The Cutthroat Cannibals

by Craig Sargent

  The wheelbarrows moved right through the center of the camp, and Stone saw that with the exception of the albinos everyone else in the place was of neanderthal appearance. The brothers ruled through sheer terror, force of will, and superior intelligence. For the dumber but stronger half-men could easily have killed and dismembered the two—what a meal that would make. Yet they shrank in fear in all directions as the food procession moved along, like long beaten dogs skulking off from their hard masters. Stone’s nose sniffed deeply a few times almost on its own as if it were a separate beast. Then he gagged. He could smell the cooking human flesh in the air. He had smelled such a scent before. He’d had run-ins with flesh-eating scum before. Only then his Harley 1200 had been functioning as had all its weapons systems: .50 cal. machine gun, 89-mm missile launcher, and various other tricks and treats. But now he had nothing, not even the fucking dog.

  Stone’s wheelbarrow passed a long trenchlike fire that had been built into the ground. They were apparently trying to get a whole ten-foot length of flaming wood reduced down into glowing red coals, and the subhumans tended the fire like a steel mill requiring constant attention, running back and forth along the fire line, poking at the burning timber with long pieces of metal rod to get everything going just the way it should be. Trained by the brothers, they moved with the automated mindlessness of robots, enjoying their simple-minded work but not even comprehending why they were trying to make the coals. And standing next to the fire, awaiting their turn to be roasted, were two bodies. They were naked, throats slit, genitals already sliced off. And they were skewered with long three-inch poles from mouth to anus, the poles slammed right through the centers of the bodies and then into the dirt so the two were facing straight down, their heads about a foot from the ground, two-hundred-pound shish kebabs ready for the grill.

  One of the subhumans was coating the bodies with some sort of sauce, no doubt a concoction of the albinos’, since these half-naked creatures were clearly incapable of even mixing spices together, but only painting them on with an old paintbrush in long, even strokes, trying their dumb best to get every square inch of the slowly rotting flesh, marinating it just right for the evening’s feasting.

  Suddenly the procession came to an abrupt halt, and Stone swung his head around to the left where the brothers’ carts were being circled. More human game, only these were alive, a woman, a young man, and a much older fellow, still distinguished looking with white beard and tortoiseshell eyeglasses. They were all tied to stakes that had been driven into the ground about two feet apart. They didn’t look happy.

  “Here we go,” the albino named Top said as his and his brother’s wheelbarrows were swung around right in front of the poled captives.

  “Now take him,” Bottom commanded the halfwits who came toward Stone, lifted him, and carried him toward an empty pole next to the woman. When he was all tied up and hanging there, as if standing on his feet like the others, the brothers had themselves wheeled back a few yards to survey their four treasures.

  “Well, we’ll save this batch for tomorrow night, what do you say, dear brother?” the high-pitched voice asked as he rubbed his pasty hands in gleeful anticipation. “We should really finish up that pair by the cooking fire. They’ll rot beyond all digestibility if we leave them even one more day.”

  “Yes, yes, I agree,” the other replied. “These four will make a fine feast to celebrate the founding of our village three years ago. Why, perhaps we should even have them live. You know the juices are so much tastier, the meat so much tarter.”

  “Why, I think you might be right, brother,” the other said, leaning over from his wheelbarrow so he almost fell out. “We haven’t had live meat for so long. Usually the meat is in such dreadful condition. But these, these…” He sat back with a happy look on his fat, rotting-dough face and signaled with a hard bang on the side of the steel barrow for his team of subhumans to push. With a collective groan they raised the back end of the thing and started forward, the other albino’s cart following close behind. They had their teams push them over to the two corpses that were pierced with the poles and began berating the marinater severely.

  “No, you fool, stroke the brush from bottom to top, bottom to top,” the higher voiced albino squealed. “How many times do I have to tell you brainless worms!” He pulled out his whip and gave the subhuman a vicious whipping, snapping the leather whip out again and again until the cro-mag’s whole body was wrapped in red welts, bleeding lines. He howled like an animal and dropped to the ground, covering his face with his hairy arms, shaking and trembling. After about a minute the other brother blurted out from his own barrow.

  “Enough, dear brother, you’ll kill him. Their kind taste terrible, you know that. And it took us nearly six months to train the turd even to do as well as he does. The others you’ll remember couldn’t even learn to keep dipping the brush into the special sauce. I can’t bear the thought of having to train another of the brainless dogs.”

  “Yes, perhaps you’re right,” the first said, snapping out one more stroke just for good measure and then pulling the whip back to him, wrapping it into a coil and secreting it under his bloody coat, once a long white physician’s robe, now greasy and splotched with the remains of his many dinners.

  “Bottom to top, bottom to top,” the other albino screamed out to the quivering subhuman, who had sat up and was sort of looking through the cracks of his fingers like a child watching a horror film. The brother moved his hand in a long slow motion, making a charade in the air as he lay slumped back like a diseased egg in the wheelbarrow, trying to show the fool how to do it.

  “Ahh,” the de-evolved once human croaked as his eyes watched the up-and-down strokes of the albino’s hand. “Ahhh,” he intoned again, getting a big smile on his cracked lips as if he had just understood some great revelation, although it had been demonstrated to him a hundred times before. But aside from being nearly as dumb as cows, the other feature of the tribe was their inability to remember anything for more than a minute or two.

  “Oh, the tools we have to work with are just deplorable,” the brother who had just whipped the drudge spoke out with a depressed sigh. He slapped the side of his barrow again and the four cro-mag’s raised it fast this time, after viewing the whipping of their own. The second brother followed along behind.

  “We all have our crosses to bear. And this is ours, to be saddled with an army of men with the brain power of amoebas.”

  “Yes, but is it not through this very suffering on our parts, the constant wear and tear on our nerves, that we in fact grow and are challenged. Was it not Nietzsche who said, ‘that which does not kill me makes me grow stronger.’ I think, dear brother—”

  “Oh, but brother,” the other cut him off as he snapped out with the side of a shovel at one of the subhumans who had drawn too close to his wheelbarrow. The shovel nearly cracked the creature’s head in two and it rolled on the ground screaming, hands over its suddenly red-coated scalp. “Was it not Hegel who stated that evolution, growth to a higher spiritual reality comes only through the overcoming of the obstacle. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Why, it is the way of all things. Yet you seem to believe that we should be excluded. That our meaning lies in suffering and not in achieving a higher, more perfect plane—”

  “Brother, brother,” the other exclaimed with an exasperated laugh. “Once again you twist my meaning from its Platonic ideal into a most vernacular vulgarity. All I meant was…” The two albinos had been having this basic argument about the ultimate meaning of man’s manifestation on earth for some twenty years now. It was never resolved but just continued endlessly on, like an old clock making its repetitive tick-tocking rounds.

  “No, I think you’re quite wrong on this point,” the high-pitched brother squeaked, starting to grow angry though they had the same argument at least a thousand times before. “I think we must consult The Books.”

  “Yes, the Books,” the second agreed enthusiastically as he shifted his we
ight in the wheelbarrow like a huge snail turning over inside its shell. “The Books shall tell us. The Books.”

  They rode at a half gallop, whipping at their teams behind them as they bounced along like shipments of white sausage back to their own human-skin homes in the center of the camp, up on a rise about ten feet above the rest of the place. They headed to their Books, a collection of treatises and sets of the great writings of philosophers throughout history. The Books contained all knowledge, all truth. Human flesh and ultimate knowledge, what finer mix could there be. The wheelbarrows were pushed right up the pathway of the round dirt mound atop which their home was constructed. The subhumans pushing them could hardly make it up the steep grade and looked as if they were about to have heart attacks as they stumbled but dared not let either wheelbarrow go over. They knew the consequences. Somehow they made it to the top and pushed the barrows right through the hanging flaps of human skin which slapped back together again once they had passed, like the dead things that they were.

  Stone shook his head in disgust, realizing he had been half hypnotized by the presence of the two. He turned his head to the right and gazed right into the eyes of a real angel. The girl was beautiful. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, with the kind of face that men would have, and had in past times, killed for. She was staring straight at him with tears running down her cheeks. She sniffled hard and tried to speak but seemed to only be able to stutter incomprehensibly, so traumatized had she been by all that had befallen her recently.

  “Easy,” Stone said softly. “Easy.” His own flesh hurt like hell, though the way they had tied his hands up and behind him helped support the weight of his body. Still the broken leg had been banged around like a fucking basketball and it felt as if razors were slashing along the inner nerves. So it was sort of nice in a weird way that there was such a distraction as a beautiful woman only inches away from him, their shoulders and hips almost rubbing together.

  “Now slowly,” Stone said, smiling at her to try to make her relax even a little so that she could talk. “Who are you? What happened to you all?” It worked, for after taking a deep breath the woman spoke very slowly, enunciating each word carefully as if it were a torture to even relate her experiences.

  “I’m Charise. Charise Gordon, and this is my—my brother and my father.” She turned, with her head looking toward the young man who was tied to the pole on the other side of her. He was slumped down, out cold with a nasty gash along the top of his scalp. Beyond him the old man looked just sort of dumbfounded by it all though he didn’t appear badly hurt. Stone snapped his gaze back to the woman and encouraged her to go on.

  “We—we were trying to flee from our town about fifty miles south of here up to Canada, where we have relatives. It’s much better up there they say. Not as violent, not as horrible. My t-t-town was wiped out by a gang of bikers. They came through like stormtroopers raping, burning, not leaving a trace of our homes or the families that had lived there for over a century. We—my family and I just got out in the nick of time in our jeep.” Her eyes darted from his face to a spot across the encampment and Stone’s eyes followed. He could see the shape of a vehicle covered with a tarp about two hundred feet away on the far side of the place.

  “We—we were about five miles from here just going down a road—when they—they—” Her eyes filled up again as if a storm were about to fall. “They attacked us. Suddenly they were just everywhere, dropping down from the trees. My brother fought back and they hit him hard with a club. I think he’s—he’s dying.” The tears started falling. Stone let her cry for a few minutes as he looked over at the young man, leaning forward in his own bonds to get the right angle. The guy’s whole head was cracked. She was right. Without treatment he was dead. Maybe even with it. Not that any of them had a very long life expectancy.

  “What about your father over there?” Stone asked after she had stopped and began wiping at her face with her shoulders.

  “He’s—he’s—I don’t know what’s wrong with him. But ever since the attack he’s just been in a daze. Oh—I—” She started to break down completely, Stone could see it.

  “Easy now,” Stone said, “it’s not over till the fat lady sings, you know what I mean?” He whispered out of the corner of his mouth, though he instantly realized that none of the subhumans who were walking around the camp bent over carrying bodies and parts of bodies were able to understand more than a fraction of what he was saying. They didn’t even appear to care what he said, being more concerned with not fucking up their tasks and getting the shit whipped out of them by the albinos.

  The expression, a remnant of old America, made her grin for just a moment through the tears. But it was enough to break the spell of total doom. She smiled at Stone and it made his heart skip a beat and something start stirring in his loins, which he couldn’t believe. He was amazed that in a camp full of cannibals, tied to a post, with his dog dead, his leg broken, and his ass about to be turned into meatloaf, he still could find the time and the energy to get horny.

  After about twenty minutes, just as the sun fell and the coals burned down for good cooking, the albino brothers emerged from their human-skinned two-story tent and were wheeled back down to the picnic grounds. The two corpses were lowered on their stakes over the fire and placed sideways onto long turning devices, sort of like the spits chickens used to spin around on, dripping grease, in the windows of delis and supermarkets. The scent of cooking flesh drifted over to Stone and the girl and filled their nostrils with the nauseating aroma of charred man. And thus they had to spend the entire evening smelling and hearing the two psycho brothers chomping away on organs and arms, while they vociferously argued the finer points of the German philosophers of the nineteenth century.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-one

  AFTER the slime had eaten and argued until about two in the morning (Stone could tell the time by the star patterns above, which his father had drilled into him in their years in the bunker), they retreated back to their little skin castle on the hill, burping and farting up a storm. Stone couldn’t sleep, to say the least, nor could Charise, though her father dozed off like a tired old professor standing and giving a classroom lecture about nothing. Once she saw that the albino twins had left and that most of the cro-mags were asleep out in the open, their arms clasped around bones or human heads like children’s teddy bears, she whispered over to Stone again.

  “I’m scared, Stone. I just don’t feel brave at all. I don’t want to die. I don’t want any of us to die.”

  “Any man or woman who said that they weren’t scared shit right now, they’d be a liar,” Stone replied with a soft whisper. “I’m scared too.” He looked at her and tried to smile, to show her that at least one person on this fucked-up piece of rock called earth was not a murdering cannibal. And she seemed to feel something, for she brightened and returned the smile, her eyes glowing like little stars.

  “Tell me, Mr. Stone,” she went on, glancing around to make sure they weren’t being overheard or observed, “do you—do you believe in God? In an afterlife? Do you think we will go anywhere when we die, or just into those grotesque stomachs?” She seemed nervous as she spoke, her long red hair flowing about her neck and head like a cape of fiery wheat. But once the questions were out, a look of relief settled over her face as if it had been important just to ask them, to release the thoughts that had been preying on her mind like a lion on a carcass for the last thirty-six hours since they had been captured.

  “I think yes, we will go somewhere beyond just the digestive tracts of the albinos,” Stone said, looking her hard in the face. “I mean we already were nothing, came from nowhere, before we entered these bodies, didn’t we? We once didn’t exist already. Out of nothing, into something, back to nothing again. As far as I can see we’ll re-emerge again in some other form, human or not, I don’t know. It’s not something I can prove, just a feeling but a strong one. Sometimes when I’m very tired, or relaxed—or drunk—and lying
down somewhere so that there isn’t a bit of tension in my body…” Stone stopped as he suddenly felt for an instant how incredibly tight all his muscles were right now, as if he had been wound up tight as a steel coil and was ready to explode.

  “Anyway,” Stone went on, “when I do feel relaxed, I swear I can feel that I was something before I was this. There are dim memories in the back of my mind, images that are almost but not quite there. Do you know what I mean? It’s as if there’s a curtain over the past before this life. It’s something we’re not supposed to see or understand. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” Stone stopped suddenly, feeling a little embarrassed that he had delivered such a monologue. He hadn’t even quite realized that he had had such feelings, beliefs, before. But imminent death stirs up deep waters.

  “Thank you,” Charise said after nearly a minute of silence as she continued to look deeply into his eyes like a faith-starved saint staring madly up into the pillowed clouds of heaven searching for God. “Thank you for sharing that feeling with me. It means more than you can know. To feel that there is something more, something beyond. I have dimly felt such things too, but couldn’t put the words to them like you did. I don’t feel as afraid of dying now,” she said, with a determined look on her beautiful young face.

  Stone couldn’t help but glance over suddenly at her right breast, which hung out exposed from the shirt that had been torn somewhere along the line during her capture. The breast was as perfect a specimen as Stone had ever seen. Like an exquisite golden fruit rising out as if to catch the rays of the sun, rising to be warmed and plucked. He tore his eyes away, suddenly realizing he had been sort of spacing out right on the pink nipple, and coughed as he looked away. Torture turned to desire. Fear to lust. Man was a strange creature.