The Savage(79)
Angus released him. Let his shape litter the floor of dirt and dead gladiators.
Angus looked to the torches that were held by silhouettes from above. “Now what? I’ve beat what you’re offering.”
Alcorn laughed. “Ain’t done yet.”
He looked to Mick. “Toss him the blade.”
From his side, Mick unsheathed a ten-inch length of steel. Dropped it into the pit.
“Ain’t killing him. He’s weak, spent.”
“Nobody’s asking ye to kill him, the winner scalps the weaker.”
“And if I don’t?”
From behind Angus, shell shot rang out. Pieces of black soil wall crumbled before him. And Corbin spoke: “If you don’t I’ll part your pan with a twelve-gauge slug. And all this’d been a waste of time and I can keep my territory.”
Angus thought of Fu, his sickness. The medicine he needed to find. To coax him. The man had saved his life from ruin. He was indebted to him for that. Had to offer the same action. Couldn’t do that if he were dead. He retrieved the blade. Took in the bloodstains of rust, scalp hairs, and hardened plasma from the fallen. If ever he was to see Fu again, save his existence, he had to do what must be done in order to see another day.
Rolling the man-beast to his chest, Angus bent over his wide back, reached down and expanded the man’s nostrils with his fingers, reared his head back, met the man’s peak of forehead with the sharp edge. Parted skin from skull. Didn’t stop till he’d cut a fold of flesh that was nearly twelve inches long and six inches wide. And all the surrounding men from above cheered with a mad and heated debauchery.
COTTO
Stringing out from its socket like a rubber ball banded to a wooden paddle, the eyeball hung in the air and Sergio begged and pleaded. “Please…” His nose had been rearranged with a small mallet. Cotto straddled him, his Mutts watched, he laughed. “The pain you’ve brought is of your own devising. You fuck me, I fuck you a hundred times harder.”
“Please, Cotto. Please! What you are doing, it is lunatic. Clamoring revenge for your father, enslaving others to rule. You … you need me.”
“Need you? When you’re spouting of my father, it is of one man’s opinion, your opinion. Of which I find no agreement. He would’ve ruled this territory with or without McGill or Alcorn. My father held a fondness for these gringos, a fondness that I do not even consider, except for Dorn. To place pain upon them brings me pleasure. Our people, where we come from, all we’ve known is struggle and belittlement from a class of people that didn’t govern; they ruled and stole and killed to appease their indulgences. I’m only spreading the gospel of what some in this country have seen as never affecting them.”
Blood bubbled pink from the uneven lips of Sergio as he told Cotto, “You … you’ve gone mad. This vengeance to conquer, to capture Dorn will lead you to your death.”
Coming from straddling Sergio, Cotto approached a metal table of flaking colors and corrosion where instruments were laid out: knives, handsaws, machete, hatchet, hammers, clamps, and forceps. From it he grasped a hooked blade. Stepped to Sergio, pressured it into the corner of his mouth. “Tell me, what is the plan that Scar has devised with your intel?”
“She … she awaits your capture of Angus. Then—”
“What, what?!”
“I … I inform her of his capture. She and her militia attack your encampment. Kill you. Your men, the remaining Mutts and Angus. Free those that you’ve enslaved.”
Laughing, Cotto says, “That is all? She waits for me to do the hunting, using her mole? You’re as pathetic as she.”
Sergio mumbled his plea once more, “You need me.”
Cotto cackled. “Need you, for what?” Looking to Ernesto, Cotto said, “I know what you need, get me Cutthroat. We need to end this clemency as it is unacceptable.” Then he turned back to Sergio. “Tell me all you know of Van Dorn.”
*
His skin lapsed, folded, and webbed like chunks of chewed and spit taffy, pink and slobbery. His legend was that of a bad birthing from a matron and sire addicted to the dope that was sometimes needled into the veins, other times fired in a smudged glass bottle, fired from the bottom and freebased.
It was an explosion of the caine being butaned from the bottle’s bottom while the mother held him that disfigured him as an infant. Skin grafts weren’t much use where he came from; regardless, his eyes rang blue as the Pacific, but his flesh was corncob rough and spiraled as if he’d been branded by the devil’s flame. His hair grew in patches of outgrowth, splotched here and there; he lived in an orphanage until a villager named Juan, who’d worked for a major cartel, growing the green stink of gummy bud, adopted him as his own, raising the boy to wield a blade, for which the boy developed a fondness, helping with those early harvests. Juan taught the boy the age-old art of slaughtering and butchering, of becoming immune to the squeal of swine or the bovine losing its moo.
By the time the adopted father had passed, the boy was old enough to earn his keep, taken in by a cartel leader known as the King; the boy was schooled by a man in the lessons of what happens when men and women deceive their employers. That man was the Ox, and the Ox named the boy Cutthroat. When Manny took out the King, he offered life to Cutthroat, letting him nurture his skills as he lived within a basement beneath the King’s barn. A room of tools, some blunt, others sharp. With the years he’d honed his trade. Now at his disposal were drums of acid. Steel tubs and areas for boiling, pruning, carving, and draining. He’d become a professor of death.