The Savage(88)
Angus’s insides tightened, his nerve endings fired madly, and a chill bumped down the vertebrae of his spine. There were numbers that surrounded him, not just a few fingers of men, but many. He feared if any recognized his name, knew of what he’d done, murdered McGill, a man looked up to by many within southern Indiana, they might end his breath at this moment on these steps. Or it could bring friction, stir up a shit storm that’d free him. Fuck it, he thought, the meek ain’t gonna inherit the earth anytime soon.
*
One by one rifles were raised. Crosshairs filled with those shapes of dented aluminum. Triggers were tugged and shapes gave, holes expanded through the cans of Old Milwaukee and Budweiser that lined the rotted posts of corroded fence wire and fallen sycamore.
How many evenings had Van Dorn and the Sheldon girl spent taking in the homemade targets? Forging bets from a distance with each shot that grew and grew. Starting with dreams of what one would do with the other. Where they’d take the other to see things they’d never eyed. Going to a movie. Buying a book that’d yet to be read. And the flirting that adolescent boys find with young girls, saying you missed, you owe me a kiss.
And now they stood below this savage man and his doped-up miscreants. Young boys whose faces were hidden behind masks, their eyes lost and catatonic, each gripped and lugged an automatic rifle. Some donned Slipknot T-shirts, others wore button-down flannel or seared cotton. They were a mix of small-town suburbanites and rural kids whose fathers worked in a factory, a mill, as a mechanic, farming, or selling insurance or real estate.
Dorn lipped a low-level voice to Sheldon: “When I say run, follow me through the holler.”
“We cain’t outrun them and make it to ole man Polk’s place with you hurt.”
“They’s a cavern on down a ways hidden by some fallen sassafras, it’ll take us out the other side of the hill, in behind an old Methodist church.”
“That’s a ways down. He’ll follow.”
“That’s my hopes, that he follows. Follows us to the end.”
“We don’t got no means to see in a cavern.”
“They’s lanterns on each end.”
From above, Cotto spoke, “Van Dorn, you’ve attained to my cause, become my goal. You possess knowledge. Skill. Have killed my best men. You’ve become my addiction. My craving. Reminding me of myself at an adolescent age. Time has come for me to take you and this Sheldon girl. Enlist you to help lead my slaughtering of the rural.”
“Run!” Van Dorn shouted. And young boys flinched, raised their rifles, and tore through the surrounding vegetation and woody perennial with gunfire.
*
It was how Angus woke every morning.
From a seated posture with lids pinched shut, Fu instructing Angus to relax. Inhale slow through his nose. To let his mind focus on one area, the lower gate. Expanding the space below his navel and above his dick. Build the internal glow as he exhaled, gradual. Releasing the air. Repeating this reverse breathing, over and over. Deliberate and controlled. No squeezing. No forcing. Relax. Imagine a small ball of light budding and swelling with each breath.
From day to day, Angus sat. Focusing and building his breath. Training his mind to guide his breath through his body. Up his spine and to his brain. Through his chest. Out to his arms. His hands. Down his legs, to his feet. Unblocking any stagnation within his meridians or gateways. Creating a positive flow. Feeling the tingle that built within during the seated meditations that sometimes lasted hours. Gradually he was constructing his internal energy or, as Fu called it, his Chi.
He sweated. Tendon and ligaments burned and shook through yoga postures. Held until Fu decided Angus’s foundation had been erected and the real training was to begin.
It was what Angus recalled and focused on as the paint-flaked doors of the church unbarred. Footsteps ricocheted into the foyer, where a long braid of knuckled rope hung down. Up above, it attached to a monstrous iron bell. Once used to signal the beginnings of church services. Now for something barbarous and untamed.
Beyond the foyer, candles burned from walls and lanterns within the open space of the church, offering a grainy glow where the floor’d been sawed and chinked out. A twenty-by-twenty squared pit, shoveled and constructed some ten feet deep.
Around the squared sinkhole, wooden pews sat like bleachers for the unruly to watch the brutality unfold. At the pit’s far end lay an upraised platform upon which a man sat robed in ragged black silk. Golden crosses decorated his chest. Tall, pallid-skinned; his eyes recessed into the rotted folds beneath each orb. He’d patches of purple and red about his cheeks and hands with a rice-crispy crust similar to hardened soap scum. Tangles of hair looked to have been clipped using a large cereal bowl, drawn on one side as if parted by an axe’s edge.
Ten young boys surrounded him, none looked under fourteen or beyond the age of eighteen. Like his, their locks were flaxseed-oily and separated. Pigment was chalky. Thin. Starved of sound unless it was hymns or fighting with eyes wrenched into their skulls. They were dressed in flannel buttoned to their necks with dirtied white cottas over top. Each bore a hatchet in his grip.
Behind the Methodist, upon the wall was a large brass crucifix accompanied by a tarnished framed portrait of Jesus Christ.
Alcorn made his way around the wooden pews. Walked toward this outline of man, the heathen boys beside him. Angus followed with Hershal and Withers in the rear. Stopping before the Methodist, who questioned, “And who is this ’loper you’ve amassed for battle?”