He Runs (Part One) (9 page)

‘Evil thrives where good men do nothing,’ Man says out aloud. ‘Or where good men have all died out.’

He turns to look and sees that the riders have disappeared. A few people remain in the streets, some leading the prisoners to the iron-barred box of cripples. With little mercy they throw the prisoners inside. One of the captors turns and cries something inaudible down the street.

Man waits and watches. Something inside him tells him that he needs to see whatever comes next. A big man emerges in the road, giant cleaver in one hand and a glowing red-orange pan in the other. He holds the pan with a thick oven glove and Man can see that he wears blood-stained overalls. He’s the butcher.

As he approaches the cage one of the captors pulls at a creature inside it, drags the deformed body to a spot just outside, a brown, grass-covered verge. Man squints, sees the body wriggle and writhe, a gag stuffed into its mouth. It rolls in spastic circles over and over on the greenery. Man sees why. The creature has only one arm and one leg.

The butcher and the captors laugh and point at the cripple, talk amongst themselves. Then the butcher steps forward, rests the pan on a nearby rock and puts a foot on the cripple’s head, presses it into the earth. He turns and a smaller man grabs the remaining arm, holds it out straight.

One swing of the large cleaver is all it takes to remove the cripple’s arm, sending his body shivering into a volatile spasm. The butcher asks for the pan but the smaller man fails to pick it up. The handle is too hot for him, even with the glove. The butcher retrieves it, as blood gushes onto the ground, turning the brown grass red. The fleshy stump is seared by the burning pan; the cripple has stopped moving. The butcher slaps him and gets no response. He looks at the smaller man who holds his arms out in a way that says he doesn’t understand. The butcher laughs and turns to the cripple’s body. He lifts the cleaver above his head and brings it down. Once. Twice. Three times.

Man takes a deep breath and then lets it go. He sees the two men picking up parts like they’re about to construct a mannequin. The smaller man has a leg and an arm, the butcher, the torso and a head. As they approach the iron cage the butcher moves to it, holds the severed head up and talks to the prisoners. Carefully, he sets the head down a short distance from the cage so that it is facing the occupants. And then he and the smaller man and the remaining crowd move off in the direction of the main street.

Man looks away and sighs, grabs for his weapons and holds them tight. He knows that when he makes contact they’ll never take him like that. If anything, he’ll do something awful, something deserving of a place on the church spikes. For Man too, is a survivor. He has made it this far. He is sure he can go further.

                            ***********************

Man contemplates the darkness of what he saw the day before, the treatment of human beings as nothing more than livestock. In a way, they were nothing more than livestock, even before the lights went out. They were just never eaten. A lucid vision appears in his mind, a memory of what he once saw when the televisions worked and man-harnessed lightning surged through insulated metal. He remembers watching a TV documentary about battery; seeing them, malformed and stuffed into cages, or crammed into an aluminium warehouse, falling over each other, pecking at manufactured seeds until they were deemed old enough and plump enough to massacre. He remembers those chickens, the expressionless look in their eyes, the constant echoes of clucking idiots who were born into a life that was not worth living. Man remembers those birds and laughs. Compared to what he saw the chickens had it easy. They were not starved and hacked to pieces, one limb at a time by their own fucking species. 

There are many sights that Man cannot un-see, many scenes of horror etched into his mind, some of which he was responsible for, but what he saw, what he can still see, stands alone at the top of a depraved mountain. 

Man looks through his rucksack, sorts the items that remain and lines them up on the grass. He has all the tools, all the equipment he needs to survive. But he has no food. The goat rotted quickly and the tinned goods perished long before that. 

He stands up on wobbly legs, the first time he has stood up in days, and looks over the village. He scratches his beard with long nails, feels the drying skin loosen and scatter like snowflakes. Everything in his being tells him to leave the village alone, to run far away and never come back. But there will be other villages like this one. And he is still being hunted by Smith and his remaining comrades. He looks at the village, the bridge and the barbed wire gate and the guards standing either side of it. He can't say for sure but they look clumsy and weak, novices to the art of commensurate combat. He knows he could kill them. Destroy their bodies in just a few moves but then what. He'd have a whole village descend upon him and before he knew it he'd be limbless, rolling around in his shit and blood, moaning and wheezing like the battery people he sees in the cage.

A thought bursts into to his mind from of the darkness.

'Why are they taking one limb at a time?' he says out loud. 'Surely they'd take a whole body. Or multiple bodies with a whole village to feed.' He sits down, removes the karambit from his waistband and runs his finger along the edge. 'Maybe there are other cells in the village. Maybe the prisoners I saw are being punished. Or maybe the village isn't full of life. It could be just a handful of cannibals, preying on the weak. I can't take them on and win by myself. That's out of the question. Unless I sneak in at night, work my way through each building. There could be children. And women. But I need to eat! And I could murder a fucking beer, if there are any.'

Man laughs to himself, amused at the fact all he can think of is having beer. It's that urge inside him, the gene-deep addiction that he'll never escape from. His father had it, had it hard and used it as an excuse to distant himself from a child that he did not understand. Or did not want to. And Man saw this, understood it as the only behaviour to befall a father. A thirst that is never quenched; a mouth, desert dry with anything except for the booze.

When
it
happened, Man was drunk. So drunk that he couldn't comprehend what was happening, where he was or how to make
it
all better. Darkness befell him in that intoxicated state. But he finds a tempered solace in knowing that in their own way, they all, each and every one of them, escaped from something that night. As if on cue the flashing images roll through Man's head like an 8mm projector, a reflection of an event so horrible that he cannot believe it ever happened. He's just glad he didn't see it. In his mind he sees a woman, lying on the floor, her frock hitched up over her thighs, her legs surprisingly hairless. A set of bright blue eyes glowing like fluorescent sapphires, burning with the passion of a fighter. Muddy brown hair flowing wildly over bare shoulders and pink lips pursed together. Her other lips emerge from beneath the frock and then he jumps on her, holds her to the muddy earth, hand clamped around her throat as he enters. He isn't gentle. And she doesn't want him. But his hips pump away like a dog on a mission to impregnate, her screams muffled by bloodied hands, her eyes meeting those of her little girl who doesn't understand what's happening. If she did she'd run far away and hide or go and get help but she can't. She's too young, her brain is creating an instinctual conflict and she doesn't know which way to go. So she stays, dumbfound and crying, the curved flashing of white buttocks pumping away on her screaming mother.

Man slaps himself, hard and fast so that his nerves tingle with a searing venomous pain. He shakes his head, shakes off the images and his mind cuts to his surroundings. He hates that vision, that night and what it’s lead to. ‘I tried to save them,’ he whispers to the wind. ‘I tried.’

He looks to the village once more, has another thought to sneak in, incapacitate a few people and steal what he needs. But with a town so large it would be blind luck if he was able to find what he wants. He knows he has to get in there, show strength and power, become accepted and preferably, not eaten. He wants a bed to sleep in, a roof over his head and beer and food in his belly.

                            ************************

The sun sits high in the afternoon sky, its cancerous rays blasting down to Earth at a speed unfathomable. Man removes his top, bundles it into the rucksack and pulls out the karambit. He rolls onto his belly, squints hard through one good eye, one bad, and looks at the cripples in their cage. Yesterday he counted sixteen. Now he sees fifteen. They took one yesterday and he heard the cries. Didn't care to look. 

Man looks up at the sun, then down at the cripples, wonders if they care about the sun burn. He wonders if the burned skin adds to the flavour, wonders if the sick cunts inside the cannibal village are roasting them slowly outside. 

He rolls onto his back, gets the karambit and opens up one of the scars on his arm. The skin splits easily and the redness begins to trickle from the wound. Man puts the blade down, smears blood on his index finger and draws a vertical line down his belly. Some more blood makes a horizontal line. Then four small ones, each protruding from the points of the longer lines. He looks down, admires his handy work. A swastika. A peace offering of sorts, his ticket into a village that he's not sure he wants to visit. But an urge he can't explain, a pugnacious throb in his mind and in his guts, pushes him forward. He's both scared and intrigued by the unknown, as most humans are unless they are psychopathic. And he's excited at the prospect of violence, especially against those who deserve it. He avoids it where and when he can but he receives a morbid enjoyment of punishing those who he deems are evil. 

************************

Man walks down the dirt track, each step sending an electric shock up his body, a glorious surge of adrenaline. He holds his arms out, rucksack in one hand, bone-axe in the other. He puffs his chest out so the newly painted symbol shines in the sunlight. The karambit is tucked neatly in his waistband. 

As he nears the bridge he gets a closer look at the cage and its inhabitants. A herd of butchered carcasses, alive but dead at the same time, rolling around, struggling to stand up. A few feet closer and he sees a trough, half filled with brown water. 

'Poor bastards!' he says to himself as the karambit digs into his back, makes him aware of the deadly curve of the blade, ignites the urge to kill the guards and attack the village. He breathes deeply, closes his eyes and opens them. The urge diminishes. 

The guards have already seen him approaching and they brandish machetes menacingly, a revolver style pistol stuffed into each of their trouser fronts. Man walks over the bridge and the guards approach. 

'Who the fuck are you?' says the guard to Man's left, a slim fellow with jerky movements and a weathered face, his beard jutting out as if protruding from a skull. He sports a thick scar on his left cheek that shines in the daylight. 

'I'm no-one important,' replies Man, 'just looking for a short stay. I need food and water and beer if you have it.'

'Fuck what you need!' snarls the other guard, a bulky and short man, beardless but handsome in a roguish manner. His eyes are cold and cobalt blue and Man has seen ones like them before. Usually in the mirror. 

'I come with peaceful intentions,' says Man, calmly. 'I've even fashioned myself with your leader's emblem as an act of respect.' 

The guards look at Man's chest, look to one another and nod. 

'You have any other weapons?' says the burly guard. 

'I do,' says Man. 'A blade on my back. I tell you this in the hope that you will honour my right to keep it. Everything else I am happy to part with, but not that blade.'

'You'll part with your fucking head if you don't give it up!' warns the slim guard. He looks at the burly one and together they move closer to Man. 

'I'm afraid that can't happen, my friends,' says Man, his chest expanding as he breathes in the air he needs to spark the fires of war. 

The guards get to within four feet of Man and then they stop. 

'Hand it over, or we'll kill you!' says the slim guard. 

'As you wish,' says Man. 'But let it be known that I am sorry for what is about to happen.' 

The guards look at each other but it is too late. 

Man drops his rucksack and swings the bone-axe in a looping hook until it meets the burly guard's hip, jams the knife tip in between the joint and separates the ligaments. The slim guard reacts quickly but not quick enough, and swings the machete wildly. Man ducks under each violent slash with ease, his body moving as though it is liberated from conscious thought. His spare hand whips the karambit out and the curved edge meets the machete mid-air, hooks it and it falls to the cobbled floor. A powerful right cross explodes from Man's shoulder, connecting with jaw bone and Man lunges down, hooks the blade around the back of the slim guard's ankle and pulls. The tendon splits with a bloody pop and the guard screams wildly. The burly guard aims a weak slash at Man as he stands but it misses and he receives a side kick above the knee, separating meat from bone and popping the patella like a lid top. 

A gunshot ceases the action as Man stands up, proud and tense, almost catatonic with adrenaline. Slowly he turns, the karambit hanging limp in his hand, his mind checking the body for any signs of pain that are strong enough to creep past the adrenaline’s veil. His eyes pass over the cage, a gathering of gaunt faces, eyes straining, jaws open at the scene they have just witnessed. Those faces fade to his periphery and some new faces take centre stage. He can hear the groaning of the guards he's just destroyed and a warming wind passes over him.