The Savage

by Frank Bill

  Angus rolled from the man, stood up. Watched the man work to standing, holding on to his limp appendage. Let it hang, swivel back and forth like a cat’s broken tail; he lifted his right hand into a fist. “Come now, you heathen fuck!”

  Do or die, adrenaline was all Angus held within his cavities. He shook his head, offering the sentiment of no, don’t do it. The beast of man came forward once again. Angus counted the short steps. Waited till the stench of flesh filled his inhale. Weighted his senses with presence. Grabbed his arm, went across the man’s throat, curved to his neck’s rear, clamped down, bent the man to him as if he were headless, cranked hard. Kept the man’s throat beneath his pit, until the gagging for wind quit and the man was dead weight.

  Angus released him. Let his shape litter the floor of dirt and dead gladiators.

  Angus looked to the torches that were held by silhouettes from above. “Now what? I’ve beat what you’re offering.”

  Alcorn laughed. “Ain’t done yet.”

  He looked to Mick. “Toss him the blade.”

  From his side, Mick unsheathed a ten-inch length of steel. Dropped it into the pit.

  “Ain’t killing him. He’s weak, spent.”

  “Nobody’s asking ye to kill him, the winner scalps the weaker.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  From behind Angus, shell shot rang out. Pieces of black soil wall crumbled before him. And Corbin spoke: “If you don’t I’ll part your pan with a twelve-gauge slug. And all this’d been a waste of time and I can keep my territory.”

  Angus thought of Fu, his sickness. The medicine he needed to find. To coax him. The man had saved his life from ruin. He was indebted to him for that. Had to offer the same action. Couldn’t do that if he were dead. He retrieved the blade. Took in the bloodstains of rust, scalp hairs, and hardened plasma from the fallen. If ever he was to see Fu again, save his existence, he had to do what must be done in order to see another day.

  Rolling the man-beast to his chest, Angus bent over his wide back, reached down and expanded the man’s nostrils with his fingers, reared his head back, met the man’s peak of forehead with the sharp edge. Parted skin from skull. Didn’t stop till he’d cut a fold of flesh that was nearly twelve inches long and six inches wide. And all the surrounding men from above cheered with a mad and heated debauchery.

  COTTO

  Stringing out from its socket like a rubber ball banded to a wooden paddle, the eyeball hung in the air and Sergio begged and pleaded. “Please…” His nose had been rearranged with a small mallet. Cotto straddled him, his Mutts watched, he laughed. “The pain you’ve brought is of your own devising. You fuck me, I fuck you a hundred times harder.”

  “Please, Cotto. Please! What you are doing, it is lunatic. Clamoring revenge for your father, enslaving others to rule. You … you need me.”

  “Need you? When you’re spouting of my father, it is of one man’s opinion, your opinion. Of which I find no agreement. He would’ve ruled this territory with or without McGill or Alcorn. My father held a fondness for these gringos, a fondness that I do not even consider, except for Dorn. To place pain upon them brings me pleasure. Our people, where we come from, all we’ve known is struggle and belittlement from a class of people that didn’t govern; they ruled and stole and killed to appease their indulgences. I’m only spreading the gospel of what some in this country have seen as never affecting them.”

  Blood bubbled pink from the uneven lips of Sergio as he told Cotto, “You … you’ve gone mad. This vengeance to conquer, to capture Dorn will lead you to your death.”

  Coming from straddling Sergio, Cotto approached a metal table of flaking colors and corrosion where instruments were laid out: knives, handsaws, machete, hatchet, hammers, clamps, and forceps. From it he grasped a hooked blade. Stepped to Sergio, pressured it into the corner of his mouth. “Tell me, what is the plan that Scar has devised with your intel?”

  “She … she awaits your capture of Angus. Then—”

  “What, what?!”

  “I … I inform her of his capture. She and her militia attack your encampment. Kill you. Your men, the remaining Mutts and Angus. Free those that you’ve enslaved.”

  Laughing, Cotto says, “That is all? She waits for me to do the hunting, using her mole? You’re as pathetic as she.”

  Sergio mumbled his plea once more, “You need me.”

  Cotto cackled. “Need you, for what?” Looking to Ernesto, Cotto said, “I know what you need, get me Cutthroat. We need to end this clemency as it is unacceptable.” Then he turned back to Sergio. “Tell me all you know of Van Dorn.”

  * * *

  His skin lapsed, folded, and webbed like chunks of chewed and spit taffy, pink and slobbery. His legend was that of a bad birthing from a matron and sire addicted to the dope that was sometimes needled into the veins, other times fired in a smudged glass bottle, fired from the bottom and freebased.

  It was an explosion of the caine being butaned from the bottle’s bottom while the mother held him that disfigured him as an infant. Skin grafts weren’t much use where he came from; regardless, his eyes rang blue as the Pacific, but his flesh was corncob rough and spiraled as if he’d been branded by the devil’s flame. His hair grew in patches of outgrowth, splotched here and there; he lived in an orphanage until a villager named Juan, who’d worked for a major cartel, growing the green stink of gummy bud, adopted him as his own, raising the boy to wield a blade, for which the boy developed a fondness, helping with those early harvests. Juan taught the boy the age-old art of slaughtering and butchering, of becoming immune to the squeal of swine or the bovine losing its moo.

  By the time the adopted father had passed, the boy was old enough to earn his keep, taken in by a cartel leader known as the King; the boy was schooled by a man in the lessons of what happens when men and women deceive their employers. That man was the Ox, and the Ox named the boy Cutthroat. When Manny took out the King, he offered life to Cutthroat, letting him nurture his skills as he lived within a basement beneath the King’s barn. A room of tools, some blunt, others sharp. With the years he’d honed his trade. Now at his disposal were drums of acid. Steel tubs and areas for boiling, pruning, carving, and draining. He’d become a professor of death.

  Sergio sat bound, the one eye hanging, tears pitted down his cheek, mixed with the blood from his busted features and serrated lips. He’d listened to the clomps climbing the steps behind Cotto. While candlelight bounced over the concrete walls of spray-painted graffiti, until an eerie shadow lurched through the entrance. And Cotto’s eyes shifted to the right, then back at Sergio. “What do you know of Van Dorn?”

  From behind Cotto stepped the shape of a bony and slumped figure. Cutthroat. He carried a square case that was laid upon the steel table of tools. Flame jumped and rimmed about the room, shadowing the singed skin of the man. Over left and right hands he wore black rubber gloves, a matching leather butcher’s apron over a shirtless body of mangled and knotted creases. Thumbs flipped the locks of the case. The lid opened.

  With his back to Sergio, Cutthroat’s lips parted with a raspy tone. “When a line is drawn across the gut, everything on the other side drops and splashes to the floor. In order for this to happen, a sharp instrument is required. A person’s life is then measured by seconds as blood exits from the wound, the head becomes light while existence is a blurring rush of events, shadows painted with a brush.” Pausing, Cutthroat turned to Sergio, holding a blade to his throat. Ran it across his neck without touching the skin. “Quickest is this swipe. The parting of one’s box for sound. When the jugular is parted, everything a person has done to that point in life becomes one heated pool of red.” Cutthroat held the blade over the candlelight. Heated it. Then turned back to the table behind him, laid it down. “I’ve removed nails. One after the other. Submerged digits with fuel. Shit burns, stings, blackens. I’ve ignited fingers. A body can only withstand so much pain before the numb overtakes the nerve endings and the person passes out.”
>
  Cotto watched from the entrance, hands holding open his leather-bound pad of notes and paper, working a coal pencil, the face of Van Dorn coming through in profile; he waited with a glint of amusement and frustration.

  Turning back to Sergio, Cutthroat’s face was lit by candlelight as if a jack-in-the-box had jumped from the dark splotches devoid of incandescence. Skin connected to the corners of his lips, which were jagged and greasy. Cutthroat had no brows, no whiskers, his face was like a papier-mâché mask created in art class. He approached Sergio again. Leaned toward him. Grasped his chin, the one eye still hanging loose as he lifted the face to meet his glare.

  “Cotto has questions. It is best to answer.”

  “They’s nothing to tell. He … he … Van Dorn was raised by his father, who was poisoned by Dillard Alcorn. He’s a survivalist. A young man who was raised from the rural land by the older-time pioneering ways. Th-th-that’s all Scar has offered.”

  Cutthroat asks, “And?”

  “And what?”

  “There’s more. You’re holding back. Your kind always holds back truth.”

  Pause.

  “There are rumors of others. They’re … they’re gathering. Building hierarchies in the woods.”

  “Who?”

  “Men, mostly, survivalists. Some have lost their spawn, their wives. Others have never been touched. Have been bunkered. They’re in clans being led by warlord types of religious congregations. They’re territorial. Tribal. Residing in different counties. Battling amongst themselves, pitting one man to represent them, their people, in some blood feud they call ‘meat cellars.’ Their numbers are multiplying. They’re armed. Unruly.”

  Cotto came forward. “I heard this rhetoric pronounced by the Pentecost. I possess something they do not: their futures, their children. They will not kill a child in battle, and because of that I will remove every one of them from existence. And I’ll do with the help of this Van Dorn and Sheldon.”

  Cutthroat looked to Cotto, who backed away, waved a hand in disgust and anger. “Do with him as you’ve done with many, he’s lost all worth to me.”

  Sergio tried to kick his legs, which were bound to the chair legs, his torso jerked. “You need me!”

  And Cutthroat questioned Cotto, “Your judgment is final?”

  Cotto came back toward Sergio. “Tell me what it is I need of you?”

  Sergio drooled a Pepto-Bismol froth from his mouth and told Cotto, “I can get you into the encampment without battle. Without sacrificing numbers.”

  “You’re an idiot. I know where it is, how do you think I tracked you?”

  “You … you don’t know where the traps and trip wires lay in camouflage. You can bait me … bait me with explosives. They’ll let me in. Then you can detonate me … they … they won’t know what hit them … it’d be—”

  Cutthroat said, “Unexpected.”

  Cotto cleared his throat, thinking of Manny. Of how he’d baited the King with the immigrants to enter his ranch, and a smile laced with vehemence shaped his lips. And he asked Sergio, “Why would you defy me only to turn around and help me?”

  “To save face before being removed.”

  “Martyrdom. Aren’t you the clever one.” Cotto paused and contemplated Sergio’s offer. Closed his sketch of Dorn and said, “We must move now. Hit hard. Hit fast. I’ll get Chub and Minister to rig you with C4. I’ll call upon my soldiers for their task of demolition.”

  * * *

  Over the months he’d multiplied them in numbers. Some had long hair, some medium length, others colored pink, fire-engine red or moss green on their ends, while their natural colors grew back. They’d piercings, concert shirts, or bright-colored cotton worn to holed and ragged. Some were skinny. Lean or athletic, those who had been obese had been whittled down in stature. Starved of sugars. Nourished with rice, beans, and mystery meats. Their frames wafted vinegary and tart from bathing in the river. They mirrored the others who had followed direction, those who formed ten lines of five. Their hands at their sides, watching and waiting to learn the discipline of soldiering. To be prepared for raids and the slaughter of their own.

  They were children, boys, younger and older, ripped from families. Their fathers murdered before them. Their mothers, enslaved and unseen.

  Day after day. Week after week, the young boys were awoken at the crack of dawn. Fed. Shuffled into groups of five. Shown how to shoot their rifles, how to load the banana clips of the AKs. Given cocaine cut with gunpowder. Sometimes heroin or marijuana. Shown how to ingest the drugs through snorting or smoking. Cotto had to put his drugs to good use, considering they’d no longer earn him tender. They’d yield him blood and territory.

  At first some would not give in. Take the drugs. They were forced. Some died immediately, as their bloodstream couldn’t handle the rush rocketing to their hearts. They were hidden deep beneath the soil of a mass grave dug by the hands of the orphaned males who could handle the excitement. Their bodies able to withstand the surge of potency. Those were the ones left with the pang of addiction shotgunning through their young arteries, and they soon found a way to numb the hurt and shock of what they were living within, exiled as junkie soldiers in a rural hell.

  But now, after weeks and months of training, it all came down to the survival of the strongest, and Cotto had lined the young men who could not meet his demands to become soldiers, lined them up in front of those who could and had survived his training; the weak ones stood snot-nosed and scared. Bloodshot eyes, smeared by dirt that rimmed their cheeks and nostrils, meshed with bruise and confusion.

  Cotto pointed. “These that stand before you are those that would not heed my words, week after week. Would not listen to command nor follow direction, month after month. Now they will kneel, pay the tokens for their stubbornness.”

  Each stood, their hands zip-tied tightly in front of them. Shirtless and pale. Some with lips busted like spores of bacteria. Others with red encasing and running from their nostrils. Cotto’s men stood behind each boy. Kicked them from behind in the bends below their hamstrings, helped them kneel quicker. Then the men backed away as another man came behind the first boy, whose hair broomed down over his eyes, cheeks gored by pus that expanded like terrain on a U.S. map. The man stood with a length of leather. Reared his arm back, snapped the leather over the boy’s back. The boy rolled his lips to bare his teeth and gums, while his eyes juiced moist and he screamed, “No, please! No! I’ll do as you tell, I’ll—” He tried to stand, was popped by the leather once more, and dropped down face-first to the ground, whimpering and slobbering in pain. Cotto told the boy, “You’ll do as commanded and this is your reminder.”

  All of the boys’ faces filled with tears, those watching and those being corrected. Their cheeks watered in front of one another. Torsos twitched as if being surged by electricity. A learning tool that bad things happen in a world turned to ruin. When rules have been omitted.

  The man who wielded the leather pulled the first boy up by his locks, lashed him five times, bringing swells and blood. Then he moved to the next, who tremored about the bony indentions of back, tactile arms, and green hair. A puddle of warm spread down the inner thighs of the boy’s legs. The first lash dropped the boy to his chest. Cotto stood, shaking his head. “Weak,” he muttered. “When I was of your age, fifteen or sixteen, I was on the front lines with my father. Earning as a man. Each of you are worms who’ve had a spoon held before your mouths for too damn long.”

  Afraid to move, to turn away from what their minds were registering, all of the boys mashed their eyes shut for long jags of time. Hoping the sounds of cruelty would end. Lessen. That this nightmare that they’d found themselves within would cease so they could get a fix and uncover silence. Recess into the caves of their consciences. Find that time before everything went so wrong. Only it was about to get worse.

  And now all of the training came down to this as Cotto told the young soldiers, “Those who’ve followed my words shall have their fi
rst mission tomorrow morning led by me and my men. Each shall administer at least one kill or be killed themselves.”

  * * *

  Morning dew coated leaves, limbs, and ridges of farmland and forest greens and tans like fresh fluid from a ruptured artery, while the band of men and boys dug into the perimeter of hillside surrounding the encampment of Scar McGill and her militia.

  Fingers rested on triggers, eyes followed those who stood within tree stands in ragged clothing bearing high-powered rifles, keeping a lookout for the threat of unknown and unwanted trespass.

  Cotto had handpicked five teams of ten boys led by his own Mutts, each heavily armed with AKs, ammo, and explosives. Their complexions painted like humans devoid of tissue or fiber, just coal blacks and chalky whites, similar to the ink that decorated Cotto’s appearance. Sergio had ridden within the dark of late morning, sat center, guiding direction, the way he’d traveled behind the backs of Cotto and the Mutts. Warm country air twigged his face, offered the last remnants of feeling or sight, elements of a life that’d been taken for granted, a nature he’d never know again once the ATVs they rode were finally parked more than a mile away from McGill’s encampment. Five men led ten boys spread out into a web of dope-induced bodies anticipating their first kills below the stone embankments.

  Settled where Sergio had told them they’d be out of eyeshot, away from trip wires and traps that would alert the militia to their presence.

  Sergio had been stopped by Cotto’s hand gripping hard at his shoulder, his one eye duct-taped over from the torture; he staggered at the sudden halt, the plastic that lined his body like thick sponging leeches in a stagnant pool of pond was rechecked, the restraint cut from his wrists, Cotto armed him with an empty rifle and pistol, shook his head. “This is how you repay the loyalty you’ve lost with me. You could call it martyrdom, but it is only the beginning of your demise.”

  Sergio stood tart tongued, duct tape and ripped cloth rounding his head to patch his sight, wanting to say, “Or the end of your reign.”