by Tim Curran
Cannibal Corpse, M/C
Tim Curran
Following a major pandemic, the country is in ruins. West of the Mississippi River is a hellzone known as the Deadlands. Here, bioengineered Corpse Worms rain from the blood-streaked sky, reanimating the dead. And here, atomic weapons have created legions of mutants, primeval monsters, and wild chaotic weather patterns. Enter: John Slaughter. Hardcore outlaw biker.
Cannibal Corpse, M/C
Tim Curran
Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.
Copyright 2012 Tim Curran.
www.PermutedPress.com
Cover art by Zach McCain.
“Only the dead are without fear.”
—Tomas, The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Chapter One
The wormboy cut in close, trying to sideswipe him, but Slaughter was ready: he brought out the big .357 Combat Mag and let it bark a couple of times. It was like thunder in the still air. The first round went wild, the other right on target. The wormboy cried out as the side of his throat was blasted to hamburger. He flipped off the shit-brown Duo-Glide Panhead, and hit the pavement, skidding on his face and leaving a greasy smear on the road. His bike went careening away, flipping over, spinning away in a shower of sparks.
Slaughter circled him, bringing his hog to a stop.
He hopped off, a tall wiry man in a greasy, road-weary jean vest emblazoned with club patches, his bare muscular arms sleeved with prison tattoos. He wore a black bandanna on his head and steel-toed motorcycle boots. On the back of his vest there was an oval logo patch with a horned deathshead over crossed pitchforks, a snake hanging from the fanged jaws. Above it, the top rocker read: DEVIL’S DISCIPLES, M/C. And below it: PITTSBURGH.
“Let’s finish this,” Slaughter said.
The wormboy didn’t stay down dead, of course, but scrambled to his feet, his graying worm-holed face contorted in a mask of anger. He pressed one gnarled, fleshless hand to his wounded throat, trying to stem the flow of black bile which passed for blood in the walking dead.
He made a low growling sound like a kicked dog, gnashing yellow teeth together, anxious to sink them into something warm and pink and full-blooded.
Slaughter put another round in his chest, then planted a third right between his eyes before he could pull the SS dagger in his belt. The contents of the wormboy’s skull sprayed across the road. He folded up, dropped to his knees, and hit the pavement face-first. As an afterthought, he shuddered and vomited out a slime of green drainage. There were maggots in it.
“Fucking wormboys,” Slaughter said under his breath, spitting tobacco juice into the ruined, blood-speckled face.
But it wasn’t done and he knew it.
He pulled his Gurkha knife from the black leather sheath at his belt and went to it. The Kukri, as it was known, had an 18” curved blade that was sharp enough to shave with. Hardcore outlaw bikers—1%ers—called it a Ginsu, and with good reason. Like some kind of deadly hybrid between a knife and an axe, you could slice a tomato clean or de-limb a tree with it.
But that wasn’t what Slaughter was going to de-limb.
He hacked off first the right arm, then the left. He hacked through both legs and then decapitated the wormboy. It was nasty, dirty work. And when he was done, there was blood right up to his bicep and spattered over his face. He got a towel out of his bag and wiped the rancid blood clean, polishing the Gurkha knife to a lethal gleam before sliding it back in its sheath.
Satisfied, he walked over to the wormboy’s remains.
The arms were still moving, fingers clawing.
There was still life in the head. Glazed, yellow-white eyes stared up at him; the teeth gnashed.
Slaughter kicked the head and it rolled into the gravel.
He fired up a cigarette and waited there, crouched by the side of the road.
The wormboy was dead, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything still alive inside him. And there it came, right out of the left eye socket: a twelve-inch segmented worm, glossy red and shiny with brain goo. It deserted the head like a rat leaving a sinking ship, slithering off in search of better pickings. Although it couldn’t see much better than your average brick—didn’t have any eyes—it knew where Slaughter was. It sensed him. Smelled him. Picked up his body heat, something. It raised its ugly bulbous knob of a head in defense. The head opened up like a flower, the worm heaved, and let fly with a stream of brown juice.
Slaughter ducked away from it.
He didn’t know what that shit was, but it had a weird narcotic effect like getting shot up with a Thorazine cocktail. You got hit and you were done. Within seconds, you were down on your knees, your limbs rubbery and ungainly, your eyes glazed over. And once you were nicely numb and doped, the worm would pay you a visit, slide right in anywhere you were open—nose, mouth, eyes, ass…they weren’t picky. After that, death came within six hours and within twelve, you woke back up with a real nasty appetite for human flesh.
There were stories making the rounds that junkies were squeezing out worms for juice, cutting it with heroin and coke and shooting it. Maybe it was bullshit, maybe not.
Slaughter crouched there, smoking, thinking of eighth grade American Lit. They all had to memorize a poem and old fat ass Mrs. Buntz gave him Poe’s The Conqueror Worm. Crazy shit, but he could still remember it, still hear those words running through his head:
But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
“Yeah,” he said, blowing smoke out through his nostrils. “Dig it.”
It was still fresh in his mind and never had those words made sense like they did now. The point of the poem was about human mortality, he knew, about people carrying on like death was not a solid, grim inevitability when in fact its shadow was cast over every living thing from the point of birth. For in the end the worm conquers all.
“The play is a tragedy and it’s called ‘Man’,” he paraphrased. “And its hero is the conqueror worm.” He stood up. “But you won’t conquer shit today, my friend.” He stomped the worm to paste, looking down that lonely stretch of highway snaking away through the green Wisconsin hills towards Minnesota. Somewhere out there was the great Mississippi and on the other side, the Deadlands. Like the name implied, the Deadlands was a great wild wasteland of roving gangs, scavengers, nomads and mutants, and the walking dead that stretched clear to the Pacific Ocean. The cities out there were cemeteries and the towns were tombs. Some of that was from the Outbreak itself and some of it was from the ten megaton nukes used to contain it. Deadly clouds of fallout and radioactive dust storms were still blowing around out there, people said. Back east, things were secure. After the Outbreak—the worm infestation that brought the dead up out of their graves—and the wars that followed, the military had reorganized and launched one cleanup op after another until nearly all the zombies were exterminated. You got west of Pennsylvania, then it was the Wild West all over again. The frontier. The politicians kept saying that the army would continue the cleanup, pushing ever westward, but as things stood, the army had enough problems securing the east.
Which was just fine with Slaughter.
He was out in Wisconsin now because it was lawless. Out here, the dead walked, psychos and paramilitary whackos would kill you for your guns, your women, or a can of fucking pork-n-beans. But that was okay. As a blood member of the Devil’s Disciples and a veteran of countless biker wars, he understood killing and attrition and the politics of surviv
al just fine. Out here, Darwinism was law and he fit right in.
Besides, he was wanted on three counts of capital murder back east and was currently the only member of the Devil’s Disciples living fancy free. The others were either dead or in prison.
He finished his cigarette and flicked it in the ditch, longing for the good old days when you patched with a good club, pushed some blow and crank, took to the road on your steel horse with your brothers, and your enemy stayed down dead when you shot him.
Those were the days.
Rumbling with the Pagans in Maryland and the Outlaws in Chicago, blood wars with the Angels and Mongols in California, nothing but pussy and booze and blood.
Lots of turf battles. Ugly affairs to be sure, but at least they were men fighting against men. Ever since the worm rains, it wasn’t the same for the 1%ers. Pickings were thin, the old boys were all dead, and there were things walking that should have moldered in graves long ago.
Kicking the wormboy’s body a few times, Slaughter scavenged the corpse, taking the SS dagger from the torso. It was deadly sharp. He used it to slit the wormboy’s colors from the back of the filthy leather vest. He held them up into the sun. A white jawless skull, fanged, set in a field of red, one socket empty the other with a staring bloodshot eye. The upper rocker read: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And beneath the skull, the lower said: KANSAS CITY.
He stuffed them in his road bag.
He had taken the colors off a dozen of them in the past three days.The farther west you got, the wilder things were. Back in the day, Slaughter remembered, the Devil’s Disciples had gone to gun against the Cannibal Corpse Nation. It had been violent, bloody warfare right from the first, a drug war, a turf war, riders and soldiers on both sides gunned down, beaten, stabbed, strangled, burned. Clubhouses blown up, chapter presidents and officers assassinated. The Outbreak had brought a cessation of hostilities, though. And that was the funny part, when you came down to it. Cannibal Corpse. They all died when Kansas City and St. Louis got dusted by tactical neutron weapons, but the worms brought them back so that in death they were what they claimed to be in life.
Slaughter went over to his bike.
He figured he’d better get back to the farm. Dirty Mary, his old lady of the moment, was probably waiting for him. He’d gone out on a run to do some scavenging and found an untouched case of Dinty Moore beef stew. Mary was going to like that.
The problem was that Slaughter was already feeling restless.
Dirty Mary was all right, but the road was calling to him and he wanted to ride, keep going west, right into the black heart of the Deadlands. The longer he sat still the more he could feel the walls of his cage narrowing even further. It had been like that ever since he was a teenager. He had to keep moving, keep doing something or he got bored and crazy after awhile. The longer he sat still in one place, the more he envisioned a gallows being built in his mind, boards being nailed into place and a noose strung from a scaffold. And he knew it was his noose and when he started seeing it, when it got into his dreams and laid a chill along his spine, he knew it was time to move.
He jumped on the hog and opened her up down the road.
Something to the west was calling to him, but he couldn’t hear the voice yet.
But soon…
Chapter Two
Slaughter’s scoot was a stripped-down, night-black Harley FLHTC with a hardtail frame, straight drag pipes, and a high compression ironhead stroker. She was loud as hell and could be heard rumbling a mile away, but she was fast and maneuverable, and when you were in her saddle, she had plenty of meat.
He shot down the I just outside Black River Falls, rode the clutch, and cut onto the county trunk which was more gravel than pavement, potholed and rough. It cut through the green hills of western Wisconsin and sometimes, when you were high enough, you could see Minnesota out there to the west, hilly and mist-choked like some fairy tale never-never land. In Slaughter’s mind, it was beginning to take on that kind of mythic quality: it was west, west into the Deadlands and that’s where he wanted to go and where it would happen…whatever it was.
Back roads like this…open fields, clustered thickets, deep-cut ravines…it reminded him of the old days when he was chapter president of the Pittsburgh Devil’s Disciples and he took the pack out on a road run.
He was thinking about Dirty Mary.
If he went west, she’d want to tag along because that’s the kind of girl she was. She was a veteran biker bitch for sure, a long-time club lady, fast with her mouth, good with a knife, slick and mean. But under all that she was weak. She was terrified of being alone. Slaughter figured that if he was going, he’d have to ditch her in the middle of the night. He knew Dirty Mary didn’t love him any more than he loved her. They were in it together for bonding, for protection, for sex. That’s how it worked. You stripped that away and they were barely friends. The first time he hooked up with her outside Milwaukee, she’d tried to put a knife into him.
It was that kind of relationship.
The sex was good—rough, raw, violent—but that’s all there was. Slaughter scavenged for food and Dirty Mary cooked it up, he protected her and she took care of him. They got it on, but they could barely stand to be in the same room together. She liked to tell him he wasn’t as smart as Jibb, her last old man, a sergeant-at-arms for the Warlocks out of Florida, and he liked to tell her she couldn’t cook or give head like Joseline could, his ex who had died back in Scranton.
Fun, fun, fun.
There was a diabolic chemistry between them and he could feel it bubbling in him like acid whenever they were together and not slapping skin. Like belladonna and mandrake root mixed, real poison, venom seething and hissing and looking for lives to take. And it was going to happen. Sooner or later, that evil temper of Mary’s was going to piss him off and he was going to hurt her or she was going to slit his throat while he slept.
Blood was most definitely in the offing.
He rumbled up a tree-lined hill, waiting for a break in the foliage because when it opened he could see the farm down there in the hollow and he would breathe easier. He always breathed easier when he saw it. Like home sweet home, dig it, made him feel relaxed. That was, until he got in the door and Mary and he started going at it, dosing each other on hate and circling one another like mad dogs.
Jesus.
Slaughter shook his head. What kind of fucking life is that? What kind of shit is that to be—
What the hell?
He was grannying the hog in low gear, moving slow and easy, when the trees parted and the bushes squatted down and he could see little home sweet home down there. Barn, silo, farmhouse, all knitted up in yellow late-summer fields like a shawl.
He brought the hog to a stop, then rolled it beneath the overhanging branches of a big oak. He hopped off and peered down into the hollow. There were two pick-up trucks parked down there, and when he’d left three hours before to eat some road there had been no trucks of any sort. So either Dirty Mary had made some new friends—Slaughter found that hard to believe—or she was in a spot.
He figured the latter.
He went back to his bike and loaded the Combat Mag, slid it in the Army web belt holster, and strapped it on. He scanned the farmyard below, figuring how he was going to do this. He should have been scared and he knew it. But with the life he’d led and how goddamned pent-up and bored he’d been for weeks now, this was escape. This was a kick. This was getting into the shit and getting in deep.
He moved down the hillside smoothly, going down into a crouch and crab-crawling his way through the yellow grass of the orchard until he got amongst the old crabapple trees and got himself some camo. He waited a few moments to see if anyone was on the watch for him.
Nothing.
“All right,” he said under his breath. “Let’s light this shit up.”
Crouching again, he moved from cover to the silo, stepping easy to the barn and waiting, his heart thumping in his throat. But it wasn’t fear. It
was exhilaration. It was excitement. Man, it was like the old days creeping up on a Cannibal Corpse clubhouse to throw some lead around and bust some heads.
He edged around the barn, smelling the pure Wisconsin air. Sweet and fresh. You had to love it. There. He saw a guy standing out near the back door having a smoke. Just a kid. He was dressed in Army-issue camo fatigues which marked him either as a member of the Red Hand of Freedom, a paramilitary terrorist sect that had splintered from the regular Army during the Outbreak, or just some dipshit hanging with another G.I. Joe combo.
Didn’t much matter; Slaughter was going to take him out.
Kid just stood there, leaning up against the wall. He had a rifle with him, looked like an old M-1. Like him, it was just leaning there. Kid wasn’t much of a sentry and Slaughter figured he hadn’t trained down in Fort Bragg.
Slaughter moved around his blindside and slipped up behind him and it was so fucking easy he thought for one moment maybe it was a trap and the kid was laid out as bait. The kid just kept smoking, not a care in the world. He made a slight grunting noise when Slaughter quickly took him by the hair, yanked his head back and put the SS dagger against his carotid.
“Move and I slit your throat,” he told him.
The kid didn’t move other than the shaking that went through his limbs. Slaughter slid the knife against his Adam’s apple, wondering if he should just do him or get some intel from him. He decided on the latter. Kid couldn’t have been more than nineteen, just a cherry. He had green eyes like a crystal deep pond. Naïve. Innocent. Slaughter figured if it hadn’t been for the Outbreak, kid would probably have been the high school track star with those long legs of his. But fate had changed all that. No track, no school, no copping a feel down Mary Jane’s pants in the back of his Camaro.
Every time he made to open his mouth, Slaughter pressed the knife up a little tighter.
