Cannibal Corpse, M/C

by Tim Curran

  The main gate was thrown wide and why not? Cannibal Corpse feared no one. And who in their right mind would willingly go through those gates into a nest of flesh-eaters?

  Only the Devil’s Disciples, he thought.

  “You can’t see the flesh farm from here,” Apache Dan said. “It’s out back behind the place.”

  Slaughter could see a rising rock wall back there and Apache said there was a high cave in it that was not natural but hewn-out and must have held some kind of top security facility in the NORAD days.

  “From what I could see of it when Moondog and me scoped it from the other side, it looks big enough to drive three or four tanks into at the same time. Hard to say what was in there or what’s in there now. Might have been a bunker or a bomb shelter. Who knows?”

  “But that’s probably where our bio will be if she’s anywhere.”

  “That’s what we think.”

  Sitting there, Slaughter saw the ratbikes of the Cannibals parked in the lot, in the drive, on the grass. They were everywhere. He counted fifty-seven of them so that meant they had at least fifty-seven members of the Nation to deal with. Not good odds for six men, even if they were hard-charging bullet-eating members of the Devil’s Disciples Nation.

  He thought over the plan Moondog had come up with. As warlord and sergeant-at-arms and a combat veteran, his plan was good. It was workable. But it was full of holes and that wasn’t poor planning or strategy, but the fact that with six men there was only so much that could be foreseen and mapped out. A good part of it was going to be the element of surprise combined with luck.

  Slaughter had been over it from start to finish a dozen times at least and he honestly couldn’t come up with anything better.

  Parked in the lot amongst the ratbikes were the vehicles of the Red Hand—APCs, Hummers, and pickup trucks. If all went successful, they’d be charging out of there in a pair of APCs. Once they started rolling, with their weapons systems and heavy armaments, nothing could stop them.

  If they could get to that part of things, and it wouldn’t be easy.

  Slaughter stood up. He saw maybe a dozen Cannibals moving around down there, shambling about as their kind did. Inside the fortress, he thought, was where Reptile and Coffin would be if they were still in fact walking.

  “I guess that about does it,” he said.

  “I guess so, man. Now we wait for dark.”

  Slaughter nodded, feeling his blood running hot. “Then we get it on.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Slaughter waited for it to begin because it was only minutes away now and he knew it. He could feel the excitement—and dread—coming right up from the balls of his feet as he waited in the darkness on Moondog’s Boss Hoss 375 Horse. It was like energy was funneling up from deep inside the earth and his feet on the ground were plugged right into it.

  Moondog was in the bus and it was starting to roll.

  Slaughter and the others waited on their bikes. They carried the arsenal Brightman had supplied them with: 12-gauge pistol-gripped Mossberg pump shotguns, white phosphorus grenades, and Hardballer .45s. Full auto weapons like the M-16 wouldn’t do much good against wormboys, you needed real punch for clean headshots.

  Slaughter lit a cigarette, watching the bus picking up speed as it made for the gates. There were about twenty Cannibals out in front of the fortress gathered with their ratbikes and there would be twenty less of them once Moondog made contact. He had rigged a pressure switch to the cow-catcher on the front of the War Wagon that was wired to two-hundred pounds of C-4. When he got within fifty-feet of the fortress he would dive out the door.

  Things were about to get loud.

  The other Devil’s Disciples were waiting out at the end of the drive that led into the compound.

  The War Wagon passed through the gates.

  Moondog turned the headlights on.

  The Disciples fired up their scoots and made ready.

  It was only a matter of seconds now before the fireworks began. Every man was tense and exhilarated, pumped-up and ready to roll. And then they heard it—WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP-WHUMP! The War Wagon went up like a dying sun, shooting out a barrage of fire and clouds of rolling black smoke. The first two explosions were the C-4 loads going, the second two were the twin fuel tanks. And now the front of the fortress was a blazing firestorm. The Cannibal Corpse wormboys in front were either blasted into fragments or lit up like napalm. Even from their distance—two city blocks away—the Disciples felt the shock wave and the heat that followed it.

  There was the diversion, time to ride into hell.

  “THE SHIT IS ON!” Slaughter cried out and the Disciples rode in hell-for-leather, whooping and hollering, shouting their rebel yells.

  As Slaughter opened the throttle and led the pack in, he could see wormboys staggering around on fire. Many more were on the ground in burning pieces.

  Slaughter came firing through the gates and a dazed wormboy came out to meet him, his face like an open infected wound, his hair smoking. Slaughter roared right at him and gave him a round from the Mossberg that took his head right off. Apache Dan fired into a group of three or four, scattering them.

  With the blazing remains of the War Wagon and the burning ratbikes of the Cannibals, it was like daylight in the front of the fortress. The blast had blown open the doors and taken a huge bite out of the concrete wall. Inside, the flames were spreading as more wormboys stumbled out, patting themselves wildly to put out the fires that licked at them.

  What worried Slaughter at that moment was that he did not see Moondog anywhere. He should have been in the grass, coming out to meet them. But he was nowhere and that gave Slaughter a very bad feeling.

  But there was no time.

  He led the pack around the side of the fortress and as they roared out of its moonlit shadow they saw the rising rock wall and the mouth of the immense cave hewn into it. There was no missing it. A paved road led from the fortress to the cave and it was lit on either side by smoldering torches that threw a shifting, dirty orange illumination.

  But the stink.

  That godawful stink.

  Slaughter knew by then what he was going to see even before he saw it: corpses. Just like in Victoria, dozens of people had been impaled on sharpened stakes driven into the ground and lit on fire. They burned with a constant guttering like corpsefat candles and he figured they had been soaked in oil or something similar so they would burn on and on.

  It was a ghoulish ride down that road with the human torches blazing and blackened and stinking to either side. When they reached the mouth of the cave, they ditched their bikes and went in.

  It was immense inside and lit by more human torches.

  In the silence they could hear them sputtering and sizzling, dripping globs of hot fat. The floor of the cave was dirt and it was littered with gnawed bones, bits of flesh and tissue, maggoty heads, and great splotches of blood. It was a dining hall for the Cannibals and what made it even worse was that to either wall, prisoners were shackled together like slaves. There were dozens of them and they were all terrified or completely out of their minds. Some called out to the Disciples but many more just stared off into space. They were citizens, Slaughter saw, many innocents and many more members of the Red Hand.

  And they were made to watch as the wormboys had their nightly feast, knowing that each day more of them would be slaughtered for food.

  All the Disciples wanted to go to them but they had other concerns right then: a group of Cannibals were feeding on the remains of a woman. Such was their gluttony and the need to fill those empty spaces below that they paid no attention whatsoever that their hated rivals had appeared.

  Jumbo made to open up on them but Slaughter held up his hand.

  Not yet.

  This was too easy.

  The wormboys were wearing their colors, which by that point were saturated with corpse goo and cemetery slime, stained by dozens of ghoulish feasts, feathered with rot and mildew. One of the Can
nibals, gore dripping from his cankerous mouth, looked over at the Disciples, watching them with fish-white eyes as he chewed ravenously.

  He made a grunting noise, but that was about it.

  The others were even less interested than he.

  The hunger of the worms that inhabited them was such that simple survival mechanisms of defense and attack were overridden in the need to shove meat into their mouths. They were fixated on the corpse of the woman who not too long ago, Slaughter guessed, had been shackled to the walls with the others. They tore at her, snapped at each other, pulling limbs free and yanking at what they found inside her open belly.

  The Devil’s Disciples waited no more.

  They opened up and dropped all four Cannibals into the gore of their meal.

  “Watch out!” someone yelled.

  And that’s when Slaughter saw the others coming at them. Not three or four, but fifteen or twenty Cannibals carrying chains and hatchets and skinning knives.

  * * *

  The wormboys burst out of the darkness at the rear of the cave, and if their dead compatriots had no longer felt the hate for the rival club, they certainly did, and they planned on doing something about it.

  Slaughter watched them come on, letting them get within killing range of the shotguns, his brother Disciples at his side, spaced evenly as they did when taking on a rival gang.

  Slaughter, at that moment, felt more alive than he had in days, if not weeks. Because when you were a 1%er this is what it was about. Nothing like a good turf battle or blood war to remind you what it was to be alive again…even if your adversaries weren’t strictly human or strictly even living things as such.

  “Grenade?” Apache Dan said.

  But Slaughter shook his head. “Not with all these people in here. Can’t risk it.”

  The dead came on.

  The Devil’s Disciples faced them.

  When they got in range, Slaughter and his boys opened up with their shotguns and within five seconds, eight of the Cannibals were down with heads blown to confetti. And then it got close in and personal, the way the Disciples liked it. They were outnumbered by the deathless horrors but that had never stopped them before and it did not stop them now. Ten wormboys converged on the five of them and they went at it, shooting when they could, using their guns as clubs, hitting and kicking, avoiding chains and hatchets, pulling knives and using them.

  Slaughter had no time to watch out for his brothers because his own skin was in danger and he was fighting tooth and claw with his Gurkha knife, the shotgun tossed aside now. He ducked under a chain and took out the throat of a Cannibal Corpse with one swing and decapitated another with a second. A chain snapped against his back, throwing him forward into a pair of wormboys who tried to get a hold of him so they could use their teeth. But Slaughter was a greased eel, twisting and sliding, nearly boneless as he fought against them. The Cannibal Corpse with the chain swung it again and he dipped under it, the chain shattering the face of one of his tormentors.

  Then the one with the chain took hold of him in a bear hug from behind, lifting him up in a squeezing killing embrace.

  Slaughter allowed it.

  He let the wormboy lift him into the air and when he did, Slaughter kicked the second zombie in the chest, flattening him, and brought the Kukri down in a savage arc, sinking it into the knee of the one that held him.

  Then he was free, the wormboy hobbled, and he took his head off with one vicious and powerful swing of the blade.

  He saw Shanks go down fighting in a crowd of five Cannibals and he ran in their direction, swinging the Kukri like a farmer scything wheat. The zombies fell like trees. He hacked, stabbed, pivoted, ducked, hacked and hacked again. Then something hit him in the face. Not hard enough to draw blood but with enough force to make him lose his footing and trip over the crawling remains he had just made.

  Slaughter rolled through them.

  He saw Shanks get up.

  He saw him smile crookedly, blood spattered over his face and then a wormboy—one that was fast and surprisingly lithe—jumped through the fighting bodies and brought his hatchet down clean into the crown of Shanks’ head.

  Shanks went down, still wearing the same goofy smile.

  “MOTHERFUCKER!” Slaughter shouted and then a strength that was pure hate and pure adrenalin rippled through him like high voltage and he fought through the remains, finding his knees, then his feet, kicking and hacking, and going after the zombie that had put Shanks down.

  Not a gang fight anymore.

  Not just bloodsport.

  Now it was personal.

  He knocked a wormboy aside and the one with the hatchet whose face was mottled blue and black came to meet him. He swung the hatchet forehand and backhand, the strokes powerful and devastating. Slaughter barely got out of the way. But as he did, he swung the Gurkha knife and sliced nearly a pound of meat from the wormboy’s left forearm.

  Being a zombie, the wound didn’t bother the Cannibal Corpse much. It was more of a surprise and a minor inconvenience than anything else.

  He looked at his arm.

  Then he looked at Slaughter.

  He grinned and black bile poured from his mouth in a bubbly foam. He swung the hatchet. Slaughter swung the Kukri. The blades met in midair, clanging and throwing sparks. The impact stopped both man and zombie, made them stagger back a bit and reassess the prowess of their adversaries.

  But if the wormboy Cannibal Corpse was hesitant to engage again, Slaughter was not. For in his mind he saw this walking carrion taking down Shanks, a brother Disciple, and that’s all it took. Letting out a war cry, he went right at the wormboy, slashing and cutting with a ferocity that made the zombie stumble back, but not before Slaughter took his hand off at the wrist and his other arm at the elbow. Then the wormboy stumbled about almost comically and Slaughter went at him again, a voice in his head saying, it’s only a flesh wound, and then he split the zombie’s face open and was splattered with his gore.

  The zombie went down, his attendant worm sliding out of his bisected skull.

  Three more Cannibals came at Slaughter with chains.

  He dove away from them and brought up his Mossberg, blowing the head off one and wiping the face off another. The third swung his chain and it connected with Slaughter’s left arm in a blazing white-hot explosion of pain that dropped him and he lost the shotgun.

  Maybe it would have been over then but Apache Dan, smeared with gore and crying out in the voices of his Shawnee ancestors, came bounding in and sank one of the Cannibal’s own bloodied hatchets into the head of the zombie, dropping him. Apache didn’t stop until that head was so much hamburger spread over the floor.

  And that’s when the others scattered.

  Slaughter pulled himself up, grabbing his Mossberg and his Gurkha knife.

  Only three of the ten were left but they were moving off deeper into the cave as if summoned.

  Shanks was dead, Jumbo and Apache Dan and Fish were badly battered but alive.

  In the rear of the cave, more torches were lit, more human candles, and Slaughter knew without a doubt they hadn’t been lit by accident. It was an invitation. They wanted him and the other Disciples to follow them and this is exactly what they did even though the prisoners against the walls cried out for them not to go any further.

  Drawn to the flickering torches, smelling the greasy vile stench of roasting human flesh, Slaughter led the Disciples deeper into the cave and what waited there.

  * * *

  Maybe he should have known it was a mistake.

  Maybe he should have known it was some kind of trap.

  And maybe he should have practiced some restraint and common sense. But he was too amped up by that point, mainlining death and hate, his belly a boiling mass of need for retribution. He wanted to kill every last Cannibal Corpse he could find until the trail of mutilated cadavers led him to the ones he wanted most of all: Reptile and Coffin.

  I’ll go to my grave, I’ll crawl thro
ugh the foulest fucking tracts of hell to get them, he thought. To sort them out proper and see their heads hanging in the wind where I’ll anoint them with my piss.

  The flickering human torches were not in the same chamber. An archway—artificial like everything else in there—led into a sister chamber that was much smaller than the first and if they thought it smelled bad where they were, the stink in here was absolutely toxic. It was like greening meat shoved up their noses and corpse-worms slicked freshly with the drainage of dead men twisting on their tongues. It was so raw and savage and unbelievably violent it nearly put them to their knees.

  Apache Dan and Fish stood there, trembling.

  It was only Slaughter that stepped forward. This chamber was the real flesh farm, the other was more of a stockyard. This was where the stunning and cutting and rendering came down, this was the abattoir where human meat was processed. This was the corpse factory.

  Fish, is what Slaughter thought as he got a good look. Like a fucking fish cannery.

  Which was something he knew about because he’d worked at one long ago one summer. Except it wasn’t fish, of course, but humans. They were netted and brought here to be cleaned. Dozens of them were hanging from the ceiling by the feet, each of them ghastly white and thoroughly hollowed. Heads were speared on sharpened dowels and arranged in great racks upon the walls. Corpses, in whole, were pressed like witches beneath slabs of stone until their intestines burst from their asses and mouths. Most of it was old death, three or four days, a fine and putrescent vintage, slimy and rotten and falling apart, carpeted in ants and beetles and noodly pockets of worms. A great number of victims were held immobile by the throats in something like wooden stocks, the tops of their heads sawn off, the brains either missing or decayed to a soft gray pulp. Along one of the walls, hearts—at least thirty or forty of them—had been speared with knitting needles and driven into corkboards. Eyes were secreted into jars like kernels of corn for proper aging.