Radix

Anxiety sparked through him constantly. And though he hated its hot taste in the back of his throat, he accepted it as one of the necessary indignities of life. So he ate, as if his dread were something that could be smothered somewhere deep in his gut, broken down, and digested.
But his real obsession wasn't food or anxiety. He wanted to be dreaded. He wanted to be the legendary Dark One— magic shining through his ugliness, indifferent to loneliness, deep and calm with violence. He wanted everyone to know he was dangerous.
The problem was that no one ever witnessed his daring deceptions. He was the Sugarat. And no one knew.
In the past six years the Sugarat had achieved a notori-ety that fringed on myth. At first he had singled out streetgangs who had humiliated or abused him. He had trapped and destroyed them for his own gratification, never considering that there would be repercussions. But his first few kills had created such a power imbalance among the many gangs of McClure that street warfare raged as it never had before. Rival gangs warred to fill the vacancies the Sugarat had opened up. Firebombs exploded in the homes of gang lead-ers. Assassinations bloodied commuter trains. Hand to hand combat in the markets and shops became commonplace in the days that followed each of the Sugarat's vendettas.
Sumner thrived on this power. He began to kill more often, for insults and slights he wouldn't have noticed before. He had become important. He had found a way of shaking the world. Of course, there was always the very real likeli-hood that one of his ploys would backfire, but the dread of being mauled by a gang in no way matched the loathing he felt for himself when he was alone and bored. It was only dread and a little luck that had kept him alive this long.
But now the police wanted Sugarat, and that was some-thing else. For six years they had known he was behind the spasms of violence wrenching the city. They wanted him at any price, but there was nobody, not one weaselly informer, not one witness or skinny-shanked clue to point him out. Nobody knew the Sugarat.
That was why Sumner needed the Tour—to feel what he had done in the past, to know who he was now.
He drove first along a rutted dirt road that smoothed into a causeway and arced out of the industrial district. In a few moments he was at the edge of his hometown, McClure. He parked the car in a dirt field crowded with the hulks of convoy trucks and ambled into The Bent Knife. Ignoring the stares of the dogfaced truckers, he wedged himself into a phone stall and called the police.
"Zh-zh," he hissed when the phone was picked up. The officer at the other end groaned, recognizing the ritual greet-ing of the Sugarat. Sumner smiled and in a mumbled whisper told the police where they could find the Nothung corpses. Then he hung up and, tucking his torn shirt in as he went along, lumbered over to the counter and ordered six sand-wiches to go.
He liked his sandwiches wide open and sloppy: horseneck clams with miso and seaweed; chunks of veal blanketed in a mushroom sauce of puffballs and chicken-of-the-woods. At The Bent Knife, however, he settled for egg gumbo on toast and barley rolls stuffed with hot pressed tongue.
He drove back into the ancient, burned-out factory dis-trict. He didn't touch his food but let its steamy odors graze his nostrils with the seductive promise of heartburn.
The Tour began at the site of. the first kill of his life. It was a fire-gutted warehouse, just a sunken-in crater with three scorched aluminum walls tottering around it. He parked his car where he could clearly see the seared white ash of the interior and, on one of the ribbed aluminum walls, streaked with mud and smoke, the huge scrawled letters SUGARAT.
He broke out one of the egg sandwiches, sniffed it ap-preciatively, then devoured it as he reminisced. He had killed seven members of the Black Touch here. The hardest part had been getting the gasoline. It was expensive, and he had had to starve himself to be able to afford enough of it. As for the liquid detergent, he had simply waited for a shipment to come in to the local mart and then, in his old delivery boy outfit, rolled off a barrel of it. Mixed together, the gasoline and the thick detergent made an extremely viscous incendi-ary. He had stacked three drums of it in the rafters of the warehouse. The strategy had been the same. When the razor-fisted headbreakers of the Black Touch chased him into the building, he had doused them with the firegun and touched them off with a torch flare. The burn had been beautiful, the screaming brief. It was his best kill. A perfect dupe. Every-thing he had done in the six years since was derivative.
Sumner cruised his kill-sites, enjoying his food and re-playing his strategies. Stacked vertically on the I-beam of a broken trestle were the letters SUGARAT. Beside it was a black tumulus of rail gravel. This was where Sumner had lured a whole gang of Bigbloods beneath the drop-site of a gravel loader. When the chute opened they had been sight-ing him with their makeshift nail-slings. They never got off a shot.
At another table, with the dank susurrus of a bog twirl-ing about him, he sat on the hood of his car nibbling a barley roll. He gazed into the darkness and the shape of dead trees where the Slash headbreakers had pursued him over a swampbridge. The bridge had been tricked to collapse, of course. But the real shocker for the headbreakers came after they sloshed into the bog—when Sumner ignited the firegum coating the mud they were in.
When his last sandwich was eaten, Sumner was parked again outside the alkaloid factory. He figured the police had come and gone, because the Death Crib had been taken away.
He only vaguely remembered why he had killed the Slash, the Black Touch, and the Bigbloods. It was hard to remember. He didn't think about it much. He wasn't one to brood, though his problems loomed larger each day. He had been out of work for a year and, at seventeen, was already the father of a five-year-old boy he was terrified of. Yet he rarely mulled over his life. He was motivated by a muscular intuition, an urging in the meat of his body to eat, to kill, to find sex. It was his dread.
For Sumner, finding sex was a lot more difficult than setting up a kill. He was big and ugly: six foot five, with rolls of fat bagging under his eyes, coiling around his neck, swaying like tits under his shirt. His face was glazed with the seepings of subcutaneous grease and crusty with eruptions that never went away but only migrated across his features. He had tried to grow a beard, but it came in mangy and made him look diseased. It disgusted him to see himself, so he had ripped out the rearview mirror in his car and kept apart, even from himself.
On the way back into McClure, Sumner picked up some pastries and cruised through the residential streets, eyeing the houses of all the women he desired.
McClure was an old city, maybe four hundred years old, and like most of the towns that had cropped up this deep in the interior, it was made of stone. At least the older buildings were. It was a matter of necessity, since the weather was dangerously unpredictable. Fierce cyclones—raga storms—with winds of four hundred kilometers an hour swooped across the country with little warning. Whole cities were sometimes lost, coastlines reshaped. Nonetheless, wooden houses were perched on hills in the more affluent sections. They were status symbols in the truest sense, meant to be abandoned when the raga storms came.
As part of the nexus of McClure's society, the wealthy had been able to reserve cubicles in the Berth, a massive citadel in the center of town. Even if the Berth were to be completely buried by a raga storm, there was enough oxygen, food, and water inside to sustain thousands of people until they could dig themselves out.