Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twenty-Five

Out in the compound, it was quiet.

A deathly brooding silence had fallen and Slaughter wasn’t caring for it much. All they needed was for a few of those things to slip up in the dark and make it into the bunker and that would be it. He still had the M-16, but it was nearly out of shot. What he would have given to have his Combat Mag again and a few speedloaders for the close-in stuff. Back in his days as a Marine, they would have set out landmines and Claymores, tripflares and boobytraps to secure the perimeter. Now he just had his five senses. But he had to remain vigilant, which wasn’t easy because he was so damn tired. His eyes kept shutting. Some coffee or a couple of bennies would have been nice.

Maria was awake.

He could feel her behind him. She was breathing softly but now and again she would move. He didn’t know what the hell he was going to do with her. In the old days, he would have probably tossed her to the headhunters if she didn’t earn her keep, but now he was thinking he had to get her somewhere. Somewhere safe. But where exactly was that? He wondered if the other Disciples were still alive, still riding hard and giving hell.

She’s going to be trouble and you know it. She’s like a child and you don’t have the time to be babysitting anyone.

But what the hell could he do?

Things were different now. He just couldn’t leave. And that meant in the morning—if they even saw the morning—she’d have to come with when he made his break out of this place. He had a pretty good idea that by dawn there wouldn’t be any Ratbags left to stop him and was that a good thing or a bad thing?

Now and again he heard a night bird crying out or the distant and terrible roar of some nocturnal predator. It was hard to say what that might have been, but he didn’t think he was being overly-imaginative when he thought it sounded prehistoric.

The eerie silence and blanketing darkness were almost unbearable.

Slaughter dug around next to him.

“What are you doing?” Maria asked him, her voice almost neurotic in its intensity.

“Putting a flare out,” he said.

What he didn’t tell her was that the stillness out there was making his skin crawl and his experience told him that this was more than nerves but a warning signal.

He aimed the flare pistol and fired it. There was a muted pop and the flare went up over the compound, throwing out a flickering red-yellow illumination that swept over the ragged landscape, creating a surreal world of strobing shapes and jumping shadows.

But his instincts had not been wrong.

A dozen headhunters were clawing their way up the hill. When the flare ignited, they froze, staring up at it like it was the eye of their god that had just opened. They watched it with primitive fascination and Slaughter sighted them in and sprayed them down with the fifty. It was a turkey shoot. The slugs ripped them apart and sent their remains tumbling down the hill. He fired on suspicious pockets of darkness and anything that didn’t move fast enough or things that looked like they might be alive. Most of them weren’t, but the hammering of the heavy machine gun and the burning flare disoriented the other mutants, forcing them up out of ditches into the killzone and scattering the rest in fear. He took out sixteen or seventeen of them by his figuring.

When he was done, the barrel was smoking.

He sighed then, lit a cigarette, knowing there was no point in stealth by then. He kept his senses alert and his instincts sharp. “How did you come to be with the Red Hand?” he asked Maria.

“How does any woman come to be with them?”

“You didn’t volunteer, I’m guessing.”

Maria made a sound that was almost laughter. “No. Would any woman in her right mind volunteer to be a camp woman?”

“I suppose not.”

“There are women who join them, though,” Maria admitted. “Some of them just want protection. But others join because they want to be part of the Hand. They want to fight.”

“But you weren’t one of them.”

“No, I wasn’t one of them.” She went silent for a moment, then: “They grabbed me and three other girls in Bismarck. We were making our way east like everyone else.”

“You were going to college when the Outbreak happened?”

“Yeah. I was studying comparative religion.”

“Heavy stuff.”

“Sure.”

She kept talking but he was no longer listening. He was getting that chill up his spine again. He knew someone, or more probably, something was sneaking up on the bunker. He listened. Intuited. Put out feelers hoping to snare something mentally, but whatever it was, it was being very quiet, very patient, something well-practiced in stealth and stalking. He thought about putting out another flare but he knew there was no time for that. He was getting a raw smell of rotting meat and old blood; nothing could disguise it.

It was getting thicker.

Hot, nauseating.

Maria had sensed it now, too. She had stopped talking.

Slaughter swallowed. Something was on top of the bunker working its way forward, inch by inch. The moonlight was very pale but there was enough of it to see by.

He waited.

A face and a trailing mop of hair appeared over the lip of the roof, then hands. They were perfectly silhouetted. Slaughter fired twice with the M-16, catching their intruder in the head. The headhunter made a gurgling sort of sound and dropped to the ground, dead.

But he was only the spearhead of a much larger force.

They saw no more reason for stealth.

Slaughter heard them grunting out there, gnashing their teeth and breathing hard. He put out a flare. Jesus, the hillside was swarming with them. They were crawling upwards on their bellies in shaggy ranks, their eyes glistening in the sudden intrusion of light.

He loaded the flare gun and put out another.

Loaded it again and stuck it inside his jean vest.

He opened up with the .50 cal. machine gun and killed twenty within the first five seconds of firing. But they were coming from every quarter. He laid down suppressive fire to the left and right, straight ahead and down below in the mud bowl. In the flickering light of the flare, it was a sea of gore down there, twitching limbs and blood and looped entrails and blasted heads. But they still kept coming, crawling right through the shattered remains of the others, painting themselves up with the blood of the fallen. Filthy, carrion-stinking, subhuman nightstalkers.

He kept shooting until the barrel was again hot and smoking.

But there were too many of them.

“We’re going to have to make a run for it!” he told Maria between shots, but she was hysterical and crying.

Two of them came out of the darkness, diving into the bunker. Slaughter was hit by something that knocked him on his ass. Maria screamed. His head filled with stars, he saw two hunched-over forms taking her out of the bunker. She fought and screamed in the orange glow of the flare, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Their silhouettes were everywhere. They were hissing and growling and squealing like boars. The air was foul with the vile, musky scents of their pelts. He could smell their acrid urine, the pungent stench of their glandular secretions, the hot-blood smell of the meat they’d been chewing on. It was a concentration of death and graveyards that sickened him and made him want to vomit. This is what Hemingway had meant by death: the carrion breath of blood-drinking hags from a slaughterhouse.

He felt them grab his ankles, dragging him up and out of the bunker. He reached blindly for the M-16 and his hands closed around a flare magazine with five rounds in it. He stuffed it inside his vest as they pulled him out of the bunker and through the dirt. In the distance, he thought he heard Maria screaming.

Making himself go limp, he let them drag him down the path and out of the main body of headhunters. In the moonlight he could see the forms of the two that had his ankles. They were taking him somewhere private to feed upon him and take his head, no doubt.

Slaughter let that happen.

He didn’t want too many mutants around when he made his move. When they got him down to the next tier and within hailing distance of the hut, he reached a hand inside his vest and pulled out the flare gun. When he got a clear silhouette and saw that the snarling simian bastards were shoulder to shoulder, he kicked out with his legs to get their attention. They dropped his ankles and turned to feed (he was thinking). He covered his eyes and put a flare right into the face of the one on the left who cried out in agony as it exploded in a shower of red sparks, lighting his hair on fire. The flare bounced off him and drilled into the other—a woman—burning across her breasts, bouncing off her legs and hitting the man again, this time in the groin.

Slaughter rolled away, scrambling off on his hands and knees.

They were screeching and growling, the man blinded, the woman seared, both of them burning now.

He made his getaway.

He ran off towards the hut but there were shapes moving all around him, so he cut down the hillside, avoided three or four more that shrieked at him, and ducked past still more. A throng of them came hobbling in his direction and more came from behind. He put a flare right into the throng and they vaulted away, screeching and burning, and he cut through them, trying to navigate in the flickering light. Then he tripped over something—a tree root, a half-buried bone, it was hard to tell—and went rolling down the hillside and found himself in the mud bowl.

There were dozens of them.

He ran and ran, found a ditch not far from the cage where he’d fought Maggot, and jumped in.

He listened to them for hours, killing and maiming, raping the women and dismembering the men, feeding on the wounded and chopping off heads. They didn’t find him. They had plenty of prey and he bided his time, shivering in the muddy ditch, just praying for dawn, his ears ringing with the screams of their victims.

As inconceivable as it seemed, he must have fallen asleep at some point because when he opened his eyes it was silent. The sun was rising over the hills in the east in a red, shimmering ball, burning away a damp early morning mist.

For some time he laid there, afraid to move.

The encampments were silent.

Nothing moved.

Nothing stirred.

He carefully raised his head from the ditch. He saw nothing. The mutants were gone. A few vehicles were burning, casting plumes of smoke into the air, but that was about it. The headhunters had left with the rising sun.

Slaughter pulled himself out of the ditch, slicked with drying mud, face painted with grime. He saw a few headless Ratbag corpses that were badly mauled or eaten, but no dead mutants. They’d dragged off their dead along with the corpses of their prey. In fact, the area was very sterile in appearance. Not so much as a stray bone or a shank of meat. He saw bloodstains; they were everywhere. But there were no corpses save a few Ratbags sunken in the mud that had been overlooked. The headhunters were very efficient scavengers, apparently.

He pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of his vest and lit it.

He wondered about Maria. Poor kid was a mess, a real basket case, a collection of neuroses, but she’d been through a lot and that was understandable. He hoped they’d killed her. He honestly hoped for that because he didn’t think any woman could remain sane after the attentions of those things.

He wanted to mourn her.

More so, he wanted to track the mutants to their lair with a hundred well-armed 1%ers and sort them out, but that was wish fulfillment and fantasy retribution. He had to be practical. He needed a vehicle. He needed to link up with the Disciples and, if that was impossible, to get to that fortress and get that bio out of there.

And don’t forget Black Hat or Nemesis or Leviathan or whatever the fuck he calls himself. Because that puke has something special in store for you at the end of the trail and you know it.

He looked for a vehicle, but every one he found was wrecked. The Red Hand must have deserted during the night, those few survivors driving off in anything that ran. Slaughter was hoping for a Hummer or an APC, but he couldn’t find so much as a skateboard. He was on foot. His scoot was back in Exodus and he really doubted it had survived the all-out attack by the Red Hand.

Damn.

On foot.

That was a hell of a thing for an old scooter tramp. He kept walking, keeping his eyes open for trouble and wondering how he was going to get out of this one and how far it might be to the nearest town where he could possibly hook up with a ride. He came closer to the main gate and he began to see a few stragglers roaming around. They ignored him. Even when he called out to them, they ignored him. They weren’t interested in him or what he was selling. He wondered how many of them had been watching him dance with Maggot.

There was a row of clapboard buildings and that’s where Slaughter had his first piece of luck of the day. The corpse of a man was impaled to the wall of one of the buildings. One of the mutants must have done it and it was a testament to the strength of those things. A knife had been driven through the belly of the corpse and into the wall, pegging it there.

The corpse belonged to Valdez.

And the knife belonged to Slaughter.

It was his Gurkha knife, his Kukri. He kind of doubted there was another one around so it had to be his. He took hold of the hilt with both hands and, bracing himself with one boot against the wall, worked the knife loose. The corpse hit the ground and he stared at the gored blade. The knife was no worse for wear. When he turned around, three or four stragglers were watching him.

When he put his eyes on them, they scattered.

All except one: a Ratbag with a .38 on his belt.

“You know where I can get a ride?” Slaughter asked him. “A car, a truck, anything?”

“No. But when you find one, you let me know.”

He was about to turn away when there came a rumbling in the distance. Slaughter recognized what it was: there was no mistaking the roar of hogs, the sound of a pack coming in on their iron horses. The only thing akin to it was the sound of heavy armor riding in formation. It was thunder and blitzkrieg and sweet music, the banging of Thor’s hammer and the echo of sheer wrath.

Problem was: who were the riders?

Slaughter couldn’t see yet because of the bend in the road out there. If it was Cannibal Corpse, the stragglers were going to wish that the headhunters had got them the night before. But if it was the Corpse, then Slaughter had already decided he was going to liberate one of those carrion-eaters of his ride.

The stragglers scattered.

They saw death coming and they weren’t hanging around. They crawled back into their holes and coverts and made for the next round which would be no less bloody and savage than the first, they figured. Slaughter slipped around the side of the building, wondering how he was going to work this. He had the Kukri and the flare gun, but that was about it. Not exactly the sort of artillery needed to handle a crew of the Corpse Nation.

But he made ready.

He was going to make it work because he had to make it work. He saw the riders coming in: four of them and behind them another vehicle.

Couldn’t be.

Couldn’t possibly be.

But it was: the Devil’s Disciples had arrived.