The Savage(89)

“Calls himself Angus,” Aryan Alcorn exhaled.

Eyes gazed. Unblinking. The mind chewing on thought. “Just Angus?”

“Chainsaw … Angus.”

There was a moment of pause. Of eyes widening, then narrowing. “The man who showered Bellmont McGill with his last rites?”

Angus looked at the sickness before him. His gut churned. His mind wondered about the adolescent boys. Their ages and their use of sexual favors for a higher purpose to such an old wannabe sage drew a molestation of disgust to Angus. Was he a divine man of the cloth, one of those types who had a congregation of mad believers who’d hand their children over to this professed divination of the holy, a man who preached divination, milked his minions, and lived in sin and sloth behind closed doors? Angus felt the answer in his gut. Felt the storm manifesting. Fu had taught him to control his misanthropic desires and behavior. His anger. His savageness. But at this venture, he was rage barred only behind skin.

“One and the same,” Angus told the Methodist.

“And to think some folk spoke of you to be dead.”

“Some used to say Santa Claus was a pagan. Can’t believe all the words you hear.”

“You’d a hearty bounty about your head.”

“I’ve had many, no one has yet to collect … or lived to tell about them.”

To the Aryan, “Does he follow our rules?”

“He does.”

Soon after, Angus faced the pit from one side. Another man faced the opposite with his wrists bound behind him. Each man waited as the old church filled with the shuffle of feet, smells of earthy-retched body and breath bouncing from the once-chalky walls that were now stained and marred by fumes, smoke, and blood.

The ceiling was the same, an off-tinted hue with webs and mud dauber and wasp nests. Folks once congregated here to worship and pray for the goodness and well-being of man, woman, and child. Now it was a sanctum of slaughter.

Hershal removed the rusted chain from the collar around Angus’s neck. Left his hands bound, same as the man opposite Angus on the other side of the pit. Two long slabs of board were dropped into the pit, one on each side, creating an entrance, Angus on one side, his opponent on the other. Two men came. One held a pistol to Angus’s skull. “Move,” he threatened, “and your memories will shower this soil.” The other man cut the tines of rope from Angus’s wrists. “Walk,” said the man. And Angus did, wondering how long Fu would or could last without medicine. If he knew of some way to meditate and take himself away from the pain and lengthen his life-span and ward off infection. The man had culled Angus from addiction and killing. Showed him another way to use his energies in life. But it seemed Angus’s biggest test would now rear its head, and if he were to fail, Fu wouldn’t keep his existence.

Standing, Angus inhaled the stench of sours. Of coagulated blood. The reek of skin that lay rotted and smeared in the dirt floor. There were laces from shoe and boot that had once bound feet, there were prints from those feet digging down, bracing their stances for pugilism. There were remains of teeth, fingers, toes, and nails. Even something that maybe resembled tongues or ears, either bitten or pried, shags of tresses or mane scattered like large blotches of ink, as though a person had carved the rind from skull. But Angus knew their means of removal. It was by confrontation.

Angus stared unblinking over the remains, sized the other man up, a seven-foot beast. Tattoos lined each veiny limb with lines that looked like stitches, curving and wiring over forearms, biceps, and shoulders as though the ink gun had gone dry in places. Began working again with spots of fade, plot marks and names all about, jagging and slanting. Creating a hand-drawn map of the county over his limbs. He’d a Mohawk the shade of neon yellow and the width of a knife’s sheath. Thick patches of sideburns brushed down from his ears and over his jaws to where his face had been coaled to black with white around his mouth like teeth. Eye sockets the same. His torso shirtless, appearing as if he’d swum in a hole of outhouse waste; his pecs and ribs were a parch of wet cotton that’d been stretched and burnt. Scars created from battles won with a string of dried and hardened scalps running horizontal over his body.

Angus did not blink. Knowing he’d take the hominid out quick. Figure on a way to release himself from this maddening fit he’d found himself enslaved within. A world and all its folk swimming in the downfall of existence.

Because of his size, Angus knew he’d need to go for the Neanderthal’s legs. Cut his height. Take his air. Then his strength and maybe his existence. The way the man twitched, his feet antsy, like his hands, which gripped and opened, Angus knew the man would come at him full force. Just a brutal surge of retard strength devoid of means or reaction.

Angus looked to the man’s knees, the lumps and knots that poked out as if chunks of gravel, busted cartilage, with veins worming down the sides of his shins, varicose working into work boots.

When the Methodist stood, all eyes were on him. “Tonight, we’ve two unbeaten conscripts, Sadist Samhain and Chainsaw Angus.”

Heads of men, women, and children turned, looked to others. A tide of disquiet and whispers stood on the air as eyes went back to the Methodist.

“You hear me correct. Chainsaw Angus. Never beaten. A man many believed dead. I’m as bewildered as you, but here he is. Representing the Alcorn clan. And if he keeps his skull skin intact, well, he has my respect and earns a partition of territory for the Alcorns.”