The Savage(3)

Leaf, rock, and limb accompanied Van Dorn’s descent.

His twenty-one-year-old frame took the jags of land. Marring and denting his arms and shins, until he lay at the bottom of the hill.

Gathering his bearings, catching the air that’d been knocked from him; adrenaline coursed through his body, blotted out the ache that would come later, after the rush, if he lived long enough to encompass the hurt.

Moans reared from the bed of the truck in the road. Scuffed-leather-covered feet came before Van Dorn with the hum of insects and a smell that made the insides of his mouth water and his stomach buckle. He wanted to retch as his eyes made out splotched and stained clothing. Over the dented and moist chest that drew to a cryptic leathery face. Lidless orbs, unblinking. Lips misshapen, revealing teeth and tongue. This texture of man looked as though he’d eaten a plate of explosives with a chain saw and lived to tell about it.

One of the men said, “Look at the size of this man-child.” The other said, “Bring him to his feet, Cotto will enjoy soldiering you.” The man grasped and pulled Van Dorn by his locks to bent knees.

Feeling his hair give, Van Dorn knew in order to survive, to escape, he’d have to do just as his father had done that night long ago. He’d have to kill. And he thought of the milk jugs filled with soil or water, used as makeshift targets. Empty cans of Miller High Life and Evan Williams bottles shot from fence posts. Or walnuts sprouting from tree limbs. Offering a marksmanship that dropped deer, rabbit, squirrel, and groundhog from their life-span. Left to be carved and cleaned for subsistence. He thought of that night. Of a man’s recognizable face before his father had told him to turn away. Then came the drum-crush of gunfire. And when he viewed the sheen of flesh again, it was an unimaginable sauce of flinted bone.

Like now, the tides had turned from a doe killed for eating to human sacrifice for the continuation of one’s existence.

Being dragged across the road, Van Dorn struggled to find his balance amongst the memory from that time he couldn’t bury. From years before, emotions of dread and the pulse of testosterone turned to fuel for his actions, for his continuance.

The one dragging him paused. Looked down at Van Dorn. His head twisted side to side. He’d an insignia branded upon his horsehide neck, a spider spread with tactile legs and a red dot upon its center.

Van Dorn had seen it before. But where was unknown.

Pawing and reaching at the hand that held him, Van Dorn reacted, palmed his Ka-Bar knife attached at his hip. Pulled and swiped upward at the arm. A line erupted with the ooze of red so dark it was black.

The man released Van Dorn, screaming, “Motherfucker!”

Another hand slapped at his shoulder from behind, tried to rein him in. Wielding the blade just as his father had taught him, Van Dorn met the digits of the man’s hand. Pain erupted thick as sap spit from trees. “Heathen bastard!”

As he shuffled backward toward the primered truck, Van Dorn’s back stung. The ache and scrape of his descent was weighing in. Sheathing his blade, he slung the leather strap from his back attached to the .30-30. To his front, a man bore down on him with a pistol. Van Dorn pointed at the form. Took in his beaver-skinned complexion, black hair, and acne-pinched cheeks with dead eyes. Van Dorn envisioned a deer lifting its head after eating acorns from the ground; he imagined aiming for its heart, and he pulled the trigger.

The man’s expression parted out of the temporal line of his skull. Another shape came at Van Dorn; he chambered a new piece of brass. Hands bloody and pulsing, raised. Energized by fear, Van Dorn told himself to shoot. Shoot as his father had done that evening long ago.

And he did. Skull bone tarred over the road.

After many months of living out of eyeshot, watching the harm of others while dodging scavengers and this horde of Spanish-speaking men, he’d now killed two of them in seconds.

Cries and whines reached for Van Dorn from the truck. He viewed what he had overlooked: an iron cage calcified and welded to its bed, restraining ivory outlines. Visages bruised, dirty, and starved of faith. “Help us!” they cried. “Please!”

Women and children. Young boys and girls. But no men.

Towering, large, and muscled, Van Dorn was the apparition of hope. Hair smeared across his head like mud, at odd lengths. Smudged face and trembling, but not broken. Then the familiar—a female with sweaty strands and a blemished outline spoke, “Dorn, help us. Please. They … they’ve slaughtered Daddy.”

The Sheldon girl from over around Frenchtown. The Widow and Van Dorn’s father helped her family run fence line for separation of their cows and hogs two summers before this hell hit. Helped them build a hog pen. Butcher, process, package, and freeze their beef and pork. He and the girl had fished, hunted, rode mules. Shared the first of several kisses, groping, and adolescent lust.

The roar of more engines from the distance rattled and scoured the land. Around the bed of the truck came the third frame, dragging his leg. A pistol raised with the same spider tattoo across the back of his hand. Van Dorn trained his rifle at the outline and followed the only word that coursed through his mind: Kill!

*

Hidden by the tarnished chrome trunks of trees and rock, Van Dorn climbed back up the hillside, .30-30 in his grip. Heart bunched in his chest. Out of breath. Shaken by his actions of survival, he turned to take a final glimpse of his eruption from the hilltop.

Below him, the roar of more vehicles had pulled up and stopped. Men like those he’d shot stepped from their trucks and four-wheelers.