by Frank Bill
“Who?” Bill paused for thought. Spittle had congealed in the corners of his mouth as he appeared more and more irritated with Dorn’s words and he said, “Was no rumor. Is real. Seen them with my own two eyes. I’d led myself astray when hunting. Came up behind a great neighborhood of brick homes. Watched from afar. Men going from house to house. The hordes looting the fathers from them. Breaking them down to their knees. Pointing a barrel to a skull and pulling the trigger in front of their loved ones. It was enough for me to mind my own.”
With a look of horror, Dorn paused his scraping and asked, “Why you figure they kill the men, keep the girls?”
Pursing his lips, Bill said, “Breeding, why else.” He then lifted his gaze to Dorn and said, “Though I never eyed them killing young boys. There lays some unknown meaning in that. To kill a father but keep a son.”
“And what about these religious clans, you’ve viewed them as well?”
“I’ve visited their cellars, yes.”
“Cellars?”
“Meat cellars. Look, all you need to know is this: stay clear of them or you’ll be enslaved to fight for another’s entertainment and power to rule. You win, you eat, and if they’s females about, they’ll be forced into coitus.”
Curled splinters of hair piled to the floor and stuck to the hands and blades of Bill and Van Dorn. Dorn believed Bill was hiding something as they scraped and scalded till there was no more growth to be removed. Then came the kettle. The removal of leaf lard that’d be used for cracklings. Bill stabbed into the boar’s spine. Guided the blade down the backbone. Then Dorn helped him lift the carcass from the hook and lay it on the large walnut table planked by heavy two-by-six cuts of lumber that’d been nicked by steel and smirched by things that had once been breathing.
Myra brought a hacksaw down the swine’s back. Getting to the pork chops and the fatback. Then the tenderloin that rested on both sides of the backbone before sawing and cutting at the rib cage.
“Think we’ll ever get juice back to light up homes?”
“If God sees it in His plans. Otherwise be prepared for a long era of suffering. This is why wars are begun. An indifference. To rebuild what has been squandered. Too many digital dependencies. Do you think many men or women, even children of this era, can do what our ancestors did in order to hold continuance, to exist?”
“I care none, all I know is what my father and grandfather taught me, the ways of the old, and for that I am appreciative.”
“But did Horace raise you by the guidance of the Lord? A better way of offering it is this: Do you believe in God? In His prowess to accept spiritual donation?”
Horace had raised Dorn with Old Testament beliefs in the Methodist Church as a boy, though he’d not stepped foot in one since his mother had abandoned them. His father had lost any hope there had been in scripture. Calling the Bible a book pasted together by a government that wanted to control the masses with fear. Letting those masses read what they wanted them to read, then interpreting it how they saw fit for control. Always pointing a finger and judging others while never judging their own ways. Horace told Dorn if there was a higher power, He was a pricey son of a bitch for all the hardships He placed on the innocent to pay for His suffering.
Dorn knew he was dealing with a man who’d been willed with religious rhetoric all his life, relied on the fear he brought to others from this rhetoric, and so he told Bill, “Never gave it much concern since my mother quit us, seems the good book is just words bound by officials.”
Bill slammed a fist on the wood table. His orbs were blusterous bulges of white splintered by a rosary of vessels. Damming around him, the girls heaved air into their lungs with shock. Each held their tools like weapons. Watched Dorn as Bill spoke. “Be damned, boy, the Lord is no fool! Why you think things has turned to chaos? ’Cause God’s coming back for us but first the Devil’s riding in pockets. Shaping and metastasizing nonbelievers into the vicious. Then it’ll be hell to pay for their wrongs. Don’t be a pagan.”
Dorn tasted the tension like a penny pulled from one’s pocket and put on a tongue, metallic and dirty. Thought of the pistol tucked down his back. The blade in his hand. Knowing he’d had his will tested too many times over the passing days. Dorn’s stomach bubbled and he felt as though he might puke. Knowing Pentecost Bill was one crazed fuck. As were his daughters, odd as ever, unlike any girls Dorn’d seen before, and he told Bill, “I’m no pagan. Like my father, I’m a survivor, a pioneer.”
A glint went from a spark to a bonfire in Bill’s eyes. “How ’bout a test of this professed survival?”
All Dorn could think was, React! React before this stone-cold-crazy son of a bitch uses you as a human sacrifice for his ill-willed God.
But before Dorn knew what was going on, he felt a heavy whack to the rear of his thigh. A hand reached for his pistol. Though it was not his hand. Another hand placed a blade at his throat and another squared a rubber mallet to the side of his temple. Lids batted and things began to start and stop until another thwack came. Dorn’s world darted and pricked like a cold wind to flesh and his face met the solid surface of the shack’s syrupy floor.
* * *
Something sandy and wet lapped Dorn’s face. Scents of coagulated seepage and sweat lay on the inhale of each breath. Of things dead and rotted. Surrounding him as his head bulged and roared. It hurt to move, but not to expand his lungs with air. His arms were not tied nor his ankles bound. The rush of fluid came quaking as Van Dorn sat up. Pushed himself to a planked wall in a room. The hound sat eye level and stared at him with its Reese’s-tinted fur, panting.
“Son of a bitch,” Van Dorn said. The breath of the hound was what he smelt. He reached for the dog. Slow, guided his palm over the cold, wet nose of scars. Up his snout and rubbed his head. Focused his eyes on the room, taking in the walls of barn wood that ran up and down with no hint of light between the cracks and the high tin roof overhead.
On the dirt floor, several feet away, he made out three squared shapes no bigger than a suitcase. And beyond that was the door. As he got to his feet, the boxes looked to be honed of plywood bottoms and two-by-four sides with screens for their tops. Like dens or cages for keeping something. He could make out coils of shape. The dog sat behind him. Whined as Dorn started to approach the boxes, when a voice spoke that was of the flesh.
“Name’s August.”
Dorn turned his attention to a far corner, where a young boy stood up. Came from the shadows, hugging himself with a slight shiver. His features smeared of dirt, hair wild and ratted. He’d a U of L T-shirt on with a pair of jeans, Nike tennis shoes. Wormy and pale.
Dorn towered over the boy, whom he guessed to be fourteen or so. “The hell you come from?”
“Your dog let me pet ’em. Stinks, though, it’s all about my hands.”
“Asked you a question.”
“Big crazy man and his daughters come to my home in New Salisbury. Killed my daddy. Took me, my mother, and my sisters. Locked us in here. Said we’d be traded to a man named Cotto for a higher purpose.”
Van Dorn spoke his thoughts aloud, trying to understand. “Traded?”
“Yeah. Hocked my sisters first. Just came in one day and took ’em. Then a week later, took my mother. My turn’s coming. He done said, like the others.”
On the dirt floor next to August’s feet lay a ceramic plate. Dorn eyed it. Said, “Others?”
“Yeah, when we got here they’s two girls. Was traded within a day. But they told they was a mother and her son before them.”
Turning things over in his mind, Dorn’s questioning of the hordes, Bill’s words. Watched. Going from house to house. Looting the fathers. Pointing a barrel to a skull.
Was Bill who done that, not the hordes. But for what reason would he have to trade mothers and children, let alone murder fathers?
“He feeds us. Won’t give no utensils.” Boy went from hugging himself to palming his face, trying to hide the wet that fell from his eyes as he whimpered.
“I’s scared. Things is gone crazy. I don’t understand.”
Weak, Van Dorn thought, this August is weak. Exactly what his father never wanted him to become.
Dorn stepped toward August. “I’ll get us from this place. But, I say run, you gotta haul ass. Don’t stray from me, stay with me.”
“Can’t leave. I’s scared what he’ll do. And them woods is plum dark. Don’t know where I’m at.”
Taking August’s hand, feeling the tremors, he led the boy over to the hound. “Pet ’em some more. Be easy. He’s feral but seems in need of companion.” August reached a hand slow to the dog. Began to rub its dank hide when the clicking of a padlock came and the door burst open.
The three girls came in front of Bill. The hound raised his ears, snarled. Dorn turned. “Easy, boy, easy.”
“Knew I should’ve pierced that mongrel’s plate but Mary said to let him be as he’s brought no harm to us. Regardless, you got a proving to offer, Van Dorn.”
Cocking his head, Van Dorn sized up Bill, his burly girth, bedrock belly blocking the opening with Dorn’s pistol tucked down his front. Each of the girls held a weapon, Mary an axe, the others skinning knives. And Dorn said, “What is it that I am proving?”
Stepping between his daughters, Bill approached the wooden boxes that lay on the dirt floor. He’d changed his shirt. Rolled the sleeves of his flannel up to the elbows of each arm, where the pink of fang scars lined each inner arm between the ink of tattoos. Bill kneeled down. A hinged latch kept each box closed. Bill fingered the one latch. Levered the screen. Said, “You professed to be a survivor. I profess you must do so by proving your faith. What we Pentecostals refer to as receiving the gifts, having a triumph.” Bill reached his digits below the opening.
And Dorn came with sarcasm, asked, “A triumph of what?”
From the box a slivering rattle dispelled like that of a baby’s toy rattler began to tack the walls of the room. Behind Dorn, August clutched his arms around the mongrel, which held a nasal growl. Bill raised the serpent. Its head lay in his open palm like a diamond-shaped heart. Black electrical-tape tongue wishboning out while its scaling body of gold, onyx, and caramel hung down as though a lamp cord unplugged. Bill embraced a smile of foliage-marred teeth and said, “A blessing. Must receive the gifts to find salvation. My judgment and the Lord’s.” And Van Dorn hid a shit-eating grin, realizing that what was in the other boxes would be his and August’s escape.
THEN
The first time it’d happened, Dorn had been around nine or ten, standing silent within the tall silver oaks alongside Horace, who held a single-shot Mossberg 12-gauge, shushing him of speech. Watching overhead as the bushy-tailed red and gray squirrels pounced from limbs, shook and wrangled their way from tree to tree. Bored, Dorn worked his eyes over the ground, studied the movement of a chocolate-and-margarine-decorated reptile tapering through the leaves and twigs, halted at his boot. Flicked its tongue out and in. Waited. Dorn stared in amazement. Finding oddness in the cold-blooded animal’s actions. Horace turned. Eyes bugged in anger at the reptile, he raised his work boot to the muscled length. Dorn reacted, a second sense he remembered, offering a hand, and the snake coiled into his palm, weighted, cool, and scaled. Horace cursed Van Dorn. “Hell you doing, boy?” Tried to swat the snake from him.
Dorn distanced himself from his father. Ran an index over the serpent’s head. Gazed into its pointed oval of eyes. Horace looked upon his son as though he were mad, came at him. Watched Van Dorn as he kneeled and let the serpent slither out from his hand and back to the ground, where it disappeared into the blankets of leaves and musk of fallen timber.
Dropping the shotgun, Horace brought a hand to Dorn’s arm. Shook him with anger.
“Kinda heathen actions you pulling, could’ve been bit. Swell up like a tick from the venom.”
Neither thought much of it. Took it only as a moment of chance, a young boy fiddling with nature.
But other times came. When gathering eggs, the Sheldon girl met the lengthy outstretched fiber of a milk snake that’d wormed its way to Dorn’s feet. Sheldon watching with surprise but not fear. He treated it like a game of keep-away: step back and it’d follow. Sheldon shaking her head, saying, “You been demonized.” Dorn doing just as he’d done when hunting squirrel with his father. Bending down, Sheldon’s blue eyes full of amazement, Dorn offering a hand. The snake letting him lift it. Hold it as though it were a purring feline. Eyeing Sheldon, questioning, “Demonized?”
“What the old-time gospel said about those who tame the serpents. Daddy says it’s much iron in the blood. My belief is reptile, carnivore, vulture, regardless of creature, it’s in all’s nature to wanna be a pet in one form or another, and they sense the good in those that’s good and the bad in those that’s bad. Regardless, you’ve got a gift.”
Another time, as she was working the soil of the Widow’s ground, she unearthed a nest of garden snakes while digging potatoes. The limbless reptiles stretched, luminous, green, and slithering, about the length from shoulder to hand. Dorn came from working a hoe. Removing weeds from around bean plants. The serpents veered their course for him. Coiled at his feet. Waited and he’d done just as he’d always done. Kneeled. Let one glide into his palm. Held one, then another. Fingering their quarter-sized heads. Watching the tongues dart out like unbraided twines of rope. Then releasing them, watching them slither back to their holes.
It quickly became clear that Van Dorn possessed that gift Sheldon spoke of, or an iron of the blood, a connection of sorts to the serpents; they continued to follow up, gathering in wait, climbing into his open palms, but for what or why no one knew, Dorn least of all.
NOW
Lengths of muscled scales hung down from each of Bill’s hands like stiff shafts of rope. His daughters showed little fear.
Approaching Van Dorn, Bill was no bigger in height, only shape. Dorn was leaner and younger, and when Bill offered his right hand of two small serpents, each copperheads, Dorn did not cower, but came sure-footed. Offered his left hand. The snakes, black and gold, jutted their heads up and down, as though lying riverside, hypnotized by the wafting travel of current. Each slithered into his palm. One darted left, the other right as they parted and twined down and around his forearm.
Bill’s eyes burned fiery as a butane lighter’s flame, unable to fathom what he was seeing. The two snakes crossed at Dorn’s elbow. Lassoed up beneath his shirt, followed his bicep, over his shoulders, and around his neck, where they rested their heads from the inner collar. Tails flanking down. Their tongues forking from their mouths.
“What trickery do you hold within, boy?”
“None.”
Bill broke down another wooden box. Unhinged it. Pulled two thick hefts of elongated meat, patterned with scales of swarthy color and tarnished coins. Their ends like honeycomb, only rattling. Standing, he held them in their centers, their upper body the size and shape of flint spearheads. Dorn had never seen such specimens of snake. Dense and long, he figured them to be timber rattlers from Kentucky. Seeing as that’d be the closest one could find such a serpent. Placing the fear of God in any taker who’d near them, except the one who stood before them at this juncture.
Offering his right hand in the same manner as the left, Dorn eyed Bill and waited. Confident and unblinking.
Bill’s retinas were charred by rage as he approached. Snakes went lax in his grip as they prepared to move toward Dorn. Bill squeezed them in anger. Baring teeth in his disgust. Dorn smirked into a smile. Watched the tails of each snake corkscrew around Bill’s scarred arm of print, twist and fang into the knotted muscle of his limb.
“Son of a bitch!” Bill screamed. His girls turned to their father’s pain.
All Dorn could think was to move his hide, and he reached for the copperheads around his neck. Held them out like an offering before tossing them at the girls. Turning to August and the hound, he hollered, “Run!” Then turned back, came at the girls and Bill. Corralled them together. Giving passa
ge to August and the hound. The girls had dropped their weapons, screamed and swatted. Two had been bit by the copperheads. The third tried to help, reaching at the serpents. Bill shook, trying to loosen the rattlers that had bitten and fanged into the meat of his forearm. Reaching at the snakes. Screaming, “Have lost the spirit. Arm has found the flare of heat. Oh, how it burns!”
Dorn stepped toward him, their eyes met. Madness surrounded them and he reached for the pistol tucked in Bill’s waist. There was no fight. Only the body-writhe from the snakes.
Dorn watched the rattlers introduce Bill’s knees to the ground. Release their jaws only to bite him once more and he said, “Been bitten ten times. And each time I’ve lost sight of the Lord!”
With the .45 leveled at Bill’s face, Van Dorn fingered the trigger, thought of taking his breath. Giving him the martyrdom he longed to have. But Dorn was no killer of any man unless forced. Backing to the shack’s opening, he slid the pistol down into the hem around his waist. Went out into the night. Separating himself from the voices of plead and ache. Closed the wood-slatted door and fastened the lock. Saw August and the mongrel in the distance. The haze of darkness hugging them hysterical, as August begged, “Where do we go, where do we go?”
Adrenaline rifling through his body, Van Dorn spoke as the sounds of Bill and his daughters rang out behind them. “Far from this juncture of hell.”
* * *
Treading over land within the maddening darkness of night, Dorn’s ankle no longer ached, only a slight stiffness, while hearts drummed, calves and hamstrings burned, and stomachs groaned for food. Buried within the heated dark was the paranoia of eyes surveying Dorn’s and August’s movements. While the sounds and images of Bill and the venomous lengths of scaled fiber haunted the boy. Glancing left and right, he’d tried to hold pace with Van Dorn and the hound. Trekking up hills and down through hollows. Carrying with them the lug of survival.
Dorn feared stopping. Imagining that Bill, his girls, or all of them would free themselves. Come bloated by poison, savage and tracking August and him. Baring their tools for splitting timber and skinning wild game. They’d come without discernment for sparing their lives as Dorn had theirs; by not rearing their brains with a single tug from his .45.
