The Savage(71)
As he tried to come at the Aryan, the rope cut into Angus’s wrists and neck. He squeezed out the words, “Fuck! You!”
Lowering himself back to the ground, the Aryan turned from Angus, chuckled, “No, fuck you. I care little of you and your troubles. I’m about to find out what kinda warm this hen has got under that pelt.”
Seated on her ass, the female shouted, “Keep your distance from me!”
Laying the 12-gauge to the dirt, the Aryan reached at her chin. Gripped her mouth, firm and tight. “You’s a frisky bitch. Once we’ve bridled you, maybe we’ll bring you out tonight, let you watch the contusions and hurt get raised about this cocky son of a bitch.”
She jerked her face and screamed, “Don’t lay your prints upon my skin!”
On his knees, the Aryan unbuckled his pants at the waist, and with the lot of dead kin surrounding him and his wounded watching, he told Mick, “Get him to the meat cellar. Wasted enough time with words. He’s gonna need that rest he told us he come to find.”
Mick steered Angus to the door, stabbed a pistol into his shoulder blade, told him, “Move it.” He could feel Mick’s eyes burning holes into the rear of his skull, could hear the begging of the female bouncing about the interior. Termiting his brain with rage, offering an emotion of weakness and nausea, as he was unable to do anything. He was helpless.
Stepping out the door, to the heat of the sun, Mick walked Angus past his Tahoe, where he knew the scabbed stock of his rifle lay, his ruck of ammunition, something the inbred racists hadn’t discovered yet. Something that if he could grip, he’d use to make new inhaling holes in each of them as he could still hear the faint screams and pleas of the female.
Mick led Angus to the rear of the house, where a doorless frame was an entrance. “Keep movin,’” Mick demanded.
Planks of floor creaked from the shuffle of feet, Angus took in the stacks of outdated newspapers and beer cans that ornamented the corners, walls had been beat and cracked, tools lay strewn about. More axes, sledgehammers, chain saws, and cans of discarded fuel. Scrapes of wallpaper had been peeled and torn, even blackened as though someone had tried to burn the vinyl widths from walls but never finished. They entered what looked to be a large room where partitions and dividers had been mauled out, only two-by-fours and frayed wires remained, drywall chunks and chalky dust littered the floor’s curled linoleum like explosions of frozen smoke. There were counters with busted saucers, plates and mugs that reeked the air with spoil. Leaving no hint of vitality. Just a bleak surface of survival, or what had once been.
From one room to the next they passed. Then came the jagged cutout of floor, a fifteen-by-fifteen square of give. Angus stopped. Glanced past the uneven saw of wood and textile, took in the piles of corrupted bodies, limbs curved and un natural in their origins. Pallid torsos buried by unknown hands. Earthen parapets scraped and smoothed by the scents of damage. Of those who’d not survived the meat cellar. Angus could only imagine what had taken place here and he felt the tug and pull to his throat and wrists. The back-and-forth motion of teeth, a drywall saw, and the release of the rope. But before he could react he was kicked in his lower back. Plunged forward, nearly twenty feet to the cushions of rot.
COTTO
Tension gathered and hardened within Cotto’s gut. Watching the gritty particles mushroom up until the vehicle halted with the smear of dust across the truck’s nicked windshield. Doors ground open from the driver’s and passenger’s sides. Three shapes maneuvered from the diminutive vehicle. Men stood with aviator-style sunglasses over their eyes, straw hats rolled on the sides like tongues, unshaven, with cutoff shirts frayed at the shoulders. Straps hung loose at their leathery elbows and ran down to the small rectangular weapons that they pointed toward Cotto, his father, Manny, and the others, who kept a trembling peasant before them. Manny’s left feeler clawed into the rear of the peasant’s skull, posturing him as though a puppet shield against any bullet fire as he held the .45 in his right.
These men were not of Latin, Spanish, or Mexican blood. They were American.
And the driver spoke. “You know what we want.”
Cotto’s father knew it made little difference if they blended in with the walkers and he laughed. “Guess you found Raúl?”
“What was left of him,” one of the men from the passenger’s side said.
The driver told Manny, “You’ve fucked with the wrong person, quit now and maybe you’ll get to breathe a little longer.”
Cotto fought the shiver of his nerves from within. His limbs rattled and shook as he kneeled, listening to and watching the bravery of his father even though he was supposed to pick a man, hone in on a target to shoot. Fighting to keep the 9 mm in his grip steady. Listening to Manny, taking in his words, while staring death in the face and having no care in the world. It dawned on Cotto in that moment, it was confidence in one’s skills and beliefs that mattered. Manny held a vision, a goal to replace the life he promised Kabeza and Cotto. What Cotto didn’t realize until later was the opportunity his father had given him regardless of the odds.
“Maybe it is you who fucked with the wrong person and will get to breathe a little longer.”
The driver smirked. “That how you see it, killing a Mexican law officer, burning his home and taking property that does not belong to you? That’s not how the man I answer to does business on this side of the border.”