The Savage(41)
“Ordinary people do the criminal action ’cause it’s become their natural means to survive, it’s instinctive. You didn’t heed what I told. Me, my militia, we live by a different set of standards.”
Poe walked toward Lucas and his brother. Lifted his AR-15 to the body of the brother, who was now charcoaled and smoldering. Lucas stood leaning, the sheet blotted by the burn of plasma, hued brown, black, and red. Moans of ache plagued everyone’s ears.
“We waited too long,” Dorn told Scar.
“Nothing to do with waiting. Shoulda let the situation unfold.”
“They’re like us, common folk, people that’s lived from the land.”
“This ain’t part of the plan, can’t fix every spoke on the wheel.”
Poe tugged the trigger, bringing a silence to his mess. Then to the other man beside him.
Dorn asked, “What plan?”
“Territory,” Scar told Dorn. “Time’s wasting. We gotta get ’fore someone sees the smoke, makes a bigger mess.” She turned her back. Poe, the hound, and Wolf Cookie followed. Walked the perimeter of the home that was becoming a bonfire of calcium carbonate. Interior and exterior walls now dark as spades.
Dorn walked to where they’d hid. Pulled August from the weeds, trembling. Shaking his head. “They killed them. Killed them all.”
“I know.”
“I’m scared.”
“Keep close to me. They won’t hurt you, I won’t let ’em.”
“We should run.”
“No, we shouldn’t. We’re safer with them than without. They know things we don’t.”
Catching up with Scar. Taking in the surrounding woods, Dorn’s eyes searched for a trace of the other charlatan. Listened for the pleas of the children who had dispersed into silence. And he asked Scar, “What about the kids?”
Stopping, she turned and said, “What about them?”
“That man took them.”
Anger cast about her facade and she made her intentions known. “What ain’t soaking into that thick understanding of yours? They’re not our troubles. We’s not Robin Hood and his merry fucking men, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. We’re rural soldiers, here to uncast the backbone that society has broken. Not doling handouts to the weak; if you’re weak you’re dead. Days of food stamps and government assistance is what brought our class to its knees.” Looking up through the leaves that angled from limbs overhead and into the sky, her eyes came back to Dorn’s and she told him, “We ain’t got time for this. We gotta get to the ATVs, endure our trek back to camp before dark.”
*
Navigating his four-wheeler over the land, crossing deer and old horse trails, Wolf Cookie was the lead, with August clutching him. Overlooking gravel roads and patches of burnt grass in the centers, Dorn rode with Scar. Poe took the rear, the hound laid across his lap. Hot air dried the moisture that glazed their bodies. That’d been matted and specked with soil, leaves, blood, and death. They passed hollows littered with limbs sheared and scraped of bark from the summer storms that had worsened over the years. Ravaging any structure or organism in its path. Garbage bags stretched over surfaces of rock, wood, and soil. Magazines and newspapers, ripped and torn. Old washers, stovetops, and rusted barrels used as doghouses, hay bedding spewing from them. Ceramic dishes and figurines had been thrown and abandoned, turned into relics of oxidation from the weather or looters.
Tire tread climbed a hillside where limestone lay gigantic and moss covered. On the other side men perched high overhead in oak trees upon slatted stoops built from pallets, some with binoculars, others without; each held scoped rifles and holstered pistols.
The land flattened down into a ridge of bunkers pitted into the ground some sixteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and ten to twelve feet deep, depending on how quickly they’d met solid lime. Roofs were gabled, ply-board shingled by ten to twelve inches of mud and weed. A rock-circled fire pit had been built out in front of each shelter with a handmade spit over each for cooking; a larger area sat out in the center appearing the same, only wider and deeper for bonfire use. Men and women stood armed, eyeing Scar and her return with strange skin. Men sported beards, oily reamed locks twisted and curled from beneath caps. Some were bibbed with denim or military pants and patterned Realtree hunting T-shirts, while the females appeared with their lengths long, pony-or pigtailed. Nails unpainted. Chewed. No gloss of lips nor liner ovaling orbs. They appeared as though creations of God’s earth. Simple.
Several pens strung of rectangular wire, attached to cedar posts, held hogs, while another held cows and chickens that sat guarded off to the south of the encampment. Several wood-walled shacks sat with chimneys to their far ends. Hides of coon, squirrel, and deer stretched about their exteriors. Smokehouses, Dorn thought. A place to cure their meat and tan their hides.
Scar idled her four-wheeler down, parked next to a bunker, and told Dorn, “This is where we bed and plan. We’s about fifty strong. Not a weak link among us. Is of what was loyal to my father. We keep eyes from sunbreak to sunset. We got hunters. Butchers. Mechanics and farmers.”
Dorn came from the four-wheeler, his bones clattered by the dip and climb of the land. His back was aching. Legs and arms hurting as well from all the damage he’d incurred over the passing days with little nourishment or sleep. Taking in the faces of the small militia, he asked, “Who are these that followed your father?”