The Savage(85)
Angus thought to himself, The almighty disciples for Christ have figured me out. He chuckled. “First off, I tried to turn away, abandon your layer. You wouldn’t allow it. Second, I’m a man of flesh and bone, removed of ignorance. I was once toxic and heathen, unruly with little guidance; now I’m just determined.” Angus held pause, needed to keep the meter running, keep the pulse of blood jagging their hearts, guide them to create mistakes. He looked to Alcorn, “For a man who calls himself a Christian, you’ve got some unruly ink about the tops of your paws.”
The man raised each hand to Angus. “Like you, I was once a sinner. A man with wicked ways about him. All the time drinking. Robbing gas stations. Casing persons’ homes. Stealing their wares to pawn for cash for my cause. Then came the collapse, the tides of Rapture, and I realized the error of my poor choices in life.”
Angus smirked. “Let me guess, all this madness is the work of the devil, and God is coming back for His minions, His sacred soldiers in this time of dark, and He shall offer the light?”
“Don’t mock me, ’loper; when the sirens ring over the land and fire falls from the sky, he will come, and when He does, we’ll be the ones laughing at men such as yourself.”
“You’re as misled and ignorant as these other two butt-fucking inbreeds you’re bedding with. You realize the man you follow was sacrificed on another continent, not on this land here where Indians and criminals roamed and settled?”
Hershal was slobbering with anger. “Ain’t none of us bedding with one another, you son of a bitch.”
“Coulda fooled me, way you keep battin’ eyes at your boyfriend Withers there. Shouldn’t have hocked the female for food, would’ve saved some face, looks to me you’re battling fantasy of same-sex coitus.”
Hershal began to raise the axe. Alcorn reached at him. “He’s tightening your restraint, Hershal, needling into your scalp.” He pointed to his temple with a gnarled digit. “He’s of the clever, let him use his smarts again tonight in the cellar. We can all dine on fresh swine afterward if he survives.”
*
Gunshots rimmed the trees midway and lower. Bark and root combusted and flaked with the explosion of carbine. Van Dorn and the Sheldon girl hugged tight to the land, leading August and the mongrel hound. Bootheels and paws dug into soil and leaf, snapping twig and limb. The pant of adrenaline, each armed and alarmed to the sounds that men and children create when playing war. Baying and rearing in the air, only they weren’t playing. They were killing one another.
Tread indented the ground and Van Dorn pointed and spoke with a winded voice to the Sheldon girl, “Keep movin’, they’s a hive of footfalls coming up the rear.”
Looking back, the Sheldon girl caught a glimpse of a string of what looked to be young boys. Some with faces painted skeletal, others with what appeared to be masks stringed and stitched by skin, armed with guns and cutting up the distance.
Huffing, she said to Van Dorn, “Think they’s of harm?”
“My thinkin’ is they could do harm. I’d rather we pull distance from them, so we don’t gotta make the choice of who lives and who dies. Just keep a jaunt to the east here. There’s a steep drop that we can go down at an angle, walk its bottom for a mile or two, and it’ll open up to flat land next to where they’s an old log trail. Can follow it to Polk’s place.”
Dorn knew the terrain. Horace and he had hunted the land with the Widow in April for morel mushroom. The honeycomb fungus of fudge and vanilla shades, picked and placed into empty bread bags. Taken home. Sliced and soaked overnight in salt water to remove bugs and earth. Rinsed the next morning. Sopped in buttermilk. Then a flour, cornmeal, and pepper concoction before being placed into a skillet of sizzling bacon grease and butter until crisp.
Sweat beaked from the face of each along with the burn of their lungs elbowing for the intake of air that combined with the rush of energy. Of the not knowing if they’d live or die.
The air lit up with the distant crack of gunfire. A hail of bullets biting trees. The rear of August’s skull parted. The front of his face meteored forward into patches of skin, muscle, and bone tossed through the air. And his shape warmed the soil with dead weight.
Van Dorn took cover behind a tree, bent his knees, shouldered his rifle, turned to scope the area. Saw to the unmoving outline that was August splayed over the ground. Felt moisture cloud his vision. “Dry it up,” he muttered to himself. “Ain’t no time for getting wet eyed. They’s someone upon you, upon us.”
The hound sat before August, whimpering. Tried to lap its grip-tape tongue at August’s unmoving body. Sensing his loss of shape and temperature. Van Dorn went, took the dog’s hide into his fist, tugged him to cover. The Sheldon girl kept hidden behind several lumps of rock painted by moss some feet away to Van Dorn’s right. Each looked to the trees and wild wintergreens of plant. Studied each for movement. Eyes batted wide like the wingspan of a buzzard. With her long streaks of hair combed tight into a ponytail, she no longer looked stripped of self but streaked with a means of continuance.
“I don’t see no movement,” she told Dorn as she lay with her rifle pointed.
Dorn watched the blood drool from the ream of flank around August’s cutout shape. Wet crimson patterned outside of his neck and shoulders, tipped the ground. “The decline to the holler ain’t far. About two hundred yards or better.”