Spare Parts
Part Four
He took his pails down in the morning and took little moments of time to survey the surrounding land, especially the yawning opening of the old bunker and the surrounding vegetation. The Believers, for modesties sake never relieved Garrett of his clothes. One night he looked at the grey, stained remains of his white robe and looked at the careful stitches made in the designs around its collar. He spared a moment to remember once more those last dire words from Winnie. Would she ever know how much of a constant they would be in his life, how post and precognitive they were and would become? Would he one day lose touch and forget what it was to be human? Would he come back to her one day and no longer be able to deliver anything but death? The answer was so easy and obvious, he had never delivered anything else before, why start now? He took his robe off and cast it into the fire and was thankful when the palsied girl brought him a simple knit shirt to replace it with the next morning.
Garrett’s nightmares were legion and most often variations on the same cruel theme. They didn’t need his sleep to manifest themselves. The crying of young goats. The Believers had a healthy flock of them. He could hear his Aunt’s dying wails in those cries. The sound sent him looking for a weapon to defend himself with every morning.
The disquieting outcries at night though, the sounds of the girl with palsy being made sport of, it would only be a matter of time before she started to show and that was the awful one act play that Garrett decided he couldn’t stand by and witness. Some of the other pail men had already eluded to her end. She would go down with the rest of them to the creek and be drown there and then dumped in the mound of waste, never to be brought up or mentioned again.
Garrett waited nearly another month, bidding his time and shutting himself down while the daily misery and nightly sports continued. He quietly gathered the necessary plants and crushed them and heated them in the pail men’s quarters. He already knew that the girl wasn’t deficient of mind, she understood what he was doing and offering. He checked on her and helped her through the ordeal in the small hours of the night. He was careful to hide the waste in his pail and dump it the next day. It was the only act of doctoring he committed during that time except to help himself.
That same week they came for him in the middle of the night. He had been expecting as much. A crowd of Believers were waiting as his guards, his overseers, set him down before the poster/altar. To become one of the true faithful was to know true sacrifice.
Garrett mumbled their words and pretended to pray to the ridiculous teen idol poster as they crudely cut away at the lobe of his right ear. Worse than the simple mutilation was their insistence that fire would be the cure. He bit down and refused to call out, a true sign of the devout by their twisted logic, as they held a flame to the open wound until it burned closed.
The overseers paid him less attention after that night so it was easy to find and stash healing plants for himself to make sure his wound didn’t fester. The real problem, the persistent issue in life, wasn’t being mutilated, he only had to look at the scar along the back of his right hand, the one his drunken father gave him, or the multitude of old injuries since then to remember his many brushes with death, it was being left alone long enough to reach the opening to that old bunker.
All he had to do was get close enough to the “well of ghosts” to vanish beneath its shade to be forgotten altogether by the overseers and the Heatherites altogether. No one would go after him once he reached that forbidden place.