The Savage

by Frank Bill

  Turning from the blaze, the man stood watching the home expand with flames and laughed.

  Dorn sat with August, Scar, Poe, Wolf Cookie, and the hound, camouflaged behind the sprout of foliage. Gripping his pistol, taking in the dehumanization, Dorn pulsed with wanting to act. Scar sensed his jittering, touched his arm. Whispered, “Wait.”

  The man with the propane torch walked over to Lucas.

  Holding the dog back, Poe said, “They ain’t with Cotto. They’re charlatans, scrounging for food.”

  “Charlatans?” Dorn questioned.

  “Copycats,” Scar told him. “Make their musings for torture appear like what Cotto and his narcos do. Been suspecting them for a month or better.”

  “How you know?”

  “The tires they throw over men. Country folk use those to start brush fires, not light folks up like these wretches aim to do, like Cotto did to double-crossers on the border, he does the same here.”

  “So they make it look as though Cotto has trespassed through and slaughtered country folks. Still, why would anyone wanna do as Cotto does? Stoop to the level of an enemy?”

  “Why? ’Cause they’s some that’d like to soldier up with Cotto. Do as he does. Live as he lives. Murder they own. Just cross paths with them, they act like they’s surviving, it’s a trap, they’s playing coy to see what you got, then they remove you, how they get by. They’re slaughterers, plain and simple.”

  Back to the situation at hand, Dorn asked, “What’re we waiting for, they’re blazing the man’s home, aim to cook him and his brother as well.”

  “That’d be a disruption to the natural order of nature.”

  “Natural order? They’re gonna kill innocent folk.”

  “You ever see a wildlife video where the filmmaker saves the animal being preyed upon? Hell no, you didn’t. It’d be an infringement upon their survival. How nature works. We never saved you.”

  “These ain’t animals.”

  “No they ain’t, they’re a whole different kinda tissue eater. You need to learn their ways to survive this terrain, as it changes with every breath.”

  The home raged orange and yellow. Black smoke billowed from it. Children began to scream. Sound of glass shattered from the side of the home. From a window jumped a young boy, then a girl, and an older female. A man came from the wooded area around the rear of the home. Grabbed the young girl from behind. Fisted her to the ground. The boy turned to the man. Kicked at his leg. Met a hand from the man, who stepped on the boy’s back. Stomped him into the earth. Kept him from crawling as he unsheathed a blade. The older female raked her nails down the man’s face. Screams came. A head butt dazed the female. Followed by knuckles branding her. Blood drew from the older female’s face. Digits groped her locks. A skinner pared the thick rind of her forehead.

  August held his gaze in the opposite direction. Eyes dampened and mucus gobbed from nostrils.

  The man with the propane flame lit the seared and branded man’s greasy hide and he came to life, writhing and spastic.

  Meanwhile, the torturer reached to his right leg. Pulled a small mallet hammer free. Looked to Lucas, whose face was wrought with tears as he screamed, “No! Please! No!”

  The torturer smiled. Billy-clubbed Lucas’s jaw. Teeth came with a thick combination of syrupy fluid that slopped from Lucas’s mouth. He tried to speak but all that exited his mouth was slurs.

  Dorn had witnessed enough. Words streamlined like slivers of madness and he told Scar, “Should’ve done saved these folks.” And he stood up. Scar reached for him but he was gone.

  Stomping from the brush of green, pistol raised, all Dorn could do was react, shot the canister within the flame wielder’s hand. An explosion encompassed Lucas and the propane wielder. Another shot thudded into the oil dumper’s skull. Followed by a shot that rang not from Dorn’s pistol but from Poe’s AR-15. Clipped shoulder and chest of the human torch’s outline. Skin fragment expelled from the man’s back. And he hit the ground like a mortal bonfire.

  Screams raged from the starved man as flames replaced his appearance. Flesh boiled and oozed fatty. Dorn holstered his pistol. Ran to a clothesline where a bedsheet hung. Ripped it from the line. Draped it over the flaming man. Suffocating the ignition of heat.

  Around the side of the flaming home, the female’s scalp was completely removed. Hanging down the back of her neck like a laceless tennis shoe’s tongue pulled away from the insole. The front of her skull, bare bone and bleeding. The knife wielder sheathed his blade. Dug his fingers into the scalp of each child and dragged them to the woods, belching tears and phlegm.

  Scar, Mike, and Poe had came from the brush. The mongrel limped. Sniffing the ground, staying near Poe. Mike made his way to the side of the home. Heat rising from the flames. Melting outer walls of vinyl. Baking anything within five feet of it. He pulled the female to the home’s front, his face quaked red from the heat. Tears streamed from the female’s face, and a fold of flesh peeled over her skull as she crawled on the ground to Lucas, pleading, “Why? Why didn’t you tell them?”

  Scar reached for Van Dorn, who stood patting the sheet over the burning man. The cotton stuck to his shape like a second set of skin. Moans crept from Lucas, whose mouth had lost its elasticity. Scar told Dorn, “It’s too late. We’ve no means to mend nor care for the wrong that’s been done.”

  All stood absorbing the massacre. Studying the demise as though a team of forensics. And Dorn told Scar, “Wouldn’t have been too late had you let us stop these charlatans ’fore they set one man aflame and the other beat by mallet.”

  Dorn looked to the mother, who sat on the ground before him. Blood crept down her face from the half-sliced head of hair, eyes like tracers, igniting stares up at her burnt husband. She turned to Van Dorn and screamed, “Mean to tell me you all sat in hiding? Watched what these men lay upon my husband, my brother-in-law, me, and my children that has been taken? You’s as savage as those that violated us!”

  As she came to her feet, swinging wildly at Dorn, a buckshot rearranged her complexion. Brain, scalp, and life dispersed. And Scar lowered the 12-gauge before the woman hit the ground. She eyed Poe and said, “Know what chore is to be done.”

  Dorn was without words. Everything had happened too quick. The woman lay on the ground. A pile of lifeless tegument. Muscles in her back fired with pulse and twitch. He looked to Scar, angered, and said, “Why?”

  “Ordinary people do the criminal action ’cause it’s become their natural means to survive, it’s instinctive. You didn’t heed what I told. Me, my militia, we live by a different set of standards.”

  Poe walked toward Lucas and his brother. Lifted his AR-15 to the body of the brother, who was now charcoaled and smoldering. Lucas stood leaning, the sheet blotted by the burn of plasma, hued brown, black, and red. Moans of ache plagued everyone’s ears.

  “We waited too long,” Dorn told Scar.

  “Nothing to do with waiting. Shoulda let the situation unfold.”

  “They’re like us, common folk, people that’s lived from the land.”

  “This ain’t part of the plan, can’t fix every spoke on the wheel.”

  Poe tugged the trigger, bringing a silence to his mess. Then to the other man beside him.

  Dorn asked, “What plan?”

  “Territory,” Scar told Dorn. “Time’s wasting. We gotta get ’fore someone sees the smoke, makes a bigger mess.” She turned her back. Poe, the hound, and Wolf Cookie followed. Walked the perimeter of the home that was becoming a bonfire of calcium carbonate. Interior and exterior walls now dark as spades.

  Dorn walked to where they’d hid. Pulled August from the weeds, trembling. Shaking his head. “They killed them. Killed them all.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Keep close to me. They won’t hurt you, I won’t let ’em.”

  “We should run.”

  “No, we shouldn’t. We’re safer with them than without. They know things we don�
�t.”

  Catching up with Scar. Taking in the surrounding woods, Dorn’s eyes searched for a trace of the other charlatan. Listened for the pleas of the children who had dispersed into silence. And he asked Scar, “What about the kids?”

  Stopping, she turned and said, “What about them?”

  “That man took them.”

  Anger cast about her facade and she made her intentions known. “What ain’t soaking into that thick understanding of yours? They’re not our troubles. We’s not Robin Hood and his merry fucking men, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. We’re rural soldiers, here to uncast the backbone that society has broken. Not doling handouts to the weak; if you’re weak you’re dead. Days of food stamps and government assistance is what brought our class to its knees.” Looking up through the leaves that angled from limbs overhead and into the sky, her eyes came back to Dorn’s and she told him, “We ain’t got time for this. We gotta get to the ATVs, endure our trek back to camp before dark.”

  * * *

  Navigating his four-wheeler over the land, crossing deer and old horse trails, Wolf Cookie was the lead, with August clutching him. Overlooking gravel roads and patches of burnt grass in the centers, Dorn rode with Scar. Poe took the rear, the hound laid across his lap. Hot air dried the moisture that glazed their bodies. That’d been matted and specked with soil, leaves, blood, and death. They passed hollows littered with limbs sheared and scraped of bark from the summer storms that had worsened over the years. Ravaging any structure or organism in its path. Garbage bags stretched over surfaces of rock, wood, and soil. Magazines and newspapers, ripped and torn. Old washers, stovetops, and rusted barrels used as doghouses, hay bedding spewing from them. Ceramic dishes and figurines had been thrown and abandoned, turned into relics of oxidation from the weather or looters.

  Tire tread climbed a hillside where limestone lay gigantic and moss covered. On the other side men perched high overhead in oak trees upon slatted stoops built from pallets, some with binoculars, others without; each held scoped rifles and holstered pistols.

  The land flattened down into a ridge of bunkers pitted into the ground some sixteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and ten to twelve feet deep, depending on how quickly they’d met solid lime. Roofs were gabled, ply-board shingled by ten to twelve inches of mud and weed. A rock-circled fire pit had been built out in front of each shelter with a handmade spit over each for cooking; a larger area sat out in the center appearing the same, only wider and deeper for bonfire use. Men and women stood armed, eyeing Scar and her return with strange skin. Men sported beards, oily reamed locks twisted and curled from beneath caps. Some were bibbed with denim or military pants and patterned Realtree hunting T-shirts, while the females appeared with their lengths long, pony- or pigtailed. Nails unpainted. Chewed. No gloss of lips nor liner ovaling orbs. They appeared as though creations of God’s earth. Simple.

  Several pens strung of rectangular wire, attached to cedar posts, held hogs, while another held cows and chickens that sat guarded off to the south of the encampment. Several wood-walled shacks sat with chimneys to their far ends. Hides of coon, squirrel, and deer stretched about their exteriors. Smokehouses, Dorn thought. A place to cure their meat and tan their hides.

  Scar idled her four-wheeler down, parked next to a bunker, and told Dorn, “This is where we bed and plan. We’s about fifty strong. Not a weak link among us. Is of what was loyal to my father. We keep eyes from sunbreak to sunset. We got hunters. Butchers. Mechanics and farmers.”

  Dorn came from the four-wheeler, his bones clattered by the dip and climb of the land. His back was aching. Legs and arms hurting as well from all the damage he’d incurred over the passing days with little nourishment or sleep. Taking in the faces of the small militia, he asked, “Who are these that followed your father?”

  “As I done told, some was mechanics, others was factory workers, fighters, hunters, builders of homes. Waitresses. They’re male and female ’lopers that’ve been wrung out by their government. Once the fortitude of society. Offered one lie after the next to gnaw on and procure a vote.”

  Behind them Poe came from his ATV with the hound. Then came Mike with August, whose eyes were wrought with fear as they took in the smears of an unknown sanctum. Dorn met August’s glare, lipped, It’s okay.

  Waving a hand, Scar motioned Dorn and the others to walk. To take in the encampment of structures built with logs that had been halved, coated by creosote to preserve the wood; she pointed to housing, told Dorn what was for storing artillery and arms. Others were for tools. Food. Told him there was a cave nearby with a spring. In its bottom lay a stream. They bucketed and heated the water to bathe. Wash clothing and whatever else. She led him to her bunker that sat next to the ammunition and weapons storage.

  Several feet behind them was Wolf Cookie, Poe, and August. She waited for them to pass by areas of men and women who sat sharpening blades. Cleaning guns.

  As they entered a cellar-like dwelling, candles burned, the air was cool. Two cots lay in the rear. Shelves lined the left flank of the bunker with books, CDs, batteries, jars of vegetables, clothing folded and stacked. Crates of ammunition stacked about the floor. Scar brightened the room up with several lanterns. Along the right flank sat a long wooden pew honed from hardwood. Scar motioned for everyone to sit down and Dorn asked, “Fuel for the ATVs, where do you get it?”

  Scar and her men laughed. “Get it? You see all that we’ve built and you ask about fuel?”

  Dorn raised a hand, said, “I view that you were prepared.”

  “Prepared? We seen what was taking shape across the country.”

  “You weren’t the first.”

  “Naw, we wasn’t, it started with a group of brothers. Ex-military. Lawmen. Called themselves—”

  Dorn cut Scar off with “The Disgruntled Americans.”

  “You know of them?”

  “Know of them? Their actions spawned an underground movement. Was all over the radio. My father held a great respect for them.”

  “Your father sounded a lot like my father, knowledgeable.” Scar paused for thought, said, “Know why my father did as he did?”

  Dorn had no idea what Scar meant and asked, “Why he did what?”

  Poe said, “Created the Donnybrook.”

  “Don’t know much of it other than your father saying the Donnybrook was a dream from his childhood, that it was savage to those that failed him. But kind to those that swam in the salvage and sacrifice of the land.”

  Scar smiled and said, “You’re correct. He was tired, had lost his job in a tobacco plant. Drained his and my mother’s savings. Sold their home. Moved in with the brutality of a man I never knew, my grandfather, my mother’s father.”

  Wolf Cookie said, “Bellmont was like every other blue-collar American at first. Had been a slave to a system that was failing its people.”

  Scar continued. “But he saw the ink on the wall. Of what was coming. Had a plan. Give the working something more than NASCAR and pro wrestling. Something they could invest their souls into while viewing, let them be a part of it even from the outers looking in, let ’em suck their swills, sell dope or char food, do as the working do. Live without regret. They were the Donnybrook. But before he was removed he’d become restless with hate for what was consuming the working. Was eat up with violence, money, the power it professed, a mirage. After his being murdered, people kept waiting for another to pick up where he’d left off, someone who’d offer an outlet for their rage of struggling. But more jobs was lost. More wages cut. Politicians kept promising jobs would come back. Good manufacturing jobs. But they never did.” Scar paused. “Jobs was replaced with a new word, college. And kids who chose not to do as their grandparents or fathers did, they went to school. Got an education. Then the market got flooded and kids was broke with unpaid bank loans for tuition. Something that gets raised every year and they’d a degree that couldn’t land a job. While the rural dealt with prescription drug abuse, meth, and heroin. Addicti
ons that poisoned the lives of common folk.”

  Scar went on. “What my father gave to people every year was a gathering of like-minded souls and they wasn’t judged. He offered them an outlet, some he even give work to, helping to run the Donnybrook, of course if you’s a fighter, he paid you and fed you. Let the working feel alive until he was handed his ending.”

  Van Dorn rolled all of this around in his mind, glanced at August, who sat in the pew, head leaned back, arms crossed, fast asleep and shaking, the hound laid out sideways below his footing, and Dorn asked Scar, “What is this plan you speak of?”

  Scar smirked and said, “Plan is simple. Once Cotto finds the one that murdered my father and his, we kill them. Then we rebuild all that has been swindled and wait.”

  “You know his location?”

  “Yes, he’s set up a large encampment along the Ohio River at the old lighthouse in Leavenworth. Smart, he holds access to water travel. We know because not all of Cotto’s men are loyalists. Some are moles. Was loyal to my father and now me. They’re my eyes. My ears.”

  Scar paused. “We know the one who murdered our fathers is Chainsaw Angus. He’s somewhere within Harrison or Orange County. Some say he’s taken in by a Chinaman with ties to Triads, was to be willed in the training of ancient fighting techniques. Cotto’ll find him, torture him. Once he does, our eyes will be there. And then we’ll remove both of them from existence.”

  PART II

  THE SAVAGE

  The global economy has brought ruin for many, and he is a pioneer of a new type of person: the human who kills and expects to be killed and has little hope or complaint. He does not fit our beliefs or ideas. But he exists, and so do the others who are following in his path.

  —Charles Bowden, El Sicario

  COTTO

  Their trespass brought visions of men stained the color of rotted sweet potatoes. They’d hands that carved, sawed, and gutted others during their hunt for the wrongs brought against them. Littering Purcell’s insides with retched bubbling, constricting his intestines, culling him from shut eyes that peeled wide and full of red lines. Creating a hurt that built and bonded over the course of months and months that’d piled onto years and years of nightmares. And when the rumble of engines bombed down the long rutted road of dirt, stone, and rotted limbs, Purcell sat knowing it was one man’s ending, but another’s inception.