The Savage(101)

EPILOGUE





Scabrous and vile, the land was burnt in places, staked with male bodies, limbless and without head. Devoid of child or women. Where homes once stood, now wrecked, littered, and rummaged. Dryers, washers, and busted screen doors, dressers upturned and set aflame. Clothing scattered and children’s dolls without eyes thrown and left lying. Remnants and refuges of times condemned by the massacres and onslaught of vehemence when time had lost light and humans forgot about neighbors. Instead they massacred their own. It decorated Angus’s, Van Dorn’s, and Sheldon’s travel with the group of clans from the Methodist’s realm to Cotto’s compound.

Some took by foot. Others by vehicle or four-wheeler.

Wounded, Scar and her militia sat at their compound. Dragging their dead to burials. Wolf Cookie asked, “Now what?”

All Scar could say was “We do as we always have, just as my father did, we build. Create something new.”

“What about Angus?”

“I’m sure we’ll cross again someday.”

“Then what?”

“What happens, happens. I’m done fighting for a while.”

Rides were bumpy and coarse. Small groups had come through the valleys. Volunteers reaching out sent by a fallen and stalled government. Helping to place things disassembled back to some type of order.

Some hoped to find their loved ones. Others sought nieces, nephews, aunts, sisters, brothers. Some connection they’d thought gone forever.

In Cotto’s compound, children were holed up in bunkers with madness in their eyes and drugs in their veins. Piles and piles of drugs strung across metal tables. There was no firefight. For all the followers of Cotto and the children he’d taken, enslaved to soldiering, had become too strung out or had OD’d, couldn’t raise claim to a rifle. The children had been robbed of youth. Of kindness. Of family. Of values. Same as the land.

There were rooms of antibiotics. Of bottled water. Of family heirlooms. Dead bodies spread and piled with insects laboring. Things burned. Crates of automatic weapons and ammunition. MREs. Things Cotto and his men had robbed in their raids.

At one end of the compound was a long, rectangular concrete building where the lock was cut from the chained door. Women had been found, ragged and rotted ivory. Locked in. Starved. Dead spread upon dead and were covered in a white powder like lime. On the rear wall, spray-painted in large block fluorescent graffiti, was FUCK YOU GRINGOS!

All stood lost. Gagged by the smells passing. Walking amongst the others who looked for their own, walked with Sheldon and Dorn, gazing about the spoiled and raisin-skinned. Wet coursed Sheldon’s eyes. Her mother was no more. Starved and withered with the other females. Dorn held tight to her frame as they walked.

In the lighthouse’s top floor, young boys lay limp about the floor like a deck after 52 Pickup. In the room’s center was a table. Six boys sat around it. Eight-ball-eyed. Each had a box of brass shells beside him. A revolver in the table’s center. One was Sheldon’s baby brother. Each resembled the next, their minds blasted of wits, playing spin the bottle. Only it wasn’t a bottle. It was the “lucky one of six.” One child spun the revolver. The child the revolver stopped on picked up the pistol. Loaded the chamber with a single bullet. Then wheeled the cylinder. Pointed it at his temple. Pulled the hammer and fired. If it was an empty chamber, the soldier wasn’t shot. That child then spun the revolver. If he was shot, another child stepped in. Spun the pistol for the next. The game went on until they reached the sixth soldier, then they started over, played until they had another sixth survivor, and so on and so forth.

It was part of Cotto’s crazed psychotic protocol. To create soldiers who faced death. Survived and no longer feared it. Created a stir-crazy in their minds. Each child’s eyes were rimmed with shock. Drug induced. Pupils the size of marbles. Sheldon ran to the table, stepping over the dead. Took the weapon from the table’s center. Scooped up their loved ones. Offered comfort. Let them know it was over. But it wasn’t. It had only begun. The world they’d once known was no more. Things would be different. Much different. The United States was now no different from the war-torn third-world countries they’d aided over the years, the ones that’d been on the world news. Or written about or photographed by American journalists.

Sheldon clasped her brother tight. “It’s over. It’s over.” Flesh around his eyes bulbous and rashed, the boy was in a state of numb to anything said. And Dorn walked them away from the lighthouse. To a vehicle that drove them to Sheldon’s parents’ farm.

*

Angus would find an antibiotic, penicillin. Was offered a ride. He took it. The man driving told him, “We been trying.”

“We?” Angus questioned.

“Yeah, National Guard. Red Cross. Everyone’s been trying to get to as many as we could. They’s just too much unknown, things is no longer safe, too damn many people. Many has gave up. No one knows how long it’ll take to sort things out. Restore all the power. They’s much uncertainty.”

“Too many crazy sons of bitches. I wouldn’t call them people no more,” Angus said, and the man kept silent, then said, “Guess you seen some shit?”

“That’s one way of coining it.”

When Angus came from the truck, he thanked the man for the ride. Walked the long drive to Fu’s home. Entered. All sat silent. Fu was no longer lying in rest. He was gone. A letter written upon a chalkboard in the kitchen read: