Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Thirteen

By nightfall, they were on their bikes again, punching through northwest Minnesota, skirting the outer edge of North Dakota. They saw very little after the madhouse of Copton, just lots of little towns with the dead wandering the streets. But no armies; just stragglers. Slaughter led them straight through every town, only stopping for a bite to eat or a fluid exchange, emptying bladders and filling gas tanks in wide open, uninhabited country.

Around sundown, in Clay County, the forest to either side of the road became thick and impenetrable, cut by an occasional river or creek, the ragged finger of a dirt road. Nothing but woods and tree-covered hills frosted by moonlight. No cabins. Not even so much as a boarded-up roadside stand.

The road forked to the left, then the right, snaked over a series of low hills, tall pines rising above looking like they might fall at any moment. And then a valley opened up before them, the road sliding down into its belly. Slaughter was keeping a close watch on just about everything, as he knew the others were, too. He was expecting an ambush at just about every turn. Then the pack was heading down into that sullen valley, a patch of boiling mist rising to greet them. They were in it before they could even think of slowing down or stopping altogether. It was a thick and roiling mist like the sort that would blow in from the sea, gray and gauzy, rolling through the hi-beams like smoke. Suddenly, visibility was down to less than twenty feet and they all downshifted, riding the clutch, cutting their speed to a safe level, navigating the crazy twists and turns the road threw at them.

Apache Dan, as road captain, gave the signal and they all rolled to a stop. He and Slaughter checked the maps Brightman had given them by penlight.

“I don’t like this fog, John. Too easy to stack a bike out in that,” Apache explained. “All it would take is a log lying in the road, a wrecked car. Anything.”

“Yeah. We better pile into the Wagon.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

They lowered the ramp and rolled the bikes up into the War Wagon and got inside themselves. Moondog took the wheel again and Shanks sat in the back with Jumbo and Irish, listening to more of Fish’s randy tales of life on the road, which left Slaughter and Apache Dan up front with Moondog.

With the arrival of the fog, things began to change.

The air no longer smelled chill and clean, but dank and moist and almost noisome, like swamp gas blown off a rotting bog. And it was warm. Hot almost. Sweat trickled down Slaughter’s neck and beaded his forehead. Moondog had to turn the wipers on to cut through the moisture clinging to the windshield.

It just wasn’t natural.

That’s what Slaughter was thinking and wondering why he was surprised by any of it. What did you expect out here? The Outbreak was a lot worse out here, man. Shit, they used nukes in Denver and Oklahoma City, half a dozen other places. You don’t let off a charge of radiation like that within the same twenty-four hour period and not have consequences.

But maybe he’d hoped they’d avoid things like that.

Maybe that was hoping too much.

The wormboys and Cannibal Corpse was one thing, as were the ragtag militias and the Red Hand. Those were known. It was the unknown things that worried him, those crazy nameless things you heard about from time to time: the mutations, the crawling nightmare abominations spawned by the release of atomic radiation. He wasn’t about to let his imagination carry him away into realms of darkness, yet he was not closing his mind to the things that might be out there, things he hoped he’d never have to look upon.

“Like fucking soup,” Apache Dan said. “Getting thicker.”

Moondog nodded. “Sure as shit.”

Slaughter sighed, lighting a cigarette. He could hear Fish in the back going on and on, telling one whopper after another. The boys were laughing nervously and Slaughter would have bet right then that the fog was getting to them, too. The night. The fog. The unknown.

“No, she was a beauty, this one,” Fish was saying, “tall and blonde. A Swede. Naomi Ericksen was her name. Don’t that just give you a hard on? Naomi Erickson. Her old man had bucks. Shit, I could’ve had the easy life with her. Too good for a fucking road rat like me. But she thought I was exciting. I took her to a couple club events and I’m not sure if she was turned on by it all or sick to her stomach. Maybe both. Then I made a big mistake…”

Slaughter watched the road.

The fog was thick and stayed thick. The headlights of the Wagon bounced right off it, reflecting back at them, and Moondog kept the speed down to less than thirty miles an hour because there was no way in hell to know what was out there with visibility down under twenty feet. The trees were black and thick-boled, their limbs hanging out over the road like the tentacles of giant squid. They passed a long-abandoned service station and the mist turned the pumps into stalking, mechanistic things like the Daleks on Dr. Who.

“Looks like it’s getting thinner,” Apache Dan said.

Slaughter thought so, too.

“We’re coming up a hill,” Moondog said.

It was a low, gradual grade, but it kept moving upward and that was the good thing because Slaughter was all for getting out of that goddamn valley. But then the hill crested and they started down again. Just before the fog began to thicken like pale gelatin, the hi-beams of the Wagon swept over a lonely meadow at the side of the road and what they saw—just for that briefest of moments—was something unbelievable.

“Holy shit,” Apache said.

That summed it up. The meadow was lit by the moonlight and they saw great ramparts and heaps of white, shining things: bones. Not human bones, of course, but the bones of animals lying about in a great crazy ossuary architecture of rib slats and skulls and disarticulated skeletons. They only saw it for a moment before the night swallowed it and the fog came pushing in again, but it was burned into their brains.

“Buffalo, I bet,” Moondog said.

Slaughter nodded. “Could be.”

“Maybe they all starved,” Apache Dan put in, but the idea, of course, was ludicrous with all the heavy grasses growing wild to either side of the road.

“Maybe,” Slaughter said.

But he wasn’t buying it and he knew they weren’t either. It didn’t look like those animals had lain down and died, it looked like their bones had been dumped there in a litter pile.

“…well,” Fish went on in the back, “I made my biggest mistake when I turned Naomi onto crank. I mean, who am I kidding? I cooked the shit. I sold it. I made serious scratch off it. But one thing you don’t do is turn on anyone you care about to that shit. I never used. Well, Naomi found her drug of choice and she became a first class fucking methamphibian. Fucking crazy, wild, eyes glazed over, hair falling out, sores on her face… ah, she ended up in dry out and her old man threatened to kill me. So that’s how I fucked up my sweet thing. Man, before the Outbreak, I could have had the life, but you know what?”

“You’re fucking stupid?” Irish said.

“That’s it, man. That’s it.”

Fish started laughing then and nobody seemed to get it until he jumped and shook his ass in Jumbo’s face and started dancing around, humming the tune to “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz. Jumbo and Irish were laughing by then, too, and Shanks was just shaking his head as he often did with Fish. Since Fish had an audience, he danced around like the scarecrow from the movie, singing:

They all burst out laughing at that, even Shanks who generally did not find anything humorous in life. They started really carrying on then but Slaughter wasn’t in the mood for that locker room shit so he told them to cool it.

“Hey, we’re just fucking around, John,” Jumbo said.

And Slaughter was going to tell them that now wasn’t the time and maybe they’d better get their shit together because they were playing for keeps here, but then he started seeing the vehicles. Moondog slowed the Wagon down. There were pick-up trucks, military Hummers, all of them smashed up like they’d been picked up by a giant and dropped. They were scattered over the road, in and out of the ditch. Slaughter thought he saw some skeletons in the cab of a pick-up truck, but he couldn’t be sure. As they passed a Hummer with an open top, moving around it slowly, he saw a camouflage fatigue shirt dark with blood stains draped over the driver’s side door—no body to go with it, just the shirt, and that made it somehow worse: like the owner had been sucked out of his clothes.

“Red Hand?” Apache said.

“Gotta be,” Moondog told him. “I wonder what happened?”

He moved the Wagon slowly through the maze of wrecked vehicles and every time they thought they were free of them, more were revealed in the fog like grim headstones. All had flat tires or torn off bumpers, crushed-in quarter panels or doors missing. Something absolutely devastating had happened here. Slaughter told himself it could have been a battle… but he didn’t believe it. He saw no bullet holes, no burned vehicles, no sign of exchanged ordinance… just those smashed Hummers and trucks. Some of them had huge, gouging scrapes in their sides.

The Wagon moved on, the fog heavier now, misting and drifting about them like fine lace. More abandoned vehicles, badly used. And then… what looked to be dangling thin cables that were hanging everywhere. They were perfectly white and freakish. They came down from the trees and out of the mist overhead, dozens and dozens of them, some drawn taut where they were connected to Hummers but most hanging limp and fraying, many broken and dangling in the slight breeze like broken clothesline wires.

At first, Slaughter thought he was looking at power cables, but power cables weren’t white and there wouldn’t be this many. The farther they went, the more they saw. Like driving through a forest of spaghetti. No, these weren’t power lines. There was only one thing they could be—

“Fucking webs,” Moondog said. “Spider webs.”

“That’s bullshit,” Apache Dan said.

“You think so?”

The others had moved up front now and were looking, feeling the flesh along their spines begin to crawl. Webs or not, there were so many strands of that white material now it became decidedly eerie. Vehicles and trees were festooned in great sheets of the stuff like gigantic cobwebs and blown cotton, spokes and threads, ropes and anchor lines and spreading white nets. It was everywhere. Combining with the pale mist, the webbing looked ghostly and surreal. The Wagon pushed through, snapping strands as it went, pushing through spokes of the stuff and woven filigree. The vehicles they saw now did indeed have human skeletons in them.

This was a graveyard, a great webbed graveyard.

“Maybe we should go back,” Apache Dan said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice and doing a real poor job of it.

“I agree,” Jumbo said. “Something spun this. I don’t want to see what.”

“Nowhere to turn around,” Moondog informed him.

“Keep pushing through,” Slaughter told him.

The web kept getting thicker, so thick that the wrecked vehicles were swallowed in networks of white mesh. The road ahead was a sold mass of the stuff, an immense funnel web that covered the trees and road and was spun overhead.

Then Apache Dan said, “What in the fuck is that?”

Moondog slowed the bus but it didn’t seem like it could possibly slow enough because that thing that came hopping and scuttling out like some cyclopean blind insect was right in front of them. From where Slaughter was standing he couldn’t be sure what it was with the fog wrapped around it, only he thought it had maybe a dozen eyes that were perfectly liquid and perfectly golden. It had a huge bulbous body that was black-red and shiny, hairs standing out on it like the bristles of a hog. And then the Wagon hit it. The cow-catcher sheared right into the thing and it made a weird, wavering, mewling sort of sound that made everyone’s hair stand on end and some brown-black juice sprayed up over the windshield and the wipers pushed it around in dirty smears.

Nobody said anything.

They knew what it was.

Slaughter felt that he finally knew what it was like to be a fly caught in the web of a house spider as they pushed on, tearing through that intricate network of white gossamer. In the headlights the stuff was shiny, glistening with something that might have been the saliva of spiders. It was about that time that they began seeing things dangling in cocooned pockets—animals, men, lots of men—dangling by threads, shriveled husks sucked dry. Then the mummies were everywhere, hanging like executed men on gallows’ nooses, bumping into the windshield, thumping against the side of the Wagon, and then it wasn’t just the mummies but spiders… or things like spiders: huge, round, bloated bodies the size of basketballs, horribly glistening black-red, hairless and shiny, fans of needle-like legs sprouting from them. And eyes… glossy green eyes like marbles. Dozens of the things hung in clusters and leggy pods as if they were mating, daisy chains of mutant spiders whose jaws dripped a foul sap. There were hundreds of these clusters and literally thousands of individual spiders strung together in snotty harnesses of silk.

Slaughter thought they were like those photographs of social spider colonies in Texas you saw that webbed up forests… except taken to a fantastic extreme.

And then on the roof of the Wagon… thump, thump, thump.

Some of that was the mummies and some of it was the spider-clusters bouncing along the roof, but much of it was individual members dropping onto the War Wagon like it was something to be fed upon, something to be webbed and sipped dry. They could hear them up there scuttling about, perhaps dozens of them, their legs making a skin-crawling ticka-ticka-ticka sound as they raced back and forth over the metal shell.

These are the babies, Slaughter found himself thinking, as afraid as he’d ever been in his life. These are the babies, but somewhere here, somewhere there’s a mother…

There were so many clusters of spiders by then that the Disciples began backing away into the rear of the Wagon. Slaughter and Apache Dan stayed up front with Moondog and, seeing no more wrecked vehicles, he eased the speed up to twenty and then thirty miles an hour and it became louder and louder with the clusters banging off the Wagon and the thumping of the hanging mummies. And then one of those clusters must have broken free of its anchor line and came swinging down at the windshield like a pendulum and the result was instantaneous: two or three of the spiders burst open upon impact with a gush of that brown-black slime and the worst part of it, the very worst part, was that everyone in the Wagon could hear the tinny, shrill, agonized screams of the things.

The windshield was a clotted, oozing mass of spider tissue and spider legs—some of which were still moving—that the wipers knocked from side to side until the spray cleaned the emulsion free.

And it was about this time that something came out of the mist and the webs at them. It was immense… something the size of a pick-up but swollen and shiny with spreading legs like telephone poles and a huge sucking black mouth fanning out with immense fangs. It dropped right on the Wagon and the entire thing shook and groaned, rocking on its springs.

Several of the Disciples cried out.

Slaughter was one of them.

He could see a pair of night-black legs, immense but tapering to surgical points tapping away on the hood… and above, that huge and fleshy thing was tearing at the roof with its fangs and the sound of that was like the blades of shovels scraping iron. The force of those teeth was unbelievable, pushing in dents, and then it did something else, it suckered its mouth to the roof and tried to drain the Wagon. The roof popped out, then in, out, then in, like the shell of an aluminum can in a fist.

“Pour it on, man!” Slaughter cried at Moondog, who stomped the accelerator, and the War Wagon rocketed forward, still sluggish with its rider. And then the spider clusters were thinning and the web was no longer a funnel but threads and wires and ropes, and it was then that the Wagon rocked again with a resounding thump and the thing was gone, jumping back into the mists and webs as the Wagon climbed a hill and broke free from the valley below.

The Disciples let forth a collective sight.

And Fish said, “I think… I think I just pissed my pants.”