62

By nine the next morning, Bunkowski was at the door of a home in the Bayou City low-income housing projects, a maze of identical buildings within Parabellum bullet distance from the heart of what he thought of as Turdtown. One of the youths who'd assaulted him was a kid named John Stephens, and it was housecall time.

The door was unlocked and standing partially open, and a loud TV blared on the other side, giving him a good excuse not to knock. He had a silenced .22 under his humongous T-shirt, and he hoped he wouldn't have to use it. The killing chain and a large pocket knife were more to his taste at that moment, and taste was what this visit was all about.

He turned the knob and quickly stepped inside, a disarming smile in place.

“What the hell you think you're—” an older man started to ask, but the smiling behemoth shushed him with his finger.

“It's a surprise for John ... from the guys,” he grinned conspiratorially. “Is he asleep?"

“Yeah,” the woman said in a loud voice, “but who the hell—” He gave her a quick thud on the skull with his bottomfist, which felled her back down to the sofa, a pile of quivering Jell-O. The man tried to get up, but his reflexes were a tad slow and he, too, took a hard thump to the head.

No follow-through with the chain. He wanted to save them.

He found the young punk John sleeping it off in his trash-and-clothing-strewn bedroom, which was decorated in Third Reich repros, and rock star pussy posters.

“Wake up, sweetheart,” he said to the kid. No response. “Fine.” The boy was sleeping on a mattress bare of sheets or blankets. Chaingang wished for Superglue, but had none on him, and, somewhat irritated, he chainsnapped the sleeping punk and returned to ma ‘n’ pa.

There was a good bit of slicing and dicing and miscellaneous mayhem for the next half hour. Dr. Bunkowski tried a couple of organ transplants but the donors rejected the work. Open-heart surgery is tiring, and by a quarter to ten the beast had disposed of the wannabe Adolph and was kicked back on the living room sofa, feet up, watching a talk show about the obese. He was fascinated.

The man in the suit and tie beamed insincerely at the camera. He had very white teeth and a manicured mustache.

“Porkchop weighs over nine hundred pounds—” he paused for dramatic effect while the audience let out an audible gasp, “and Porkchop is what he likes to be called, right?"

“Yeah. That's my name. Porkchop.” The viewers at home and those watching the studio monitors saw a hugely obese figure sprawled out face down on a stack of mattresses. Only his head and bare arms could be seen. His body was covered in two blankets which had been sewn together. The man's head appeared to be disproportionately small in comparison to the enormous mound under the blankets.

“Believe it or not, folks,” the host of the show continued, “Porkchop is married to a beautiful woman. Dasheeka, are you there?"

“Here I am,” a woman said. She was an attractive woman, and as the shot widened out the audience could see her seated on the mattresses next to the huge man.

“Porkchop, you and Dasheeka have given us permission to inquire publicly about a very personal matter. We want to ask you about your intimate relationship together.” He lowered his voice to a soft, pseudo-concerned-sounding caricature of sensitivity. “How can you two have sex?” The audience held its breath in unison.

“It's easy,” the man on the mattresses said. “You just gotta work it out, you know? Me and Dasheeka are a perfect fit. She's hung like a donut and I'm hung like a donut hole.” The audience whooped and hollered as laughter filled millions of living rooms.

“We'll be right back,” the talk-show host said, pretending to be shocked at the man's remark.

“Do you have an opinion about today's program?” an announcer's voice asked, as a nine hundred number was scrolled across the television screens. “Call us at 1-900-SPEAK UP. Each call costs fifty cents, and you must be eighteen or older. Let's hear your opinion."

Daniel flipped the audio off with a remote control. He got up heavily from the sofa where he'd been watching television, wedge between the man and woman of the house. “You two behave yourselves.” He clomped across the carpet, his 15EEEEE feet making nasty squishing sounds as he walked to the telephone and dialed.

He listened for the instructions and gave the telephone number. When he heard the tone he made his recorded message.

“Hello. My name is Bill Stephens,” he said, giving the name of the man who was watching silently from the sofa, “and my wife and I just saw the show with Porkchop and Dasheeka. It just killed us. It was so funny,” the deep basso profundo rumbled, without a hint of mirth, “we died laughing.” He hung up, and walked back through the pools of coagulating blood.

When his bare feet were nice and wet he walked over to the dining-room table, and with some effort hoisted his butt up onto it. Carefully positioning himself he then made one footprint after another on the wall, lying on his back as he walked up the wallpaper as high as he could.

Mr. and Mrs. William Stephens, of Turdtown. Missouri, eyes taped open and heads duct-taped to the sofa itself, observed their human centerpiece—unseeing—as he left bloody tracks, then sat up with a grunt and began wiping his feet with the wet towels he'd arranged nearby. With that accomplished, he hopped off the table and walked across scattered pieces of clean cardboard to the bathroom.

Tomorrow, the next day, someone would find the three corpses. Whoever or whatever had ripped their hearts out had then apparently walked across the room, up the wall, and dematerialized.

The talk show had put him in a playful mood.