A Savage Life
Chapter 21

An absolute nutcase! It’s been thirty minutes with this guy, and I will probably scream in the next twenty. He has done nothing more but complain, narrate to himself, praise me excessively, complain, and eat all our food rations. At one point, he begged me to carry him again. God have mercy! This must be one sick joke You have!

I take my mind off of complaining, only because I see the end of the desert (It wasn’t really a big desert to begin with anyways) and see a wooden shack in the near distance. Oh lucky me! Surely there must be somebody that can help!

I almost take off running until I’m tackled by Damien.

“Wait! Danger!” he shrieks.

I almost hit him, but what he says is true. What if I get to the shack and there’s a posse of bounty hunters and mercenaries? I’m sure they’d LOVE to see me! What if there’s a crazy old guy just sitting in there? He probably has a loaded shotgun and ready to fill anything that moves with lead. But then again, it could be some nice people. Once again, Russian Roulette out here folks. Russian Roulette. And why I just decided to go against my prior knowledge of these situations and take off running, I’ll never know.

Damien pulls himself off of me and picks me up by my shirt, standing me up on my own two feet.

“I don’t remember much, but I think there’s some mean mutants that live there.” Damien tells me, clutching his head like he’s in pain.

I would ask him if he knows any other way around or how he knows all of this, but he would just likely freak out and alert the mutants of our position. At the same time, I can see a volcano in the distance, and maybe the mutants were weak.

I know I’m going to sound crazy, but I’m thinking of robbing those people of food, clothes, weapons, whatever they have. And I might get directions of where I’m at. It’s a winning situation for me, if I play my cards right. We would raid them at night, and break into their house, maybe hold them at gunpoint, and take what we need.

First things first, I will check for weapons and smuggle them out, because as far as I know, I probably couldn’t trust Damien to squash the bug crawling in front of me properly, so I will do this alone. When night falls, Damien will take himself beyond the shack and hide, and wait for me. I won’t need him to bail me out of trouble. I will also need determine the risks too. I need to tell Damien, so I pull his attention to my own, and I tell him, “Damien, I have a plan, and I’m sure you aren’t gonna like it.”

It was sundown and I had already seen what I was up against. I was up against six men, who probably tower over Abe Lincoln with his top hat and a standing stool, with buff arms, almost as if they’d popped right out of an old cartoon, and were loaded with weapons. These were badrears, and a force to be reckoned with (And I know from pure experience too) as I could tell, since I began watching them for several hours now.

They are pretty strong, because the newbie, or a man with tan skin, and what looks to be reflective eyes, had been tossed around, shaken, beaten, slapped, kicked, cursed at, and forced to do demeaning tasks by the bigger ones. He also had sharp teeth and talons for toenails.

The leader had the facial features of a crocodile, and the canines of a sabre toothed cat. He wore sunglasses on a consistent bases, ripped blue jeans, a white shirt with so many stains on it, it would be hard to map out what stain came from what, and he had these long, flexible arms that stretched whenever he needed them to. He had one hand that ended in long, sharp, blood-covered claws, and his arm without the hand ended in a very pointy lance. He had no nose and long black hair.

These were mutants alright, and they likely would’ve surpassed Pumps any given day of the year by a longshot. There was no way in God’s green Earth that I was going to mess with them, but I needed the supplies, and seeing my circumstances, it did not look like a good choice to make. Yeah, I think I’ll skip this one and try my luck out there. There’s little to go wrong, but if it does happen, I’m screwed. Better go tell Damien that the deal’s off, there is no shack-raiding tonight.

I pop out of the small hole that I’ve dug, knowing that the mutants were snug in their beds, and started to sneak as best as I could, past the shack. As I begin to pass by the porch, I catch something out of the corner of my eye. A gun! And a mechanical one too! I feel almost compelled to grab the shining beauty off of the deteriorating porch, but who leaves a gun out in the middle of the open? It could be a trap. Or it could be pride. After all, they were a reasonably scary group of mutants that nobody would want chasing after them.

I felt my heart skip several beats at the sound of rummaging. I bolt and run to hide beside the house, making about as much noise as possible. I also think I may have shrieked ten octaves higher than usual. Great, if I wasn’t going to be caught before, I am now.

I look up at the window to see if a glowing pair of evil eyes were watching me cower, but instead of seeing a 10 foot tall mutant glaring at me through the translucent, hardened sand, I see Damien, making as much noise as possible. My God, I give him one job and he botches it! One job God! One job! Help me!

Instead of waiting around, I instinctively run to the porch and grab the shotgun. I check to see if it was loaded, and it was, and I also remember the bullets the Mysterious Hood gave me. Bingo! Jackpot! I smell the blood of humans! Wait, what?

Suddenly I see Damien dashing through the door and jumping from the porch, over the steps, with a bag of loot in his hands. “God, you are a good one!” I nearly sing. At least that amnesiac can be a helpful rebel after all.

I smile and vault over the porch, shotgun in hand, and take off running, thinking that I have the advantage of the night and a good head start, but little did I know, the newbie had teleported himself beside me, swooped his arms towards me, and sent me flying into a rock, all before I knew anything.

I hear a sickening crunch as I’m thrown so hard into a rock I think I broke it in half, and then feel a terrible pain in my leg. I let out a scream and I knew my leg was broken.

“Hey boss! Got one!” the new guy called out.

“Damien!” I scream out, but I knew that he was long gone, and that I was in this on my own.

Luckily for me, I still had the shotgun, which was small for a bunch of giant mutants. Must be my lucky day.

“Well bring him in,” the leader shouted. “And I’ll call Tarold Greysing.”

“I can smell the money boys!” one of the mutants called out, causing the others to give a shout like they were at a rave party.

He looked normal, but his overstretched, taffy-like torso said otherwise.

I saw my chance when the newbie took his reflective, gray-green eyes off me, and shot him in the back of the neck, knocking him to the ground. It didn’t kill him, but he was incapacitated.

I felt the adrenaline surge through me and stood up quickly, pushing my boot into the mutant’s head, killing him, slowly and traumatizingly, to be brutally honest. His buddies were on their way, and slowly.

You didn’t think I was going to say fast now did you? I’m basically a sitting duck, so they treated me like one. I tried to get away, but to cut to the point, it’s hard to run when you’ve broken a rib and your tibia. And if you’ve kept yourself up to date with the nature channels, you would know that cats play with their food, correct? So guess what, while the leader was calling this Officer Tarold Greysing, I was being flitted from hand to hand by the remaining gang members like a helpless mouse to a monstrous cat. It’s not fun. And when I tried to fight back, they only laughed.

They took the shotgun and threw it in the distance to where Damien went, while laughing at me and asking, “Is Damien your friend or your wife?” I just told them it was my name and to go somewhere dark and evil. I got a good punch in too, but what good did it do me? None. Their skin was as hard as iron and my knuckles were broken and bloody from that one punch.

I had finally, after several hours of being mutant entertainment, escaped to sweet freedom. But just as things were looking good, they shatter. It was all a ploy as a motorcycle nearly ran me over trying to stop me in my tracks. A man in a grey hooded cloak, business pants, and a hairstyle that screamed 1950s under his hood stepped off of his motorcycle with two thick, circular handcuffs just for me.

“Well done boys,” the man congratulated towards the mutants. “All I have to do now is handcuff him and the money is yours.”

The mutants cheered. I wanted to escape, but I couldn’t, there was just so many ways this could end, and neither choice had a happy ending. But still, I tried. Quickly, I concocted a scheme in my head, and if this doesn’t work, what will? And if I die, at least I tried.

I waited till Officer Tarold Greysing got close enough to me that I could hit him. That’s right, I was going to punch him with the butt of my new toy. I waited until the man undid his hood, revealing salted hair and touched roots, and then, POW! I slammed the end of my gun into his skull and took off running, the best I could, screaming, “Damien! Damien!”

Then I realized something. The bike! I quickly turned around and started to hobble the best I could, laying out Officer Tarold a second time before I stole his bike, and his goodies. Weapons amass, I was the richest man alive! I gave out a hearty laugh towards the mutants, who were more interested in Officer Greysing than I, and shouted, “Later boys. Enjoy your “pay raise!“” I hit the throttle choking on the dust I was making and leaving them to eat gravel.

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