Wounds
Prologue
NOTE: This prologue is for paid subscribers only, but the rest of the serial, starting next week, will available for everyone. Hang on to your eyeballs my sweet meats 💚
The scent of advanced decomposition wasn’t new to Vincent. You spend enough time in the forest, you’ll happen across something rotten. But the whoop his father let out ahead of him made his heart thump like a kick drum. His pop had promised if they came across a mountain lion he’d let him keep a paw. Long as he kept it hidden, of course. Laws being the man traps they were. Made for no other reason than to hold a man down and make his life too difficult to live. So said Grandpop, anyway. Vincent found the thought of total anarchy exhausting. Nature had her laws, man should have his, he figured. You follow ‘em or you don’t, but that’s on you. Most people won’t have the guts to break ‘em, less of a free for all means more for the criminals. Sometimes he thought Grandpop had more balls than sense.
Thinking gets you scars, boy. Another thing Grandpop always said.
When he got to where his pop stood, the man was standing with one hand on the hunting knife in his belt and the other on the top of his head. Vincent saw the dead fuck’s feet first. Not paws, feet. Bare feet with five toes each and the number seven tattooed on the left sole. He looked from the dead guy to his old man, something unpleasant roiling in his gut. He felt it come up, but clenched his jaw and turned to face the forest.
“You puke I’ll make you fucking eat it,” Pop’s voice was not angry, just declarative. Vincent’s eyes watered. His teeth hurt from squeezing his jaw shut. He could run, but Pop might shoot him.
“We’re cutting the bastard up.”
Vincent, still facing the forest, a sweet scented carpet of ferns and fungi spread out under the redwood canopy, took a careful inhale, “Why?”
