The Savage(43)

PART II

THE SAVAGE

The global economy has brought ruin for many, and he is a pioneer of a new type of person: the human who kills and expects to be killed and has little hope or complaint. He does not fit our beliefs or ideas. But he exists, and so do the others who are following in his path.

—Charles Bowden, El Sicario





COTTO

Their trespass brought visions of men stained the color of rotted sweet potatoes. They’d hands that carved, sawed, and gutted others during their hunt for the wrongs brought against them. Littering Purcell’s insides with retched bubbling, constricting his intestines, culling him from shut eyes that peeled wide and full of red lines. Creating a hurt that built and bonded over the course of months and months that’d piled onto years and years of nightmares. And when the rumble of engines bombed down the long rutted road of dirt, stone, and rotted limbs, Purcell sat knowing it was one man’s ending, but another’s inception.

But exactly whose it was he didn’t know.

From the driver’s and passenger’s sides men stepped. Their eyes like hooked blades parting and digging deep to rip and maim those who dared cross them, armed with automatic AKs, their black-spore locks slicked, faces patched by thick moss like whiskers and jagged scars. Led by a man in his late twenties, face inked and textured to appear skeletal, head shaven like a field of bush-hogged wheat. He’d a rim of thorns running the circumference of his skull and eyes painted by evil. His moniker was Cotto Ramos.

Cotto and his savages walked past the large oak tree in the front yard where a worn and silver-taped leather heavy bag was hung from a tree limb by a rusted chain; off to the rear of the property sat a barn beneath a graying sky as the men surrounded and surveyed the farmhouse.

Inside sat a man who knew the die had already been cast. Waking early from sweat-soaked dreams of men he could not name, could only describe as earthly and savage. One was a man with a vendetta, a goal to rule territory and people. The other was young, but held skills from the old ways. And there was the man with the opal eye. The man who’d nearly cost them their lives at the Donnybrook. But what there was not to be seen in the future was Jarhead. A fighter Purcell once believed to be the leader of the struggling class in a time without guidance.

Two men held opposite flanks of a door, a third kicked in the slab, splinters came with shrieks, followed by features and ribs being knuckled and bloodied. Cotto’s AK rattled the scuffed wood. He shook his head, spit blood, and lined his view to a man of proportioned muscle. Fists raised. He came with a strong left jab. Cotto ducked. Jarhead fed him a right knee, then a quick left elbow. Cotto unsheathed a blade without notice. Lined the edge with his forearm. Came swiping at Jarhead’s right cross. Drawing a line of fluid into tissue, then stabbing into shoulder meat.

“Fuck!” Jarhead screamed. Staggering backward. His wife, Liz, and two children shouted, “No!” while Christi, Purcell’s daughter, and David, his son-in-law, watched without fight, only horror.

Cotto retrieved his rifle. “Enough of this weak squab bling.” Pointed his rifle and pulled the trigger. Jarhead Earl’s thigh flowered with the pulp of muscle.

“Show me your true shades. I want to see your insides.”

Donnybrook, seemed everything circled back to that, the three-day bare-knuckle brawl that Jarhead had fought in. That he and Purcell had watched go to snuff when the unbeaten pearl-eyed fighter by the name of Chainsaw Angus shot Bellmont McGill, the creator and owner of the free-for-all. Shot his ass dead. Followed by killing a man known as Manny, while the crew that followed him, the Mutts, had watched the murder of each man take place during the chaos, unable to save their lives amongst the unhinged pandemonium, the capital of hell, that had ensued when the unruly crowd of onlookers flooded the wired ring. All manner of chaos came violent and uncontrollable with bottles, fists, feet, elbows, rocks, and clubs beating any and all, similar to what John Milton had written about in Paradise Lost.

Rousing his men, Cotto shouted, “Each and every body I want accounted for, keep them separate.” He watched Jarhead struggle about the floor. Told him, “Only fight to be left in you is on your knees.” To his men he spoke, “Outside, drag him to the dirt.”

Pulling the blade from his wound, Jarhead slobbered. Crimson rivered. One of the soldiers kicked the blade from Jarhead’s grip. Another cleaved into his messy lengths of hair. Dragged him across the slats of floor. Swamping a mess of self from the house to the yard, bringing his wife, kids, and Purcell behind him, with Purcell reaching for his family, who were pulled like mops from buckets, by their ankles, sopped in the opposite direction across the slats of floor to the basement. The male tried kicking at the clasp of hand around his leg, bicycling his heels to fight, but was pounded about the face by a rifle’s butt till his frame was dull of struggle. Facedown, the female created a scratch trail, the nails of her digits splintering across the cedar.

Tied in the basement, the man, David, and woman, Christi, were left to starve. Jarhead’s boys, who numbered two, were gathered with their mineral-flaked skin and eyes of fear. Clutching their mother’s arms, they were loaded by men onto a rusted flatbed, where they were caged, their eyes haunted by the beating of their father. The wife’d be used for whoring back at Cotto’s camp. The children, he’d usher into soldiers. Soldiers who would abide by his goal of ruling the land, and if power were to return, he’d traffic in drugs, just as he had south of the border.