Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twenty-One

How long they had been watching him, he did not know.

He couldn’t say that they were necessarily amused but they did seem almost curious. Twenty or thirty had been his rough guesstimation but that was certainly wrong because there were more now and they were pushing in from every quarter. The stink of them was their symbol of office and it was nauseating and maggoty. They stood about while clouds of meatflies rose and descended, feeding and planting eggs and ensuring the cycle of vermin. The dead cared not. Faces that were bleached and pouchy, raw-boned and oozing, held eyes that were flat black and dull red and pus-yellow and sometimes they held no eyes at all. Here were old men and women, wrinkled and naked in dry flaking skins like yellowed parchment or faded, discolored silk. They were crones and reapers and eye-biters with exaggerated skulls and tousled hair like white straw. With them stood men and women from youth to middle age with bloodgreased faces and bodies cankered with sores and gaping ulcers. Some of the women were obviously pregnant or blown-up with gas… but no, their swollen bellies moved with oily gyrations as the children turned within their wombs. Little ones stood with them, boys and girls, some in moldered burial suits and dresses, most simply naked. They were small and hunched and elfin, some skinless and others wearing borrowed hides and still others appearing as if they had been turned inside-out.

Slaughter knew what this going to be.

He felt it coming off them with the hot corpse-gas that blew out from their orifices and innumerable lacerations: the need to kill. Not just to take life but to feed, to stuff themselves. The majority were already doing that—stuffing themselves with any available carrion whether it came from their own putrescent bodies or goodies yanked or clawed from those standing near them. And that was almost ritual with them, he knew: the stuffing, the filling, the instinctive need to shove meat into their mouths and chew it, crush it to pulp, swallow it and feed again with voracious gluttony until they fell to the earth to become food. The worms inside them demanded it.

As they watched him, he watched them.

He found his pack on the ground and made ready. He strapped on the holster with the Combat Mag and the sheath with the Gurkha knife in it. He stuffed three extra speed loaders into the ammo pouch on the holster. He was thinking that if he could draw them away, out into the town itself and lose them in the streets he might make his way back to his scoot and ride out.

The dead began to move.

At least, half a dozen of them did: children. They were so unspeakably filthy with grave-dirt and corpse-drainage and the festering ordure of what they had been feeding upon, it was hard to tell if they were boys or girls and in the final analysis, it really did not matter. They grinned at him with faces like pocked membranous sheaths and liquid putrefaction. One of them was certainly a little girl that looked oddly like a Raggedy Ann doll with her stitched red grin and bulging black glass eyes, a gray watery discharge running from the holes in her face. The others to either side were like walking bone sculptures or cages of animated bones lightly fleshed in leathery pelts. One of them had an almost ritualistic pattern of sewing needles jutting from her face and what that could mean he did not know.

He began to move.

Their numbers were thinnest off to the right so this is where he went, moving casually, suppressing the desire to whistle, knowing he was in incredible danger but refusing to give in to fear. That was mostly the aftereffects of the peyote, that singular sense of indestructibility and joyous exhilaration at being alive.

They had not grouped to stop him.

But just as he got close to his opening and was already notching up his muscles for a wild run, a woman stepped out to stop him. She wore a finely-tailored business suit… at least it had been until the mildew started growing all over it. When he got within spitting distance, she hiked her skirt up so he could see the ruin of her sex. It looked like a Venus Fly-Trap, spiked and hungry. He brought up the Combat Mag and shot her in the head, the slug making a clean entrance by splitting her septum lengthwise. Although most of her brains and skull were ejected out with the back of her head, she took three or four drunken steps and then vomited out a black, gushing curd of corpse-chum that splattered at his feet before she tipped straight over face-first into the grass. The others covered her like locusts, stuffing themselves and Slaughter charged through their lines, casting three or four aside and blowing the head off another.

Then something looped around his throat and he brought his elbow back and felt it sink into flesh gone to mush and the dead man that had taken hold of him stumbled back.

Three more ringed him in.

But his hand was practiced and sure. The Combat Mag barked and they all went down with perfect headshots. He spun and drilled another, but his aim was off and the slug went into another’s throat. And that was six rounds and he knew it.

No time to reload.

He holstered the .357 and slid the Kukri out.

They screamed and converged and he went straight into their numbers with the Gurkha knife slashing back and forth in lethal arcs, severing limbs and opening guts and splitting open faces. He kept hacking and cutting as they fell and others surged over the top of their comrades and he stumbled through their masses, tripping on entrails and fluids, splashed with their drainage and foul gouts of blood.

Stumbling, tripping, Slaughter hopped forward, fell again, rolled free and came up running.

Breaking free momentarily he ran out of the park and saw there was no way in hell he could make it to the hog. He dashed towards a row of storefronts, gasping as he tried doorknob after doorknob and the dead poured in at him from every direction.

An open one.

A hardware store. He locked the door, ran behind a counter thick with grime and went down on one knee, pulling out the Combat Mag and a speedloader. He dumped the spent cartridges, quickly inserted the speedloader drum, twisted the knob, and the Mag was loaded.

By then they were thick outside.

They battered into the door and threw themselves against the dusty plate glass windows until cracks began to appear. He took aim and fired at a wormboy leading the charge and the slug took out the window and his target. The others surged forward in a sea of rot, spearing themselves on shards of glass that didn’t even slow them down.

At the same time the window went, the door crashed open and seven, then eight, of them pushed through. He dropped two more, kept firing, emptying the gun as the zombies were felled like dead trees and their fellows began to feed on them.

Slaughter quickly made it into the back of the store, slamming the door shut and throwing the lock. He was in a short corridor with two doors. Think fast, man: door number one or door number two. Fuck it. He tried them both. The first led into a cramped storeroom and the other led into the alley… he hoped.

He threw it open and an immense woman was waiting for him.

She was flabby and quite naked, her face huge like an ashen moon, eyes sunken into pockets of flab and fungus. Her breasts were lolling sacks of flour, the nipples like corded hazelnuts leaking gray milk. Black autopsy stitching ran from her crotch to her throat and it was feathered with a blue-green mold.

There was no time for anything but shock.

Slaughter hesitated with the empty .357 in his hand for just one second and she came at him. Before he could ward it off, one gas-plump hand stiff-armed him in the chest and knocked him flat. Not just flat, but sliding him across the floor.

Definitely no time for reloading.

She stood in the doorway, filling it, blocking out the sunlight behind her. She gnashed yellowed teeth together, gagged out a dust of dead flies, and licked her lips with a tongue like a fat black leech. It left a trail of slime on her puckered mouth.

It was then, as his hand gripped the Kukri, that he noticed she carried something in one of her arms. What he had taken to be another meaty roll of flab was a child… a little wormkid infant with a face like a caul, its body a rolling, distended mass like a prenatal sack full of sloshing embryonic juice.

The woman took two lumbering steps into the room as the dead pounded on the door in the corridor, wanting in, wanting not just to feed, Slaughter thought, but to view the festivities.

The woman cocked her head to the side as he stood.

Was this defiance? She just wasn’t sure.

The baby in her arms made a gurgling sound like its mouth was full of gruel. It dug spiny fingers into its mother’s bulk, something like a face moving behind the caul, grinning, chewing, feeding on itself.

Slaughter was beginning to think he might be able to get a speedloader in, but when he reached for the gun, the woman shivered and clots of black wormy earth dropped from the mossy purple-black crevice between her legs which were stout marble pillars.

“Glhhhh,” she said as if trying to form word. “Glhhhh?”

A question. One without an answer.

Her hair was a dull, weed-dry gold that must have been beautiful and luxurious at one time. Now it was patchy, crawling with insects. Coffin beetles, mottled black-and-red like bloodstones, were chewing at her scalp, pushing themselves under the skin.

Slaughter held the Kukri in one blood-spattered, white-knuckled fist.

The woman stepped forward.

Lips peeled open, yellow teeth were unsheathed.

She reached for him and he slashed out with the Gurkha knife and cleaved one of her breasts open. It split like a casket pillow, scattering filth and drainage and she roared, maybe not so much out of pain but out of damage.

She reached her free arm out at him, scabrous black nails coming within inches of his face and then he jumped back. The zombies were still beating at the other door and he knew it wouldn’t hold. His choice was to go through them or go through this woman.

There was no choice.

He’d have to hack straight through her.

One of her eyes pushed out of its seam of fat and winked open, a glossy ova serrated by red veins. She puckered her lips like she wanted to kiss him, expectorated in her throat, and spat a globby/stringy ball of bile at him. He ducked and it splattered against the wall.

She made a chortling sound as if amused.

She dug her fingers between her legs, tearing out a slimy blob of something that dripped a thin watery red sap.

And threw it.

He ducked away from that one, too, and she chortled again. And, worse, her child made a moist giggling noise that sounded like somebody vomiting.

She took two steps forward and Slaughter took two backward.

She was grinning.

He was shaking.

She made a retching sound and gagged up a ball of mucus and slime and spit it at him. As quickly as he ducked it, another came and then another and then another, spattering against the walls like red, juicing inkblots. She repeated the process two, then three times, wiping maggots from her lips and then tossed her child at him.

Slaughter stepped aside and it hit the floor with rubbery, slick sound like a water balloon. It rolled towards him, mewling. He gave it a kick and it squealed, its hide ruptured and black juice spilling out.

The woman cried out and launched herself forward.

Slaughter came at her, meeting her, bringing the Kukri down with full force and slicing her bulbous head open lengthwise. She let out a scream that was almost too human and sank to her knees, pudgy pulp fingers exploring her cleaved-open head. Brains ran down what remained of her face in a gray, inching slop like something yanked from a corpse with a funerary hook by an Egyptian embalmer. Blood and pus and clotty drainage poured out, then nests of roaches and pockets of silverfish.

She pitched over, trembling.

The wormkid oozed over the floor and Slaughter gave it a kick that caved in its caul and it slithered about like a rent jellyfish.

He hopped over it and out into the day.

There were more out there and he saw them. He shook the shells from the Combat Mag and inserted his last speedloader with a twist of the drum knob.

Six more rounds.

That’s all you got. You better make it count.

By the time he got to his feet and made ready for the killing there were dozens and dozens of them. Like worms sliding free of carrion, they came out of houses and stores, sheds and garages, attics and crawlspaces and weedy drainage ditches. There was a solid mob of them that encircled him now and he knew there was no way, just no way, he could fight through them.

He looked around as they tightened their noose.

Nowhere but up.

If he could shimmy up a raingutter, somehow get up above them onto the roofs, he might stand a chance.

God, the entire rotting population of the town was out there now and then… they parted. They made way for another that stepped into view. A wormgirl. But a special one and even he could see that. She wore a hooded poncho of human skin and a corpse mask which had been stripped from some old hag and carved to look almost totemic.

Slaughter just stared as a voice in his head said, remember this one. She’s important. She’s different than the others. She’s like a death-goddess to them and you can see the authority she commands.

Which was something that was very obvious when two wormkids stepped in front of her, offering themselves to her and she took her expiation, her burnt offerings, her sacrifice of flesh without hesitation. White fingers with black, hooked talons in place of nails lashed out and slit the offerings at her feet. They stood still, embracing the ritual. She yanked out their entrails and looped them around her throat in pink scarves. She lifted her mask precious inches to reveal a face that was fissured like pine bark, a drab yellow-white, a hollow skullish cavern where her nose had been. Lips opened and red scarab beetles ran from her mouth. Her teeth were impossibly lustrous black fangs. She stuffed entrails into her mouth and chewed on them.

Then she pointed a clawed finger right at Slaughter.

There was no mistaking it.

And as she did so, he felt a distant rumbling in the back of his skull as if she were not walking meat like the others but something of a higher, spiritually defiled office and wanted him to know this. Her thoughts speared into his own and made him quiver as what she sent out to him nested happily in the dark nether regions of his brain.

Does thee fare well, biker boy?

It was the voice of Black Hat and Slaughter knew it instinctively. There could be no other voice like that… dry and scraping, like a skeleton key scratched over a rusting iron tomb door. It was him. The death-goddess was part of him, they were joined together in something. And that was obvious when she lifted the veil that covered her pubis and belly. Her bone-white legs were stained with something like dark menstrual blood or afterbirth and across her gleaming white autopsy-stitched belly something was burned black into the flesh:

That word, that symbol, whatever in the Christ it was. It was everywhere and it was the core of this thing. If he could translate it and know what it meant it would reveal many things. But there was no time to contemplate it because the zombies were massing. They would tear him to bits.

Then the cavalry rolled in.

Once again, the Red Hand arrived.

They came in armored vehicles with shock troops pressing in behind. Light machine guns opened up, cutting down the dead and shooting gouts of fire at them from mounted flame throwers. Then the troops moved in and cut the others down. Slaughter hit the ground and knew there was no escape.

They had him, if that’s what they wanted.

But one thing they didn’t get was the death-goddess for she was nowhere to be seen.

Once the zombies were nothing but blackened, smoldering refuse in the streets, the troops moved in on Slaughter. He still had the Kukri and Combat Mag in his hands.

“The wise thing to do,” one of them said with a submachine gun pointed at him, “would be to drop that hardware.”

So Slaughter did just that.

And they charged in at him.