The Savage(70)

Angus jerked, the rope went tight. He gagged and coughed. Thinking that regardless of what had befallen the female, she was a spent, unappreciative cunt.

Mick pouted a laugh. “Silly son a bitch still carry some spurs in your boots for scrapping, don’t you?”

The Aryan looked over at Angus, tilted the barrel toward the side of his head; fumes of whiskey spilled from the man’s lurching shape. Angus eyed the man’s profile, the peer of light drew his features now without any shadow as he noted the smooth scarring above his eyes, a nose that had been busted and swelled more than the count of fingers and toes on a hand or foot, never set properly, and the stench that spilt from his gristled pores, from hulky limbs that were dressed with the ink of swastikas, eagles, and skulls ranging all about as though ruined and faded stars, dotting the raw flesh of forearms, biceps, and malformed hands. He’d been a fighter or brawler or defender of whatever belief he stood for.

Coming to his feet from the female, the Aryan looked to Mick. “Get this infringer to his feet.”

The man whose knee Angus blasted, Grudge, lay with blood dripping to the dirt and whined, “What of me?”

The Aryan told him, “Quit your damn yammering, we get some kerosene to your wound, get you bandaged when we get this slab of chops to the cellar. Don’t need the others looking down upon me ’cause one of my followers held no taste for pain nor pugilism before the eyes of God.”

Grudge looked to the Aryan, his lookers going clockwise with confusion, and Mick shouted, “Quit offering yourself to that of the weak, that’s what Aryan Alcorn’s speaking at you.”

Kneeling down in his faded maroon Fruit of the Loom T-shirt with tiny worm-sized holes across the chest, Mick drew Angus to his feet. The Aryan reached and squeezed Angus’s arms, shoulders. Ran a thumb about the curves of skin that’d been beat, swelled, and healed. Pursed his raggedy lips, pushed back the oily gray and black threads of his hair, scratched the curved bristles of insect-legged beard with the 12-gauge’s barrel. Stood his ground, looking into Angus’s eyes, into his soul as though a lion defending his territory, until Angus coughed words.

“Odds are a stacked and jagged concern, as you’re not gonna end me.”

Showing crooked and broken enamel the shade of leaf-stained water, Dillard Alcorn motioned with his shotgun toward the mess of female about the floor and said, “Correct you are, too damn squirrelly and gamey for ending, you’re like I once was, what I wanted my spawn of followers to be, fighters. I see it in your hide, you’ll bring damn good hawking amongst the beggars and thieves when night blankets our land and the Lord watches over us.”

Angus winked one eye small, left the other big. “Beggars and thieves, the hell are you spitting, Aryan?”

Alcorn laughed. “You’ll see. It took near thirty years of confronting the damnations, battling for what I believed, seeing whites, blacks, chinks, and gays mingle, adopt, and breed, infecting this land, thinking they could do as they pleased and call it freedom of choice, telling me what I believed was wrong, hateful, even demeaning, but in a world that takes till they’s no more to take from the Aryan skinned, they bottomed out. Now that the world has run bankrupt and wild, well, me and a host of others can run it even madder than McGill’s Donnybrook in something we call the meat cellar, where men and women tend to get crazed as leprous wolves with hunger in they blood, and it don’t matter what color your skin is or who you worship, seeing as the prize is to breathe for another day, to entertain all who attend and bring respect to their clan and their followers and earn territory.”

Mick’s eyes glistened wild and bulbous as he nudged Angus: “You’re nothing more than a pawn for nourishment, we’s doing some bidding of our own, you just happen to be white and can square your punches.”

Donnybrook, the bare-knuckle free-for-all that he’d fought in. McGill, the creator, a man who was something like a God amongst the working folk, that is until Angus fed Bellmont his ending. To have devised something crazier than the ’Brook, that placed a trickle of angst into Angus. “Talking crazed, this ain’t about whites and blacks, this ain’t about race. I was looking to rest my mind, in search of medicine.”

Mick whipped Angus’s face sideways with a pistol. “Don’t wanna hear that sap stringing from your yapper, you’re a trespassin’ murderer who stopped at the wrong property, now you earn your existence. They’s no more of the money masters, of the government or politicians, rules or laws, now each man regulates his own symbi, symbi—”

“Symbiosis, you stuttering retch of skin,” Alcorn chimed. “You can’t pronounce it, don’t speak it. Quit offering yourself and our race to appear more ignorant than you are.”

Mick’s face kindled red. Alcorn looked to Angus. “You say you wanted to rest your head, but you travel with a lone female.”

Angus swallowed hard. “Some horde removed her father, husband. Allotted themselves the Mutts. I spared her of befouling.”

“Ahh. Cotto Ramos and his band of mercenaries. His father once muscled for me, he wasn’t a Christian but he was a man of his word.” Alcorn stepped sideways, pointed down at the female, and said, “Woman’s got an awful plumbed complexion, looks as though you roughed her up a bit. Must’ve garnered yourself a hell of a workout ripening her features, sure she didn’t seek shelter with another because of your pugilistic ways?” Alcorn chuckled and paused, looked to his wounded and deceased flock, and finished with “Or did she get untamed on you like my followers?”