Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twenty-Eight

There was only one way in and they took it: right through the front doors which had now been nicely widened by the explosion of the War Wagon which was still burning… what was left of it. They rode their bikes right through curtains of flame and funneling smoke until they got clear of it in a corridor.

“Goddamn place is going up, John.”

“We better be quick then.”

Other than the flames, the fortress was shadowy. They pulled out tactical flashlights from their ammo bags (noticing with some unease that they had no shells left, only a couple of grenades) and bracketed them to the barrels of their shotguns. They clicked them on and started hunting. The place was immense and they went room to room to room and, other than a few Cannibal Corpse zombies they killed, they found nothing. Just offices and storerooms and emptiness. From what they could see, the first floor was untouched.

So they climbed the stairs to the second.

More corridors, a labyrinthine maze of them in fact. Many doors were locked. They saw no wormboys and from the screaming they heard outside and the occasional gunfire—Jumbo, no doubt, and hopefully Moondog—the wormboys were probably in hot pursuit of the prisoners which provided a diversion, even if an unwanted one.

They kept scouting around and downstairs they heard rumbling sounds like explosions. Slaughter didn’t think it was ordinance at all, but the fire spreading, finding new rooms to engulf. Things were getting hairy and time was running out and where in the fuck was the bio?

He kept thinking about his brother and that brought to mind Brightman. The two were connected and he wondered, really wondered, how much he could trust that spook.

And what choice do you have? he asked himself. Honestly, ultimately, what choice do you really have? All you can do is keep your word and get the bio. It’s called dealing in good faith. And right now, that’s about all you have. Faith.

Funny. But as he poked his nose into room after room, he heard a voice in the back of his mind praying to God that he could find the woman, get her out, get what remained of his brothers away from this place in one piece. He felt hypocritical. Absolutely hypocritical. When he was a kid, he thought maybe he believed in God. Before Catholic school had destroyed his faith. But for a time, he thought he had. Part of him in these last desperate hours wanted to reconnect with that but it just wasn’t there. Yet, in the back of his brain, that voice kept praying and wasn’t that just amazing? Wasn’t that a wonderful comment on the human species?

In the beams of the flashlights, dust motes swam like pillow down, drifting and floating. And it was the dust itself that guided them. Certain corridors had an undisturbed layer of it and others had trails pounded through it.

More rumbling from below.

A couple of them shook the fortress.

“John…” Apache Dan started to say.

“I know, man. Just a few more minutes and we’re out.”

They came to yet another corridor and by then they were so mixed up and turned around that Slaughter had to wonder if they’d ever find their way back out even if they did locate Isley. The corridor had been well-trod, judging from the dust. It had possibilities. Unfortunately, it was almost as long as a city block.

“All right,” he said, feeling hope fading in him. “We check the rooms and then we’re out.”

“You take this side, I’ll take the other.”

Slaughter didn’t like separating, but what choice was there? Time was a factor now and they had to move it and get it done. He checked three rooms, coughing on the dust he stirred up. Three more. A fourth. Then a fifth. Then—

He threw open the door and was looking into an empty room except it wasn’t empty because there were three people in there: two women and a man he recognized: Brightman. They were tied to a bench. One of the women was clearly dead.

He blinked again and again because he really thought he was seeing things. He panned the light over them.

“Jesus Christ, you finally made it,” Brightman said.

“I told you I would.” Slaughter set his shotgun aside and lit a cigarette. “What’re you doing here?”

Brightman stared at him with shining eyes set in a grimy face. “The Red Hand. They attacked the base and overran us. They took me as… as a bargaining chip, I suppose. Now cut me loose.”

“Not so fast. Where’s Isley?”

“She’s sitting next to me. Now cut me loose.”

Slaughter ignored him. Just as in their first meeting, he got a bad feeling from this guy. He turned to the door and shouted out into the corridor: “Apache! Down here!”

Then he went back into the room. “They brought you here?”

“Yes… then those bikers, they took over the place and slaughtered the Red Hand. Now cut—”

“How come they didn’t take you into the cave?”

“What cave?”

Slaughter didn’t push that. He let Brightman talk. Apparently, after Cannibal Corpse stormed the place, Brightman and Isley and the other woman—who apparently had been some sort of assistant to Isley and was now quite dead—were shuttered away up here. They hadn’t eaten in days. They were starving. Dehydrated. Isley was dying.

“Now can we shitcan the questions, Slaughter, and get me loose?”

Slaughter blew out smoke. “Way I’m figuring it, I don’t need you. I just need the woman.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Brightman asked him. “You need me. She’s dying. She’ll do you no good. If I can get on a radio I can have your brother’s sentence commuted and I can get a chopper in here to get us out. But we have to move. We really have to move because I’m pretty sure this place is going to be leveled by an airstrike and I’m surprised it hasn’t been already.”

“I want my brother freed.”

“Cut me loose and get me to a radio and it’s done.”

That’s when Isley lifted her head up. In the flashlight beam, her face was yellow, jaundiced-looking. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. “Your brother is dead,” she said in a perfectly lucid voice.

“She’s out of her fucking head!” Brightman insisted. “Now cut me loose before this goddamn place gets bombed!”

But Slaughter wasn’t about to do that. Red Eye was dead? Dead? Is that what she said? Is that really what she just fucking said? He swallowed and then swallowed again. He pulled off his cigarette and tried to keep his cool.

“How do you know that?” he asked her.

“Slaughter! She’s out of her head! Please, goddammit, cut me loose!”

But Slaughter ignored him. He focused on the woman. She put her eyes on him and he didn’t like them at all because they reminded him of the eyes of the woman at the Red Hand encampment that had been shooting worm juice.

“Your brother’s name was Perry. People called him Red Eye,” she said in her gravelly voice. “Brightman told you if you got me out of here, your brother would be freed but your brother was already dead and he knew it.”

Slaughter looked at Brightman now.

But Brightman shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Slaughter, she’s got a worm in her. You can’t believe what she’s saying. C’mon, just cut me loose and I’ll get your brother freed. You have to trust me.”

But why did Slaughter feel like that was the one thing he could never do? He looked back at the woman. Yeah, she was in a bad way and he had no doubt that she did have a worm in her. He knew the look they got once they were infected. But he knew something else, too. That junkie back at the encampment had started talking about things she couldn’t possibly know and he had seen the infected do the same thing to one degree or another as they slipped into the coma that led to death… and resurrection.

“Your brother was dead from the first. He was executed in Chicago. Brightman knew it. They sent you here to die because they had to send someone.”

“Listen, Slaughter—” Brightman started to say, but Slaughter cuffed him in the mouth to shut him up. He wanted to hear what this lady had to say. He had come an awfully long way and through some very nasty territory to hear her words.

So he asked her questions and she answered them. Sometimes she went off on crazy tangents, but mostly her words had the ring of truth. She said that there were basically two factions out east fighting for control of the central government: those who wanted a cure from the infesting worms and those who were afraid of the same. The second group was afraid because they knew what caused the worm rains in the first place and if the truth came out—say if Katherine Isley for example made it back east and told all that she knew, which was considerable—they would be held responsible for what had happened to the country and probably be tried for treason and war crimes at the very least.

“And what did cause them? The worms?” he asked. Brightman looked like he was going to open his mouth and Slaughter gave him a hard look that shut him up.

Isley’s eyes rolled in her head a moment, then focused… somewhat. “It was called the Proteus Experiment: a biological weapons program that got out of control. It proved to be self-perpetuating. After the worm larva was set loose experimentally, it was found that it could not be contained.”

“And you?”

“I was brought in to seek a cure of sorts,” she admitted. “What I came up with was a synthetic virus. Then things happened. I think you know the story. I ended up here.”

Slaughter sighed and ground his cigarette out under his boot. “I don’t get it. Why the charade? If they wanted me dead why didn’t they put a bullet in my head?”

Isley told him to remember the two factions: those who did not know and those who did. The first group knew what Isley had been working on with the CDC, they knew about the mathematical model for the virus. They wanted her found and brought back. The reality of the situation was the armed forces—special ops and commandos—that could pull off such an operation were stretched pretty thin as it was. But the first group demanded. The second group could not admit their culpability, but at the same time they had to play along with the first group. To do anything less would have been inhumane and immoral. That’s when Brightman, who was CIA, and his think tank came up with the perfect solution… especially when a report came across his desk about a renegade biker named John Slaughter who had killed a couple of cops and was heading ever west. They’d grab Slaughter, free his boys from lockup, send them on a mission they couldn’t possibly complete (it was thought) and then no one could say a rescue hadn’t been attempted. Of course, the people back east would be told it was a highly-trained mercenary force of expendables, not a bunch of rowdy outlaw bikers. Perception management. Playing one hand against the other.

Brightman was sweating and breathing hard by that point. He just shook his head. “Slaughter… please listen to me,” he said, trying it once again. “This woman is ill. She is delirious. She’s talking fantasy. Please! Use your head.”

Slaughter went over to Isley and cut her loose. “You’re coming with me.”

“I can’t. I’m infected. But… if you help me,” she said, tottering uneasily. “I think I can help you.”

He led her from the room and behind him Brightman was screaming hysterically: “SLAUGHTER! GODDAMMIT, SLAUGHTER! YOU LET ME OUT OF HERE! YOU CUT ME LOOSE! DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU GODDAMN FUCKING NO GOOD SHIT-EATING FUCKING BIKER TRASH! YOU CUT ME LOOSE!”

Slaughter led her down the corridor using his flashlight. He called out for Apache Dan but there was no reply. A sense of dread began to move through him. They came to a door with a digital lock. Isley punched a code and it opened to a plush office with leather chairs and an antique desk, impressionist paintings on the walls, and a wet bar. Very nice. Very cozy.

“This was Colonel Krigg’s office,” she said. “He’s dead. He was one of the first that the reanimates fed upon.”

“Okay. How can you help me?”

She fell into a chair, seemingly barely conscious by that point. She told him there was something behind the paneling. He gripped its edges and it swung out. A safe. A big floor safe.

“Open it,” she said, telling him the combination.

He did as she asked and the only thing in the safe was what looked to be an aluminum box with a keypad and a digital display. He hefted it out, discovering that it weighed easily eighty pounds or more. He slid it across the floor.

“What is it?”

She blinked her eyes. “It is a sub-kiloton weapon.”

“What?”

“A tactical nuclear device.”

Slaughter stepped away from it, keeping his light on it. “A fucking suitcase nuke?”

“Yes. Colonel Krigg planned on activating it if the Army came for him. He wanted to go out in a big way. He stole it in the early days of the Outbreak. Now you will activate it. You’ll have enough time to escape.”

“And you?”

“There’s no point in me escaping, now is there?”

She was right and he knew it. But a nuke. A fucking nuke. Why not, man? Why the hell not? This fucking fortress and what it contains is a blight on the landscape, a fucking cancer. You want to erase it and the wormboys who call it home, then this is the way. Good-bye Cannibal Corpse Nation. Do it for Red Eye. Do it for the shit you’ve been put through. Do it for the lies you’ve been fed and the corrupt puppet masters that have been pulling your strings and have cost the lives of your brothers.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

She told him a code and he punched it in. A digital display beeped and read: ARMED AND READY. She gave him another twenty digit code and he punched it in. A shrill alarm sounded and a plastic catch popped open on the display. There was a green button behind it.

“Arm it,” she said. “You’ll have sixty minutes. That’s it. One hour to move your people out of here.”

Sweat running down his face, Slaughter pressed the button.

The alarm shrilled again.

The display read: 59:58.

“You’d better go, Mr. Slaughter.”

Slaughter grabbed his shotgun and Gurkha knife. His palms were so sweaty he could barely hold onto them. He put the light on Katherine Isley but she was gone… no, not dead, but worse: she was moving, twisting, her mouth peeling open in something almost like a blood snarl. And her face… bulging, contorting, rippling with motion just beneath the skin. As he watched, the worms started coming out of her. From her mouth, her nose, even her eyes. Not maggots because this woman was surely not dead and decomposing. These were the red worms. The resurrection worms and she was alive with them. They started tunneling out of her face, pushing out, scarlet and slicked with fluids.

Just like the girl on that video from the compound in Wisconsin.

But Isley was living and that meant breeders were not always corpses, but living human beings.

Not that this jewel of wisdom mattered one bit, for the digital display on the nuke read: 58:43.

And counting…