The Savage(40)

“So they make it look as though Cotto has trespassed through and slaughtered country folks. Still, why would anyone wanna do as Cotto does? Stoop to the level of an enemy?”

“Why? ’Cause they’s some that’d like to soldier up with Cotto. Do as he does. Live as he lives. Murder they own. Just cross paths with them, they act like they’s surviving, it’s a trap, they’s playing coy to see what you got, then they remove you, how they get by. They’re slaughterers, plain and simple.”

Back to the situation at hand, Dorn asked, “What’re we waiting for, they’re blazing the man’s home, aim to cook him and his brother as well.”

“That’d be a disruption to the natural order of nature.”

“Natural order? They’re gonna kill innocent folk.”

“You ever see a wildlife video where the filmmaker saves the animal being preyed upon? Hell no, you didn’t. It’d be an infringement upon their survival. How nature works. We never saved you.”

“These ain’t animals.”

“No they ain’t, they’re a whole different kinda tissue eater. You need to learn their ways to survive this terrain, as it changes with every breath.”

The home raged orange and yellow. Black smoke billowed from it. Children began to scream. Sound of glass shattered from the side of the home. From a window jumped a young boy, then a girl, and an older female. A man came from the wooded area around the rear of the home. Grabbed the young girl from behind. Fisted her to the ground. The boy turned to the man. Kicked at his leg. Met a hand from the man, who stepped on the boy’s back. Stomped him into the earth. Kept him from crawling as he unsheathed a blade. The older female raked her nails down the man’s face. Screams came. A head butt dazed the female. Followed by knuckles branding her. Blood drew from the older female’s face. Digits groped her locks. A skinner pared the thick rind of her forehead.

August held his gaze in the opposite direction. Eyes dampened and mucus gobbed from nostrils.

The man with the propane flame lit the seared and branded man’s greasy hide and he came to life, writhing and spastic.

Meanwhile, the torturer reached to his right leg. Pulled a small mallet hammer free. Looked to Lucas, whose face was wrought with tears as he screamed, “No! Please! No!”

The torturer smiled. Billy-clubbed Lucas’s jaw. Teeth came with a thick combination of syrupy fluid that slopped from Lucas’s mouth. He tried to speak but all that exited his mouth was slurs.

Dorn had witnessed enough. Words streamlined like slivers of madness and he told Scar, “Should’ve done saved these folks.” And he stood up. Scar reached for him but he was gone.

Stomping from the brush of green, pistol raised, all Dorn could do was react, shot the canister within the flame wielder’s hand. An explosion encompassed Lucas and the propane wielder. Another shot thudded into the oil dumper’s skull. Followed by a shot that rang not from Dorn’s pistol but from Poe’s AR-15. Clipped shoulder and chest of the human torch’s outline. Skin fragment expelled from the man’s back. And he hit the ground like a mortal bonfire.

Screams raged from the starved man as flames replaced his appearance. Flesh boiled and oozed fatty. Dorn holstered his pistol. Ran to a clothesline where a bedsheet hung. Ripped it from the line. Draped it over the flaming man. Suffocating the ignition of heat.

Around the side of the flaming home, the female’s scalp was completely removed. Hanging down the back of her neck like a laceless tennis shoe’s tongue pulled away from the insole. The front of her skull, bare bone and bleeding. The knife wielder sheathed his blade. Dug his fingers into the scalp of each child and dragged them to the woods, belching tears and phlegm.

Scar, Mike, and Poe had came from the brush. The mongrel limped. Sniffing the ground, staying near Poe. Mike made his way to the side of the home. Heat rising from the flames. Melting outer walls of vinyl. Baking anything within five feet of it. He pulled the female to the home’s front, his face quaked red from the heat. Tears streamed from the female’s face, and a fold of flesh peeled over her skull as she crawled on the ground to Lucas, pleading, “Why? Why didn’t you tell them?”

Scar reached for Van Dorn, who stood patting the sheet over the burning man. The cotton stuck to his shape like a second set of skin. Moans crept from Lucas, whose mouth had lost its elasticity. Scar told Dorn, “It’s too late. We’ve no means to mend nor care for the wrong that’s been done.”

All stood absorbing the massacre. Studying the demise as though a team of forensics. And Dorn told Scar, “Wouldn’t have been too late had you let us stop these charlatans ’fore they set one man aflame and the other beat by mallet.”

Dorn looked to the mother, who sat on the ground before him. Blood crept down her face from the half-sliced head of hair, eyes like tracers, igniting stares up at her burnt husband. She turned to Van Dorn and screamed, “Mean to tell me you all sat in hiding? Watched what these men lay upon my husband, my brother-in-law, me, and my children that has been taken? You’s as savage as those that violated us!”

As she came to her feet, swinging wildly at Dorn, a buckshot rearranged her complexion. Brain, scalp, and life dispersed. And Scar lowered the 12-gauge before the woman hit the ground. She eyed Poe and said, “Know what chore is to be done.”

Dorn was without words. Everything had happened too quick. The woman lay on the ground. A pile of lifeless tegument. Muscles in her back fired with pulse and twitch. He looked to Scar, angered, and said, “Why?”