a few feet from the building, and a fist like the business end of a huge sledgehammer pounds on the back door.

Cursing inside.

“We're closed till eleven,” a voice screeches from inside. Again. Hammer time.

Curses. Movement. Slam of door. A woman, hair wild, face a snarl of anger and disarray.

"...closed, goddammit! Don't you fuckin’ speak English?" Daring him to offend her.

He tries to speak. To do what he normally does in such instances, which is to manipulate with his voice and speech. He is a master of the mumbled nonsense phrase, the double-talk aside that buys an extra moment of time from the unsuspecting.

He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. The drugs, perhaps, or the long time in the hole—over two years since he was in the field like this. All these elements, combined with his rage, render him speechless. All he can do is roar and growl and it explodes right there and he is carefully chain-slamming her and waddling past her moving into the shack, moving quicker than anyone alive has ever seen him move, silently, a deadly killer who only wants one thing—to destroy! He opens a door ready to strike.

Another starving dog! This one is muzzled. Their house pet, no doubt. These fucks. His rage is a blinding thing, and behind him a voice snarls, "Who the fuck are—” But this serious threat is negated as the bearded gutter face is split open, a yard of tractor-strength chain links smashing down at it, upside Butchie Sutter's ugliness. Nice ‘n’ easy, by Chaingang's standards.

He goes through the shack. No more human filth. No more pit bulls. He turns. Goes back the way he came, getting his bag from beside the door, getting leather gloves, this and that. Dragging the woman into the main area of the barroom beside her employer.

He finds identification. Connie Vizard is her name, William Sutter the oaf's handle. He binds the man's wrists in a wet bar towel, searching for things, people, goodies. He turns up a length of stout clotheline, tests its tensile strength, binds Butchie with a vengeance, stuffing another wet rag in the man's mouth.

Gets bottles from behind the bar. The gasoline container from the back room. Pours, soaking Butchie and assorted rags, papers, flammable stuff. He wants Butchie awake when he lights him up.

Examines both pit bulls again. Should he feed them? Then what? He checks his kit—he has the tranquilizer. He could knock them out, leave them at a vet's with money and a note. Both dogs look beyond help. He destroys them quickly, as humanely as he can.

It angers him to do so, and he puts his silenced firearm back in the duffel and returns to the woman. Grabs her hair, pulls her face close to his. She is groggy but conscious when he tenses from the diaphragm and hauls up a monstrous regurgitation of foulness, belching residue of freeze-dried Long Rats, halitosis, and the clump of hot wild garlic he munched on the way to Butchie's, into the face of Ms. Vizard. She gags on the breath of death and he snaps her neck while Butchie struggles, showing them his disdain for them as he takes them out.