Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twelve

Thick as summer locusts, the dead moved up the road in an enraged swarm. Blown by desert-hot winds, they shambled forward en masse in clouds of dust to meet the invaders, pushing ever closer with a yellow, subterranean stink of mortuary spices. It was Slaughter who saw them at a distance with his Minox binoculars. Men, women, and children, erupting in an army from the city limits of Copton, Minnesota like a flurry of hollow-eyed wraiths breaking out of a midnight cemetery. He got the bikes and their riders into the Wagon.

Since there was no way around, they were going right through.

“We’ll slice ourselves a path right through with our cow-catcher,” Moondog said. “Gonna be ugly, but it’s the only way.”

The closer they got, the thicker the swarm was until they could see hundreds of them, chalk-white funeral sculptures bearing the stigmata of the grave, stalking out like bone-pale mantises stuffed with dry grasses and withered weeds, semi-human ghouls on the march.

All of the Disciples were gathered up front as Moondog pushed the Wagon further, gathering up speed, but not too much, knowing he had to have enough velocity to punch through the horde.

Slaughter waited, tensed like the others.

He’d never seen so many undead in one place before and he would have been lying if he did not admit to himself that he was scared, really scared. Even the wormboys that attacked Rice’s farmhouse had been a drop in a bucket compared to this. And what really bothered him was that it seemed almost as if they knew the War Wagon and its outriders were coming. That was crazy but he did not honestly think the idea sounded as crazy as it should have under less trying circumstances.

It’s like they’re waiting for us, he thought then. Like every walking stiff in the county is gathered there in Copton, waiting for us. Like they were compelled to wait for us.

He’d had the same feeling at Rice’s farmhouse. It had seemed downright odd that the zombies had come down the road and chose Rice’s place to attack. It seemed somehow coordinated and he did not like that.

By the time they got the bikes into the Wagon, a storm began to break over Copton. The sky became a boiling black mass stitched with white seams of lightning, and the land grew dark with shadows. Within ten minutes as that darkness fell and those cloud masses overhead unzipped themselves with hot arcing fingers of electricity, the thunder began to boom so loud it made the windshield of the Wagon tremble in its frame.

Then it really started to hit.

Forking lightning was drawn down to the rooftops and steeples of Copton, the thunder exploding like cluster bombs as a clammy dank ground mist blew through the legs of the zombies.

Then the rain crashed down, except it wasn’t droplets of water, but a rain of red worms falling from high above. They thudded against the bus like soft, rotten hailstones, smashing against the windshield and leaving smears of pulpy red tissue that soon built up into a soggy, runny membrane that the wipers could barely clear. They pelted the zombies and carpeted the road in twitching masses, gathering in undulant red pools that burst their banks and flooded the world until it seemed they were four or five inches deep on the road The sound of the Wagon’s wheels cutting through that was sickening to the extreme… like riding through especially wet, congested leaves.

“Jesus Christ,” Fish said. “I’m about to lose my mind here.”

Jumbo said, “Hang on, Fish. It won’t last long.”

As the wipers worked frantically and the wiper fluid gushed to clear the glass, Slaughter could see that the zombies were sill coming, feverish with worms, but still coming right at them and impact would be in less than a minute.

“Here we go,” he said. “Grab something and hang tight.”

“And that don’t mean my dick, Shanks,” Irish said, his voice high and broken as he tried to calm his own nerves.

Shanks just said, “Shit.”

The worms came down in an ever-thickening rain until the Wagon was painted with a slimy, cold wormjelly that oozed in clots and clumps like the aspic gelatin of a canned ham.

The electrical storm did not abate in the least.

It raged and flashed as forks of lightning came burning down from the heavens, hitting trees and houses and aerials in Copton and fires blazed in every quarter. Slaughter saw a steeple in the distance get hit by branching lightning and there was a blinding flash and then the church and houses to either side went up like kindling, throwing out smoke and flames in sheets. About ten seconds before the Wagon hit the zombies, something in the town detonated with a rolling, sonic boom and three gigantic clouds of fire rose above the roofline.

It must have been a tanker truck filled with gasoline or a storage tank of natural gas, he figured, because it ignited like napalm, creating a wild, raging firestorm that swept through the town, scattering red-hot ashes into the dry wind.

Moondog had the War Wagon up to about forty miles-per-hour then as it reached the outskirts of the town. Every time the wipers cleared the worm goo away, they could all see just what sort of inferno they were driving into, the zombies backlit now by the spreading fires in the gray afternoon dimness.

Then they hit the zombies.

The worms were bad enough, but the zombies were worse.

The cow-catcher did the real work and the wormboys and wormgirls out there literally exploded as it breached their lines like a hot knife. The zombies went up like blood-blown bags of meat, gore and guts raining up and over the Wagon, a few stray limbs bouncing across the hood. The bus shook with each jarring impact. THUD, THUD, THUD, THUD-THUD-THUD! Moondog could barely see where he was driving and the Wagon shook and reeled as it smashed zombies aside and split them in two, rolling right over them, knocking aside wrecked cars and trucks and slicing deep into the bowels of Copton which was a furnace by that point, a great smoldering kiln, and the air inside the bus became thin, rarified, dry and hard to breathe.

But the zombies were still coming.

That was the amazing thing, the disturbing thing: they just kept coming and coming in waves, crowding the streets and pressing closer and closer until the bus crashed into them and their anatomies splashed over the pavement and drenched the others.

As Copton continued to burn, great bonfires swept up by the dry winds became a living fire demon, a sentient conflagration of pure elemental, oxidizing wrath and the zombies went up like tinder and blazed like sulfur. They were melting corpse candles and hot smoldering fuses and Guy Fawkes dummies glowing with tongues of flame, chestnuts popping in firepits. They did not run or try to flee. They were engulfed and still they shrieked with scalded voices for the flesh of the invaders as the fire withered them and scattered them like crematory ashes in a whirling, scorching wind.

Sweat beading his face, his throat scratchy and dry, Slaughter held onto the dashboard as Moondog held onto the wheel and pushed them down narrow streets and arteries clogged with debris and blackened stick-forms.

In was a yellow-orange jungle out there and its trees and vines and creepers were made of fire. Copton was overgrown by the combustion, flooded, drowning in searing brimstone growths, black smoke rolling through the streets and sparks sweeping down byways. The houses and buildings were red glowing bricks. And the zombies… fire ghosts, feral red things reaching out with gnarled fingers, breathing embers, and flaking away like coals in the sizzling, crackling purgatory, the steam and smoke boiler of the holocaust.

“Hey! Did you fucking see that?” Moondog asked.

Slaughter looked at him.

Moondog just shook his head. “I’m losing it. I saw… I thought I saw…”

“What?”

“I don’t know… a guy standing there in the flames. Just standing there, only he wasn’t burning. Weird. Like an old-time preacher,” Moondog said. “Long black coat… and a black hat.”

Slaughter sat down because his knees felt weak. Well, then, now somebody besides himself had seen Black Hat. He tried to convince himself that it wasn’t so, but he didn’t believe it for a moment.

Maybe what you need to do is quit trying to rationalize shit. Quit trying to make sense of things. Take ‘em as they come.

Which was fine and dandy, only it didn’t explain a thing and he badly needed some explanations. Black Hat was occupying a zone of darkness in his head that was widening its perimeters by the hour and Slaughter was beginning to worry that he’d fall in and never find his way out again. There was both rhyme and reason to all this, only it was beyond his limited faculties of comprehension to understand. But it was big. It was important. Black Hat was prophecy and fate, doom and destiny, twisted divination and mad-dog Karmic retribution all rolled into one and Slaughter felt that right into his marrow.

That Black Hat was evil was absolute.

That they would meet was inevitable.

And that they would clash was predestined.

This was all Slaughter really knew for sure. Some dark night on some dark lick of pavement, we’re going to come together. And before the pain and the dying and the bloodshed, there just might be a few answers.

Moondog eased the War Wagon out of Copton and the town faded into thankful memory. Then they were on the road and the temperature dropped and the Disciples began to breathe again. Behind them, the horizon glowed red.

The storm still raged but the worms had been replaced by sweeping sheets of rain, real rain that washed the worm and zombie remains from the Wagon and brought a welcoming chill to the air, cleaning away the stink of death and cremation that was the special smell of Copton, Minnesota.

“Sheeee-iiit,” Shanks said, and everyone agreed silently, for what else was there to say?