Cannibal Corpse, M/C

by Tim Curran

  “What cave?”

  Slaughter didn’t push that. He let Brightman talk. Apparently, after Cannibal Corpse stormed the place, Brightman and Isley and the other woman—who apparently had been some sort of assistant to Isley and was now quite dead—were shuttered away up here. They hadn’t eaten in days. They were starving. Dehydrated. Isley was dying.

  “Now can we shitcan the questions, Slaughter, and get me loose?”

  Slaughter blew out smoke. “Way I’m figuring it, I don’t need you. I just need the woman.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Brightman asked him. “You need me. She’s dying. She’ll do you no good. If I can get on a radio I can have your brother’s sentence commuted and I can get a chopper in here to get us out. But we have to move. We really have to move because I’m pretty sure this place is going to be leveled by an airstrike and I’m surprised it hasn’t been already.”

  “I want my brother freed.”

  “Cut me loose and get me to a radio and it’s done.”

  That’s when Isley lifted her head up. In the flashlight beam, her face was yellow, jaundiced-looking. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. “Your brother is dead,” she said in a perfectly lucid voice.

  “She’s out of her fucking head!” Brightman insisted. “Now cut me loose before this goddamn place gets bombed!”

  But Slaughter wasn’t about to do that. Red Eye was dead? Dead? Is that what she said? Is that really what she just fucking said? He swallowed and then swallowed again. He pulled off his cigarette and tried to keep his cool.

  “How do you know that?” he asked her.

  “Slaughter! She’s out of her head! Please, goddammit, cut me loose!”

  But Slaughter ignored him. He focused on the woman. She put her eyes on him and he didn’t like them at all because they reminded him of the eyes of the woman at the Red Hand encampment that had been shooting worm juice.

  “Your brother’s name was Perry. People called him Red Eye,” she said in her gravelly voice. “Brightman told you if you got me out of here, your brother would be freed but your brother was already dead and he knew it.”

  Slaughter looked at Brightman now.

  But Brightman shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Slaughter, she’s got a worm in her. You can’t believe what she’s saying. C’mon, just cut me loose and I’ll get your brother freed. You have to trust me.”

  But why did Slaughter feel like that was the one thing he could never do? He looked back at the woman. Yeah, she was in a bad way and he had no doubt that she did have a worm in her. He knew the look they got once they were infected. But he knew something else, too. That junkie back at the encampment had started talking about things she couldn’t possibly know and he had seen the infected do the same thing to one degree or another as they slipped into the coma that led to death…and resurrection.

  “Your brother was dead from the first. He was executed in Chicago. Brightman knew it. They sent you here to die because they had to send someone.”

  “Listen, Slaughter—” Brightman started to say, but Slaughter cuffed him in the mouth to shut him up. He wanted to hear what this lady had to say. He had come an awfully long way and through some very nasty territory to hear her words.

  So he asked her questions and she answered them. Sometimes she went off on crazy tangents, but mostly her words had the ring of truth. She said that there were basically two factions out east fighting for control of the central government: those who wanted a cure from the infesting worms and those who were afraid of the same. The second group was afraid because they knew what caused the worm rains in the first place and if the truth came out—say if Katherine Isley for example made it back east and told all that she knew, which was considerable—they would be held responsible for what had happened to the country and probably be tried for treason and war crimes at the very least.

  “And what did cause them? The worms?” he asked. Brightman looked like he was going to open his mouth and Slaughter gave him a hard look that shut him up.

  Isley’s eyes rolled in her head a moment, then focused…somewhat. “It was called the Proteus Experiment: a biological weapons program that got out of control. It proved to be self-perpetuating. After the worm larva was set loose experimentally, it was found that it could not be contained.”

  “And you?”

  “I was brought in to seek a cure of sorts,” she admitted. “What I came up with was a synthetic virus. Then things happened. I think you know the story. I ended up here.”

  Slaughter sighed and ground his cigarette out under his boot. “I don’t get it. Why the charade? If they wanted me dead why didn’t they put a bullet in my head?”

  Isley told him to remember the two factions: those who did not know and those who did. The first group knew what Isley had been working on with the CDC, they knew about the mathematical model for the virus. They wanted her found and brought back. The reality of the situation was the armed forces—special ops and commandos—that could pull off such an operation were stretched pretty thin as it was. But the first group demanded. The second group could not admit their culpability, but at the same time they had to play along with the first group. To do anything less would have been inhumane and immoral. That’s when Brightman, who was CIA, and his think tank came up with the perfect solution…especially when a report came across his desk about a renegade biker named John Slaughter who had killed a couple of cops and was heading ever west. They’d grab Slaughter, free his boys from lockup, send them on a mission they couldn’t possibly complete (it was thought) and then no one could say a rescue hadn’t been attempted. Of course, the people back east would be told it was a highly-trained mercenary force of expendables, not a bunch of rowdy outlaw bikers. Perception management. Playing one hand against the other.

  Brightman was sweating and breathing hard by that point. He just shook his head. “Slaughter…please listen to me,” he said, trying it once again. “This woman is ill. She is delirious. She’s talking fantasy. Please! Use your head.”

  Slaughter went over to Isley and cut her loose. “You’re coming with me.”

  “I can’t. I’m infected. But…if you help me,” she said, tottering uneasily. “I think I can help you.”

  He led her from the room and behind him Brightman was screaming hysterically: “SLAUGHTER! GODDAMMIT, SLAUGHTER! YOU LET ME OUT OF HERE! YOU CUT ME LOOSE! DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU GODDAMN FUCKING NO GOOD SHIT-EATING FUCKING BIKER TRASH! YOU CUT ME LOOSE!”

  Slaughter led her down the corridor using his flashlight. He called out for Apache Dan but there was no reply. A sense of dread began to move through him. They came to a door with a digital lock. Isley punched a code and it opened to a plush office with leather chairs and an antique desk, impressionist paintings on the walls, and a wet bar. Very nice. Very cozy.

  “This was Colonel Krigg’s office,” she said. “He’s dead. He was one of the first that the reanimates fed upon.”

  “Okay. How can you help me?”

  She fell into a chair, seemingly barely conscious by that point. She told him there was something behind the paneling. He gripped its edges and it swung out. A safe. A big floor safe.

  “Open it,” she said, telling him the combination.

  He did as she asked and the only thing in the safe was what looked to be an aluminum box with a keypad and a digital display. He hefted it out, discovering that it weighed easily eighty pounds or more. He slid it across the floor.

  “What is it?”

  She blinked her eyes. “It is a sub-kiloton weapon.”

  “What?”

  “A tactical nuclear device.”

  Slaughter stepped away from it, keeping his light on it. “A fucking suitcase nuke?”

  “Yes. Colonel Krigg planned on activating it if the Army came for him. He wanted to go out in a big way. He stole it in the early days of the Outbreak. Now you will activate it. You’ll have enough time to escape.”

  “And you?”

  “There’s no point i
n me escaping, now is there?”

  She was right and he knew it. But a nuke. A fucking nuke. Why not, man? Why the hell not? This fucking fortress and what it contains is a blight on the landscape, a fucking cancer. You want to erase it and the wormboys who call it home, then this is the way. Good-bye Cannibal Corpse Nation. Do it for Red Eye. Do it for the shit you’ve been put through. Do it for the lies you’ve been fed and the corrupt puppet masters that have been pulling your strings and have cost the lives of your brothers.

  “All right,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

  She told him a code and he punched it in. A digital display beeped and read: ARMED AND READY. She gave him another twenty digit code and he punched it in. A shrill alarm sounded and a plastic catch popped open on the display. There was a green button behind it.

  “Arm it,” she said. “You’ll have sixty minutes. That’s it. One hour to move your people out of here.”

  Sweat running down his face, Slaughter pressed the button.

  The alarm shrilled again.

  The display read: 59:58.

  “You’d better go, Mr. Slaughter.”

  Slaughter grabbed his shotgun and Gurkha knife. His palms were so sweaty he could barely hold onto them. He put the light on Katherine Isley but she was gone…no, not dead, but worse: she was moving, twisting, her mouth peeling open in something almost like a blood snarl. And her face…bulging, contorting, rippling with motion just beneath the skin. As he watched, the worms started coming out of her. From her mouth, her nose, even her eyes. Not maggots because this woman was surely not dead and decomposing. These were the red worms. The resurrection worms and she was alive with them. They started tunneling out of her face, pushing out, scarlet and slicked with fluids.

  Just like the girl on that video from the compound in Wisconsin.

  But Isley was living and that meant breeders were not always corpses, but living human beings.

  Not that this jewel of wisdom mattered one bit, for the digital display on the nuke read: 58:43.

  And counting…

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Shotgun in one hand and Kukri in the other, Slaughter raced down the corridor shouting out for Apache Dan because time had never, ever in his life been so unbelievably goddamn dear. But the corridor was long and there were so damn many rooms and offices and as he ran along he could see that digital readout in the back of his head counting down to doomsday and hear that alarm shrilling in his ears.

  Jesus. There just wasn’t time.

  They had to get gone.

  “APACHE!” he cried out at the very top of his lungs. “APACHE! MOTHERFUCKER, WE GOT TO MOVE! WE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE!”

  But the very quality of his voice as it echoed down that lonesome corridor told him that Apache Dan would never answer. Dread deepened in him. Where before it felt like a surgical cut at the base of his belly, now it was yawning wide and becoming a deep and hurting wound that could have swallowed him alive in a coveting and formless blackness of despair. Apache Dan and he went way back, way, way back and it was these memories that assailed him, weakened him, slowing his running feet to a clumsy thudding of motorcycle boots on dusty hardwood flooring.

  He called out the name of his brother again, but without any true force behind it. It was like there was no breath in his lungs: “Apache? Apache?”

  He stumbled on down the corridor, unsure then if he’d been moving down it for a minute or an hour or a minute that had been squeezed into an hour. His mouth was dry, his skin sweaty and cool. His hair was damp and his limbs felt rubbery. He remembered at that precise moment that he had not felt like this since he was a kid and had to cross the lavender-curtained parlor of the funeral home to look down at his mother lying in that long polished box.

  And he was not feeling that way again for no reason.

  There was an open door at the end of the corridor and he knew very well what would be in that room. God, how he knew it. Go ahead, Johnny. Go take a look at death and know the pain it inspires and the bleak finality it lays upon the soul like an iron door clanging shut that will never, ever be opened again.

  Enough. He would not be ruled by fear and regret and channeled guilt.

  He looked in the room.

  Apache Dan’s corpse was flopped in a pool of ever-spreading blood that was so darkly red it was nearly black. He sucked in a sharp breath. It was as he had expected, except for the fact that his brother’s head was missing and that was the final indignity of his mortification and degradation.

  A frozen terror spread out inside him, chilling all it touched, and he felt like an ice sculpture waiting to melt. His life had not been a good one when you put it under the microscope and dissected it layer by layer. There was suffering and pain. There had been hunger and squalor as a child and petty crime as a teenager followed by violence and murder, drug dealing and misery as an adult, years of incarceration in brutal hardtime joints. And all he’d ever really had through the sad roll of those latter years was his brothers, his patched brothers, the Devil’s Disciples. They were his equilibrium, his support system, his sanity. The cool water in his throat and the hot food in his belly. The hands to clasp and the shoulders to bear his weight.

  Gone now.

  All gone.

  Because he knew, God how he knew, that Moondog was gone, too. It had been that crazy death-happy bastard’s plan from the beginning to ride the War Wagon into his own personal blood-drenched biker heaven of Valhalla. He was gone. Apache Dan was gone. Shanks, Irish, Fish, and probably Jumbo, too.

  “I’m sorry, my brother,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  He turned back into the heavy silence of the corridor and breathed deep its air, which was stale and dusty, almost gritty in his throat. Okay. Okay. Time to go, But then—

  Thud, thud, thump-thump-thump.

  What the fuck?

  He stepped around the final bend of the corridor, playing his light around. He saw a set of steps and then something came thudding down them: Apache’s head. Sure, over-the-top, high melodrama and Grand Guignol, but wasn’t it almost to be expected? The head hit the landing and rolled to a stop and other than seeing its whipping blue-black locks, Slaughter did not look at it; there was no point.

  He stepped closer to the landing.

  He sucked in great whooping gasps of stale air which carried a sickly-sweet after-odor of putrefaction to it. It was getting so the smell of death was the rule rather than the exception.

  A peal of chilling laughter drifted down from the landing high above.

  The sound of it was telling, for it was the sort of laughter that would echo through subterranean depths and from the dripping hollows of midnight tombs. He went rigid, absolutely rigid, as he brought the beam of the flashlight up to reveal the crooked form that waited at the top of those crooked stairs.

  The laughter again.

  And in Slaughter, the mourning and grief and self-recrimination of this entire haphazard, perfectly fucked-up affair was shelved, and he felt hatred to his marrow and the need for payback to his core. He didn’t know who or what was up there but he was going after them, he was going to gut them, he was going to stuff them, he was going to mount their gamey ass on a fucking wall, so help him God. So as he charged up those stairs and that crooked shape retreated, he felt like he was put together out of heat and electricity; voltage looking for something to fry. In essence, about 110% pure undiluted death.

  At the top, he saw the crooked figure, its back to him. He had the light on it and he saw the three-piece patch very clearly: the fanged skull in its pool of red, that single bloodshot eye staring out at him. The upper rocker: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And the lower: KANSAS CITY.

  His blood ran hot.

  The figure turned.

  Death and resurrection hadn’t been exactly kind to Reptile. He had been a big, strapping fellow bulging with muscle and attitude, death kept at a low simmer in his black eyes…but now he was shrunken, leathery like brown hide, his face looking a little too
much like the logo on the back of his denim vest: a skull covered in papery flesh like poorly dried papier mache, a living deathshead aswarm with red beetles that chewed and tunneled and devoured the thin scraps of face-meat that were left. His eyes were dun pockets of pestilence lidded by gray flaps, his bare chest crudely stitched like a stuffed Sunday chicken.

  The beetles had been busy, as had the worms, for in the end the worm conquered all…even this walking heap of grave matter. White bones extruded from his chest, black bloodgrease bubbling from open wounds. His mouth was a blackened corpse-grin that extended ear to ear in a ghoulish smirk. Dead insects dropped from his tongue as he spoke: “Well, lookee here, it’s Johnny Slaughter, prez of the mother chapter of the Devil’s Disciples. Another one for my collection.” He laughed, coughing out a dustball sputum of carapaces. “I think it’s just you and me, Johnny. Now that old Apache Daniel went to meet his maker. But don’t let that eat your guts, prez, because I did it quietly, just like I did the other Disciples. Apache never knew he was dead until his head bounced over the floor.”

  Slaughter, feeling a mixture of repulsion, pity, and razor-edged hatred, flipped the Kukri in his fist, sheathing it expertly like a gunslinger slipping his Navy Colt into its scabbard. He racked the pump on the Mossberg.

  “Man you came to meet is up above, but you’ll never get there, Johnny,” Reptile said, seething with a blackness that was death fermented in its own vile juices and maybe even something beyond death. “I think you’re gonna scream, Disciple. I think you’re gonna scream real loud when I eat your soul.”

  Slaughter brought the shotgun up. “Then quit jawing, Reptile, and slither on over here.”

  Reptile made a sound that he probably thought was laughter but sounded more like a scream echoing up an elevator shaft. And then he moved. He was in rough condition and Slaughter did not expect much and that’s why he was shocked: because Reptile did not shamble towards him with a slow and drunken zombie crawl, he exploded, he filled the air like chain lightning and blooming black smoke, flesh and motion and Jack-in-the-Box surprise, a raging carrion gelatin smear in the air that got within about six inches of the shotgun barrel before Slaughter squeezed the trigger and his head was atomized into a spray of pink-black mucilage that sprayed against the wall with the tinkling of pellets.