Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter One

The wormboy cut in close, trying to sideswipe him, but Slaughter was ready: he brought out the big .357 Combat Mag and let it bark a couple of times. It was like thunder in the still air. The first round went wild, the other right on target. The wormboy cried out as the side of his throat was blasted to hamburger. He flipped off the shit-brown Duo-Glide Panhead, and hit the pavement, skidding on his face and leaving a greasy smear on the road. His bike went careening away, flipping over, spinning away in a shower of sparks.

Slaughter circled him, bringing his hog to a stop.

He hopped off, a tall wiry man in a greasy, road-weary jean vest emblazoned with club patches, his bare muscular arms sleeved with prison tattoos. He wore a black bandanna on his head and steel-toed motorcycle boots. On the back of his vest there was an oval logo patch with a horned deathshead over crossed pitchforks, a snake hanging from the fanged jaws. Above it, the top rocker read: DEVIL’S DISCIPLES, M/C. And below it: PITTSBURGH.

“Let’s finish this,” Slaughter said.

The wormboy didn’t stay down dead, of course, but scrambled to his feet, his graying worm-holed face contorted in a mask of anger. He pressed one gnarled, fleshless hand to his wounded throat, trying to stem the flow of black bile which passed for blood in the walking dead.

He made a low growling sound like a kicked dog, gnashing yellow teeth together, anxious to sink them into something warm and pink and full-blooded.

Slaughter put another round in his chest, then planted a third right between his eyes before he could pull the SS dagger in his belt. The contents of the wormboy’s skull sprayed across the road. He folded up, dropped to his knees, and hit the pavement face-first. As an afterthought, he shuddered and vomited out a slime of green drainage. There were maggots in it.

“Fucking wormboys,” Slaughter said under his breath, spitting tobacco juice into the ruined, blood-speckled face.

But it wasn’t done and he knew it.

He pulled his Gurkha knife from the black leather sheath at his belt and went to it. The Kukri, as it was known, had an 18” curved blade that was sharp enough to shave with. Hardcore outlaw bikers—1%ers—called it a Ginsu, and with good reason. Like some kind of deadly hybrid between a knife and an axe, you could slice a tomato clean or de-limb a tree with it.

But that wasn’t what Slaughter was going to de-limb.

He hacked off first the right arm, then the left. He hacked through both legs and then decapitated the wormboy. It was nasty, dirty work. And when he was done, there was blood right up to his bicep and spattered over his face. He got a towel out of his bag and wiped the rancid blood clean, polishing the Gurkha knife to a lethal gleam before sliding it back in its sheath.

Satisfied, he walked over to the wormboy’s remains.

The arms were still moving, fingers clawing.

There was still life in the head. Glazed, yellow-white eyes stared up at him; the teeth gnashed.

Slaughter kicked the head and it rolled into the gravel.

He fired up a cigarette and waited there, crouched by the side of the road.

The wormboy was dead, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything still alive inside him. And there it came, right out of the left eye socket: a twelve-inch segmented worm, glossy red and shiny with brain goo. It deserted the head like a rat leaving a sinking ship, slithering off in search of better pickings. Although it couldn’t see much better than your average brick—didn’t have any eyes—it knew where Slaughter was. It sensed him. Smelled him. Picked up his body heat, something. It raised its ugly bulbous knob of a head in defense. The head opened up like a flower, the worm heaved, and let fly with a stream of brown juice.

Slaughter ducked away from it.

He didn’t know what that shit was, but it had a weird narcotic effect like getting shot up with a Thorazine cocktail. You got hit and you were done. Within seconds, you were down on your knees, your limbs rubbery and ungainly, your eyes glazed over. And once you were nicely numb and doped, the worm would pay you a visit, slide right in anywhere you were open—nose, mouth, eyes, ass… they weren’t picky. After that, death came within six hours and within twelve, you woke back up with a real nasty appetite for human flesh.

There were stories making the rounds that junkies were squeezing out worms for juice, cutting it with heroin and coke and shooting it. Maybe it was bullshit, maybe not.

Slaughter crouched there, smoking, thinking of eighth grade American Lit. They all had to memorize a poem and old fat ass Mrs. Buntz gave him Poe’s The Conqueror Worm. Crazy shit, but he could still remember it, still hear those words running through his head:

“Yeah,” he said, blowing smoke out through his nostrils. “Dig it.”

It was still fresh in his mind and never had those words made sense like they did now. The point of the poem was about human mortality, he knew, about people carrying on like death was not a solid, grim inevitability when in fact its shadow was cast over every living thing from the point of birth. For in the end the worm conquers all.

“The play is a tragedy and it’s called ‘Man’,” he paraphrased. “And its hero is the conqueror worm.” He stood up. “But you won’t conquer shit today, my friend.” He stomped the worm to paste, looking down that lonely stretch of highway snaking away through the green Wisconsin hills towards Minnesota. Somewhere out there was the great Mississippi and on the other side, the Deadlands. Like the name implied, the Deadlands was a great wild wasteland of roving gangs, scavengers, nomads and mutants, and the walking dead that stretched clear to the Pacific Ocean. The cities out there were cemeteries and the towns were tombs. Some of that was from the Outbreak itself and some of it was from the ten megaton nukes used to contain it. Deadly clouds of fallout and radioactive dust storms were still blowing around out there, people said. Back east, things were secure. After the Outbreak—the worm infestation that brought the dead up out of their graves—and the wars that followed, the military had reorganized and launched one cleanup op after another until nearly all the zombies were exterminated. You got west of Pennsylvania, then it was the Wild West all over again. The frontier. The politicians kept saying that the army would continue the cleanup, pushing ever westward, but as things stood, the army had enough problems securing the east.

Which was just fine with Slaughter.

He was out in Wisconsin now because it was lawless. Out here, the dead walked, psychos and paramilitary whackos would kill you for your guns, your women, or a can of fucking pork-n-beans. But that was okay. As a blood member of the Devil’s Disciples and a veteran of countless biker wars, he understood killing and attrition and the politics of survival just fine. Out here, Darwinism was law and he fit right in.

Besides, he was wanted on three counts of capital murder back east and was currently the only member of the Devil’s Disciples living fancy free. The others were either dead or in prison.

He finished his cigarette and flicked it in the ditch, longing for the good old days when you patched with a good club, pushed some blow and crank, took to the road on your steel horse with your brothers, and your enemy stayed down dead when you shot him.

Those were the days.

Rumbling with the Pagans in Maryland and the Outlaws in Chicago, blood wars with the Angels and Mongols in California, nothing but pussy and booze and blood.

Lots of turf battles. Ugly affairs to be sure, but at least they were men fighting against men. Ever since the worm rains, it wasn’t the same for the 1%ers. Pickings were thin, the old boys were all dead, and there were things walking that should have moldered in graves long ago.

Kicking the wormboy’s body a few times, Slaughter scavenged the corpse, taking the SS dagger from the torso. It was deadly sharp. He used it to slit the wormboy’s colors from the back of the filthy leather vest. He held them up into the sun. A white jawless skull, fanged, set in a field of red, one socket empty the other with a staring bloodshot eye. The upper rocker read: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And beneath the skull, the lower said: KANSAS CITY.

He stuffed them in his road bag.

He had taken the colors off a dozen of them in the past three days.The farther west you got, the wilder things were. Back in the day, Slaughter remembered, the Devil’s Disciples had gone to gun against the Cannibal Corpse Nation. It had been violent, bloody warfare right from the first, a drug war, a turf war, riders and soldiers on both sides gunned down, beaten, stabbed, strangled, burned. Clubhouses blown up, chapter presidents and officers assassinated. The Outbreak had brought a cessation of hostilities, though. And that was the funny part, when you came down to it. Cannibal Corpse. They all died when Kansas City and St. Louis got dusted by tactical neutron weapons, but the worms brought them back so that in death they were what they claimed to be in life.

Slaughter went over to his bike.

He figured he’d better get back to the farm. Dirty Mary, his old lady of the moment, was probably waiting for him. He’d gone out on a run to do some scavenging and found an untouched case of Dinty Moore beef stew. Mary was going to like that.

The problem was that Slaughter was already feeling restless.

Dirty Mary was all right, but the road was calling to him and he wanted to ride, keep going west, right into the black heart of the Deadlands. The longer he sat still the more he could feel the walls of his cage narrowing even further. It had been like that ever since he was a teenager. He had to keep moving, keep doing something or he got bored and crazy after awhile. The longer he sat still in one place, the more he envisioned a gallows being built in his mind, boards being nailed into place and a noose strung from a scaffold. And he knew it was his noose and when he started seeing it, when it got into his dreams and laid a chill along his spine, he knew it was time to move.

He jumped on the hog and opened her up down the road.

Something to the west was calling to him, but he couldn’t hear the voice yet.

But soon…