Cannibal Corpse, M/C

by Tim Curran

  Children were skinned and heaped in red piles.

  Women had been violated with pitchforks.

  Men were strung by nooses of their own viscera.

  It was all appalling, but what was even worse and nearly inconceivable to the sane mind were the vats of creamy oil that held living humans with mad staring eyes glazed like windows. They were huge, bloated, greasy with oil and lubricated with their own septic foulness, fattened calves that were soaked in seasoned brine like rare cuts of meat or exotic pickles, allowed to absorb the fatty excretions until they swelled up into soft, tasty shanks of delicate sweetmeat for the palettes of discerning ghouls.

  Slaughter had to look away, for the insanity etched into those fly-specked faces was simply too much. But everywhere there was more and more and more until he was so utterly physically ill he had to cough out a tangle of bile, steadying himself by momentarily dropping his shotgun and placing one gore-speckled, shaking hand on a barrel. There were many barrels and all of them were packed with human organs and human meat, floating in sharp-smelling serums.

  He grabbed up his shotgun, breathing in the dank rot and exhaling.

  There were maybe seven or eight wormboys in there, but they were almost pedestrian compared to the thing that sat in an altar chair of knotted human bone high above all else, three prostrate and shivering boys kneeling at her feet. When Slaughter saw her, he knew who she was. This was the death-goddess, as he had called her, from Exodus. The one that had pointed at him and gotten inside his mind for those few brief moments before the Red Hand rolled in.

  Here she was now, looking down at him.

  She wore the fresh and bloody skins of slain children over veils of mold-specked spiderweb silk, scarves of human bowels lovingly wrapped around her throat. Over her head was the same tanned mask of the hag she had worn the last time. He could see her mouth, the puckered lips, the gloss-black fangs awaiting something to tear.

  “How does thee fare, biker boy?”

  It was a voice he knew. At first it was that of Black Hat, scraping and dry and worn like bones in a catacomb rubbing together, but gradually it became another voice and he tried to place it but his thoughts scurried madly in his skull. They could find neither common ground nor cohesion.

  “Who are you?” he heard himself say.

  “Who exactly, biker boy?”

  She stood now and the veils parted so he could see, yet again, her porcelain-white belly with its black autopsy stitching running from pubis to breast, the symbolic signature of Leviathan burned deep into the flesh. Her vulva was engorged and teeming with parasites. Gouts of black menstrual blood dripped from between her thighs. He knew her voice, he knew it well. But all his mind could see was the death goddess, the consort of Leviathan, the zombie witch, the black Madonna who gave birth to children that she in turn fed upon and skinned. These were the stark and haunting images in his mind.

  But he had to remember.

  Remember.

  And, yes, of course, then he knew. He saw himself in New Castle after those shit-eating cops had gunned down Neb and he himself had returned the favor with the MAC-10. Word had reached him that Neb’s old lady, Indiana, had dimed them, turned evidence on them to the police to avoid another drug-related conviction. For days Slaughter had hunted her, the only thing keeping him going was the all-pervading, all-filling, all-nourishing hatred and need for revenge. He tracked her like a stalking cat. He followed her to a bar. Sometime after midnight she came out with some drunken scooter tramp and Slaughter slipped out of the shadows.

  The tramp said, “Wha—”

  Slaughter punched him in the face and kneed him in the groin. When he went down in the gravel lot, Slaughter kicked him in the ribs and booted him in the head until his eyes rolled back white.

  Then it was just him and Indiana.

  Why she hadn’t run he didn’t know.

  She waited there. In fact, she went down on her knees and begged him for mercy, that it wasn’t her or if it was then the cops had forced her to do it.

  Slaughter took her by the hair and yanked her to her feet. His face inches from her own, he said, quite calmly, “You fucking skank. You fucking whore. You fucking grubbing dirty little cunt. Neb. They killed fucking Neb and you’re the rotten fucking cunt who put them onto him.”

  She was crying and shaking, but all her little girl tears were wasted on Slaughter’s stony demeanor.

  “Oh please, oh God…John, please, John, don’t kill me,” she whimpered. “Oh please, John, please please please…”

  “Here’s your please,” he told her, the knife in his hand. “Here it is for you, you fucking cunt.”

  He sank the blade to the hilt into her belly and she gasped at the violation of cold steel. Then, still holding her head by the hair so that her face was but inches from his own, he pulled the knife right up to her sternum, gutting the hog and dropping her, leaving her to die in her own pooling blood and bowels.

  That’s what he had done to her, that fucking rat.

  Indiana.

  Indiana…

  So now he knew. Indiana. Goddamn Indiana.

  “You,” he said.

  Her mask was stripped away and dispensed with now and he looked at her fissured corpse-face that was like the root of a dead tree. The boys before her stood—lambs to slaughter, offerings of meat—and she flayed them with her black thorny nails. Like scalpels, they sheared the skins of the boys free and then gutted them in turn, eviscerating them as Slaughter had once done to her. Before they dropped at her feet, those nimble white fingers pulled an offering from each of them: their still beating hearts. Then, each in turn, her lacquered black fangs bit into them, mouth spilling candy-red sauce, biting and ripping at them, engorging the pink-muscled masses nearly whole.

  Sacrifice had been taken.

  Slaughter vaguely heard Apache Dan and Fish call to him, but he was transfixed by the atrocity he witnessed, and maybe equally by Indiana’s bile-yellow eyes that swam with maggots, the scarab beetles that poured from the skullish cavern of her nose, and the bulimic gush of vomited human meat she spat at his feet.

  Hissing like a serpent, she said, “I am become death, the devourer of worlds.”

  The words of Lord Shiva, the Hindu death god, in the Bagavad Gita, Slaughter knew, but never had it been so appropriate, so fitting, and so very prophetic.

  As she descended from her throne of human bone, Slaughter did not back away from her. No, he waited for her and maybe in some psychic realm of his mind he went to her as fast. His brain was rioting with conflicting emotions—rage, terror, disgust, and maybe even pity. For maybe it was another sparkling and impossibly lucid Zen moment, but he saw very clearly himself killing Indiana and knowing it was ugly and brutal and very wrong in the human sense of things, but resurrecting her like this as wormgirl incarnate, the Queen of the Dead, Dark Maiden of Destruction, Extermination, and Necrotic Dissolution, Mistress of Dank Tombs and Graveyard Rats…it was an atrocity and one, he knew, he had played a hand in.

  As he raised the Mossberg, he wanted to shout, to cry out something melodramatically Hollywood like, Die you evil cunt or Back to hell where you belong but there were no words extant that could encompass what was in his brain so he simply opened up on her, blasting her into writhing fragments until the shotgun was empty. But as he reloaded and fired again, he saw something that he would never have believed. If the identity of the death goddess as Indiana was the first revelation then here was the second: although she was blown apart in fleshly corruption, she did not stay apart. As he killed her, she was reborn; as he unmade her, she was remade; as he atomized her remains she reparticulated.

  She was deathless, eternal, immortal.

  He killed her again and again. Each time she exploded into a storm of tissue, blood mist, and winging white deathshead moths only to be reanimated and remade in a fleshstorm of corpse ropes, blood trains, scab and suture, creeping beetle and squirming maggot, all coming together and pressing out another copy of her l
ike hot plastic formed in a mold. And then she would be standing there with glaring yellow eyes of leprosy and a toothy grin of charnel delight, things dropping from her, things squirming in and out of her, fetal cemetery rats pushing from her flesh and sprouting greasy hair and rabid teeth and glaring red rodent eyes. Like her, they reformed and fleshed out.

  Again, Slaughter destroyed her and again she became a steaming, smoking fleshshow of liquid polymer that sought and found the same form again and again.

  But by then—and it had probably only been seconds since he’d killed her the first time—Fish and Apache Dan were with him and all three of them stood there like the Magnificent Seven minus four, blasting away at the death goddess until she fell apart and came back together in a whirling storm of graveyard waste. They put her down and she stood back up. They kept shooting until their weapons were hot and smoking in their fists and that’s when Fish totally lost control. Because it had been too much for him for a long time now. The spider-things in the mist had unhinged him as had the sporing mutants and now, his shotgun empty, he went into a blind, hating rage and charged the death goddess with his Mossberg held like a club.

  He went at her, swinging.

  Slaughter heard his own voice cry out in desperation.

  But too late.

  The death goddess had already accepted Fish as an offering.

  In a whirlwind hallucinogenic eruption of writhing white limbs, she embraced him, pulling him into her and crushing him until his bones popped like bubble wrap and red mush spurted from his mouth and she chortled with obscene laughter, blowing out a hot sulfuric steam that was acrid and burning.

  Apache Dan shouted and Slaughter hooked him by the arm and pulled him away, taking out a white phosphorus grenade from his ammo sack, pulling the pin, counting the seconds, and then tossing it at her. And as he did so, he threw himself and Apache into the dirt and there was a resounding explosion, an outpouring of heat and acrid smoke…and as they looked backward, the death goddess was caught in a hot-white blazing firestorm that spread out, lighting up the hanging bodies and seeking dry tinder at every quarter.

  She screamed.

  She laughed.

  She sobbed.

  She cried out at Slaughter the way she had the first time she died.

  But in the end, she collapsed into herself, burning and popping, throwing out gouts of flame and greasy curls of black smoke as she was incinerated and cremated into drifting black ash.

  They lobbed two more WP grenades into that slaughterhouse so all would burn, all would be cleansed by fire, and all would go to ash.

  Then, coughing and gagging, they stumbled off into the other chamber.

  * * *

  Jumbo was waiting for them. He was carrying the corpse of Shanks who looked like some bloody, slit, and broken ragdoll. “Fish?” he said.

  “He’s gone,” Apache Dan told him and said no more.

  They brought Shanks outside and laid him in the grass. There was no service, nothing but thoughts and remembrance. There was time for little else. Then, heeding the cries of the prisoners, they moved methodically from one to the other cutting the leather thongs that bound their wrists. Most were on their feet immediately if somewhat unsteadily. Others never lost the glazed look in their eyes. They had to be pushed along by the healthier, saner ones towards the opening.

  Slaughter kept asking them the same question again and again: “Which one of you is Katherine Isley?”

  He got no responses and that only deepened his dread.

  The three Disciples got the prisoners out of the cave and into the relatively fresh air of the night.

  “Get out of here,” Slaughter told them. “Go back where you came from or grab a vehicle out front. But go! Just go!”

  They need no further urging. They moved off into the night, all except for one young boy who said, “You’re looking for Kathy Isley?”

  “Yes.”

  He pointed towards the fortress looming in the night. “Colonel Krigg was keeping her in there.” Then the kid ran off.

  Krigg was the leader of the Red Hand. Slaughter figured he was probably dead by now and maybe the bio, too, but he had to go look. Much as he hated to, he had to go into that fucking mausoleum.

  “Jumbo,” he said as they climbed on their hogs. “Get out front. See if you can find Moondog. Get us an APC. Whatever you can find. When we come out, we’re going to be in a hurry.”

  Jumbo fired up his Panhead and roared off into the night.

  “You sure you wanna go in there with me?” Slaughter asked Apache Dan as they reloaded their pump shotguns.

  He just laughed. “Quit with the stupid fucking questions, John.”

  Together, side by side, they rode off towards the fortress.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  There was only one way in and they took it: right through the front doors which had now been nicely widened by the explosion of the War Wagon which was still burning…what was left of it. They rode their bikes right through curtains of flame and funneling smoke until they got clear of it in a corridor.

  “Goddamn place is going up, John.”

  “We better be quick then.”

  Other than the flames, the fortress was shadowy. They pulled out tactical flashlights from their ammo bags (noticing with some unease that they had no shells left, only a couple of grenades) and bracketed them to the barrels of their shotguns. They clicked them on and started hunting. The place was immense and they went room to room to room and, other than a few Cannibal Corpse zombies they killed, they found nothing. Just offices and storerooms and emptiness. From what they could see, the first floor was untouched.

  So they climbed the stairs to the second.

  More corridors, a labyrinthine maze of them in fact. Many doors were locked. They saw no wormboys and from the screaming they heard outside and the occasional gunfire—Jumbo, no doubt, and hopefully Moondog—the wormboys were probably in hot pursuit of the prisoners which provided a diversion, even if an unwanted one.

  They kept scouting around and downstairs they heard rumbling sounds like explosions. Slaughter didn’t think it was ordinance at all, but the fire spreading, finding new rooms to engulf. Things were getting hairy and time was running out and where in the fuck was the bio?

  He kept thinking about his brother and that brought to mind Brightman. The two were connected and he wondered, really wondered, how much he could trust that spook.

  And what choice do you have? he asked himself. Honestly, ultimately, what choice do you really have? All you can do is keep your word and get the bio. It’s called dealing in good faith. And right now, that’s about all you have. Faith.

  Funny. But as he poked his nose into room after room, he heard a voice in the back of his mind praying to God that he could find the woman, get her out, get what remained of his brothers away from this place in one piece. He felt hypocritical. Absolutely hypocritical. When he was a kid, he thought maybe he believed in God. Before Catholic school had destroyed his faith. But for a time, he thought he had. Part of him in these last desperate hours wanted to reconnect with that but it just wasn’t there. Yet, in the back of his brain, that voice kept praying and wasn’t that just amazing? Wasn’t that a wonderful comment on the human species?

  In the beams of the flashlights, dust motes swam like pillow down, drifting and floating. And it was the dust itself that guided them. Certain corridors had an undisturbed layer of it and others had trails pounded through it.

  More rumbling from below.

  A couple of them shook the fortress.

  “John…” Apache Dan started to say.

  “I know, man. Just a few more minutes and we’re out.”

  They came to yet another corridor and by then they were so mixed up and turned around that Slaughter had to wonder if they’d ever find their way back out even if they did locate Isley. The corridor had been well-trod, judging from the dust. It had possibilities. Unfortunately, it was almost as long as a city block.


  “All right,” he said, feeling hope fading in him. “We check the rooms and then we’re out.”

  “You take this side, I’ll take the other.”

  Slaughter didn’t like separating, but what choice was there? Time was a factor now and they had to move it and get it done. He checked three rooms, coughing on the dust he stirred up. Three more. A fourth. Then a fifth. Then—

  He threw open the door and was looking into an empty room except it wasn’t empty because there were three people in there: two women and a man he recognized: Brightman. They were tied to a bench. One of the women was clearly dead.

  He blinked again and again because he really thought he was seeing things. He panned the light over them.

  “Jesus Christ, you finally made it,” Brightman said.

  “I told you I would.” Slaughter set his shotgun aside and lit a cigarette. “What’re you doing here?”

  Brightman stared at him with shining eyes set in a grimy face. “The Red Hand. They attacked the base and overran us. They took me as…as a bargaining chip, I suppose. Now cut me loose.”

  “Not so fast. Where’s Isley?”

  “She’s sitting next to me. Now cut me loose.”

  Slaughter ignored him. Just as in their first meeting, he got a bad feeling from this guy. He turned to the door and shouted out into the corridor: “Apache! Down here!”

  Then he went back into the room. “They brought you here?”

  “Yes…then those bikers, they took over the place and slaughtered the Red Hand. Now cut—”

  “How come they didn’t take you into the cave?”