Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twenty-Six

On the road again.

In the bright sunshine of a bright day, the War Wagon rolled on, moving steadily north-northwest up to Devil’s Lake where the real action would begin. Slaughter slept away the morning and a good piece of the afternoon in the back of the Wagon after the exhilaration of forming up with his brother Disciples again had worn off. Up front, Apache Dan was driving, the others out riding their iron horses with Moondog leading the pack. Slaughter lay on his cot in the back looking at all the military surplus stacked up, smelling engine oil and gasoline, and thinking there wasn’t a finer and more relaxing scent on earth. With what he’d gone through last night, he was starting to wind down and he was glad the Disciples had shown because it had really energized him to the task at hand and that was something he needed badly.

It had only been a few days since they were together last, but out here in the Deadlands a few days could be an awfully long time. In a few days you could meet a crazy old Indian barbecue king who could tell you wild tales about a Skeleton Man and you could trip your brains out on peyote and have visions and hold court with Black Hat and face down a town full of zombies only to be taken prisoner by the Red Hand and be forced to fight a giant wormboy only to barely escape a worm rain and hook up with a neurotic young woman who you began to feel protective of only to see her dragged off by mutants. And then there was always the bit about the woman squeezing out worms and becoming some kind of fucking seer. Yeah, a few days in the Deadlands could be like a lifetime of revelation and pain and horror.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Maria and hoping she had died quickly, because he had felt responsible for her in her helplessness and felt that he had let her down.

You did the best you could do. Since you seem to be believing in karma these days, then you can believe that yours is intact and unsullied as far as Maria goes because you couldn’t have done more.

According to Apache Dan, after Slaughter rode off that day, drawing the Red Hand away from the pack, they had gone to ground for hours, waiting it out in the shelter of some trees. After a time, Apache Dan had led Moondog and Shanks out on their bikes searching for him. They looked for hours but could find no sign of him and then, since Apache Dan was in charge, he did the only reasonable thing and resumed the drive up to Devil’s Lake. None of them wanted to leave Slaughter behind but they figured if they would link up with him anywhere it would be up at their destination. When he wasn’t there, they got down to business anyway and did some reconnaissance of the old NORAD fortress.

“It was worse than we thought,” Apache Dan told him. “We were expecting to see it swarming with the Red Hand, but that’s not what we saw at all.”

“What did you see?” Slaughter asked him.

“Cannibal Corpse.”

According to Apache at some point—fairly recently, he was guessing—the Corpse Nation had overrun the fortress compound and taken over.

It wasn’t good news.

In fact, it was unbelievably bad news.

Apache Dan and Moondog had scouted out the perimeter of the place for some time and from their estimates there were at least forty or fifty members of the Corpse hanging around with more inside. And it looked like they were running themselves a flesh farm out back of the fortress. Somewhere in there, Slaughter knew, would be the bio. The Red Hand had been smart enough to keep her alive for a bargaining chip, but he doubted the same could be said of Cannibal Corpse. There was every likelihood she had either gone on the spit or become one of the walking dead by that point.

It would be no easy bit getting in there.

Finding her would take sheer luck.

And getting out with her in one piece would be akin to an act of God.

It was suicide from beginning to end but there was no backing out of it now. The thing was, even if Slaughter wanted to, the others wouldn’t have it. They all wanted this and wanted it bad. They all wanted to charge in there, if for no other reason than to sort out Cannibal Corpse. To them, Katherine Isley, the bio, was secondary. The woman really meant nothing to them. They wanted payback. They wanted to put an end to the Cannibal Corpse Nation once and for all.

And Slaughter understood that.

He felt that hatred as deeply as they did.

He had not forgotten about Coffin, the Kansas City chapter president of Cannibal Corpse, or his sergeant-at-arms, Reptile. They were responsible for murdering Disciples and Slaughter knew if he accomplished nothing else he would see the both of them hacked to pieces. When he was through with them, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to get up and walk.

But all that aside, there was more on the burner here.

There were bigger things.

Things that involved Black Hat who, he now felt, was the undeads’ god just as that zombie woman in Exodus was their death goddess. They would have to be put down. But if Black Hat was Nemesis and Nemesis was Leviathan, who quite conceivably was a demon of some sort or Death himself… what chance was there?

If you really believe these things and you’ve attained some higher state of consciousness where karma is not just a word but a physical/mystical flow of universal energy, and ethically and morally you’ve been taken up a few notches, then you have to know that going into the fortress with these boys means their death. They will not survive this and neither will you.

And that was it in a nutshell and he knew it.

Did he have a right to make these boys, his brothers, throw away their lives? He could tell himself they wanted to, but if he gave the word he knew that they would forget it and be more than happy to follow him on a road ride out to, say, the Pacific Ocean, fighting and raising hell the entire way. They’d like that. But he couldn’t do that and if he backed down from Cannibal Corpse they might lose respect for him and he couldn’t allow that. He had to follow this through because he knew it was his destiny to do so and he firmly believed this.

But six of them.

Six Devil’s Disciples against an army of Cannibals, an army of nearly un-killable walking dead bikers. What were the chances?

“Live hard and die free,” he said under his breath.

It was the mantra all 1%ers lived by. And when they stopped practicing it they were no longer 1%ers, they were no longer outlaw bikers.

Enough thinking.

Enough.

Slaughter went up front and clapped Apache Dan on the shoulder.

“Did you have a good sleep?”

“Yeah. I fucking needed it.”

“You did.”

“How far are we?”

“We should make Devil’s Lake just before sunset.”

It was all planned out and everyone knew their parts and Slaughter didn’t bother reiterating any of it in his head. Moondog had a special way in mind to breech the fortress and lay waste to most of the Cannibal Corpse wormboys at the same time. It would take daring and real guts, but Slaughter had no doubt that these boys were the ones for the job. He lit a cigarette and watched them out there—Jumbo and Shanks, Moondog and Fish. They were riding high and tight and as he watched them, feeling joy at seeing it and remorse knowing he would never see it again, in his mind he could see other road runs of the past where sixty or seventy Disciples rode in the pack and everything and everyone got well out of their way.

“Can’t help thinking,” Apache Dan said then, “that you were real vague about the past few days.”

“Was I?”

“Sure. Let’s see. You took a wild ride with the Red Hand on your ass. You carved out through fields and back roads. Met an old Indian and ate some antelope. Fought some wormboys in a town called Exodus. Got taken by the Red Hand and fought some big wormboy and held your own against a mutant attack.”

“That about sizes it up,” Slaughter said, pulling off his cigarette.

“Sure. But seems to me you’re leaving out the in-betweens.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah. And I think we both know it.”

“What if I told you those in-betweens were the sort of thing you wouldn’t believe?”

Apache Dan laughed. “Listen to me, man. For twenty-odd years we been riding together, drinking together, fighting and whoring and raising hell together and wearing the same patch… you think I wouldn’t believe your word, my brother? You think there’s anyone in this world I trust more than you? Have more faith in or more respect for? Any man I love more or wouldn’t die for if you asked me to?”

Slaughter swallowed something down in his throat and thought about trying to bullshit the man but he knew he couldn’t do it, so he told him everything and with the telling it sounded even worse than he thought it would.

When he was done, Apache Dan said, “Leviathan. Leviathan, man. Dig it. That’s heavy shit. The Lord of the Dead. Goddamn.”

“You still want to go through with this?”

Apache Dan smiled. “I want it more than ever, John. This is epic. This is the shit sagas are written about. If you’re going to go out, I always say, then go out big. And what better way for a Disciple to cash-in than fighting the Devil himself?”

“You are one crazy mother,” Slaughter told him.

“That’s why I wear the patch, my brother. Because I earned the right.”

As the sun set, they were sitting on a grassy hilltop beneath the cover of some trees scoping out the NORAD complex below which looked like the castle of a witch in some evil fairy tale. The place was much as Brightman had described it: three stories of gray concrete, drab and deathly and utilitarian. Boxlike with a flat roof and rectangular windows, all of which were covered in steel mesh. The compound surrounding it was faced off by a circular drive and a huge parking lot that was now cracked open with sprouting weeds. There was a courtyard of high yellow grasses that stretched out about three hundred feet in every direction until it reached a high chainlink fence topped with razor wire. The road leading up to the main gate was long and straight and set out with lots of abandoned guard shacks. With his binoculars, Slaughter could see where the tire traps had been—sheaths of spikes that would rise up out of the road at intervals to snag any vehicle that tried to make a run at the complex. He could also see obvious scars in the landscape outside the main fence where a series of fences had been taken out after the complex closed up shop. At one time, the fences would have held dog runs in-between with vicious German Shepherds that would have stopped anybody from even getting close to the place. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s and probably right up into the 1980’s, if you would have been even as close as they were on the hilltop you would have been arrested by MPs and tossed in a military prison. It had been secure during the Cold War, but now it was wide open.

The main gate was thrown wide and why not? Cannibal Corpse feared no one. And who in their right mind would willingly go through those gates into a nest of flesh-eaters?

Only the Devil’s Disciples, he thought.

“You can’t see the flesh farm from here,” Apache Dan said. “It’s out back behind the place.”

Slaughter could see a rising rock wall back there and Apache said there was a high cave in it that was not natural but hewn-out and must have held some kind of top security facility in the NORAD days.

“From what I could see of it when Moondog and me scoped it from the other side, it looks big enough to drive three or four tanks into at the same time. Hard to say what was in there or what’s in there now. Might have been a bunker or a bomb shelter. Who knows?”

“But that’s probably where our bio will be if she’s anywhere.”

“That’s what we think.”

Sitting there, Slaughter saw the ratbikes of the Cannibals parked in the lot, in the drive, on the grass. They were everywhere. He counted fifty-seven of them so that meant they had at least fifty-seven members of the Nation to deal with. Not good odds for six men, even if they were hard-charging bullet-eating members of the Devil’s Disciples Nation.

He thought over the plan Moondog had come up with. As warlord and sergeant-at-arms and a combat veteran, his plan was good. It was workable. But it was full of holes and that wasn’t poor planning or strategy, but the fact that with six men there was only so much that could be foreseen and mapped out. A good part of it was going to be the element of surprise combined with luck.

Slaughter had been over it from start to finish a dozen times at least and he honestly couldn’t come up with anything better.

Parked in the lot amongst the ratbikes were the vehicles of the Red Hand—APCs, Hummers, and pickup trucks. If all went successful, they’d be charging out of there in a pair of APCs. Once they started rolling, with their weapons systems and heavy armaments, nothing could stop them.

If they could get to that part of things, and it wouldn’t be easy.

Slaughter stood up. He saw maybe a dozen Cannibals moving around down there, shambling about as their kind did. Inside the fortress, he thought, was where Reptile and Coffin would be if they were still in fact walking.

“I guess that about does it,” he said.

“I guess so, man. Now we wait for dark.”

Slaughter nodded, feeling his blood running hot. “Then we get it on.”