The Savage(51)

But with the appointment of a person or persons always comes power and the politics of ruling, meaning what was best for all was sometimes overlooked for the betterment of one.

*

From a distance Cotto’d heard the echo of rifle fire that crowned the valley. Eyes surveyed and scouted through the single glass circle mounted on top of a metal-housed HK33 assault rifle, magnifying images, centering shapes of human or animal, just as Manny had taught Cotto after so much blood had been spilt.

Lowering the rifle, Cotto swung his leg over his ATV. Cautious, he studied the ground for answers to the weight of his three men that lay waiting for the rot that the heat delivered. Cotto let others lead, in case something of this nature occurred. His way of thinking screamed ambush! Something Manny had learned him when they used one of their many routes for smuggling to the Midwest. A decoy to take the eyes off another. One makes it while the other is caught.

They’d just raided several homes. Came away with fresh bodies, several young boys for training, and girls with their mothers for bargaining with their young and to satisfy a man’s needs when required regardless of force.

From the road Cotto indexed and thumbed pieces of spent brass. The metal, warm. He surveyed the hillside. Saw the sets of upturned leaves. Looked over at the deer. Came toward it. Saw the tenderloin carved from the spine. A hunter. Excited and angered, he stepped back toward the road’s edge. Prints. Several sets. But one set traveled back to the top. At an angle. They possessed know-how, knowledge of how to maneuver terrain.

If a hunter, he thought, his survival had been interrupted. Another man who would need to be murdered just as Cotto’s own father had been. But what if it were not an older generation of male?

Behind him, the sounds of the begging children and their mothers came from the barred-in flatbed. He crimped his eyes with the unrest of losing three men. Too soft, he thought. Migrating to this land did that to his people, and even to Manny. Getting away from struggling to get by; getting fat from booze, food, and training less and less; not having to keep an eye over your shoulder for those wanting to take what you had away. His hordes, his father’s Mutts. They lost that edge of having to earn their existence, to compete for their lives, like he and his father had done before migrating to America. Building connections with Alcorn and McGill and the others sometimes meant letting one’s guard rest. And their training and hardening waned, became less and less. But not Cotto’s. He never quit training.

When he opened his eyes, the crunch of tread to ground stopped beside him. One of his men pointed at the leaves with question-mark eyes. Cotto Ramos spoke, “’Twas a hunter. Maybe a real survivalist. What some call a pioneer. Is my guess. But not old. Have this feeling.” He’d viewed these men who scattered themselves about the land. Preppers. Storing grain, canned goods, barrels of water. Ammunition, guns. Those were his favorites, these men wanting to be warriors. Overweight, smoking fags, they were old and living in a comic book. They’d no deep-earned desire as to what it took to have that edge. That precision. They took on some type of Mad Max ideology of survival from too much American television, when they’d never tasted a grain of bitter. But this was not one of those types of men, Cotto could taste that.

Scanning the hillside for movement, one of Cotto’s men asked, “How do you come to this knowledge?”

His soldier was soft to the ways of continuation, to survival. His know-how was minuscule. He’s not suffered like me, Cotto thought as he turned to the slain deer. I shall enlighten him, and he pointed. “Study the parting of hide. Removal of organ. It’s called field dressing. They’ve done this action many times. Have a certainty of wielding. They got interrupted by Diego. Became rushed, moved without haste, quickly, like the young, not the old, took only the loin and—”

Behind them, a young female screamed from the cage, “Dorn! Free us from this hell! Return to—” A mother’s hand suffocated her words. The young female swiveled her eyes to her mother with a look of hate. Slowly it dissolved. Cotto turned to the cage, studied the girl. A witness to the demise, the slaughter, he thought to himself.

A playful malice scribed Cotto’s eyes and lips as he approached the barred flatbed. To the girl he spoke, “You hold knowledge to the one who did this.”

Tremoring, the mother could not look Cotto in the face as she told him, “She speaks with fear, with ignorance. She’s out of her wits. Rambling. She—”

Cotto’s words shifted to the mother. “Silence your tongue, bitch, or I’ll remove it quick as a winter frost. I’m the judge, the speaker to your child. Look at me, not from me, when you offer words.” Back to the young female, he questioned, “Offer to me, girl, your namesake?”

“Sheldon.”

Smirking, Cotto asked, “Tell me, then, what is this Dorn you bark about?”





ANGUS

Those first days were ones of vibration. Angus’s stomach muscles belted tight, eyes felt scooped, his mind running soupy as gravy with too much milk and not enough flour. Hungering for amphetamines; the slit-eyed man known as Fu offered Angus a shovel.

“Hell’s this for?”

“Digging.”

Angered, Angus questioned. “How deep?”

“How tall are you?”

“Look, you aim to kill me, I ain’t sectioning the soil for my own damn grave. Divide my brain or knife my fuckin’ heart.”