The Savage(46)

Balling his fist, Angus screamed, “Motherfucker, I need to procure some crank!”

“It is what you shall eat from. With no bowl you’ve nothing to place your sustenance within.”

“This is a goddamned concreted cell. You’re the warden. That it? Let me spell it out, I don’t get me a fix, I’ll spoon your fucking eyes out with my nails, stomp a path over the floor with your breathing parts.”

Fu chuckled. Shook his head. “You will not. I shall dismiss your pains. Refresh your tides of thought, I am no warden, I come from the Fukien province of China. And how I came to find you is this: I am employed by a man to collect debts. You and your sister, Liz, voided a man who owed my employer. That debt fell onto you. I hunted and studied you. We rode with each other at one point until you decided to offer reckless abandon.” Fu pointed to his jaw. A dime-sized jelly bubble from a cigarette burn, the jerky colored scratches. “You treated my face as an ashtray when we were getting acquainted. Underestimation of you was my mistake as you kicked my head through the driver’s-side glass. Left me tangled in barbed wire. That’s when I realized your skills. Your potential. It is now water beneath the bridge. I’ve taken a leave from my employer to offer tutelage as I’ve done in the past. Once we’re finished, there will be a test of oneness.”

Angus was drawing a blank. Couldn’t recall much more than those final moments at the Donnybrook and he said, “Tutelage?”

Irritated, Fu told Angus, “Training is another word for what I do, but also hunting and making death appear…” Fu cleared his throat. “Natural. But that’s later, much, much later. For now let us keep actions simple. You must eat to nourish your strength. But to eat you must earn that privilege, and to stay strong you must train.”

“Earn?”

“Yes, earn your nourishment. Shall we begin?”

With the fog slowly making its way from his mind, Angus stood with little option.

“Sure, Bruce motherfucking Lee, sure,” he told Fu.

“Sure is not a positive response, it implies uncertainty. And uncertainty implies weakness. You are not a weak man. Yes or no. That is how you shall answer from here on out.”

“You’re goddamned kiddin’ me.”

“No, I am not goddamned kidding you. And I am not Bruce motherfucking Lee, I am Fu. Now, shall we begin?”

Tired, hungry, irritated. Anxious for amphetamines, Angus clasped his eyes and exhaled. “Let us spur the horses for a gallop.” Opening his eyes, he finished with “I’ve a single question.” He paused. Voices, he did remember hearing other voices like Fu’s when he was encased within the steel coffin of spikes. That he remembered. “Others, they’s more like myself?”

“Like you? Sort of. Yes.”

“No. Foreign-tongued. I recall conversations when I was in that fucking tin body sack of a tomb with sixteen penny nails pricking me at every angle.”

“There are others. My students. They teach another white skin known as Pete.”

That name rang a bell. Images drizzled down the snake hole of Angus’s memory. Pete. Pete. Cur’s Watering Hole. A shithole. A run-down shack. A house. Men bound by duct tape and covered in something sticky. Some of it was coming back to him. But most of it was tainted, seemed like one big fucking dream, the details or the meaning, his hunt for the crank, for his sister, Liz. Liz? She’d stolen what he’d cooked with that gar-mouthed pariah named … Ned.

Angus’s eyes whelped up. “They’re here?”

Fu shook his head. “Questions. Questions. Questions. No. They believe I’ve taken you to my senior, Si-Bok Lao, when I have not. I’ve kept you for my own means, that is, if you can survive. As I said, there is a test.”

“Tonguing goddamned riddles at me, survive what?”

Exhaling hard, Fu stared at Angus. “My training.”

That had been several years ago, before everything dissolved. When times were tough. When men and women lost jobs, but could scrap, cook crank, grow dope, do handyman work to get the layout of a person’s home and their possessions in order to thieve. And then a rumor of a militia group robbing the local Walmart spread throughout the working class. A group of ex-lawmen and military special ops who’d served overseas. They’d robbed not for the money but to prove a point. The robbery spurred an underground movement across the Midwest. That’s when things really unraveled. Got tougher. Debt piled up and the dollar was no longer worth the paper it was inked upon, and man, woman, and child had had enough of the bullshit laws and rules. Some believed it was these groups who took out the power grids.

Now Fu was feeble. Unwell. Seemed his early years of alcohol and cigarettes had damaged his liver, his heart, weakened his lungs. Internally he was not functioning properly. Was whittled down to the depth of a prisoner of war, more flesh than muscle and a railing rack of bones. He’d sent Angus in search of something more than those fuckin’ herbs. A strong dose of penicillin, an antibiotic to kill an infection, something to cleanse and bring his mind and body back to a functional state.

Here Angus sat, in the worn leather driver’s seat, hidden behind the tinted glass of the Tahoe. Dirt specked his view, taking the old road slowly, passing more and more abandoned vehicles, papers wadded about the weeds, plastic bottles of empty. He’d viewed humans beaten, shot, stabbed, or crucified, for what? Food. Fuel. Survival.