The Savage(69)
“You’ve known all along?”
“I know that if I am smuggling drugs, I can’t trust anyone, so I’d wanna know where my product was at all times until I get it to the customer and I get paid. I know the bodies of the men that took my wife from me would have been found in the charcoaled remains of the torched house. So, yes, I knew it was only a matter of time. They’ve been wrangling us, signaling with the lights, shifting us from our route to here. That’s why we needed the C4, it’s part of my plan.”
Ernesto smirked. “Your plan?”
“To dethrone the King. We need only one of the approaching men alive.”
“To show us the way?”
“Yes.”
Cotto’s father told him, “Stay close, my son, and when you shoot”—there was a hesitation in his words, but it was not fear, it was that of a methodical and precise leader, passing from his rimmed-out orbs to his son’s—“you do it to wound first, then we kill those men who need it, ’cause they will have no pity for any of us by the time we’re done with them.”
To Ernesto, Manny questioned, “Can you circle back behind us, go unseen, take out the one who has been tracking us?”
Ernesto replied, “Can a tarantula not cross the desert in silence for his kill?”
“Then go, bring me his fucking head.”
Ernesto kept low to the ground, distanced himself from the kneeling Manny and peasants.
To Chub, Minister, and Cotto, Manny said, “Act as if you’re a peasant, keep your guns from eyeshot but at the ready, calculate your targets, when I release the peasant’s locks with my hand, you do as I, react. No wasting of ammo. Clean shots. Wound them, confiscate their arsenal, and search the vehicle, then we can decide on who fucking lives.”
And to the peasants, Manny said, “Any of you run, you die here.” From that day of waiting on the unknown, Cotto practiced patience. Becoming composed. Dissecting. Learning. But viewing the Sheldon girl come from the house of slaughter, all he could think of was Dorn. Was she leading him to Dorn? Or was she playing with him, his mind? Knowing he was watching her every movement, studying her instincts to survive?
Cotto was rattled as he watched her carry the rifle, a pack strewn diagonal across her body, and a pair of binoculars. Cotto believed Sheldon was armed with more than a rifle as she trailed through the tall grass, making her way toward a thicket of cedar that swallowed her.
Scaling down from the tree, Cotto was careful. Coming across the field at a trot, passing the cars, he descended the porch, glimpsed the dead, their outdrawn shapes of disfigure and decomposition. Traced Sheldon’s steps into the home only to view what appeared to be a young man. Who lay with the rear of his skull goring a wall of books. The floor was putrid with its stink of all things human and non, coating the tiles with prints and slips, smears and artifacts of what he believed to be the butchering of vertebrae. And questioned, Dorn, could he have delivered this bloodbath? If so, he held real grit, something deeper and darker than Cotto could have imagined, and that grooved a shiver into Cotto. Increased the course of his adrenaline.
Stepping from the home, heartbeat redlining, he maneuvered past the dead outlines. Took caution, following in the broken lines of knee-high grass that the Sheldon girl had walked through. Grazed past the cedar, scraping his grainy skin, inhaling traces of the girl’s scent, nerves jittering; he attuned his ears for sounds, stepped from the cedar, from the diminished needles whose color had transpired from green to a tanning orange to the outgrowth that had fallen from other trees, searched the ground for her steps, indentions, and breaks; eyeing them, he tracked her veering of foot. Came to a road that he crossed only to search the opposite side for her travel.
Traces of her flesh traveled within the air, the sweaty soured lilac and berry, she was close. He stopped. Listening to the distant mash of her feet to the earth, sniffing, he moved forward with the caution of a feral dog in search of food scraps, not wanting to be seen.
Passing a massive, perfectly triangular-sized opening within the earth, peeking down into soiled walls of root that haired out like parasites, he found the outlines of hide, marred and filthy, sharp bone glistened from gum and flies, seeped, grooved, and laid their flutter and squirm in the digs of decomposing canines. Turning from the trapping pit, Cotto could hardly contain his emotion, seeing the onslaught left by Dorn. To be young and possess such skill astounded him. What the young man could offer to others, to pass on, was limitless. What this meant to Cotto: power to rule.
Cotto distanced himself from the grotesque shapes of carnage. Knowing how close he was to the creator of this savage obstruction, he maneuvered with caution.
ANGUS
A shiver of awkward befell the leader’s stiff hold as if he were an aged bull trying to hoof a frozen pond for water; with arthritic hands he constructed a double slip knot from a thick braid of rope, lassoed one end around Angus’s neck, drew it tight, the other end around his wrists behind his back, keeping him connected and restrained from any pull of limb or the area between head and shoulder that would draw a taut stringing choke, while Mick kept a clear bead on Angus with one of the two pistols.
Standing, the Aryan bore down with the sawed-off, turned to the female. Prodded the scuff of black about her one eye with his booted foot. It appeared almost synthetic or unreal with its bruising as she winced in pain. Bending down, the Aryan sniffed her, drove a finger about the hemline between shoulder and chest, began scouring her until he came to the unsupported weight of skin where mothers feed their newborn. She cringed, bared the white about her gums, and spit, “Remove your touch from me!” He slipped a tongue from his ulcered lips and battery-corroded teeth. Ran it over the lids of her eyes.