Chaingang

The car ran quite well, he thought, although he immediately detected bad brakes, and his sensors filled him with an abiding distrust of the master cylinder.

Such thoughts were far from the top level of his perception as he slowly negotiated the pothole-laden blacktop, the faulty wipers producing a rather pleasing background noise. He was somewhere else at the moment, far from Waterton and Jackson's Grove, Missouri, collating and reassessing tables, lists, logs, balance sheets, and graphs. Analyzing deceits, misstatements, distortions, inventions, falsifications, and an entirely counterfeit spectrum of lies imposed by Uncle's hidden agenda.

The physical Chaingang, a well-oiled dispenser of final solutions, trained to kill with machinelike precision and efficiency, was controlled by his mental computer. That computer, in turn, reacted to a variety of triggers, some of them as inexplicable as the influences and confluences of earth, wind, sky, and water.

This morning it had come to him as cold rain, and the thing—whatever it was—had triggered the computer as the beast slept. He came awake with a violent jolt, full power of concentration locked in, packing his belongings with a vengeance, leaving his apparently safe hideaway in Tinytown for the last time.

With the blanketing rain had come a mysterious honing of the discriminatory faculties, a deepening of the sensory capacities, a sharpening of the perspectives—real-time and historical—an enhancement of creative thought and intuitive analysis, and whatever it was that Dr. Norman defined as “physical precognition."

This data-base-directed logic bomb, this cold-hearted heart-taker, idiot savant killer, mindless monster without redeeming humanity, saw the reality with eyes that few of us are even permitted to open.

He drove, driving on automatic pilot, the sky eyes forgotten, because he knew—understood the larger game. He saw the invisible wires. Comprehended, for the first time, the real plan, of which he was only a disposable extra. Stopped. Stood, hiding in rain-drenched woods, listening and sensing the busy, invisible world around him:

Under his 15EEEEE feet, ciliated protozoans, minute infusorian organisms, decomposed. Slow-moving tardi-grades, microscopic eight-wheelers, came from their watersheds and mossbanks. His computer sorted assertions, theses, conjecture, hypotheticals, ipse dixits; chose the most likely unproved dictum. Scanned.

And just as the four pairs of microlegs moved the tardi-grades in the direction of the decomposing protozoans, the thing that no one could explain pulled him in the direction of the least resistance.

Who understands—in an earthly sense—the mysteries of faith? There are those phenomena that are unknowable, but made conceivable to reason by one's spiritual soul.

Those who believe in God are in very real touch with the supernatural, mystical, yet incontrovertible truth of a holy divinity. The Lord's invisible but certain presence chums out of the believer's heart, appealing to the noble aesthetic sense that is the sum total of one's inner reality.

For Daniel Bunkowski the inner essence is altogether different. Where someone else has the Immaculate Conception, for example, he has this—the thing that lets him see.

This is the truth of what Chaingang believes: that an unseen, unknown watcher clicks a hidden field cam loaded with Ektachrome 400 stock, shooting with one one-hundredth-second shutter speed at f11, using 200-mm telephoto, and he is going to take those fingers that hold that camera and RIP THEM FROM THE ARMS AND THEN RIP THE ARMS FROM THE HANDS AND THEN RIP THE HANDS FROM THE MONKEY SOCKETS and that is what he truly believes in the madness of this cold, wet dawn.

There is a prison term for a con who has an ability to work himself free from handcuffs—even when “black-boxed.” The phrase sits on Chaingang's mental shoulder and smiles: monkey pawed, such an inmate is called. For a souvenir he will take a pair of these monkey paws. That is Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski's inner reality.

He was passing through Briarwood on his way toward Tennessee. He'd decided he'd shag a motel, maybe give some thought to an appropriately déclassé rental of some kind—there were ways to remain away from the transaction, but these ways all required elaborate setups and time. He liked the looks of the isolated phone and stopped the Delta, heaved his bulk out from the groaning scat, and splashed through a deep puddle toward a bank of vending machines and telephones.