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His unbounded loathing and murderous desire act as his flexible chain mail, the lust and the killing, linking themselves together to form a kind of neurological protection from normalcy—or so his mindscreen suggests, as he thinks of the chain reaction of mushroom blasts, and he moves across the bridge, into the next field, and sees a rust red, discarded refrigerator with a heavy chain around it. His life has been a chain of violent events.

Enters woods, surefooted now, pulled by his homing mechanism. Finds the old shack. Rectangular blocks of scorched steps, with bent iron pipe and broken conduits and reinforcement rods protruding. Charred timbers, combat-assault concrete, battlefield brick, exploded masonry, mortar fragments, and twisted firefight wreckage—this site suggests.

Half the shack is gone. A fire consumed it, seemingly in one big black bite of hungry flame, then it was extinguished. What remains is half a shack, roof and walls more or less intact, one side open, and a square of burnt earth where the rest of the shack stood, bordered by what was left of the stove and the blocks the house sat on.

A sharecropper's place, perhaps, tucked into this little woodsy grove of trees and shrubs, not a hundred feet from the rock road, but hidden and safe from prying eyes.

With one level of his mind he is rebuilding a temporary wall, sealing off his newly acquired snuggery from the elements. With another he is thinking about the sign he's seen for the last half a klick, remembering the abandoned end of a railroad spur now far fields away, and the assorted tracks and messages he has duly recorded.

His entire life, both institutionalized and—for wont of a better word—free, has been spent in close proximity to riffraff, robbers, rascals, ruffians, scamps, scoundrels, scoff-laws, scumbags, burglers, buggers, brutes, bangers, deadbeats, derelicts, desperadoes, degenerates, criminals, cutpurses, cracksmen, crooks, tramps, tricksters, thieves, thugs, fakers, freeloaders, fugitives, felons, freebooters, footpads, fag-bashers, and fruit-rollers of every type, size, shape, creed, kind, and color of the rainbow's dirtiest oil slick.

He is—therefore—multilingual and fluent in street guinea, gypsy, carny, cowboy, bum, drifter, grifter, and the assorted dialects of homeboy, gangster, and juju man. He reads hobo chalk-talk easily, and watches—with no small degree of amusement—the crossbar variations advertising free medical aid, handouts of clothing, food, and the quid pro quo expected of the recipient in the way of work, con, or fast moves.

He puts no store in such childishness, but it pleases him to watch for the intersecting circles, stick-figure-and-triangle art, and the slashes that speak only to the brethren of the boxcar and the denizens of the drunk tank about such monkey dangers as hobo-haters and men with guns nearby.

His doughy baby face is distorted by a beaming, dimpled ear-to-ear grin when he sees the ticktacktoe scratches on the side of the foundation cornerstone nearest the front door, that is, nearest to where the door would have been before the fire.

But only if you speak hobo do you realize it is five lines and not four. It is a serious, adult signal, not a child's game. It reads, to the initiated:


EXTREME DANGER! A CRIME WAS COMMITTED AROUND HERE, AND THIS IS A BAD PLACE FOR STRANGERS.


Night takes its time, this day, but it does eventually come and erupts layers of liquid black lava over Tinytown, slough, dump site, and reservoir. Light is gone from this remote and moonless spot, and the fortresslike factory brick is gone, the ramparts of the old water treatment plant, the tree-line silhouettes and false horizons, and the look of country, town, warehouse, walkway, railing, and water all blend into darkness.

Death waits here in ticking readiness, tremor-sensitive, vital signs stilled to a near-motionless flutter-crawl, in absolute menacing silence, waiting and hating, precognating and gestating, alembic poisons refining, transmuting, distilling the venomous loathing into its most lethal essense. The beast lets it build, boil, bubble over into the red-hot tidal thing that will sweep over humanity in a murderous mutilating frenzy of destruction.

This hatred, which has a life of its own, has changed, mutated, and—hypertrophied and swollen like a tumorous membrane—it will sicken him if he does not expunge it. It wells up inside him now.

He knows that he has been extrinsically controlled by this, even partially manipulated into position by suits who play his fierce, deep loathing like a finely tuned instrument of mayhem, and this only worsens the hating, amplifies his hunger, deepens the thing that lives on the hate essence, forcing him to kill. Death is troubled by the unseen hands that set him in place. And he uses this, too.

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