by Tim Curran
He felt them grab his ankles, dragging him up and out of the bunker. He reached blindly for the M-16 and his hands closed around a flare magazine with five rounds in it. He stuffed it inside his vest as they pulled him out of the bunker and through the dirt. In the distance, he thought he heard Maria screaming.
Making himself go limp, he let them drag him down the path and out of the main body of headhunters. In the moonlight he could see the forms of the two that had his ankles. They were taking him somewhere private to feed upon him and take his head, no doubt.
Slaughter let that happen.
He didn’t want too many mutants around when he made his move. When they got him down to the next tier and within hailing distance of the hut, he reached a hand inside his vest and pulled out the flare gun. When he got a clear silhouette and saw that the snarling simian bastards were shoulder to shoulder, he kicked out with his legs to get their attention. They dropped his ankles and turned to feed (he was thinking). He covered his eyes and put a flare right into the face of the one on the left who cried out in agony as it exploded in a shower of red sparks, lighting his hair on fire. The flare bounced off him and drilled into the other—a woman—burning across her breasts, bouncing off her legs and hitting the man again, this time in the groin.
Slaughter rolled away, scrambling off on his hands and knees.
They were screeching and growling, the man blinded, the woman seared, both of them burning now.
He made his getaway.
He ran off towards the hut but there were shapes moving all around him, so he cut down the hillside, avoided three or four more that shrieked at him, and ducked past still more. A throng of them came hobbling in his direction and more came from behind. He put a flare right into the throng and they vaulted away, screeching and burning, and he cut through them, trying to navigate in the flickering light. Then he tripped over something—a tree root, a half-buried bone, it was hard to tell—and went rolling down the hillside and found himself in the mud bowl.
There were dozens of them.
He ran and ran, found a ditch not far from the cage where he’d fought Maggot, and jumped in.
He listened to them for hours, killing and maiming, raping the women and dismembering the men, feeding on the wounded and chopping off heads. They didn’t find him. They had plenty of prey and he bided his time, shivering in the muddy ditch, just praying for dawn, his ears ringing with the screams of their victims.
* * *
As inconceivable as it seemed, he must have fallen asleep at some point because when he opened his eyes it was silent. The sun was rising over the hills in the east in a red, shimmering ball, burning away a damp early morning mist.
For some time he laid there, afraid to move.
The encampments were silent.
Nothing moved.
Nothing stirred.
He carefully raised his head from the ditch. He saw nothing. The mutants were gone. A few vehicles were burning, casting plumes of smoke into the air, but that was about it. The headhunters had left with the rising sun.
Slaughter pulled himself out of the ditch, slicked with drying mud, face painted with grime. He saw a few headless Ratbag corpses that were badly mauled or eaten, but no dead mutants. They’d dragged off their dead along with the corpses of their prey. In fact, the area was very sterile in appearance. Not so much as a stray bone or a shank of meat. He saw bloodstains; they were everywhere. But there were no corpses save a few Ratbags sunken in the mud that had been overlooked. The headhunters were very efficient scavengers, apparently.
He pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of his vest and lit it.
He wondered about Maria. Poor kid was a mess, a real basket case, a collection of neuroses, but she’d been through a lot and that was understandable. He hoped they’d killed her. He honestly hoped for that because he didn’t think any woman could remain sane after the attentions of those things.
He wanted to mourn her.
More so, he wanted to track the mutants to their lair with a hundred well-armed 1%ers and sort them out, but that was wish fulfillment and fantasy retribution. He had to be practical. He needed a vehicle. He needed to link up with the Disciples and, if that was impossible, to get to that fortress and get that bio out of there.
And don’t forget Black Hat or Nemesis or Leviathan or whatever the fuck he calls himself. Because that puke has something special in store for you at the end of the trail and you know it.
He looked for a vehicle, but every one he found was wrecked. The Red Hand must have deserted during the night, those few survivors driving off in anything that ran. Slaughter was hoping for a Hummer or an APC, but he couldn’t find so much as a skateboard. He was on foot. His scoot was back in Exodus and he really doubted it had survived the all-out attack by the Red Hand.
Damn.
On foot.
That was a hell of a thing for an old scooter tramp. He kept walking, keeping his eyes open for trouble and wondering how he was going to get out of this one and how far it might be to the nearest town where he could possibly hook up with a ride. He came closer to the main gate and he began to see a few stragglers roaming around. They ignored him. Even when he called out to them, they ignored him. They weren’t interested in him or what he was selling. He wondered how many of them had been watching him dance with Maggot.
There was a row of clapboard buildings and that’s where Slaughter had his first piece of luck of the day. The corpse of a man was impaled to the wall of one of the buildings. One of the mutants must have done it and it was a testament to the strength of those things. A knife had been driven through the belly of the corpse and into the wall, pegging it there.
The corpse belonged to Valdez.
And the knife belonged to Slaughter.
It was his Gurkha knife, his Kukri. He kind of doubted there was another one around so it had to be his. He took hold of the hilt with both hands and, bracing himself with one boot against the wall, worked the knife loose. The corpse hit the ground and he stared at the gored blade. The knife was no worse for wear. When he turned around, three or four stragglers were watching him.
When he put his eyes on them, they scattered.
All except one: a Ratbag with a .38 on his belt.
“You know where I can get a ride?” Slaughter asked him. “A car, a truck, anything?”
“No. But when you find one, you let me know.”
He was about to turn away when there came a rumbling in the distance. Slaughter recognized what it was: there was no mistaking the roar of hogs, the sound of a pack coming in on their iron horses. The only thing akin to it was the sound of heavy armor riding in formation. It was thunder and blitzkrieg and sweet music, the banging of Thor’s hammer and the echo of sheer wrath.
Problem was: who were the riders?
Slaughter couldn’t see yet because of the bend in the road out there. If it was Cannibal Corpse, the stragglers were going to wish that the headhunters had got them the night before. But if it was the Corpse, then Slaughter had already decided he was going to liberate one of those carrion-eaters of his ride.
The stragglers scattered.
They saw death coming and they weren’t hanging around. They crawled back into their holes and coverts and made for the next round which would be no less bloody and savage than the first, they figured. Slaughter slipped around the side of the building, wondering how he was going to work this. He had the Kukri and the flare gun, but that was about it. Not exactly the sort of artillery needed to handle a crew of the Corpse Nation.
But he made ready.
He was going to make it work because he had to make it work. He saw the riders coming in: four of them and behind them another vehicle.
Couldn’t be.
Couldn’t possibly be.
But it was: the Devil’s Disciples had arrived.
Chapter Twenty-Six
On the road again.
In the bright sunshine of a bright day, the War Wagon rolled on, moving stea
dily north-northwest up to Devil’s Lake where the real action would begin. Slaughter slept away the morning and a good piece of the afternoon in the back of the Wagon after the exhilaration of forming up with his brother Disciples again had worn off. Up front, Apache Dan was driving, the others out riding their iron horses with Moondog leading the pack. Slaughter lay on his cot in the back looking at all the military surplus stacked up, smelling engine oil and gasoline, and thinking there wasn’t a finer and more relaxing scent on earth. With what he’d gone through last night, he was starting to wind down and he was glad the Disciples had shown because it had really energized him to the task at hand and that was something he needed badly.
It had only been a few days since they were together last, but out here in the Deadlands a few days could be an awfully long time. In a few days you could meet a crazy old Indian barbecue king who could tell you wild tales about a Skeleton Man and you could trip your brains out on peyote and have visions and hold court with Black Hat and face down a town full of zombies only to be taken prisoner by the Red Hand and be forced to fight a giant wormboy only to barely escape a worm rain and hook up with a neurotic young woman who you began to feel protective of only to see her dragged off by mutants. And then there was always the bit about the woman squeezing out worms and becoming some kind of fucking seer. Yeah, a few days in the Deadlands could be like a lifetime of revelation and pain and horror.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Maria and hoping she had died quickly, because he had felt responsible for her in her helplessness and felt that he had let her down.
You did the best you could do. Since you seem to be believing in karma these days, then you can believe that yours is intact and unsullied as far as Maria goes because you couldn’t have done more.
According to Apache Dan, after Slaughter rode off that day, drawing the Red Hand away from the pack, they had gone to ground for hours, waiting it out in the shelter of some trees. After a time, Apache Dan had led Moondog and Shanks out on their bikes searching for him. They looked for hours but could find no sign of him and then, since Apache Dan was in charge, he did the only reasonable thing and resumed the drive up to Devil’s Lake. None of them wanted to leave Slaughter behind but they figured if they would link up with him anywhere it would be up at their destination. When he wasn’t there, they got down to business anyway and did some reconnaissance of the old NORAD fortress.
“It was worse than we thought,” Apache Dan told him. “We were expecting to see it swarming with the Red Hand, but that’s not what we saw at all.”
“What did you see?” Slaughter asked him.
“Cannibal Corpse.”
According to Apache at some point—fairly recently, he was guessing—the Corpse Nation had overrun the fortress compound and taken over.
It wasn’t good news.
In fact, it was unbelievably bad news.
Apache Dan and Moondog had scouted out the perimeter of the place for some time and from their estimates there were at least forty or fifty members of the Corpse hanging around with more inside. And it looked like they were running themselves a flesh farm out back of the fortress. Somewhere in there, Slaughter knew, would be the bio. The Red Hand had been smart enough to keep her alive for a bargaining chip, but he doubted the same could be said of Cannibal Corpse. There was every likelihood she had either gone on the spit or become one of the walking dead by that point.
It would be no easy bit getting in there.
Finding her would take sheer luck.
And getting out with her in one piece would be akin to an act of God.
It was suicide from beginning to end but there was no backing out of it now. The thing was, even if Slaughter wanted to, the others wouldn’t have it. They all wanted this and wanted it bad. They all wanted to charge in there, if for no other reason than to sort out Cannibal Corpse. To them, Katherine Isley, the bio, was secondary. The woman really meant nothing to them. They wanted payback. They wanted to put an end to the Cannibal Corpse Nation once and for all.
And Slaughter understood that.
He felt that hatred as deeply as they did.
He had not forgotten about Coffin, the Kansas City chapter president of Cannibal Corpse, or his sergeant-at-arms, Reptile. They were responsible for murdering Disciples and Slaughter knew if he accomplished nothing else he would see the both of them hacked to pieces. When he was through with them, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to get up and walk.
But all that aside, there was more on the burner here.
There were bigger things.
Things that involved Black Hat who, he now felt, was the undeads’ god just as that zombie woman in Exodus was their death goddess. They would have to be put down. But if Black Hat was Nemesis and Nemesis was Leviathan, who quite conceivably was a demon of some sort or Death himself…what chance was there?
If you really believe these things and you’ve attained some higher state of consciousness where karma is not just a word but a physical/mystical flow of universal energy, and ethically and morally you’ve been taken up a few notches, then you have to know that going into the fortress with these boys means their death. They will not survive this and neither will you.
And that was it in a nutshell and he knew it.
Did he have a right to make these boys, his brothers, throw away their lives? He could tell himself they wanted to, but if he gave the word he knew that they would forget it and be more than happy to follow him on a road ride out to, say, the Pacific Ocean, fighting and raising hell the entire way. They’d like that. But he couldn’t do that and if he backed down from Cannibal Corpse they might lose respect for him and he couldn’t allow that. He had to follow this through because he knew it was his destiny to do so and he firmly believed this.
But six of them.
Six Devil’s Disciples against an army of Cannibals, an army of nearly un-killable walking dead bikers. What were the chances?
“Live hard and die free,” he said under his breath.
It was the mantra all 1%ers lived by. And when they stopped practicing it they were no longer 1%ers, they were no longer outlaw bikers.
Enough thinking.
Enough.
Slaughter went up front and clapped Apache Dan on the shoulder.
“Did you have a good sleep?”
“Yeah. I fucking needed it.”
“You did.”
“How far are we?”
“We should make Devil’s Lake just before sunset.”
It was all planned out and everyone knew their parts and Slaughter didn’t bother reiterating any of it in his head. Moondog had a special way in mind to breech the fortress and lay waste to most of the Cannibal Corpse wormboys at the same time. It would take daring and real guts, but Slaughter had no doubt that these boys were the ones for the job. He lit a cigarette and watched them out there—Jumbo and Shanks, Moondog and Fish. They were riding high and tight and as he watched them, feeling joy at seeing it and remorse knowing he would never see it again, in his mind he could see other road runs of the past where sixty or seventy Disciples rode in the pack and everything and everyone got well out of their way.
“Can’t help thinking,” Apache Dan said then, “that you were real vague about the past few days.”
“Was I?”
“Sure. Let’s see. You took a wild ride with the Red Hand on your ass. You carved out through fields and back roads. Met an old Indian and ate some antelope. Fought some wormboys in a town called Exodus. Got taken by the Red Hand and fought some big wormboy and held your own against a mutant attack.”
“That about sizes it up,” Slaughter said, pulling off his cigarette.
“Sure. But seems to me you’re leaving out the in-betweens.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah. And I think we both know it.”
“What if I told you those in-betweens were the sort of thing you wouldn’t believe?”
Apache Dan laughed. “Listen to me, man. For twenty-odd years we be
en riding together, drinking together, fighting and whoring and raising hell together and wearing the same patch…you think I wouldn’t believe your word, my brother? You think there’s anyone in this world I trust more than you? Have more faith in or more respect for? Any man I love more or wouldn’t die for if you asked me to?”
Slaughter swallowed something down in his throat and thought about trying to bullshit the man but he knew he couldn’t do it, so he told him everything and with the telling it sounded even worse than he thought it would.
When he was done, Apache Dan said, “Leviathan. Leviathan, man. Dig it. That’s heavy shit. The Lord of the Dead. Goddamn.”
“You still want to go through with this?”
Apache Dan smiled. “I want it more than ever, John. This is epic. This is the shit sagas are written about. If you’re going to go out, I always say, then go out big. And what better way for a Disciple to cash-in than fighting the Devil himself?”
“You are one crazy mother,” Slaughter told him.
“That’s why I wear the patch, my brother. Because I earned the right.”
* * *
As the sun set, they were sitting on a grassy hilltop beneath the cover of some trees scoping out the NORAD complex below which looked like the castle of a witch in some evil fairy tale. The place was much as Brightman had described it: three stories of gray concrete, drab and deathly and utilitarian. Boxlike with a flat roof and rectangular windows, all of which were covered in steel mesh. The compound surrounding it was faced off by a circular drive and a huge parking lot that was now cracked open with sprouting weeds. There was a courtyard of high yellow grasses that stretched out about three hundred feet in every direction until it reached a high chainlink fence topped with razor wire. The road leading up to the main gate was long and straight and set out with lots of abandoned guard shacks. With his binoculars, Slaughter could see where the tire traps had been—sheaths of spikes that would rise up out of the road at intervals to snag any vehicle that tried to make a run at the complex. He could also see obvious scars in the landscape outside the main fence where a series of fences had been taken out after the complex closed up shop. At one time, the fences would have held dog runs in-between with vicious German Shepherds that would have stopped anybody from even getting close to the place. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s and probably right up into the 1980’s, if you would have been even as close as they were on the hilltop you would have been arrested by MPs and tossed in a military prison. It had been secure during the Cold War, but now it was wide open.
