The Savage(76)
“They’s nothing to be told as you’ll only refer to me as a fool. The boy held snakes as though he’d magic bound within his marrow, we’d a standoff, a test of the spirit, he was the victor. I was bitten in abundance, he fled with a ragged ’loper of a boy I’d kept for you and your soldiering.”
“Where, where would they seek shelter?”
“Remove the rifle from between my sight, let me recollect in peace.”
“Cipher me an answer or I shall splay you into pieces and let you rest in that manner.”
“You are an evil just as Van Dorn, only a different shade.”
Exactly! Cotto thought to himself. Dorn reminded him of himself. Only younger. More skilled.
“I am a perversity unlike anything you’ve ever known, now speak to me of shelter and not sins or blasphemy!”
“To the west of here, amongst stones, they’s military types of bunker. It was a donation from the army back in the mid-seventies for the youth of a church, a place that pastors and their minions could take their young to camp in the summers and be left to God and nature, learn their Bible scriptures from the Methodist teachings. It’s no longer used. Word is it’s now fortified by Scar McGill and her militia that grows by the day.”
“Bellmont’s daughter? How long have you known of this?”
“Learned of it not long after your last encroachment. They’s also word that the militia clans are seeding in numbers. Been enslaving men of strength and skill. Building fighters. Men starved like animals until they victor in bare-knuckled battles. They’ve grown heathen and restless without McGill or the taverns and their back-lot brawls. You’re gonna have a sack full of pissed-off serpents when you least expect it.”
Cotto said, “Tell me more of these clans.”
“They’s the Aryan clan. The Chicken Foot Tharp clan. The Methodists, and many more. They’re a mixed mass of men and beliefs who once fueled the counties with weed, whores, guns, and old-time religion until the dark came and crippled the rules and laws. Now they’ve regrouped and are creating their own clans that are about their own devices, tossing men into pits, forcing them to do harm to each other or be shot face-first, the man who wins is the man who can eat and bring his owner territory. It’s savage.”
Bill halted his words, sweat taffied his frame, he’d a deep hurt, an ache that pulled him in and out of reality, and he told Cotto, “Some say this chaos, it is the result of the Donnybrook fallout. New game. New rules. Similar to those in the cities who start fires in abandoned houses. Hide and watch them burn from a distance, cheap entertainment. Others preach this new system is an offshoot of the Disgruntled Americans, as these people are looking for a new outlet, a new decree, a man to follow.” Bill waited, let his sayings curve his tongue, swim about Cotto’s intellect, and he told, “But it shall not be you.”
Gunshot filled the area. Hearing was deaf and the particles of bone, skin, and the muscle for human thought was splayed about the girders, planks of wall, webs and the faces of the Pentecost’s daughters, as the only one who could muster a scream cried for her father. “No!” she shouted. “Why?” She turned at Cotto. Wanted to do something, a defense mechanism, he sensed it. Then she cowered within his demeanor. And began to bawl.
Pink had broken the surface of complexion, expanding over Cotto’s cheeks, forehead, and nose. It was anger, and to the girl he spoke, “Hide or flee, it makes no difference, me and the Mutts will return and take you. But not until I’ve found this Van Dorn and pressed his skills and his worth onto my own soldiering horde.”
ANGUS
Without light from day the shower of heat coated Angus. The stink of men bearing torches and guns, smelling sulfurous and rancid, their reams of tobacco drool running from furred lips and down chins. They pushed their fighter into the squared pit, egg-shaped head with hair removed glaring like a full moon of nicks and jags beneath flames from above as he came from hands and knees. Appeared as though shaved with a dull razor, cankerous scabs oozed, one side of his lower lip bulged out as the other’d been bitten or chewed off.
Dumas, the scavangerous announcer, stood in bloodstained carpenter pants and a moth-holed flannel devoid of sleeves and about ten years of unshaved whiskers; he watched from the wall as each man sized the other up.
Angus ignored Dumas, studied the handmade jewelry around the neck of the fighter that hung about his torso like unspent shell shot with barbed wire threaded through shriveled hides of dander. The bulk of man removed the human necklace, tossed it up to his keepers. He trembled with hurt from both hands, which were nothing more than swells of damaged bone and cracked cartilage. Angus took note of his hurt, his inner ruin, his weakness.
Knife wounds, bruises, and laceration was all he had of a chest. Angus knew why the denim sheathing his legs was no longer blue or faded. He knew it was muddy with the blood of battle.
Tensing his fists, he glanced above the pit, taking in the Aryan Alcorn, who stood with his followers, greasy and grimy; each kept a weapon either in hand or tucked in his waist. Christi kneeled like a mistreated stray, so out of tune with the reality she was surrounded by, her arms crossed at the wrists and bound behind her, half-clothed but looking even more ragged and despondent, her one eye soldered shut, the other wandered like a light in search of a barge on a river in dark, and on the opposite side of the pit stood the keepers of the man who stood before Angus. They numbered five in count, thin as malnourished dogs, veiny and warty, their heads shaved except for the centers, which boasted spikes of lock laying or standing. A pistol or sawed-off in hand; their eyes hemmed as each wore a chicken foot calcified from twine around their necks to signify their clans’ label.