by Frank Bill
Cotto froze with shock from his father’s actions. Manny switched the Colt to his left, came with one confident foot after the other toward Raúl. Cotto followed. Watched his father’s right hand rise and reach for the .38. Manny knocked the square wallet to the floor. Pressed the .38 into Raúl’s right, which clutched his bleeding left hand. Pinned both hands to his chest until he screamed in dire pain.
Manny smiled. Pulled the .38 from Raúl. Cotto filmed his father’s actions with his eyes. Watched the weighted revolver’s butt hammer down over the bridge of Raúl’s complexion. Delivering a stress crack that expelled more gore and gave Raúl’s legs a new angle as he fell from his seated position within the chair, his knees thudded into the dusty wooden foundation.
Manny screamed to Cotto, “Get his wallet. Move!” Cotto came from his father’s side, from his stupor, kneeled. Peeled up the billfold from the flooring and opened it. Inside was the weight of a gold shield. An Eagle over top of it with a crest of letters that pronounced SPECIAL POLICE.
Cotto offered the open wallet to his father for viewing. Manny glanced down at the two halves that lay open in Cotto’s hands. Told Cotto, “In this land, no man can be trusted, every person is lawless. It is repercussion of poverty brought on by government that milks its people.” He paused, then barked to Raúl. “On your fucking belly, spread your hands over the floor.”
Twitching, Raúl begged, “But, señor…”
“You fuck!” Manny spit, delivered a boot to Raúl’s gut. Watched the air leave the pain of his facade as he dropped face-first to the wood. Spreading his arms out, whimpering like an abused canine. “You … You don’t know who it is I work for. They … they…”
“Shut your face. You can tell me what I want when I ask it of you,” Cotto’s father commanded Raúl. Grabbed the cuffs from the shelf, kneeled, pushed both revolvers down his waist, reached at Raúl’s thumb that hung by blood, tendon, and hurt, ripped it free, tossed it across the floor. Raúl screamed until he went silent with faint. Manny snapped the cuffs around left and right wrists. Wiped the blood onto his pants leg. Stood, pulled the heavy Colt from his waist, handed it to Cotto, and said, “Tonight, you learn resurrection.”
* * *
What Cotto learned that night so long ago, he would never forget: becoming a man, a soldier, accepting loss. But now, with the rumbling engines maneuvering through the paved neighborhoods of suburbia, that time seemed as lost and distant as the loud begging of men, women, and children within the elaborately structured brick homes, two-car garages, yards once manicured by lawn services, and hard-earned fortunes that no longer mattered. Their pleas for trade, their wads of cash that no longer held worth, their silver or gold antiques, family heirlooms, all were met with the sardonic grins of men whose only purpose was war, slaughter, torture, and rule, while keeping an eye or ear open for Chainsaw Angus. Regardless of ruling the land, which was his destiny, Cotto would not pass up killing the man who eliminated his father, Manny Ramos, while abducting young boys, turning them into soldiers to fight against their own.
Cotto and his men offered pain and death to the fathers, to the older men, just as Manny had taught Cotto: remove the strengths, and power shall fall, as the men were hindered in their ways and views. Unlike the children, the young sons whom he gathered like livestock to be broken down, built back up with training until he felt the children’d been trained enough to be soldiers for killing their own.
Some men stood begging, others defying. Only to get the same words that were offered at every hoarding and butchering: “We’ve come for your children. Your wives. We’ve no use for you males.”
Some fell to their knees, pyramiding their hands in front of them. Others thought they could swing a punch as easily as they did a golf club on the golf course. Or aim a rifle or pistol for personal protection like they did on the shooting range or the yearly hunting ventures they took or viewed upon their reality TV shows. Those fell just as quick as the kneelers. Hit the ground before they’d even had a chance to touch the trigger, let alone pull it. Dropping like the previous beggars and brawlers. The weekend-warrior wannabes.
Some were hung from door openings of cherry and oak, others were chopped and grated, left like party decorations from trees in yards or spread and spiked into the paved roads. Left for birds and buzzards to feed on, or a possum, raccoon, or coyote to snack on.
One of the Mutts told a man just before gutting him, “You got fattened by working for so long, your soft hands have lost the skills your ancestors possessed. ’Tis a shame, as you were misled like those in my country, you helped bleed the dollars while being led by a senseless blue-haired government. No bonus checks for you, gringo! Your country has turned as crooked as my own.”
“Please!” the man begged. “Please.”
“Ask that of your God, gringo. Ask that of your God.” And then the Mutt drew a line of red with his machete from beneath his chin, down his bare chest, and stopped at his waist. U-turned the blade’s angle, pressed hard, and cut upward. Letting the organs of color rainbow and splash to the ground.
Turning his back, the Mutt said, “I guess your God is busy, gringo, I guess your God is busy.”
* * *
Within the cages Cotto’s men loaded, the scared and bawling children, restrained each with zip ties, wrist over wrist behind their backs and placed upon the flatbeds. Hauled away from the suburbs within the small towns, their mothers whose soft skin and tanning-bed flesh would help them none.
Trucks were led by four-by-fours and ATVs, led first through several small towns from the north, south, east, and west. These were viewed as the easier takings. Those lined around shopping centers and fast-food dives. But there were those who were not taken, those of law enforcement or military service or sportsmen who hunted for nourishment. Those who possessed a knowledge of combat, of killing, of strategy. Those escaped. Disappeared into the rural landscape. A landscape Cotto and his men began working their way through. The back roads and farmland. Sometimes they’d gathered none in the rural areas as surprises of ambush awaited them from those who’d gathered and amassed with others who’d possessed know-how. Men and women with skills of survival. Skills of hunting and gathering like those of their pioneering ancestors. Those who’d relied less on technology and lived from the land. Farmed and gardened. Read The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The Foxfire books. The mechanics. The electricians. The carpenters. The laborers. Those nomadic men, women, and children who patched their own roofs, changed their own oil and spark plugs, sharpened their blades; those who’d less and less dependency on their government or TV or Internet. These were the types the Mutts feared if they were to create a commerce and grow in numbers. These were the people they wanted cleaned from the territory. And they wanted their children.
Those who fought back were hidden, unruly but needing organization as they battled against their own. They needed someone to lead them, not rule them, like several of the religious sects that had spawned the brawling meat cellars.
But with the appointment of a person or persons always comes power and the politics of ruling, meaning what was best for all was sometimes overlooked for the betterment of one.
* * *
From a distance Cotto’d heard the echo of rifle fire that crowned the valley. Eyes surveyed and scouted through the single glass circle mounted on top of a metal-housed HK33 assault rifle, magnifying images, centering shapes of human or animal, just as Manny had taught Cotto after so much blood had been spilt.
Lowering the rifle, Cotto swung his leg over his ATV. Cautious, he studied the ground for answers to the weight of his three men that lay waiting for the rot that the heat delivered. Cotto let others lead, in case something of this nature occurred. His way of thinking screamed ambush! Something Manny had learned him when they used one of their many routes for smuggling to the Midwest. A decoy to take the eyes off another. One makes it while the other is caught.
They’d just raided several homes. Came away with fresh bodies, several
young boys for training, and girls with their mothers for bargaining with their young and to satisfy a man’s needs when required regardless of force.
From the road Cotto indexed and thumbed pieces of spent brass. The metal, warm. He surveyed the hillside. Saw the sets of upturned leaves. Looked over at the deer. Came toward it. Saw the tenderloin carved from the spine. A hunter. Excited and angered, he stepped back toward the road’s edge. Prints. Several sets. But one set traveled back to the top. At an angle. They possessed know-how, knowledge of how to maneuver terrain.
If a hunter, he thought, his survival had been interrupted. Another man who would need to be murdered just as Cotto’s own father had been. But what if it were not an older generation of male?
Behind him, the sounds of the begging children and their mothers came from the barred-in flatbed. He crimped his eyes with the unrest of losing three men. Too soft, he thought. Migrating to this land did that to his people, and even to Manny. Getting away from struggling to get by; getting fat from booze, food, and training less and less; not having to keep an eye over your shoulder for those wanting to take what you had away. His hordes, his father’s Mutts. They lost that edge of having to earn their existence, to compete for their lives, like he and his father had done before migrating to America. Building connections with Alcorn and McGill and the others sometimes meant letting one’s guard rest. And their training and hardening waned, became less and less. But not Cotto’s. He never quit training.
When he opened his eyes, the crunch of tread to ground stopped beside him. One of his men pointed at the leaves with question-mark eyes. Cotto Ramos spoke, “’Twas a hunter. Maybe a real survivalist. What some call a pioneer. Is my guess. But not old. Have this feeling.” He’d viewed these men who scattered themselves about the land. Preppers. Storing grain, canned goods, barrels of water. Ammunition, guns. Those were his favorites, these men wanting to be warriors. Overweight, smoking fags, they were old and living in a comic book. They’d no deep-earned desire as to what it took to have that edge. That precision. They took on some type of Mad Max ideology of survival from too much American television, when they’d never tasted a grain of bitter. But this was not one of those types of men, Cotto could taste that.
Scanning the hillside for movement, one of Cotto’s men asked, “How do you come to this knowledge?”
His soldier was soft to the ways of continuation, to survival. His know-how was minuscule. He’s not suffered like me, Cotto thought as he turned to the slain deer. I shall enlighten him, and he pointed. “Study the parting of hide. Removal of organ. It’s called field dressing. They’ve done this action many times. Have a certainty of wielding. They got interrupted by Diego. Became rushed, moved without haste, quickly, like the young, not the old, took only the loin and—”
Behind them, a young female screamed from the cage, “Dorn! Free us from this hell! Return to—” A mother’s hand suffocated her words. The young female swiveled her eyes to her mother with a look of hate. Slowly it dissolved. Cotto turned to the cage, studied the girl. A witness to the demise, the slaughter, he thought to himself.
A playful malice scribed Cotto’s eyes and lips as he approached the barred flatbed. To the girl he spoke, “You hold knowledge to the one who did this.”
Tremoring, the mother could not look Cotto in the face as she told him, “She speaks with fear, with ignorance. She’s out of her wits. Rambling. She—”
Cotto’s words shifted to the mother. “Silence your tongue, bitch, or I’ll remove it quick as a winter frost. I’m the judge, the speaker to your child. Look at me, not from me, when you offer words.” Back to the young female, he questioned, “Offer to me, girl, your namesake?”
“Sheldon.”
Smirking, Cotto asked, “Tell me, then, what is this Dorn you bark about?”
ANGUS
Those first days were ones of vibration. Angus’s stomach muscles belted tight, eyes felt scooped, his mind running soupy as gravy with too much milk and not enough flour. Hungering for amphetamines; the slit-eyed man known as Fu offered Angus a shovel.
“Hell’s this for?”
“Digging.”
Angered, Angus questioned. “How deep?”
“How tall are you?”
“Look, you aim to kill me, I ain’t sectioning the soil for my own damn grave. Divide my brain or knife my fuckin’ heart.”
“No grave. How tall are you, six-one?”
“’Bout that.”
“Dig to shoulder level.”
“For?”
“Your head. Now quit speaking and dig so you can learn.”
Once the hole was deep enough, Angus asked, “Now what?”
“Now remove yourself of garment, get into the hole, keep upright.”
Undressed to nothing more than his boxers, Angus got into the hole. Looked up at Fu, who began shoveling soil back in around Angus until he’d gotten to Angus’s waist. “Raise your arms out away from your sides.” Angus raised his arms. Fu began filling the hole with soil once more.
Buried to his neck, Angus was immobile. “What if I gotta shit or piss?”
Fu smiled. “Nothing is obstructing you from doing so.”
For several days Angus was spooned liquid with herbs from a ceramic-fired bowl. First they were spit out. Then devoured and sipped with a gagging aftertaste. The execution of ingesting such an awful concoction eventually waned Angus’s ache. Rid his body and mind of the want for toxic abuse.
Soups and rice came. A ritual of curing Angus’s dope sickness. It lasted days. He was immobile, couldn’t move. Therefore he couldn’t hurt himself. Was left to sweat the ache and pain from his pores.
When Fu finally dug him out, Angus was ropy-lean, dirt-stained muscle with little to no body fat. Tattoos of the names of men he’d beaten in bare-knuckle brawls still scrolled over his frame. Fu dragged him to a chair. Seated him where he sipped herbal tea until he regained the circulation in his limbs.
Fu shaved Angus’s head smooth with a straight razor. Did the same to his bristled face. Let him shower and clean himself once the feeling of motor functions had returned to his frame. He drank in the water that beaded upon his body, washing away the sweat. The soil, the grit. The piss and the shit. He came to his cot, pulled the cedar trunk from beneath it, where he found boxers, socks, and black military fatigues; black T-shirts and black boots. All to Angus’s exact measurements.
Once he was dressed, he did not sit, he stood and waited for instruction.
When Fu entered the concrete room, he told Angus, “Everything you know must be relearned. But you must know. If you were to try and go back to your old ways of cooking crank, running dope, and double crosses. If you were to defy my trust that you must earn, you would become a hemorrhage, a lump of useless matter in my world, your own self would be splayed upon the ground that you trespass within minutes of being recognized for the murder of Bellmont McGill. This you must be aware of. Am I clear?”
“Why are you offering this to me?”
“Because now you are sober of the drugs that poisoned your inner chemistry. You could leave and function with clear thoughts. Though I doubt you’d live long with a massive bounty being offered by Scar McGill. But if you stay, you will only better yourself. I want you to know you’ve options. That this is not a prison.”
Angus stood thinking of Shogun Assassin. A film he’d watched at an early age with his father, about a rogue samurai who offers his son a choice between a sword and a ball. To choose the ball would mean death. To choose the sword would mean life. The son chose the sword, unknowing his fate regardless of his choosing. Angus looked to Fu. “Let’s get this goddamned betterment of self under way.”
From there he was shown stretches and postures. Bending and kneeling to awkward positions. Warming the stiff from his tendons, ligaments, and joints. Keeping his body aligned, holding the postures for minutes. Building toward hours of stiffness and numbness. Then came the practice of strikes. Punches executed at any and all angles, much
like boxing, but much stricter, with reverse punches, vertical punches, uppercuts, hammerfists, and backfists. Followed by kicks thrown over and over. Side kicks, flip kicks, roundhouse kicks, front kicks, crescent kicks, back-leg traps, front-leg traps. All aimed from the waist to the ankles. Nothing high or flashy. The tendons and ligaments of Angus’s body heated until he felt as though they were putty being fired in a furnace. Going from soft to softer, burning until he could feel nothing but confetti dotting and flowing through his limbs.
* * *
A numb rang through his feelers and standers from the pain given by the saber-toothed beast. Angus flipped a generator switch in his brain. Found his second wind. Became wide-eyed. Twisted and brought his elbow into the man’s nape. His appendage throbbed with numb. He clubbed the missing link of man. Crimson poured from his arm till the man dropped in the slick puddles of wound.
Angus pointed the .45 down into the rear of the man’s scalp. Added to the mess on the floor.
Lungs heaved and Angus listened to the faint bellow of a female travel from downstairs. Twitching with electric rage, Angus wanted to leave, but stepped over the dead man. Glanced for a rag to tourniquet the flow of red from his arm.
Gathering his bearings, he held the pistol high, knowing what he must do, what he had to know. Holding the vision with the basement opening, nothing more than a dark void as he approached. Scents of decay and chemical swam into his inhale.
As he stood in the basement’s opening, wooden steps descended into an abyss with a faint glow at the bottom. Slurred speech begged, “Somebody … please … help me—”
The jar and pound in Angus’s ears from the rhythm in his chest made it hard to distinguish sound when coupled with the hurt within his arm, which worsened with each breath. The voice spoke again, “Please … help—”
Angus took that first step down the basement steps. Creaks shifted and bounced. Eyes adjusted with glints of light scraping through the cracks. Making out objects, webbed and rusted along the joists above. Traps, rungs of fence wire, machete, axe, and hammers lay on a wooden workbench attached to the wall. Light came from the rear of the basement. Seeped and burned over legs spread, arms strapped by reeds of leather, and the body were that of a female. Marred with bruise and filth. Panty and bra removed, strewn on the floor. One eye swollen like a bee sting. Nostrils pasted with crusty fluid. She shivered, but not from cold. It was shock. Trauma. A loaded deck of all discrepancies.
