Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twenty-Three

By the time the rain started coming down in sheets and turning the ground to rolling mud, Slaughter had climbed up and over the fence of the cage and dropped into the muck on the other side. The rain was cool and cleansing and it felt good as he stood in it, trying to see through it, trying to figure out where some shelter might be. It kept coming down, drenching him, cleaning the stink and remains of zombie gore off of him.

But he knew that, at any moment, the worms might start coming down, too.

He had to find shelter.

In the distance were those encampments and he made for the nearest one, hoping he’d make it and not get shot when he jumped the perimeter. He ran through the mud, slipping and falling, getting up again and then tripping over something and going face-first into the slop. He rose up, the rain washing the muck from his face.

There was a woman there.

She was hugging herself and rocking back and forth on her haunches.

That’s what he tripped over.

“You better get to cover!” he shouted at her, but she just shook her head.

He knew at that moment that every second was precious. He should have run. He should have worried about himself but he knew if he did that, he knew if he abandoned the woman and saved his own skin, he was no better than the citizens who’d cheered on his death in the cage. And he knew he was better than them. At least, now he was.

He grabbed the woman by the arm and pulled her up.

She didn’t fight.

She didn’t do anything.

She just stood there with absolute dejection, wet hair plastered to her face. She was nearly limp as he dragged her along, mumbling something or other about wanting to stay out in the rain and wait for the worms.

He pulled her along, slopping forward to the nearest barbwired encampment. As they came through the wire, a man with an M-16 came out of the gathering darkness. He almost walked right into Slaughter. Slaughter chopped the edge of his hand across the guy’s nose and kicked him in the head when he fell. He grabbed the rifle and pulled the woman into the compound with him. In the rain, no one fired because if there were guns out there, no one could be sure in that deluge who was a Ratbag and who was not. There was a little tin shack at the foot of a hillside that might have been a guard house once.

“C’mon!” Slaughter said, dragging her forward.

When he got her to the shack, he pushed her down in the mud, grabbed the latch on the door and threw it open, jumping to the side. A couple of shots rang out. Some swearing. Some shouting.

Slaughter rolled over the ground through the muck and puddles and came to a rest on his belly, firing indiscriminately into the shack. A man cried out and fell from the doorway and a woman screamed, tried to pull him back in. Slaughter sprayed both of them down and yanked their corpses out, throwing them in the puddles. He pulled the woman in there and latched the door, breathing heavily.

“That was tight,” he said.

The falling rain on the tin shack sounded like popcorn popping. There were a few tiny leaks in the ceiling and a few drops of rain still fell, but it was dry and it was warm. There were dry blankets on a shelf and a couple of chairs against the wall, a candle flickering in the corner.

Had yourselves a cozy little love shack here, eh, citizens? he thought with absolutely no sympathy. Well ain’t that too fucking bad?

He wondered how many rocks and bottles the two he had killed had thrown at him. How many jeers and boos they had called out. How badly had they cheered on his death?

“What’s your name?” he asked the woman.

“Does it matter?”

“Sure.”

He wrapped her in a blanket. She was small and shivering, her hair long and straight, dishwater blonde. She had a nice face, blue eyes, girl-next-door pretty but despondent as hell. Something in her had been yanked out and crushed.

“Maria,” she said.

“Slaughter.”

She did not look at him. She looked at the floor. She did not speak, he soon realized, unless she was spoken to. She acted like some of the weaklings he remembered from prison. The bitch-boys and punks that the hardtimers used as girlfriends. She was like them: trained, silent, obedient. Not a shred of defiance in her.

“Were you a camp woman?”

She looked up at him. “I was a whore to be used.”

Jesus. Thoroughly broken.

“I suppose that’s what you want,” she said, lifting her shirt and exposing two pert breasts that were grimy and sullied by purple bruises.

He pulled her shirt back down. “I got other things on my mind right now.”

“You’re not going to rape me?” she said.

“Honey, I never raped anyone in my life,” he told her. “It was always given to me, I never had to take it.”

He felt a foolish, almost boyish and immature need to brag of his sexual conquests to her. The club runs and parties back in the old days. All the women who’d show up. Not just biker babes but hot college girls and attractive housewives looking for a ride on the wild side, looking to escape the dull confines of their ordered lily-white worlds, attracted by bad boys as women of all stripes were always attracted by bad boys. But what was the point in telling her that stuff? It would have been silly. Like a thirteen-year old kid bragging in the locker room about the handjob Betty Sue had given him in her parent’s garage. Puerile.

“You don’t have to take it, I’ll give it to you.”

“I don’t want it.”

She looked dejected. “You don’t think I’m pretty?”

“Got nothing to do with it. Right now it’s about surviving.”

She was silent for a time but he could feel her warming up to him, intrigued that he had no interest in her body. “I thought bikers always raped women.”

He laughed. “That’s what citizens always want everyone to think.” He shrugged. “Some of us do. But so do some citizens. People are people and animals are animals.”

She seemed to think about that for a time as if the idea of something like that had never occurred to her. “You killed those two people.”

“They would have killed me,” he explained. “Those two were more than happy to watch me die in the cage.”

“Yes, they were.” She stared at the rusting tin walls, pulled the blanket tighter around her. “I didn’t think anyone would ever kill Maggot. You don’t know how many people he killed and ate in there.”

“I can guess. But you can’t blame him for that. He wasn’t responsible for what he was. You give a starving dog a juicy bone and he’ll bite it. And I just bet they kept him hungry.” He shook his head. “The real monsters were outside the cage. The ones who got all hot and bothered to watch me die an ugly death.”

Slaughter was amazed by his own enlightenment. Had those Zen experiences of late changed him in some way, transformed him? He wondered if it wasn’t true. Ever since the trip on the peyote express he had been thinking differently, seeing things clearer. He had to watch that. Compassion and wisdom even were grand things, but enlightened men tended to become martyrs and he couldn’t have that. He had to keep his edge. He had to find his brothers. He had to lead them at the fortress so he could snatch the bio and set his brother free, get old Red Eye out of the hot seat.

They listened to the rain coming down as the candle burned low. It was a nice sound. He pulled the blanket up tighter and realized he was getting too comfortable. He couldn’t afford to sleep right now.

“Why did you want to stay out there?” he asked her.

Maria looked at him, then looked away. “I wanted the worms to get me.”

“Why?”

Now she did not look away. “Do you know what life has been like for me?”

He nodded. “Still… rising back up as a dead thing isn’t much of a plan.”

“It sounded okay to me.”

The rain kept falling and they could hear it sluicing in rivers and creeks, expanding into ponds and muddy bogs that would become lakes in time. Thunder boomed off and on. Water dripped from the roof.

“Listen,” Maria said.

Slaughter did. He heard nothing at first and then: plink, plink, plink. It was either a hailstorm, which he had not seen in years, or a worm rain. No, too soft for hail. It was worms, all right. He could hear their small, soft bodies smashing against the shed. Out there in the distance, people were crying out, either trapped in the rain or just terrified at the idea of it.

Maria was shivering. “I hate worms. I hate all worms.”

“And you were going to give yourself to them?”

“I wasn’t thinking straight.”

The sound of the worms falling seemed to go on interminably and Slaughter was thankful for the candle. Being in the dark and not being able to see them if they breached the shack would have brought him a little too close to out-and-out madness. Plink-plink, plink, plink, plink, plink-plink, plink, plink, plink… on and on it went and then Maria let loose with a little scream and Slaughter saw why. A worm had gotten through the tiny hole in the roof and landed on his blanketed lap. He flicked it off and crushed it under his boot.

But another fell, and another.

Tearing a strip off the blanket, he stood on the chair and wadded the material into the hole so no more could get in. When it was tight and impenetrable, he jumped down and smashed the intruders. They were only about an inch long, immature as all the worms that fell were, but fat and soft. Repulsive.

He sat back down and Maria clung to him. She was shivering. He pulled her tight against him and she molded right into his body, but she did not stop shaking.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“No, no I’m not.”

An hour later, the rain had stopped.

No more worms.

That part of the downfall only lasted ten or fifteen minutes and then it was pure rain again. When they stepped outside, it was still daylight. A grainy uneven daylight, but daylight all the same. The sky was pink streaked by red and scudded with indigo clouds, but it was clear, no storms on the horizon. The landscape looked like Flanders in 1915 during the height of the Great War: a great bubbling swamp of mud with corpses trapped in it, hands and limbs and sightless staring faces rising from the muck. Slaughter saw at least a dozen dead, but figured there were probably many more sunken beneath the mire.

Tomorrow night they would rise up.

“It’ll be dark before long,” Maria said. “We better find a place to hide.”

He looked at her. “The wormboys?”

“There’s other things out here,” was all she would say.

They saw a few stragglers dragging themselves through the mud, but no armed bands of Ratbags. They were either dead or scattered or lying low. And that was okay. Slaughter had already checked the load on his weapon and he had no more than ten or twelve rounds at best.

They were down in the lowest part of the compound, he saw. Almost a bowl hemmed in by rising hills. He figured none of it was natural. The Army or whoever built this place had landscaped it to resemble a battlefield of sorts. The hills rose in tiers, each set having a few tin shacks or bunkers dug into them with perimeters of barbwire. He decided they needed to get up and out of the slop so, Maria behind him, they followed a greasy trail up and out to the next tier where there was a flattened walkway. The bunkers looked empty and he checked them one by one. Maybe the Red Hand were in the other encampments. He saw a few corpses, skittering rats, some standing water in the bunkers, but not much else.

“That one over there,” Maria suggested.

It was a wood-framed hut built right into the hillside. It was much larger than the shack and looked somewhat defensible. As they made their way over there, a low warm wind began to blow. The world was silent, a dim light laying over it.

There was a red cross on the door of the hut and it must have been some kind of aid station for war games. For reasons he did not even fully understand, Slaughter knocked on the door a few times before opening it and going in low with the M-16 held out before him. It was warm and dry inside. There were a couple of cots, a few empty drug cabinets. A woman with glazed eyes was sitting in a chair before a folding table.

“Don’t mind us,” he said.

She didn’t mind them at all. In fact, she seemed utterly oblivious to their presence. She mumbled under her breath, chattered her teeth, and shook with sudden quick spasms. Her teeth were bad, her face pockmarked with sores. She looked like a meth freak.

Slaughter looked over at Maria and she shook her head, twirled her finger next to her temple to indicate this lady was crazy. They sat together on one of the cots and watched the crazy woman, intrigued by her own closed world of madness.

She was clutching something to her breast with muddy fingers and then she revealed it, setting it on the table: a jelly jar. A jelly jar about a third way full with squirming red worms. Slaughter and Maria just watched. They said nothing, appalled, but not really surprised. Still humming and mumbling, the woman pulled a baggie of brown powder from the pocket of her flannel shirt. Slaughter thought it looked like low-grade Mexican brown heroin cut with something. From between her legs came a little vinyl fanny pack. She unzipped it and took out a spoon and a hypodermic needle, a Bic lighter and something like a small set of blunt tongs that he knew was a garlic press. Then a set of medical forceps.

Bitch is going to spike up right in front of us, he thought.

With shaking hands she searched around, patting herself, and then pulled a length of rubber hose from inside her shirt. It was dirty and well-used, as was the needle. She rolled up her sleeve and tied off the rubber hose at her bicep. Her forearm was bruised and ugly with needle tracks.

Maria took his hand, tried to pull him up so they could leave.

But he would not leave.

He had to see this. He had heard about this shit but he had always thought it was some kind of half-baked urban legend. Now that the tourniquet was tied off, the woman spilled some powder carefully into the spoon, patting it down with the tip of one finger. Setting the spoon aside gently… very gently… she took up the forceps and dug around in the jar of worms until she had a real good fat one. Most of them were sluggish or dead. But the worm she chose was quite lively. She brought it out and captured it in the garlic press. Licking her lips, her humming rising higher and higher, she crushed the worm with the press, the pale pink juice dripping into the powder on the spoon. She set it aside and, taking up the spoon, brought the flame of the lighter beneath it until the powder and worm juice became a bubbling liquid mass.

Her humming sounded like erotic joy by this time.

“Let’s go,” Maria said. “Please.”

Slaughter ignored her. There was a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches on the window sill. He helped himself, smoking and watching, transfixed.

Using the syringe, the haggard woman sucked up the pale brown fluid and, breathing heavily, selected a vein that wasn’t collapsed. She jabbed the needle into it, gasping with pleasure, sucked up some blood, then injected the syringe of fluid into her vein.

She set the needle aside, pulled off the tourniquet.

“Please,” Maria said, pulling on Slaughter’s arm. “Let’s get out of here before she starts talking.”

The woman began to grin, huge and moony, her glazed eyes bright and sparkling.

Then, wetting her lips, she turned and faced her visitors and began to speak.

“I know what you seek,” said the woman. “I can see it.”

Slaughter just stared at her. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

“What I’m doing I’m doing for my brother.”

The woman tittered with laughter that was acerbic, caustic even. “The one you seek was here. He laid with me. He spoke the tongue in my ear.”

Slaughter looked at Maria but she did not meet his gaze.

“He said… he said you would come and I would know you. That your name is Death and that you ride a pale horse,” the woman said, her eyes almost blazing now as if something in her brain were slowly smoldering. “He said I would see the hate in your soul, the murder in your eyes, and smell the blood upon your hands. I would know you as Death.”

“You don’t know shit, lady.”

She smiled at him. “But I do, John Slaughter. You are Death. On the surface you can tell yourself that you seek freedom for your brother but underneath, in the darkest tracts of your soul, you only want to kill and kill again. You are Death but you pretend to be freedom and life. And that is the great irony, is it not? That Death does not even recognize himself as Death.”

Slaughter was stunned.

The crazy bitch knew his name, about his brother, and was that just because Black Hat had told her or was it the drugs? Did that worm juice tweak some latent telepathy or powers of prophecy? He didn’t know. Couldn’t know. But it disturbed him greatly.

He swallowed, looked at Maria.

She still would not meet his gaze. As the crazy woman fell into some weird little fugue, her eyes rolling back white in her head, he grabbed hold of Maria’s chin none too gently and forced her to look at him. “Do they always do this? Does shooting up that worm juice make them read minds?”

“Sometimes.”

“Just sometimes?”

Maria shrugged, then sighed. “Some of them just go into a stupor and mumble. Others lose their minds. Some, like this one, have certain abilities. They can see things and know things.”

The woman’s eyes rolled in their sockets, then focused with a glassy clarity. “He said you would come because this is the land of the dead and you will ascend the throne of death because it is your calling.”

“Bullshit.”

Again that simply awful laughter which raised goosebumps on the backs of Slaughter’s bare arms.

“He caused all this, didn’t he?”

The woman just stared at him.

“All of this was from his hand?”

“Men caused this.”

But Slaughter didn’t believe that. Not entirely. Maybe it was close proximity to this worm-witch (as he was beginning to think of her) but in his mind so many things that had long been vague and unformed were taking on a curious sort of shape. “No, not men. Men are puppets to a thing like him. He feeds off death and pain and insanity. He revels in it. He mainlines it. He’s nothing but a fucking leech.”

“No!”

“Yes. He’s responsible for bringing this death into the world. The worm rains and the wars that followed it… it’s all a fucking page written in his hand, in his book.”

“You lie!” the woman nearly screamed at him. “He said Death would lie! That Death despaired of the truth! You are the king of liars! You are the king of spades! You are Death riding a pale horse with Hell following you just as he said!”

“He’s a liar.”

“No! No! No!”

“Yes. He’s the liar. Tell me his name.”

The woman was shaking now, contorting. Tears ran from her eyes and a revolting stench issued from her that smelled almost like burning flesh and singed hair. It was hot and febrile. “He has no name!”

“Yes, he does. Tell me.”

“I will not!”

“Yes, you will.”

“I cannot!”

“But you must.”

Her head whipped from side to side. “No, never!”

“I’ll find him. I’ll hunt him down. I’ll make him pay for all this.”

“No!”

Slaughter stood up and picked up his rifle. “Tell me his name.”

But she wouldn’t so he put the barrel of the M-16 up to her eye and put his finger on the trigger. She thrashed and cried out, flailing and weeping, calling out mixed-up prayers and psalms, her legs kicking and her hands flailing. Her face ran with sweat. Her tongue lolled from her mouth. Her eyes rolled back white again. And her voice, shrill and screeching and nearly inhuman in tone, said, “You! You! You! You came as he said you would! You stand here in the flesh! Death! Oh, abominable, hungry Death! Pestilence! Plague! War! Famine! It is wrought by your hand and written in the Book of Hell! I will not be witness to it! DO YOU HEAR ME, DEATH? I SHALL NOT BE WITNESS TO YOUR BLASPHEMY AND YOUR MURDER AND YOUR SEETHING HATE! I-I-I-I WILL NOT!”

She was moving with wild greased gyrations by that point. The burning smell was stronger about her and blood ran from her mouth. It filled her eyes and dripped from her ears. Then she slumped over and hit the floor. As she laid there, obviously dead, limbs askew, mouth still wide, eyes still staring, steam began to rise from her like she was melting. It carried an acrid stink of burning flesh.

Something was happening.

Something revelatory.

Maria was openly crying out in her fear, but Slaughter was close to something, he thought, or maybe miles distant. Yet, he knew what was happening was not by accident. He had the most uncanny feeling that it was meant for him and him alone. As the steam continued to rise, filling the hut with a sickening odor, he used the barrel of his rifle and pulled the woman’s shirt up and there it was as he knew it must be. Her belly was rising like bread dough, pushing up to form letters that were going from pink to red like scalded flesh. Then there was a searing, burning stench and he saw it, he saw it once again:

Just like all the others, it was branded right into her. Upraised and branded right into the flesh and just the sight of it made him take a stumbling step towards the door. He stepped out into the air which, although dank and cool, was comparatively fresh compared to what he’d been breathing in the hut. He was dizzy. Woozy. His knees were weak and his legs were shaking. He found an overturned crate and dropped his ass on it, breathing in and out, clearing his mind.

“Are you all right?” Maria said, wiping tears from her face.

He was still trembling. “Yeah… I’m okay.”

“I told you we should leave,” Maria said to him. “I told you that they say things. Things you don’t want to hear.”

He nodded. “Question is: how much of what she said can we believe?”

“I don’t know.”

“She knew things she shouldn’t have known. I can’t explain that with ordinary logic, now can I? And, even if I could, I sure as hell couldn’t explain those words burned into her.” Before he could stop himself he told Maria about that word and where he had seen it before. “I don’t know what it means but Black Hat is behind it.”

“Black Hat?”

Since he had started telling the tale, he went through the whole spiel, telling her about that video at the compound in Wisconsin, his dreams, and specifically about Frank Feathers and the Skeleton Man.

Maria was silent for a moment when he was finished. “I’ve seen it before,” she finally said.

“You’ve seen it, too?”

She shook her head. “Just in a book.”

She explained that in college she was into occultism and New Age stuff, everything from healing crystals to pyramid power and the tarot. It was just a kick and lot of kids were into it. “In 1611, I think, this priest named Father Louis Gaufridi was executed for sending demons to possess the nuns of Aix-en-Provence in France. During his trial they found a pact with the Devil signed in blood. It bore the reverse signatures of six major demons of Hell and was countersigned by a seventh.”

Slaughter was sitting forward now. “Tell me the name.”

“Leviathan,” she said.

Slaughter heard it, felt it echo through his head and knew it was right. He formed the word silently with his lips. Leviathan. To him, it had power and diabolical force but that was mainly because of the circumstances relating to it. He remembered hearing the name in Catholic school as a kid. He thought leviathan had something to do with a whale and told Maria this.

“Sure,” she said, “people call whales leviathans. It sometimes means a fire-breathing sea monster. But in demonology, Leviathan is one of the four crown princes of Hell. He’s the gatekeeper. He tempts men with carnal sin, murder, and avarice. He is a god of chaos. His direction is west. West, traditionally, being where people thought the dead went because the sun sets in the west so they thought it was the land of the dead.”

“So he’s the lord of the dead?”

She shrugged. “It’s open to interpretation, I guess. All that stuff is.”

But it would fit. He had seen those weird little altars in several towns, like offerings made to some pagan god. Maybe that pagan god was Leviathan and maybe his worshippers were the zombies. It made a crude sort of sense. In Exodus, he had seen the wormgirl, the death-goddess, maybe she was like some kind of high priestess. Again, he was reaching but it all seemed to make some kind of sense, for who else would the undead worship but something like Leviathan? Back in Victoria, where he’d found all those impaled corpses on the green, he also found that old man with the words burned into his back, the signature of Leviathan. And what had the old man said? The one who perpetrated that atrocity said his name was Nemesis, which could be construed as adversary or enemy.

Nemesis… I am Nemesis.

“Yes, to all living things you certainly are.”

“What?” Maria asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing.” Then the obvious occurred to him. “Can Leviathan mean the Devil or something like the Devil?”

“Yes.”

She was very uncomfortable with it all and he could see that. He didn’t know what to think about it all. He had never in his life believed in the Christian Devil. He had always pretty much associated it as being symbolical for the animal side of men and their primal past. With all he had seen, was he now ready to believe in something as intrinsically offensive to a reasoning mind as a demon or the Devil himself? He wasn’t sure. He really wasn’t sure. Maybe not the Devil, but perhaps the sort of thing that had inspired such belief. Because it really fit. All of it did. Frank Feathers had told him of the brutal murders in Crabeater Creek in association with the Skeleton Man. The murder part fit. The chaos thing did, too, because the worm rains had certainly created chaos. And the west being the Land of the Dead… well, that was certainly true enough.

If what that worm-witch had said was true, then Black Hat was expecting him, knowing that, inadvertently, Slaughter was following him. They were going to meet. Slaughter knew that. And it was going to be an ugly affair when they did. Who was he to fight something like Leviathan? He did not know. Yet, he almost felt that it was fated.

But one thing was for sure: he wasn’t about to ascend the throne of death. It wasn’t his calling. If he had one, it was to purge Leviathan from the world.