Chaingang

Vaguely pie-cut shaped, at least in his mind, there are six to a container, which weighs nearly twenty-two pounds. He carries a full load of claymores the way one might carry a carton of cigarettes. Each one of the three-and-a-half-pound mines, roughly the size of a curved shoe box, is marked M-18A1 ANTIPERSONNEL, and these are but part of his mobile arsenal.

Death is a walking hunter-killer machine: M-26s with the four-second and shortened one-second fuses, M-15 Willie Peters, 25A2s with CS, and an MK-26 Model O Haversack for his “wet work,"—part of the arsenal that supplants his primary killing tool, the M-60.

Death senses something now. It jars his mental gyro and he freezes. Sees men—moving—silhouetted against the night, speaking, a flurry of hands and arms, and he snaps out of the haze as he feels his massive bulk being pushed down a slide of some kind.

He hears their voices clearly now. Grunting. Laughing. Swearing men who struggle to move his enfettered dead weight. They strain, and he is moving again. Sliding from the chopper?

No! He is being offloaded from the back of a truck. Huddled in chains and restraints.

“Go! Take off. Go!” the man in charge shouts, and the truck starts moving. Chaingang's thoughts are clear. He is being freed for some reason. Even though he sees the truck, he wonders why they did not insert him by Huey, then he realizes the Nam thing was hallucinated. Dr. Norman did this to him—for that one instant he feels the hot red desire to rip the sissy doctor's body apart—then he remembers he is about to get free and he's too excited to think of anything else.

There is a horizon of dark tree line. Beyond it he senses a river, and the wordscreen feeds “disembogue": to flow or come forth as from a waterway or channel that empties into a stream. He is near a river and some kind of a canal or waterway, he intuits, then the beast's mind reminds him he heard a distant barge.

He is not in a watery paddy marked LZ Quebec-Tulsa, but he smells truck crops and goat heads. Early bean stalks cut. Cockleburs. Goldenrod, creeper vine, thistle, dog fennel. Poison ivy. Assessment: a desolate piece of farm ground.

Norman's admonition replays: “You will be safe.” His mental sensors do not warn him otherwise. One of the monkey men speaks in harsh tones from out of a moving jigsaw.

“Map.” He throws a plastic case at the huge bata-boots. “You hear me all right?” Chaingang listens. “Equipment. Everything's in the two cases. Compass.” He drops something on the map.

“Everybody mounted up?” There is a shouted reply. The scent of freedom and that of running blood mixed with vengeance is like the loam of the richest bottomland, an earthy, alluvial perfume, fueling what only base feeding will appease.

“Hey!” he shouts, unnecessarily. “Keys!” It obviously frightens the man to say this as he throws them. They hit in the dirt beside the huge bulk of the bound beast, and the man is running before they strike the ground. The trucks disappear into the darkness.

Is it a trick? Possibly. But what would justify the effort? He files the possibility and tries to scoot his body closer. It is not as easy as he thought.

He is able to finally get close enough to snag the keys. Huge paws carefully test each key in the two main chain shackles, first the cuffs, then the leg chains.

By luck he hits the handcuff key on the third try with the tinier keys, but it takes a lot longer than he wants it to before the proper key unlocks the leg shackles.

Chaingang crawls to the massive duffel bag and finds a flashlight and tries it. Batteries are strong. Paws through till he finds his big fighting bowie.

The dreaded biter and the other restraints are sliced and he is standing. Armed. Free.

He knows not to linger in this field. Swooping up the heavy duffel, the two cases—also extremely heavy—and having pocketed the compass and map, he begins a fast waddling trot in the direction of the deepest darkness.

There is some moonlight, but rain-cloud night blankets him. The gigantic beast moves surefooted as a huge, fat cat, the proximity of human beings acting as his biocatalyst, activating and accelerating the mysterious processes that have always protected and guided him.

Instinctively he moves in the direction of isolation and concealment, away from humanity for the moment, away from danger, his mind a seething maelstrom of hatred, relief, and kill-hunger.