Primal Gambit

Chapter 27: The Hole Drex Crawled Out Of

It was only rumor that Drexel, like the others born within The Yard, rose out of the scrap metal and clawed his way from the mud. Scary stories told by parents to children in the Inner City before bed were fallacy and heresy. The grizzled chop chopper was a man like any other, sharing the same genetic makeup of those with the money and luck to be bred into the wealthy families of The Dark City. No one wanted to believe it. No one dared to.

To do so would be to give in to the most primal fear: what fellow men were capable of. To grant their young the lust to kill what they deemed their own, to fight with anything possible to grant ownership of what belonged to them.

This was where Drexel thrived, out there in the hills where chaos festered like flies over a corpse. The young chop shopper in training did the same.

Violent thoughts with no patriarch or monarch to deter or correct; no one to teach him right from wrong. It was the same for every damned soul bred in The Yard. To kill for what they deserved was the honest path, the noble one.

Only the weak and meager would trade their hard-earned valuables for others. It was dishonest. Those in The Yard had significant difficulty understanding such a bloodless way of life. Their lives were born atop the mounds of rubble and chassis of old war machines. To eke out an existence different would have been criminal, resulting surely in death. The worth of a man boiled into the mound of riches he sat upon, anything different was alien.

Chop shoppers cared not for the backstory of a man so long as his current life was devoted to a cause similar to theirs. It was for this reason that Drexel knew not what hole Crow crawled out of or the mother that birthed two grotesque fiends known as Grog and Gruel. None of the choppers knew where Drex came from. He simply showed up at the garage one night with an ideal for death and pension for smelting metal by flame.

It was not like him to delve into his past. As far as he was concerned, the rest of the murderers did not care to know where he came from. He enjoyed the way things turned out – the fact that they never asked about his harrowing history. To learn of his roots would bring both tremors and nausea to any parent telling their child the story before bed.

He was born on the outskirts of The Yard to a woman no one had ever heard of; her name escaped even him. His father was a dust shadow on the nuclear blast of life, having disappeared like a phantom before he knew of his son's existence. Like many romantic tales, he was abandoned, wrapped in torn cloth canopy that had been scavenged from some great mountain within the confines of the junkyard.

And then, just like the rest, he was picked up by a scavenging crew under the command of a transient by the name of Axle. The father-figure played his cards close to chest. None of the savages under his lead knew anything about his past and he reveled in the mystery. To him, delving not into his upbringing was the key to survival; had any of the highwaymen learned of his childhood spent in the arms of a wealthy family of The Dark City, he'd have been exiled or worse.

Though they all looked up to him. He had a certain aptitude for leading men and building upon the garage they called home. The chop shoppers respected that.

But to those living in the city, the children going to bed every night in fear of getting lost beyond the borders, these men were ghosts – phantoms, figments of their imaginations created from the ashes of the new world to breed fear into their hearts. Before a child would finally give in to the alluring peace of sleep, she would hear the distant laughter of the maniac on the mountain.

And it was Drexel, howling out to the moon like the vicious wild dogs would.