The Savage(17)
Dorn stood by the door that led to his freedom from the house. Dug a match from the box in his pack. Waited. Listened to the footfalls approaching. The basement door was busted from its hinges, bobsledded down the stringer of stairs.
Dorn knew it was now or never. Clamped his eyes shut. Listened to his heart pump one jab after another into his breastbone as the soles of boots descended the stringers. Purging. One at a time. Dorn remembered what his grandfather Claude had told him of soldierin’ when getting rabid on vodka. He’d served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Hide of one leg whittled and gnawed by shrapnel. Begged as he did to have the limb removed, the doctors would not. The man was old-school badass. Would sit sucking down one glass after another, spilling stories of traveling in small units. Before initiating combat, he and his men sat, studied their enemy. Discovered who was commanding, killed him first, and the others scattered and fell by brass, bayonet, or grenade. They were run down, hunted, and eliminated.
Opening his eyes, he flicked the match against the zipper of his jeans. Inhaled the sulfur flame ignition. Met the eyes of the man who led the others down the steps. Lifted his weapon. Dorn tossed the match to the floor. Turned. Flung the door open. Gave more air to the combustion of flames. Stepped out into the daylight, where black dirt-specked vehicles were scattered about the property. Off in the distance stood the blur of the figure with tattoos comic-booking his face, a crown of thorns haloing his temples, and the Sheldon girl within his grip.
Stone-shocked for a moment with what was happening, Dorn wondered if she had led these men to his dwelling after he’d abandoned her and the others earlier.
Automatic gunfire kicked up granules of soil. Van Dorn’s veins were swamped by adrenaline, he’d no other choice but to run. Couldn’t contemplate the Sheldon girl’s actions, he could only react, run opposite of the mayhem, away from the screams, shrieks of shapes being ignited, and the carbine that echoed all around him. Hoofed toward the barn, where he saddled his mule, Red. Heard the shouts of men from the house. The Sheldon girl’s face haunted him. Her long layers of moleskin hair. Smudged cheeks and blue eyes. Custard lips, limbs so thin they appeared ossified.
Mounting the mule, Van Dorn pulled on the reins. Guided Red out the rear of the barn.
Galloping along the river, Dorn halted the mule, turned to study the sky above the trees. Looked back to where the house was. Thought of circling back, but knowing there were too many of them, well armed and beyond pissed off by this point as he saw the hint of black rising. Smelling the burn of all that he’d known since returning to Harrison County: wood-framed windows, walls of shelves that held pictures of the Widow’s people. Fathers, mothers, and grandparents. Her history reduced to ashes.
Van Dorn told himself he needed to find distance, regroup, devise a plan, then maybe he’d scour the land. Not let the Sheldon girl lose her account of life. Not let it be taken or ended before it’d even begun. He’d start by traveling north up the worming Blue River. Cross over to the west, keep to the trees above and along Rothrock Mill Road, journey past the place of the killing, keep working his way toward Wyandotte Cave Road and beyond, hopefully find shelter amongst the rocky hills.
*
There was the uneasiness of eyes studying Van Dorn’s every movement as he reined Red down the grooved soil of broken bank where a canoe launch was located at the Mill. Red took the decline along the shore of pea gravel. Dorn studied the green glass of miniature ripples still present even without much rain, and thought of the river’s center and the folklore that plagued it.
The Widow had told him that a local man of the county, who was married with a boy, had drowned his lover in these waters, the lover being his cousin, though she was never found. The blame had been placed on the man’s son because of an altercation between him and the father over the female’s disappearance. Something the son had seen but the father denied. The Widow knew this as truth, telling that she’d been the one to have found the drowned female’s stray bones downstream when laying manure nets in large holes for baiting catfish. Though it was not nearly enough to construct a body, it had given the Widow reason to drag for more. She searched the river bottoms but nothing else was found.
Crossing the river’s center, Dorn’s mule came from the water on the opposite shore, climbed the hillside at a slant. Clomped over a dead-end road where people had once parked to fish. Other than tracking and shooting the deer, Dorn had not hunted or traveled this side of the river since the loss of power. He’d kept to his own, hunting the fields and wilderness to the southeast, not the northwest. Refraining from as many eyes as possible, especially the hordes that’d become more and more visible over the passing weeks.
Working his way over the leaves crunching like miniature tins, Red huffed and snorted, several times jerking as though he were spooked or sensed Van Dorn’s paranoia of those he’d ignited within the house.
Dorn halted Red. Listened to the woods. Read the signs: a huddle of sparrow about the ground in search of nourishment, a bush-tailed squirrel gathering nuts from below a walnut tree, and as Dorn watched he wondered, if he were to shoot a rabbit, would the fur about its bottoms be thicker than normal? It was mid-September and before he’d become a scavenger, he’d grown up with the wisdom of his father predicting the oncoming winters by the wildlife’s behavior and their appearance. So far their movements hinted toward a rough winter.
Waiting, Van Dorn listened and watched to see if he was alone. Several crows perched upon a limb, another sign for a bad winter. Dorn watched the birds’ quiet. Their quick blink of the eyes. Their glancing into the silence around them.