The Savage(47)

With his gut churning, Angus had a better understand ing of why Fu had done as he did. Saved him from his reckless abandon. Otherwise he’d have ended up like one of these rotted specks smeared across the baked expanse of wilderness. The skills he’d discouraged himself from using for so long had been nurtured, fine-tuned him to become an ass-kicking machine.

In his search for medicine, he’d become tired and beat, wanted shut-eye. A place to rest, gather some provisions, ’cause one could never have too much; he turned down a long, winding stretch of dirt and gravel, hoping for a secure place to do all of the above.

In the front yard, from an oak tree, hung a pulped complexion leaning into a shoulder. A rope anchored around the shape’s neck, stringing the frame stiff as a copper wind chime from a limb of walnut for decoration. Cherry-tomato-sized holes stitched the outline. In its chest letters patterned the words THE MUTTS. Blood had spewed and baked black, ran down to bare feet that were dirtied with bruise.

It was that old fuck from the Donnybrook, Purcell. Goddamn, what are the odds? Angus thought.

On the radio in his concrete living quarters where he trained with Fu, Angus remembered hearing that once the U.S. dollar lost its worth, the militia groups took the power, then the bottom fell out and a real hell had inflamed each and every state, from the West Coast to the East. Men and women would have to depend upon one another, not others taking care of them. Those who had formed militias, or gangs, they’d be the wiser. The ruling class.

Angus carried a .45 Glock, 450 Bushmaster rifle. Extra clips of hollow-point ammo and empty jugs for fuel. Fu had his hand in many black-market schemes, and guns was one of them.

Out the windows, silence and the hint of smoke passed his inhale. Off in the distance sat a barn with something scarecrow-like hanging from it. Below Purcell lay what appeared to be a charcoaled torso. Did these men, the Mutts, he wondered, find Purcell? Is the body below me the infamous and unbeaten Jarhead Earl? Did the Mutts find them, believing they’d been the one to pull the trigger on ole Manny, their leader? Purcell and Jarhead had not been the ones who’d pulled the trigger. Angus did. They’d only pulled somewhat of a heist. Taking the Donnybrook’s earnings. This, Fu had explained to Angus. What robbery and murder had done placed a sizable bounty on each man’s head.

Shifting into park, Angus sat. Listening. And memories came like migraines, paining his mind with visions of his recent travels through the winding and beat concrete paths of road, searching for Fu’s medicine in a pharmacy in Paoli. Then Salem. Finding nothing. Witnessing gothic decorations similar to Purcell all throughout the highways and rural pavings of southern Indiana. Viewing a house or trailer busted, burned, or smoldering from flames. Men like scarecrows in a garden or pasture, mangled or ritualized. Dead vegetation, callousing heat, and the words he heard as a young boy, from his grandfather, speaking of the year without a summer in 1816. When spring came but what followed was ass-backward. No heat, just cold clothing the land with ash skies and farmers losing their crops and cattle.

Turning the engine off, sounds of heated metal popping beneath the hood as it cooled. Opening the truck door. Seemed the only vehicles that would run had to be carburetor engines due to the collapse of technology and the computer-chipped fuel-injected engines. And that was only if you had fuel and oil to make them go. Fu did. He had barrels of water. Fuel. Guns. Ammo. Blades of steel. Stockpiled plenty of rice and canned vegetables. Fu had been prepared. But he had run out of herbs and pharmaceuticals. And he was dying.

Paranoia branded Angus with the feeling of eyes watching him as he passed over the yard where, to his right, the screech of a chain braiding through the hickory slats of a swing flicked the air. A headless Captain America action figure lay with its garment snagged and torn. To his left hung a cracked and duct-taped leather heavy bag, strung by a barnacled chain that ivied up and around an oak limb.

Sliding the .45 from his side, Angus made toward Purcell’s faded farmhouse with a tin roof and its clay chipped barn off in the distance.

His chest pounded in his palms. Angus hoped to find something more than squalor. Some fuel or medications left behind in a medicine cabinet.

Bloodstained planks of stringer attached to the porch gave way beneath Angus’s boots. A bucket of decaying apple cores and eggshells lay next to the door, fuming with insects. He walked through the splintered front door. Hints of mold, perspiration, and struggle lined the once white-papered walls of the home. In short order it reeked of death.

Framed pictures of a man with a female and two young children hang on the walls. Jarhead Earl, he recognized, with his family, Angus surmised, out in a meadow where hogs grazed in the far.

Angus tried to remember a time before drugs spored throughout the Midwest. Wrung the working of their means. When men and women worked either in a factory for their hometown or upon the acreage for which they were born to bear something of continuance, be it a mechanism or roughage, when the worst one had to worry about was smoking too many cancer sticks and drinking too much golden hops or sour mash instead of snorting, smoking, or shooting explosive chemicals that rotted the teeth, blackened the gums, and turpentined one’s body and mind. Where had it all gone?

In the living room, dust the color of burnt wood lined shelves of books, Old and New Testament, Foxfire books, hunting and trapping manuals, Hemingway, Bukowski, Céline, Shakespeare, Melville, Milton. There were figurines and German/Irish beer steins with lids. Pieces of memory. Dust coated. Flooring scuffed by fingernails. Stains in uneven circles, an upturned love seat with cushions hemorrhaging dull cotton.