Panic Prone.

The car had been turned over in the dirt close to four miles down the road from where they had set up their current base of operations. What was once a mint-green Pontiac was now a faded, broken sham, only a tiny fraction of the old-world-mechanical brilliance it had once been. All four tires had been taken, some simply broken off for lack of looting equipment, and the front end had been forced open with its contents devoured, streams of wires falling from where they had once been attached to the engine and the battery. The sun was lower now, the east beginning to show the world it’s purplish haze, and in the diminishing light a black jeep rolled onto the side of the road and stopped. Four men piled out from the back and from the hatch area, all dressed in camouflage and army gear and wearing weapons on their shoulders and hips. If anyone had seen them, one might have assumed that they were one of the last remaining factions of the United States army.

That was where they would have been wrong.

A large body stepped down from the passenger side door of the jeep, standing with his hand on the door to assess, from a distance, what was seen to be salvageable. His olive skin played nicely against the darkening sky, a scene that seemed almost portrait worthy, and the last remaining rays of the sun danced upon the left side of his face and covered half of him in darkness. The man who had been inspecting the front windshield looked up and, after a moment of silence, shrugged. “Guy, I think this baby’s been picked clean.”

“Did you check the brake plates?”

The man sighed, shook his head and moved toward the car’s undercarriage.

A freckled, middle-aged mess wriggled himself from the mass of metal that had once been the passenger entrance, out from looking at the glove compartment and holding a flashlight in hand. “Hey, Boss. You should come take a look at this.”

The man rolled his eyes, stalking up to the side of the car where the group had now congregated. Shoving them out of the way, he bent down to where freckles was shining the flashlight and squinted through the back window. He moved to wipe away the dust-caked surface and finally, after a few moments and eyestrain, he caught a glimpse of a brown lump, small and unmoving. Freckles answered before he even got the chance to ask. “It’s a boy; looks about eight or nine. Can’t tell if he’s dead or not, but he’s all wrapped up. Seems to me like a cat, crawling up into a place to die, you know?”

The boss squinted a few more minutes, and then, with a casual tone, he said, “No, I don’t know. What does this have to do with us?”

Freckles made a face, but didn’t seem too horribly offended. “He’s holding a bag. It looks like it might have something in it, maybe food.”

“Then get it. I didn’t need to come all the way over here for this. A kid’s a kid, a dime a dozen and a pain in my ass to boot. Just get the bag and let’s go. Hinzelman, did you find those brakes?”

“Nah, Guy. They’ve been picked off too. Jesus, how long’s this been here?”

The voices faded as the crew shuffled back toward the jeep and Freckles sighed. Without another word, he lowered himself back down through the gap in the twisted wreckage. He slipped in easily, his slim body only finding difficulty at the waist where he had less leverage. He scanned over the inside of the vehicle one last time, then swept his flashlight into the back seat. The boy’s face was pale, blonde hair matted with dirt and grime, and the blanket he’d wound himself in looked less than comfortable. With a grunt and a sympathetic sigh, Freckles shrugged. “Sorry, Kid. You’re not gonna need it anyway, right?” He held himself up with one gloved hand and reached the other arm forward to hook his index finger around one of the protruding loops. He stretched, feeling parts of his arm straining, even as he attempted to pull a little bit more of him through the door. He almost didn’t hear them, the sounds of a falling hammer, the shuffling of sheets and dirty clothes. He did, however, hear the gunshot that followed.

The side of his head was gone, spattered plainly across the front seats, the dashboard and the windshield. Sound broke and all things grew quiet, and then came the noises of charging feet, drawing nearer as they approached the car. “Davis. Davis?” A lone voice swept through the noise, and then a pause, the charge suddenly fading. “Oh, fuck. Oh, fucking shit.”
“Well, if he wasn’t so clumsy-”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“Pull him out of there, and hurry up.”

The body shifted and then was dragged out, head and heavy limbs falling limply and thudding as they were pulled into the light. Silence again, deep and contemplative, containing no ounce of real sadness or sympathy, but a great deal of regret. Finally there came another shuffling, and with a great heave, the entire driver’s side door was yanked away, its rusted hinges brittle and easily broken. The door clattered somewhere in the distance, and the car began to sink down, rusted metal moaning as Guy’s massive body slipped in. He was darker now, eyes white and shining against the sunlight that found it’s way around his waist. A pause, and then he turned, the barrel of his handgun leading the way in and finding the spot where the flashlight touched skin-tone.

Half-lidded eyes stared downward between the two front seats, slowly shifting now to find Guy’s face without success. They swam, vulnerable, lost somewhere between dream-like-state of progressed malnutrition and the place-wherever it was-that one goes when he dies. The boy shifted, attempting with sleepy, delirious movements to pull the bag underneath him, and it disappeared within the folds of shadow between his torso and his curling legs. It was, to Guy’s immediate understanding, the last thing that the boy would ever fight for, or at least attempt fighting for, and what was left his heart went out to the boy who, despite the apparent hopelessness of the situation, was defending his last bits of property. A real man, if he had ever seen one.

There was a thump on the roof of the car as the boy dropped the gun, having unknowingly allowed it to slip loose of his fingers while he worked to hide his bag, and his eyes moved as though suddenly in slow motion, to eye where it may have fallen. Guy saw his chance and reached forward, throwing the blanket and the boy’s fragile body from the bag and seizing it with a strong hand. The boy made a noise, containing all of the disbelief, unhappiness and surprise of a child who had forgotten when it was proper to cry out. His hands moved, grabbing the strap just as it was about to extend beyond his reach, and when Guy finally managed to maneuver the bag out from the door, he turned to find that the boy, skinny and wrapped in moth-eaten clothes, had been dragged along with it. The small body, for a moment, did not move, but as Guy attemped to reach down and pull the bag over his shoulder, he found, again, that the boy who had been barely able to hold a gun was now holding on for dear life. What a marvelous thing, death was… such a motivator.

Guy made a face and shook the bag, and before long the boy came loose, falling and scraping his hands and knees beside the dusty road. He crawled forward, pushing dirt into his open wounds without notice, and took hold of the man’s pant leg as he attempted to walk away. Guy stopped and looked down. There they were, eyes of a child so round and unknowing, so enormously injured by this action, but he was unaware of it. All of this- Guy, the men, the painful sounds of gunshots- was no more than a nightmare, soon to end without so much as a glimmer of hope, and this bag… this bag was his promised land, his burning bush. Guy paused, listening to the men as they quietly piled the remains of their friend Davis into the jeep and watching those eyes as they looked upward. There was vulnerability there, there was fear… but they did not plead.

“Let go of my leg, Boy.”

He did not, pulling himself farther upward, but his head was cast down, not in shame, but in preparation for something painful. It came in the form of a hard smack across the face, a fierce back hand that sent the boy sprawling back downward onto the ground. The boy didn’t move again until Guy’s back was turned, when his body edged forward on all fours, and with one last bit of strength, his fingers caught at the hem of his pants and tugged. The grip was loose. At anytime, he could have pulled away, saved himself all this God damn trouble. What was it actually, that planted his feet?

Guy had always considered himself a God among men. He was strong, agile, fast on his feet, and he was proud of the fact that within all his flesh and all his muscle there contained not an inch of pity, not for anyone. It was dog-eat-dog, as they used to say, survival of the fittest. No, this wasn’t pity. This was, perhaps, something even more natural than anger, easier than lust, or hunger. This was no more than fascination. “How much longer do you think you’ll last?” He asked, knowing that there would be no reply, and there wasn’t, only a calm wind that picked up and threw sand over his boots. They would need another body, after Davis. Thusfar, he hadn’t produced any heirs, and there was no better way to produce an heir than to recycle one. He would mend him, tape him, glue him, hit him, and teach him. And somehow, when this idea occurred to him now, he suddenly realized that there was nothing in the world that sounded more appealing than the manipulation of a broken mind. He chuckled and reached down, taking the boy by the back of the collar and lifting him. The hands slipped away, eyes closed, unconscious, and Guy grinned, dragging the limp body with ease upward toward the road. “Your feeding a pretty terrible habit, Boy.”