by Tim Curran
He had to get to Devil’s Hole.
He had to get to that NORAD complex.
He had to get that bio out of there.
He had to save his brother’s ass.
But even so, even as dangerous as that all was going to be, he felt that it was purely peripheral. It was the skin of this sad tale. The real meat lay beneath. Tucked in the hot red stuff down there in the bones was where he was going to find Black Hat and the hag from his dream. Because they or it were waiting there. Waiting for him.
Around noon they got into it.
Things had been cool and easy and Slaughter figured something was coming. He figured something had to be coming, this deep in the guts of the Deadlands. And then, just ahead, sweeping around the corner and putting on the speed was death: twenty bikers that he knew without a doubt were outriders of Cannibal Corpse. A wolfpack. Unlike the Disciples they chewed the pavement in a loose, sprawling sort of formation.
There was no way to avoid them, no time to slow down and double-back.
No time to get the bikes in the Wagon. No time for anything but to clash head-on and that’s the way it was going to be. If the Disciples ran for cover, the riders would be on them before they could dismount. Jumbo came over the walkie-talkie. “You better go to ground, John. They ain’t slowing down.” But Slaughter told him there was no time. Had they been in the Wagon they could’ve played slice-and-dice with the Cannibals using the cow-catcher, but it wasn’t going to be like that.
Both Slaughter and Moondog agreed that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later (and, realistically, it could have been worse: it could have been the Red Hand coming at them with machine guns and heavy artillery instead of these deadheads). So that morning they broke out the M16A2 rifles they’d gotten from Brightman. They duct-taped the barrels to the handlebar mounts of their bikes with the stocks and trigger guards resting on the gas tanks sideways, making room for the magazines and providing easy access. Moondog said that in World War I the allied pilots of the British, French, and American forces were getting their asses handed to them by the German aces in their Fokkers triplanes. The allies had a gunner in back, while the Germans had a machine gun mounted in front that the pilot fired. The pilot used line-of-sight firing directed by the position of the aircraft instead of some gunner in the back trying to swing his machine gun around at swift moving and dipping planes. Something that never worked.
And that’s what the Disciples would do.
Line-of-sight.
Rider-directed.
He gave the signal to the others to go in flogging, wide open. They throttled up, spread out, made ready to meet the bikers dead-on. Slaughter knew from his extensive prison reading that during the Civil War, the Confederate mounted cavalry was considered invincible, untouchable, unstoppable. Then George Custer re-wrote the book. He led wild charges directly into the heart of Confederate cavalry units, cutting through them like a knife, shooting and hacking with his saber, scattering the enemy to the four winds. And thus ending the myth of Confederate cavalry superiority.
Again, that’s what they were going to do right now.
The riders came at them and there was no doubt by then that these were Cannibal Corpse riders—those that had faces as such were leathery masks pitted with holes and others were eaten right down to the bone. They rode muddy hogs painted flat black or primer red, most on ratbikes that had been thrown together out of spare parts.
When they were in range, the Disciples opened up with a devastating barrage. Seven or eight of the Cannibals were blown off their mounts and it took some serious trick-riding to avoid the spinning bikes and tumbling riders.
They all made it through the first pass save for Irish, who rolled over a Cannibal Corpse rider, lost control, and slammed into one of their bikes, stacking his own mount on the pavement, low-ending it in a violent tabletop slide.
There was no time to go to his aid.
They pulled off the road, circled around just as Jumbo plowed through the zombie ranks, knocking a half dozen more to the road and catching another on the cow-catcher and dragging him and his bike thirty feet in a smear of blood and oil and motorcycle parts.
Slaughter came back around without hesitation.
The Cannibals came to meet him and it was one of those ice-pure, hot/cold Zen moments that he had experienced only once or twice in his life and usually at a time like this—right in the heat of battle. It was like everything momentarily ground to a halt, total slo-mo, video jumping slowly frame by frame by frame. He saw the wormboy bikers, six or seven of them bearing down on him, and was amazed at the sheer wrath and sheer fucking ugliness of them. Their faces were beyond simple comic book rot, but a wild and perpetually maggoty delirium of slack-jawed screams, scarification and random impalements, insect-eaten, flyblown, runny/pus-juicing/vomited-clotted expulsions of pulpous ooze.
They came at him and he inched forward to meet them.
The world was soundless, a dead vacuum in some distorted cul-de-sac of space and time. He watched them come to kill him, to slobber on his brains or heave blood-slicked resurrection worms down his throat, and he saw his death and did not fear it, but accepted it, saw the smooth transition and the calming crystal purity of abandoning the flesh, for once it was gone and you were divorced of it…no more pain or suffering or torment or worry or fear. A butterfly taking wing from a pupa, breaking free and gliding in the warm summer night of eternity—
Click.
That Zen moment, so fleeting and existential, was gone and the physical world pushed back in. He saw those dead riders as they saw him and he was just John Slaughter, outlaw biker and criminal hardcase, barbarian on an iron horse, his belly filled with acid and his soul smoldering with rage and hate and kill-happy enthusiasm.
When the Cannibals were twenty feet from him, he squeezed the trigger on the M16 and, lookee there, these deadheads were capable of learning because as soon as the rounds started to fly two of them broke free, cutting away from the wolfpack. But the others were strafed by slugs that made them hop and jerk, made one of them fall right out of the saddle and strike his head on the pavement with such velocity that it exploded on impact, spraying a gore-soup of rot and filth—and one surprised worm—over the blacktop.
But one or more of those rounds chewed into a gas tank and there was a resounding varoom! as it went up in a fiery eruption, spreading a curtain of flame fifteen feet in every direction, letting loose a burst of flechette shrapnel which were the remains of the gas tank itself.
Burning, four Cannibals lost control of their rides and skidded out, but one came right at Slaughter with a toothy mortuary grin and that was because he held a hatchet in one claw-hand and, despite the fact that one of his eyes was a yellow gummy soup and the other was swinging free by the stalk, he was bringing it forward in a perfect arc that would have taken Slaughter’s head right off.
But he ducked.
The hatchet slashed empty air.
The forward momentum and the wild swing threw the Cannibal off balance and he lost control, the bike going one way and he going the other. Slaughter never saw that, for as he cut hard to the left to avoid another Cannibal bearing down on him, he found the gravel at the edge of the road and lost control himself. His scoot skidded out and he was tossed mercifully into the long grass and then down into the ditch amongst some desiccated cattails that broke apart in a storm of soft fuzz.
The first thing he did was pull the bluesteel Combat Mag in one quick motion like a gunfighter unleathering his Navy six. Just in time, too, for a big hulking Cannibal Corpse whose face was more maggots than face stepped up to the edge of the ditch, grinning, his flat black eyes filled with secret triumph. Well, what do we got here? But what he got instead of easy meat for the chewing was the business end of the Mag and then Slaughter squeezed the trigger. The Mag boomed and a .357 round went right through the zombie’s forehead, coring him, sliding through his skull like a drill bit and taking most of what was inside out the back of hi
s head. In fact, when the slug went through, the impact broke his skull part and the top of his head jumped three inches like a hat blown up in the wind and came right down in a splash of red/black slime and the zombie folded right up.
Of course, the rest of the Disciples were hardly standing still during this time.
Apache Dan and Shanks were still on their bikes, jousting with the Cannibals, Fish was on the road shooting zombies off their mounts and Moondog had his machete out and was busy decapitating the downed Cannibals. What he didn’t see was a huge walking slab of carrion descend on him with a lead pipe, but Jumbo did. By that time he was on his sweet ‘54 Panhead like a knight that realized he’d almost missed the fun. He roared into the fray and when the big zombie was bearing down on Moondog, he popped a wheelie and slammed the front tire right into the side of the corpse’s head.
They both went down and just as quickly, they were both up, going at it bare fisted.
Slaughter climbed out of the ditch and saw what he wanted right away: the Cannibal Corpse with the hatchet. Among the other patches on his leather vest was one that read: VICE-PRESIDENT. St. Louis chapter and not Kansas City, but still…Vice-Prez.
He saw Slaughter.
Slaughter saw him.
They charged at each other, the Cannibal holding up his hatchet and Slaughter unsheathing his Kukri. It would have been so much easier to pop the zombie with the Combat Mag, but that’s not what Slaughter wanted. Sometimes, in the thick of battle with so much indiscriminate, impersonal killing going on with guns, there was a call to the knife. A need to swing and taste blood. Smell it. Feel it. To watch your prey go down dead. Maybe it was an instinctual thing, but he had felt it before.
The Cannibal came at him with a high-pitched war cry that was somewhere between a howling wolf and a mad dog. Black ribbons of slime flew from his mouth and a slop of maggots was expelled from his left nostril.
“Come on!” Slaughter called out at him. “Bring your gamey ass on!”
The Cannibal vice-prez came in with wild slashing motions of the hatchet which, although not controlled, were fast and vicious and much more powerful than Slaughter expected from a deadhead. He got under them and around them and lashed out with his left foot, catching the vice-prez in the back and throwing him forward.
He brought the Gurkha knife around, the eighteen-inch blade just missing the back of the zombie’s neck. The vice-prez whirled back around, making a chattering/cackling sound and lunged.
Slaughter dropped back, slid on the gravel and went on his ass.
The zombie struck out with the hatchet. Missed. Brought it down again and Slaughter rolled away, scrambling to his feet.
The vice-prez swung his hatchet.
Slaughter swung his Kukri.
The blades clattered in mid-air and Slaughter felt the numbing shock of it right up to his elbow. He danced back as the hatchet came again and then again. He spun around and slashed open the zombie’s chest, and it would have been a near-fatal cut for a living man but to this deadhead it was just a flesh wound.
He got out of the way of the hatchet, slashed at the zombie’s arm, made contact, peeling free a chunk of greening meat. And the hatchet came within inches of his face but the swing threw the vice-prez off balance and Slaughter leaped. He brought the Gurkha knife down with full-force into the zombie’s face and it sounded like an axe splitting black oak.
The zombie cried out, its last good eye shattered in a splash of yellow serum. A rancid blood poured from his split face, a thick and curdy sort of blood that was squirming with graveworms. He swung the hatchet and Slaughter ducked under it and brought the Kukri into the back of his neck. The zombie gagged out clots of tissue in a vomit gush of bile and blood.
He dropped the hatchet.
Slaughter slashed him across the throat, took one hand off at the wrist, then brought the Gurkha blade to bear, slitting off the top of the vice-prez’s head. He tottered weakly, barely staying up, screaming out in rage and pure hate, then he began to come apart as if the damage done to him was the catalyst that broke him apart from the inside out. He went to his knees, face hanging by threads of gore, and Slaughter smelled one violent odor after another—flesh-rot, formaldehyde, dry hay, hot bacterial decay—and the zombie crashed into a heap of dusty, moth-eaten, dank-smelling debris. Then goo spurted out…black blood and creamy white marrow, yellow globs of liquid fat, and lastly, a fountaining eruption of maggots that steamed and sizzled and went to chalky grave-paste.
The skull had broken apart with the rest…but the jaws were still intact and the teeth chattered like they were cold.
Slaughter kicked them away.
The dead were all over the highway. None had escaped. Several of the corpses were still burning, letting off greasy plumes of black smoke that carried a sharp, nauseating stink of burnt hair. The bikes of the Disciples were scattered about. Several of the Cannibal Corpse bikes were burning along with their riders. The remains of the zombies were splashed over the road.
Jumbo and Moondog were squatted over Irish who was torn up and glistening with blood. He wasn’t moving. Shanks was standing there, just staring down at him. Fish was walking around with a dazed look on his blood-streaked face, stomping the worms that crawled out of the dead zombies with his motorcycle boots. Apache Dan saw Slaughter coming, the gore-dripping Kukri still in his fist. He looked over at him, the left side of his face discolored by a livid bruise, blood on his mouth, a smear of grease over his face like warpaint. When Slaughter met his eyes, he just shook his head.
Slaughter wiped his blade off on the colors of a Cannibal Corpse and sheathed it.
He stooped down by Irish who had gotten mangled in the slide he took. He put his hand in Irish’s hair, brushed a few strands from his face, said something silently and stood up.
“Let’s plant him proper,” he said.
They buried Irish in the field, in a hole set there amongst the waving yellow switchgrass. When they had filled it in, they stood around somberly and stared down at the grave. No one spoke. There were things that could have been said for their fallen comrade but no one had the heart to speak. They just stared down and remembered the hard rides and fast times and how it all came rushing to an end out here when he stacked his bike. He would have been happy knowing he’d gone out on his scoot. It was all he could have asked for.
Wiping moisture from his eyes, Fish bent down, scooped up some grave-dirt in his palm and let it fall through his fingers. “See you on the other side, my brother.”
The others followed him back to the road, silently.
Chapter Sixteen
Freak weather pattern.
That’s what Slaughter thought as they entered another valley and the fog swept up to meet them. One of those freak weather patterns that happened from time to time and it really meant nothing. Warm southern air sweeping up and meeting cold air coming down from Canada. That’s all it was. Yet…the way it seemed to shimmer, lighting from slate-gray to a dull and luminous yellow…it was unnerving. Unnatural. He couldn’t stop thinking about the last foggy valley they’d gone through and he wasn’t about to put himself or his brothers through that again. They’d been through enough.
“Nobody’s blaming you, man,” Apache Dan said. “Irish went out the way he would have wanted.”
Slaughter just stared into the fog. He was at the wheel of the War Wagon and when he was driving a cage like this—or any cage—he started thinking too much and feeling too much until his insides seemed to twist up and get sucked down into a black hole inside of him. And Apache Dan always seemed to know. Always.
“Yeah, but I can’t help feeling like shit about it. Irish knew what he was getting into, but if he was still in-stir—”
“If he was still in-stir, man, he’d be rotting away in a fucking cell. This way he got to be with his brothers. He was a Disciple again. Wearing the colors meant the world to him. Same as it does to you and me and the rest of these animals,” Apache Dan told him. “He got to ride again.
He got to fight again. He died in the saddle with his fucking boots on and that’s all any Disciple wants.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“I’m always right, bro. Just like when I tell you I don’t like how this is shaking—another valley, more fog. It gives me bad thoughts.”
“Me, too.”
“The boys are getting nervous back there.”
Slaughter listened to them fooling around in the back. Playing cards. Betting with both hands. Insulting each other. Fish telling more lurid tales of his sex life. Seemed like they were doing okay…but were they? He thought their voices sounded strained, their laughter a little too forced and a little too loud as if they were overcompensating.
“I hear you,” he said. “I’m nervous, too. I’m taking her in slow. We see anything…spiders or anything…we turn around. You got my word on that.”
“That’s good enough for me, bro.”
But what if this isn’t just garden-variety fog? Slaughter asked himself after Apache Dan went to sit in on a hand in the back. What if it’s something else? Something worse? Something…dangerous?
He knew it sounded paranoid…but what if there was something funny about it? What if this wasn’t just fog but some cloud of radioactive waste that had drifted down from a leaking reactor or oozed up out of the earth from some toxic waste dump set free by the use of multi-megaton nukes? And hadn’t he heard something about a nuclear power plant in Nebraska going supercritical with a core meltdown since the Outbreak? Clouds of fallout could drift for hundreds of miles before coming to earth. He knew that much. Maybe that explained the Valley of the Spiders (as he was now calling it) and maybe that explained this valley, too.
Then again, man, maybe it’s just fog.
Lacking a Geiger counter or those little radiation detection badges people wore around atomic reactors, there was no way to know. Slaughter decided he’d keep the radiation thing to himself.
