by Tim Curran
“So he’s the lord of the dead?”
She shrugged. “It’s open to interpretation, I guess. All that stuff is.”
But it would fit. He had seen those weird little altars in several towns, like offerings made to some pagan god. Maybe that pagan god was Leviathan and maybe his worshippers were the zombies. It made a crude sort of sense. In Exodus, he had seen the wormgirl, the death-goddess, maybe she was like some kind of high priestess. Again, he was reaching but it all seemed to make some kind of sense, for who else would the undead worship but something like Leviathan? Back in Victoria, where he’d found all those impaled corpses on the green, he also found that old man with the words burned into his back, the signature of Leviathan. And what had the old man said? The one who perpetrated that atrocity said his name was Nemesis, which could be construed as adversary or enemy.
Nemesis…I am Nemesis.
“Yes, to all living things you certainly are.”
“What?” Maria asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.” Then the obvious occurred to him. “Can Leviathan mean the Devil or something like the Devil?”
“Yes.”
She was very uncomfortable with it all and he could see that. He didn’t know what to think about it all. He had never in his life believed in the Christian Devil. He had always pretty much associated it as being symbolical for the animal side of men and their primal past. With all he had seen, was he now ready to believe in something as intrinsically offensive to a reasoning mind as a demon or the Devil himself? He wasn’t sure. He really wasn’t sure. Maybe not the Devil, but perhaps the sort of thing that had inspired such belief. Because it really fit. All of it did. Frank Feathers had told him of the brutal murders in Crabeater Creek in association with the Skeleton Man. The murder part fit. The chaos thing did, too, because the worm rains had certainly created chaos. And the west being the Land of the Dead…well, that was certainly true enough.
If what that worm-witch had said was true, then Black Hat was expecting him, knowing that, inadvertently, Slaughter was following him. They were going to meet. Slaughter knew that. And it was going to be an ugly affair when they did. Who was he to fight something like Leviathan? He did not know. Yet, he almost felt that it was fated.
But one thing was for sure: he wasn’t about to ascend the throne of death. It wasn’t his calling. If he had one, it was to purge Leviathan from the world.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The shadows were growing very long and they knew they weren’t about to spend the night in the hut with the corpse of the worm-witch, so they struck out for something better. And about that time, they heard screams coming from across the encampments. The sound of gunfire. Down in the mud bowl below people were running. Shouting. It was coming from every direction.
Maria was nervous.
So was Slaughter.
He led her up to the next tier and they came across a man lying in the dirt. His throat was torn out and recently, they knew, from the blood pooling around him that was still fresh, still very wet. Another man was tangled in the barbwire. Like the first, he was dressed in fatigues. Ratbags. There was an arrow in his back. Not a modern streamlined thing but a crude shaft that looked like it had been carved from a stick of wood, but deadly just the same.
His head was missing.
What the hell is this now?
“We have to find a place to hide!” Maria said. “We have to hurry!”
“What’s going on?”
She looked around frantically, her eyes beady and filled with fear. “Mutants,” she said. “Headhunters.”
Slaughter was going to ask her what she was talking about and then, from below, near to the hut, a man ran screaming and four hobbling shapes took him down. He saw that they were both men and women, judging from the pendulous breasts on a couple.
And then Maria cried out.
A woman came running from a bunker in their direction, a look of absolute desperation and absolute horror on her face. And it didn’t take long to see why: the mutants were hunting her.
A trio of them hemmed her in and took her down.
Slaughter got a good look at them.
None of them were more than five feet in height. They were thick-bodied and bow-legged, apelike, with long dangling muscular arms. They were all naked, bodies greased with clotted gray mud that was so thick in places it was cracking open like parched earth. Where the mud had worn away he could see that their skeletons were exaggerated, jutting, their seamed yellow skins barely covering the architecture of bones beneath. Their hair was long and tangled like ditchweed, knotted up ritualistically with sticks and bonepipes, pulled into crude roped dreadlocks with snakeskin thongs and feather clusters.
He fired on semi-auto, busting two 5.56 mm slugs into the back of one of them. The creature—a male—jerked from the impact, but did not go down. He turned and snarled, bearing a mocking grin of crooked, protruding teeth and loops of saliva. The incisors and canines were sharp and doglike.
As the other two mutants literally tore the poor woman apart, this one charged with a hatchet in its gnarled hand.
Slaughter did not hesitate: he fired on full auto, spraying the mutant in the chest. This time the creature went down, making a low grunting sound that could have been pain or pleasure or both. He rose back up, spilling blood from his wounds, and Slaughter put three more in his head and he pitched into the mud, convulsing.
The other two had succeeded in eviscerating the woman now and were fighting over her entrails. A couple more, excited by the smell of blood, loped over there and two more began sniffing around the corpse of the one Slaughter shot. One of them chopped off the woman’s head with an axe and held it high like a trophy.
“C’mon!” Slaughter said, dragging Maria to her feet. “Don’t fold up on me for chissake!”
More mutants were massing now. There was no way in hell they could hold off those primal monsters with an M-16; there were too many and Slaughter was pretty sure he was down to four or five rounds by that point, but he didn’t dare take the time to check. From all across the encampments he could hear shooting, screaming, people dying. The Red Hand had superior weapons, but against the sheer number of mutants it was hopeless. The mutants were loosely organized into hunting bands, but driven into a psychotic kill-frenzy by hunger. They didn’t fear death. They celebrated it, glorified in bloody carnage. A wolf pack with only a vague resemblance to men.
Slaughter led Maria away, only firing when they were threatened.
They climbed quickly to the uppermost tier which seemed to be mutant-free. The bunkers up there were arranged so that they had a perfect, unobstructed killzone before them. The only way the enemy could get at these was to climb the hillside or drop down from above. The first bunker they checked was collapsed, the second was filled with sand and had no weapons. But the third was exactly what they were looking for. It was reinforced concrete, sandbagged, with a .50 caliber machine gun emplacement and a barbwire perimeter. Military surplus was stacked along the low walls. Apparently the Red Hand was using it for storage.
It had been years since he had fired a fifty cal, but it came back to him quick enough. He pulled back the bolt and fed in the belt from the ammo box.
“Please…please don’t let them get me,” Maria said. “You don’t know what they do.”
“I can imagine,” Slaughter told her.
In the setting sunlight, he saw a group of mutants climbing the muddy hillside up at them. They clawed their way up, using their powerful arms and swinging themselves in rapid ascension like monkeys climbing trees. There were a series of barbwire perimeters confronting them, but they crawled up and over the first, torn and bloody, but undaunted in their hunt for meat.
“Okay,” Slaughter said. “This is going to get loud.”
Maria was hunched over behind him and now she curled up in a ball and, if he hadn’t known it before, he knew now that she was going to be absolutely no use in a fight. It made him think of Dirty Mary. She
would have relished something like this. Oh, she’d have been scared, too, but once her claws were out, he knew, you’d never have suspected it. He was beginning to really miss her…or maybe he was only now allowing himself to admit it.
In the dying light, Slaughter got a bead on the mutants. They were smeared with blood and one of them brandished a severed arm like a club. He opened up and the fifty did its work just fine. The mutants literally exploded when the .50 cal slugs ripped into them. They were cut in half, throwing up mists of blood and bone fragments. A few more tried to climb either to feed on their downed brothers or to get up at the bunker and Slaughter cut them down. He scattered a few more packs, driving them into the shadows and out of sight.
As darkness came on, he could still hear the screams of the dying from the encampments. That and the grunting and growling of the mutants as they fed.
“Maria?” Slaughter said.
She was still curled up behind him, just shaking.
“Listen,” he said. “I need your help here, man. I can’t do it all myself. You gotta pitch in.”
She sat up. “What do I have to do?”
“Start going through those crates and see what we have.”
Hesitantly, she did. She found a few more ammo boxes for the .50 cal, some medical supplies, bottled water, military MREs, some flares, but no grenades. That was the one thing that he had been hoping for. She passed out food and water, arranged some flares for the long night and then just sat there, staring, practically comatose again.
By the time it was fully dark, the screams out there had all but subsided. They could still hear the mutants from time to time but even that was lessening. The hot wind carried a raw, evil stink of death and suffering.
“You need to tell me about these things out there,” Slaughter said, knowing he had to somehow slap her out of her current state.
In a low, weak voice she said, “They’re flesh-eaters.”
“I figured that.”
“Headhunters. That’s what people call them because they always take heads.”
Slaughter sighed. “Yeah. I got that much.”
“They come in packs and murder everyone. Some of the women they carry off to—”
“Figured that, too.”
“They usually attack towards dark like this and the Red Hand knows it. They haven’t been after us in a month or more,” Maria explained. “I think…I think people let their guard down. I think the headhunters knew that and waited for it.”
Out in the darkness below he could hear the unmistakable sounds of the mutants feeding—snapping bones, chewing, now and then shrieking, and howling.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Out in the compound, it was quiet.
A deathly brooding silence had fallen and Slaughter wasn’t caring for it much. All they needed was for a few of those things to slip up in the dark and make it into the bunker and that would be it. He still had the M-16, but it was nearly out of shot. What he would have given to have his Combat Mag again and a few speedloaders for the close-in stuff. Back in his days as a Marine, they would have set out landmines and Claymores, tripflares and boobytraps to secure the perimeter. Now he just had his five senses. But he had to remain vigilant, which wasn’t easy because he was so damn tired. His eyes kept shutting. Some coffee or a couple of bennies would have been nice.
Maria was awake.
He could feel her behind him. She was breathing softly but now and again she would move. He didn’t know what the hell he was going to do with her. In the old days, he would have probably tossed her to the headhunters if she didn’t earn her keep, but now he was thinking he had to get her somewhere. Somewhere safe. But where exactly was that? He wondered if the other Disciples were still alive, still riding hard and giving hell.
She’s going to be trouble and you know it. She’s like a child and you don’t have the time to be babysitting anyone.
But what the hell could he do?
Things were different now. He just couldn’t leave. And that meant in the morning—if they even saw the morning—she’d have to come with when he made his break out of this place. He had a pretty good idea that by dawn there wouldn’t be any Ratbags left to stop him and was that a good thing or a bad thing?
Now and again he heard a night bird crying out or the distant and terrible roar of some nocturnal predator. It was hard to say what that might have been, but he didn’t think he was being overly-imaginative when he thought it sounded prehistoric.
The eerie silence and blanketing darkness were almost unbearable.
Slaughter dug around next to him.
“What are you doing?” Maria asked him, her voice almost neurotic in its intensity.
“Putting a flare out,” he said.
What he didn’t tell her was that the stillness out there was making his skin crawl and his experience told him that this was more than nerves but a warning signal.
He aimed the flare pistol and fired it. There was a muted pop and the flare went up over the compound, throwing out a flickering red-yellow illumination that swept over the ragged landscape, creating a surreal world of strobing shapes and jumping shadows.
But his instincts had not been wrong.
A dozen headhunters were clawing their way up the hill. When the flare ignited, they froze, staring up at it like it was the eye of their god that had just opened. They watched it with primitive fascination and Slaughter sighted them in and sprayed them down with the fifty. It was a turkey shoot. The slugs ripped them apart and sent their remains tumbling down the hill. He fired on suspicious pockets of darkness and anything that didn’t move fast enough or things that looked like they might be alive. Most of them weren’t, but the hammering of the heavy machine gun and the burning flare disoriented the other mutants, forcing them up out of ditches into the killzone and scattering the rest in fear. He took out sixteen or seventeen of them by his figuring.
When he was done, the barrel was smoking.
He sighed then, lit a cigarette, knowing there was no point in stealth by then. He kept his senses alert and his instincts sharp. “How did you come to be with the Red Hand?” he asked Maria.
“How does any woman come to be with them?”
“You didn’t volunteer, I’m guessing.”
Maria made a sound that was almost laughter. “No. Would any woman in her right mind volunteer to be a camp woman?”
“I suppose not.”
“There are women who join them, though,” Maria admitted. “Some of them just want protection. But others join because they want to be part of the Hand. They want to fight.”
“But you weren’t one of them.”
“No, I wasn’t one of them.” She went silent for a moment, then: “They grabbed me and three other girls in Bismarck. We were making our way east like everyone else.”
“You were going to college when the Outbreak happened?”
“Yeah. I was studying comparative religion.”
“Heavy stuff.”
“Sure.”
She kept talking but he was no longer listening. He was getting that chill up his spine again. He knew someone, or more probably, something was sneaking up on the bunker. He listened. Intuited. Put out feelers hoping to snare something mentally, but whatever it was, it was being very quiet, very patient, something well-practiced in stealth and stalking. He thought about putting out another flare but he knew there was no time for that. He was getting a raw smell of rotting meat and old blood; nothing could disguise it.
It was getting thicker.
Hot, nauseating.
Maria had sensed it now, too. She had stopped talking.
Slaughter swallowed. Something was on top of the bunker working its way forward, inch by inch. The moonlight was very pale but there was enough of it to see by.
He waited.
A face and a trailing mop of hair appeared over the lip of the roof, then hands. They were perfectly silhouetted. Slaughter fired twice
with the M-16, catching their intruder in the head. The headhunter made a gurgling sort of sound and dropped to the ground, dead.
But he was only the spearhead of a much larger force.
They saw no more reason for stealth.
Slaughter heard them grunting out there, gnashing their teeth and breathing hard. He put out a flare. Jesus, the hillside was swarming with them. They were crawling upwards on their bellies in shaggy ranks, their eyes glistening in the sudden intrusion of light.
He loaded the flare gun and put out another.
Loaded it again and stuck it inside his jean vest.
He opened up with the .50 cal. machine gun and killed twenty within the first five seconds of firing. But they were coming from every quarter. He laid down suppressive fire to the left and right, straight ahead and down below in the mud bowl. In the flickering light of the flare, it was a sea of gore down there, twitching limbs and blood and looped entrails and blasted heads. But they still kept coming, crawling right through the shattered remains of the others, painting themselves up with the blood of the fallen. Filthy, carrion-stinking, subhuman nightstalkers.
He kept shooting until the barrel was again hot and smoking.
But there were too many of them.
“We’re going to have to make a run for it!” he told Maria between shots, but she was hysterical and crying.
Two of them came out of the darkness, diving into the bunker. Slaughter was hit by something that knocked him on his ass. Maria screamed. His head filled with stars, he saw two hunched-over forms taking her out of the bunker. She fought and screamed in the orange glow of the flare, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Their silhouettes were everywhere. They were hissing and growling and squealing like boars. The air was foul with the vile, musky scents of their pelts. He could smell their acrid urine, the pungent stench of their glandular secretions, the hot-blood smell of the meat they’d been chewing on. It was a concentration of death and graveyards that sickened him and made him want to vomit. This is what Hemingway had meant by death: the carrion breath of blood-drinking hags from a slaughterhouse.
