Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Shotgun in one hand and Kukri in the other, Slaughter raced down the corridor shouting out for Apache Dan because time had never, ever in his life been so unbelievably goddamn dear. But the corridor was long and there were so damn many rooms and offices and as he ran along he could see that digital readout in the back of his head counting down to doomsday and hear that alarm shrilling in his ears.

Jesus. There just wasn’t time.

They had to get gone.

“APACHE!” he cried out at the very top of his lungs. “APACHE! MOTHERFUCKER, WE GOT TO MOVE! WE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE!”

But the very quality of his voice as it echoed down that lonesome corridor told him that Apache Dan would never answer. Dread deepened in him. Where before it felt like a surgical cut at the base of his belly, now it was yawning wide and becoming a deep and hurting wound that could have swallowed him alive in a coveting and formless blackness of despair. Apache Dan and he went way back, way, way back and it was these memories that assailed him, weakened him, slowing his running feet to a clumsy thudding of motorcycle boots on dusty hardwood flooring.

He called out the name of his brother again, but without any true force behind it. It was like there was no breath in his lungs: “Apache? Apache?”

He stumbled on down the corridor, unsure then if he’d been moving down it for a minute or an hour or a minute that had been squeezed into an hour. His mouth was dry, his skin sweaty and cool. His hair was damp and his limbs felt rubbery. He remembered at that precise moment that he had not felt like this since he was a kid and had to cross the lavender-curtained parlor of the funeral home to look down at his mother lying in that long polished box.

And he was not feeling that way again for no reason.

There was an open door at the end of the corridor and he knew very well what would be in that room. God, how he knew it. Go ahead, Johnny. Go take a look at death and know the pain it inspires and the bleak finality it lays upon the soul like an iron door clanging shut that will never, ever be opened again.

Enough. He would not be ruled by fear and regret and channeled guilt.

He looked in the room.

Apache Dan’s corpse was flopped in a pool of ever-spreading blood that was so darkly red it was nearly black. He sucked in a sharp breath. It was as he had expected, except for the fact that his brother’s head was missing and that was the final indignity of his mortification and degradation.

A frozen terror spread out inside him, chilling all it touched, and he felt like an ice sculpture waiting to melt. His life had not been a good one when you put it under the microscope and dissected it layer by layer. There was suffering and pain. There had been hunger and squalor as a child and petty crime as a teenager followed by violence and murder, drug dealing and misery as an adult, years of incarceration in brutal hardtime joints. And all he’d ever really had through the sad roll of those latter years was his brothers, his patched brothers, the Devil’s Disciples. They were his equilibrium, his support system, his sanity. The cool water in his throat and the hot food in his belly. The hands to clasp and the shoulders to bear his weight.

Gone now.

All gone.

Because he knew, God how he knew, that Moondog was gone, too. It had been that crazy death-happy bastard’s plan from the beginning to ride the War Wagon into his own personal blood-drenched biker heaven of Valhalla. He was gone. Apache Dan was gone. Shanks, Irish, Fish, and probably Jumbo, too.

“I’m sorry, my brother,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

He turned back into the heavy silence of the corridor and breathed deep its air, which was stale and dusty, almost gritty in his throat. Okay. Okay. Time to go, But then—

Thud, thud, thump-thump-thump.

What the fuck?

He stepped around the final bend of the corridor, playing his light around. He saw a set of steps and then something came thudding down them: Apache’s head. Sure, over-the-top, high melodrama and Grand Guignol, but wasn’t it almost to be expected? The head hit the landing and rolled to a stop and other than seeing its whipping blue-black locks, Slaughter did not look at it; there was no point.

He stepped closer to the landing.

He sucked in great whooping gasps of stale air which carried a sickly-sweet after-odor of putrefaction to it. It was getting so the smell of death was the rule rather than the exception.

A peal of chilling laughter drifted down from the landing high above.

The sound of it was telling, for it was the sort of laughter that would echo through subterranean depths and from the dripping hollows of midnight tombs. He went rigid, absolutely rigid, as he brought the beam of the flashlight up to reveal the crooked form that waited at the top of those crooked stairs.

The laughter again.

And in Slaughter, the mourning and grief and self-recrimination of this entire haphazard, perfectly fucked-up affair was shelved, and he felt hatred to his marrow and the need for payback to his core. He didn’t know who or what was up there but he was going after them, he was going to gut them, he was going to stuff them, he was going to mount their gamey ass on a fucking wall, so help him God. So as he charged up those stairs and that crooked shape retreated, he felt like he was put together out of heat and electricity; voltage looking for something to fry. In essence, about 110% pure undiluted death.

At the top, he saw the crooked figure, its back to him. He had the light on it and he saw the three-piece patch very clearly: the fanged skull in its pool of red, that single bloodshot eye staring out at him. The upper rocker: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And the lower: KANSAS CITY.

His blood ran hot.

The figure turned.

Death and resurrection hadn’t been exactly kind to Reptile. He had been a big, strapping fellow bulging with muscle and attitude, death kept at a low simmer in his black eyes… but now he was shrunken, leathery like brown hide, his face looking a little too much like the logo on the back of his denim vest: a skull covered in papery flesh like poorly dried papier mache, a living deathshead aswarm with red beetles that chewed and tunneled and devoured the thin scraps of face-meat that were left. His eyes were dun pockets of pestilence lidded by gray flaps, his bare chest crudely stitched like a stuffed Sunday chicken.

The beetles had been busy, as had the worms, for in the end the worm conquered all… even this walking heap of grave matter. White bones extruded from his chest, black bloodgrease bubbling from open wounds. His mouth was a blackened corpse-grin that extended ear to ear in a ghoulish smirk. Dead insects dropped from his tongue as he spoke: “Well, lookee here, it’s Johnny Slaughter, prez of the mother chapter of the Devil’s Disciples. Another one for my collection.” He laughed, coughing out a dustball sputum of carapaces. “I think it’s just you and me, Johnny. Now that old Apache Daniel went to meet his maker. But don’t let that eat your guts, prez, because I did it quietly, just like I did the other Disciples. Apache never knew he was dead until his head bounced over the floor.”

Slaughter, feeling a mixture of repulsion, pity, and razor-edged hatred, flipped the Kukri in his fist, sheathing it expertly like a gunslinger slipping his Navy Colt into its scabbard. He racked the pump on the Mossberg.

“Man you came to meet is up above, but you’ll never get there, Johnny,” Reptile said, seething with a blackness that was death fermented in its own vile juices and maybe even something beyond death. “I think you’re gonna scream, Disciple. I think you’re gonna scream real loud when I eat your soul.”

Slaughter brought the shotgun up. “Then quit jawing, Reptile, and slither on over here.”

Reptile made a sound that he probably thought was laughter but sounded more like a scream echoing up an elevator shaft. And then he moved. He was in rough condition and Slaughter did not expect much and that’s why he was shocked: because Reptile did not shamble towards him with a slow and drunken zombie crawl, he exploded, he filled the air like chain lightning and blooming black smoke, flesh and motion and Jack-in-the-Box surprise, a raging carrion gelatin smear in the air that got within about six inches of the shotgun barrel before Slaughter squeezed the trigger and his head was atomized into a spray of pink-black mucilage that sprayed against the wall with the tinkling of pellets.

The head was gone.

The forward momentum of the body struck Slaughter and flattened him, knocked the wind from him, but he gathered himself quickly enough and kicked himself free of the carrion.

He wondered how much time was left before the nuke pissed death to the four winds.

He decided he didn’t really care.

Because up above, that’s where Coffin was waiting and he had a pretty good idea by then that he would wear a black hat.

Now it comes to a close.

Now the beginning seeks its end.

Now the circle closes and in closing, nooses itself tight.

It didn’t take Slaughter long to find the stairs that could only lead to the roof and he took them slowly, calmly, the threat of thermonuclear annihilation like some fairy tale he’d heard long ago and never really believed. In his mind were feelings and sensations that went far beyond the mere five and into another realm, an undiscovered country that was part terror, part revelation, and pure fission.

He could feel Coffin waiting for him.

More so, he could feel what hid behind Coffin: an entity in a black hat who described his kingdom in bones and ashes and wrote his name in a blood mist upon the marrow of the sky again and again like a silly, bored, and sadistic child obsessed by its own identity:

The name rang out in his head and he feared its echo, its discord, its resonance. But as he feared it he knew that ultimately in some small and possibly insignificant way that it feared him, too. Had it not once called him a favored son? Maybe that was in the whirlpool apparitional phantasmagoria of a peyote dream, but he still felt that it had weight. Black Hat had shown him a future that was an atomic Armageddon wasteland of skeletons and blowing dust and cities that were graveyards. He claimed that was the end of the game, that Slaughter himself would have a hand in it and there was a certain truth in that as death ticked away downstairs, only it would not play out exactly as Leviathan had hoped, just as nothing from the beginning of this sordid little mess had played out the way Slaughter had expected it.

That was life and destiny and fate intertwined:

Yes, that was it, for even spoilers bleed and gods die and demons themselves are caught in the web of forever, the lathe of cosmic eternity and resolution and chaos.

As he moved up those steps, he felt Coffin and Black Hat and Nemesis and Leviathan, that destroyer of worlds. But he felt something more than that. It was thrumming through him. Nemesis. Leviathan. A discarnate death entity that had built its house bone by bone and corpse by corpse and skull by skull, a castle then, a cathedral of the dead and the damned where this abomination might walk in tomblike malignant grandeur, his monolithic eyes sweeping over the vast charnel empire he had built with the help of stupid men with brilliant minds who had handed him the trump card that he had longed for in the form of a weaponized biological death: the resurrection worms. He had called to them in their vanity and animal aggression from his den of bone-picked darkness and they had heeded the summons. The worms rained from heaven’s split flesh and the dead rose in tomb legions, cavorting and feasting and spreading the pall of death and giving unto him their burnt offerings which were the souls of the innocent which he craved and the worshipful adoration of graveyard faces which he ached for. His realm was no longer some interdimensional sucking black hole of mausoleum delight but an entire world, a world given unto him like a sacrificed firstborn, a world remade into death, an ossuary without border.

This is what Slaughter felt and knew and understood.

Leviathan was vain.

He had been for so long reviled. Hated.

Now he was worshipped by the risen.

Humanity was desecrated by its oldest enemy and somebody, somehow, somewhere, needed to put an end to Leviathan’s little evil playground.

So his favored son moved up the steps with killing and cessation in mind and nothing could stop him.

When Slaughter stepped out onto the rooftop and smelled the night air and felt the billowing heat of human corpse-candles burning high above him and dripping their clotted wax, he saw that he was in a nest of zombies. The rooftops of the NORAD fortress were roughly the size of a mall parking lot and the dead were crowded there, waiting for him. How to take in the living dead in ranks of rot and ruin, crumbling things and slime-oozing things and upright skeletons and yellow-eyed cadavers? He looked at the rows of his enemies, the members of Cannibal Corpse in their colors, in various states of dissolution. But amongst them, oh yes, Ratbags of the Red Hand—alive and uninfected, it seemed—that hadn’t gone on the spit. They all held rifles and every last one was trained on Slaughter as the mannequin dead ringed him in, trying to suffocate him with their boneyard stenches. He offered no resistance as those bloated white hands like clown gloves held him in place.

The crowds parted and here was Coffin and he did indeed wear a Black Hat that he removed and tipped towards his guest with sardonic courtly manner.

“Well, Johnny K. Slaughter,” he said and his voice was like a throat burnt by lye and scratched red by ground glass. “A long road it has been and a deserved end it is, my friend. Did you have a dance with Reptile and did you enjoy it?”

Slaughter didn’t struggle; he was held and that was acceptable for now. “I killed him. I blew his fucking head off and I stamped the worm that crawled out.”

“Well, that’s fine, Johnny. Just fine and peachy.”

“Just like I’m going to do to you, maggot.”

Slaughter stared at Coffin. The others did not exist. They were only part of him. This was Coffin. This was the piece of shit that had ordered the death of his brothers. This was Death. This was the slimy, crawling casket-worm that crept through the hair of corpses and adorned itself with tubes of gut and swam through rivers of poisoned blood and tunneling through shattered anatomies and dancing in the flayed skins of children, gnawing on organs and fondling the severed breasts of mothers and sisters and daughters uncounted.

Death laid bare.

Coffin was dressed in typical 1%er chic: black jeans and motorcycle boots. He wore a black leather vest with no shirt beneath. He was a bloated walking torso, a sun-swollen fish that was gutted then stitched back together… poorly. It looked like his arms and legs had been pulled off and then shoved back in their sockets. Everything was out-of-sync. He was bulging with corpse-gas and pockets of larva like there were innumerable hungry ghosts just beneath the skin trying to push their way out. His eyes were dead suns sinking into pockets of blood, his face was pocked and pitted and riven with tiny holes as if nails had been pounded into it, the flesh cold dead white, crosshatched by intensive suturing to hold it together. The lower lip was gone, the upper swollen thick as an engorged leech, the teeth stained pink. He was so pale he was luminously white, yet it looked like he had been peeled, his flesh regenerating itself not as a smooth cutaneous membrane but in ropy corded strands of gut.

He laughed at Slaughter, slow and deadly, brushing strands of coal-black hair from his distorted face. “Ha, ha. Don’t worry about that worm, Johnny. Always more where that came from, always more.” And as if offering proof, three or four of them slid from the holes in his face and dropped writhing to his boots. “Right now you’re thinking, if I can just shed these deadheads long enough to get at my shotgun or that .45 on my belt, I’ll blow this fucker’s head clean off. End of story. Only, see, Johnny, it won’t be the end of the story but the beginning of a new chapter and you ain’t gonna like the story it tells.”

Slaughter just stared and waited. It was coming. What he was waiting for, oh yes, it was most surely coming.

“Too bad about your Disciples, Johnny. You had some good boys. Apache Dan. He would have made a good Cannibal. Too bad he wasted his life with shiteaters and rat-suckers like the Disciples. I hear my boys took out Irish. Glad to know it. Fish is gone, Shanks is dead, and you know damn well that Moondog went out with a bang. Like I said, too bad.”

Baiting him. That’s all this was. It could be nothing more. The death of Moondog came as no real surprise, of course. The only thing he didn’t know and would never know is if Moondog couldn’t get out of the War Wagon in time or if he just decided to ride it straight into hell. He favored the latter because that was exactly how Moondog would have wanted it to end.

“The thing I love about you, Johnny, is that you’re so fucking predictable,” Coffin said, uttering that horrible laugh, his long pale fingers lightly brushing the bulging pockets and sacs of his face, all of which seemed to be moving. His eyes were pink, juicy meat. “I wanted you here on the roof so I had Reptile do Apache, knowing that you’d have to come. You’d have to come to right the wrong against your club. Ha, ha. I love that about you, Johnny. That misplaced, convoluted sense of honor. I knew you’d come here to this place and you did. I knew you’d bring meaty sacrifices of your own Disciples and goddamned if you didn’t.”

Slaughter kept breathing evenly and deeply.

He could not let Coffin scent what he was feeling, because there was terror, great shivering amounts of terror. He knew at that moment in the greater scheme of things that everything that had led up to this moment had been neither accidental nor coincidental; it was planned. All planned out. Probably from the moment he killed those two cops in New Castle. He had been baited every step of the way and he had taken the bait offered. Taken it? No, he had jumped for it, sinking his teeth into it, enjoying every bite. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Coffin had wanted not only him but offerings of the very things that meant the most to him: his brother Disciples.

That was the definition of true sacrifice: the offering of that which you loved best and by your own hand.

Slaughter thought of the dream.

That hag-face rising up and then that voice, that terrible, terrible voice speaking prophecy on the dead wind: We’re waiting for you, Disciple, for you have been named. We’re all waiting for you, she had said. Out here. Out in the west. Out in the Deadlands and cemeteries and the tombs of men, in narrow boxes and seeping charnel depths, we wait for you. Come unto us, Disciple. Bring us our burnt offerings and our racks of meat prepared by thine own hand—

Yes, it was there and it always had been.

The answers he sought were most simple: he was a puppet carefully manipulated and his brother Disciples were nothing but fucking offerings to this obscenity, to Coffin/Nemesis/Black Hat/Leviathan.

“I got a little present for you, Johnny.”

A group of Cannibal Corpse zombies dragged a man out. He was handcuffed, gagged, ankles tied together. They dumped him at Coffin’s feet. It was Jumbo. He was gagged, his eyes wild and pissed-off.

Slaughter tried to break free but he was held firmly.

“I want you to watch how Disciples die, Johnny,” Coffin said. “I want you to see your last boy flip patches.”

The zombies dragged Jumbo to his feet and he looked through the crowd at Slaughter and there was no hatred or recrimination in his eyes. There was only a look that signified friendship. We ride hard and we die hard, John. That’s why they call us the Devil’s Disciples. Slaughter felt something breaking open inside him. A blackness filled his guts and clouded his skull and it was the blinding blackness of sheer hate.

As Jumbo was held, Coffin pulled a looping red worm from one of the holes in his face and dangled it over Jumbo’s lips. Jumbo thrashed his head back and forth, a sweat breaking out on his face, but finally they held him so tightly he could not move so much as an inch.

“Welcome to Cannibal Corpse,” Coffin said and dropped the worm on Jumbo’s face, grinning as it slid up his nostril.

They dropped Jumbo and he convulsed on the ground for some time. Before he disappeared back into the greedy hands of the crowding undead, Coffin had one more indignity for him. He pulled out a knife and slit the colors off his leather vest. The violation and degradation were complete.

Or were they?

For now there was no knife in Coffin’s hand. There was a flat-black branding iron, the branding head of which glowed red.

Slaughter wanted to scream, but there was no point.

The Cannibals yanked Jumbo’s shirt and vest up until a nice wide expanse of back was revealed. The flesh sizzled as the branding iron burnt deep and sure. And then Jumbo was marked:

“Man, Johnny,” Coffin said. “I can’t wait to brand you. You have no idea how much I’m gonna enjoy it.”

Regardless of what evil possessed Coffin now, he was still a Cannibal Corpse at his dark core and what he had done, right in front of the president of the mother chapter of the Devil’s Disciples, was basically ritual defilement.

Slaughter knew it had all been staged to weaken him and break him down on some essential level. And it had done that, all right, at least for a few moments. Now the hate was back and it owned him, it clung to his back like a monkey, it squatted in his belly in a hot mass of boiling tar. It was a grinning, toothy goblin in his head and it was hungry. It was very hungry.

Coffin held a large leather book in his hand now.

Slaughter knew it was The Book of Hell. There was no mistaking it. “Too bad about Jumbo,” Coffin said. “But his name is written in here. As is yours, Johnny K. Slaughter.”

“Any time you’re ready, maggot.”

Coffin laughed. “Ah, yes. You know what comes next, don’t you, Johnny? Oh yes, you know. Now we fight. But not with guns, we fight with blades. Because hasn’t that always been your secret death wish fantasy?”

Slaughter could not deny that. He had dreamed of killing Coffin countless times and it had never, ever been with anything as impersonal as a gun. It was always with a knife. And each and every time he had gutted him and let him a die a slow, agonizing death.

“You wanna kill me, Johnny? Kill me? Kiiiiiillllll me? Yes, that’s good. That’s the way it needs to happen. I knew I could count on you. Right from the beginning, I knew.” Coffin laughed. “So predictable. But that’s good and that’s fine. You’re maybe the only man left who can kill me, Johnny. The others are afraid. But not you. Never you.”

“So let’s get to it.”

“You dreams are mine, Johnny,” Coffin told him, still uttering that terrible laugh as if he knew the punchline to a wonderful joke. “I’m going to gut you, Disciple. Then I’m going to eat your still-beating heart. Then I’ll take your soul.”

Slaughter was released as Coffin produced a machete.

Pulling the Kukri from its sheath, Slaughter said, “If you could have taken it, you would have by now… maggot.”

Then it wasn’t Coffin facing him but Black Hat. He smiled like a well-polished skull. “Well played, biker boy. Indeed. Well played.”

Then it was Coffin again and it began.

They circled each other like blood-hungry animals in a cage and that’s essentially what they were, each scoping out the other as experienced fighters will do, looking for weak spots, advantages. Slaughter saw many with Coffin because the dead man was barely held together by catgut and wire. But that did not mean he was not dangerous because he was, he most certainly was.

Then Coffin moved.

He went after Slaughter with a couple of quick slashes, feigning moves more than anything else to draw him out, but Slaughter didn’t bite. He’d taken too much bait by that point. He would take no more. He moved around and around as quick as he could, going faster and faster, trying to force Coffin into something and it worked: Coffin let out a war cry and came at him, slashing wildly. Slaughter barely got out of the way of the blade. He ducked and darted, then swung the Gurkha knife. He caught Coffin across the ribs and freed some wriggling parasites but that was about it.

Coffin barely seemed to notice.

He changed his strategy. From gentle probing he went for an all-out vicious assault and Slaughter was taken aback at how quickly he moved, how fast and powerful and almost athletic he was for something that had crawled from a grave. He came on swinging and slashing and Slaughter was kept ducking and dipping, looking for an opening and trying to keep from getting cut. When Coffin swung at his head, the force carrying him around in a half-circle, Slaughter seized the opportunity and brought the Kukri down on his forearm. It was a quick, glancing blow but the razored blade of the Gurkha knife peeled Coffin’s left forearm to bone.

What Slaughter didn’t expect was that even a cut like that didn’t make Coffin hesitate. He brought the machete back with maximum thrust and Slaughter avoided the blade, but the arm that held it cracked him in the side of the head and dropped him to the ground.

The Cannibals roared with glee.

Coffin made to stomp him and was successful with three good ones that brought serious pain to Slaughter, but with the fourth stomp he kicked out and caught Coffin’s ankle and the snap of the bone was loud and clear. Hobbled, Coffin staggered back.

Slaughter jumped to his feet.

Coffin made with a few defensive arcs of the blade, but Slaughter came on with renewed fury and took the Cannibal Corpse leader’s hand off at the wrist and slashed his belly open.

“Nice move, Johnny,” he said, gesturing at him with a wrist-stump that pissed a purple-gray fluid. The stump cauterized itself with a sizzling sound and a nauseating odor of burnt skin. Coffin was holding his guts in place with his knife hand. Then the wound cauterized itself, too, and Coffin went at it again. He swung the machete and Slaughter ducked down and hacked Coffin’s bad ankle with the blade of the Kukri.

And if the undead could know pain, Coffin knew it: he let out a raging shrill howl.

His gait was uneven now, but he was far from finished. He went after Slaughter with the machete and Slaughter caught a good gash on the shoulder but gave Coffin two more deep stabs. Before they could begin cauterizing he jumped up and sliced Coffin’s face open, taking one of his eyes out and freeing pockets of gushing black drainage. Coffin lashed out and Slaughter brought the Kukri down and took off his knife hand and then, just missing Coffin’s head, sank the blade about three inches into his shoulder.

But Coffin still came on, battering Slaughter in the face with his stumps. His blade still wedged deeply into the zombie, Slaughter punched him in the stomach and felt his fist sink into a pocket of pulpy tissue. Coffin hammered him with his right stump and Slaughter nearly went down. He pitched to the side and Coffin got behind him, putting a headlock on him and yanking him backwards with brutal force. Slaughter let out a cry and brought the heel of his right motorcycle boot up into Coffin’s crotch were it mashed his spongy genitals to sauce. Then he reached back, pivoted, and flipped Coffin over his shoulder.

With the impact, the Gurkha knife came free and Slaughter dove for it. A pair of Cannibals tried to get to it before him and he bowled them over, coming up with the knife.

“Come on, Johnny,” Coffin said, gouts of cherry-red juice spilling from his mouth. “Show me what you got.”

So Slaughter did just that.

He brought the Kukri to play, hacking at Coffin’s face until it came apart in a wet vomit of skullbone and gurgling raw blood matter. Then it was time to finish him and as he stepped forward to do that, things started to happen. Coffin’s entire body, damaged and stitched, slashed open and steaming with spilling fluids, began to move with a writhing vermiform motion like it was trying to crawl free of the bone beneath. He was like a hissing hot gas swamp of tissue, boiling and bubbling, letting out geysers of searing steam.

Slaughter fell back and away.

He wanted to take Coffin’s head off, but he didn’t dare get too close. Coffin’s was like a shadow box thrown open, splitting, stitches popping, creeks of blood and brain matter pouring forth along with an oozing yolky excrescence of brilliant red gore. It was liquiform and plastic, melting and running like tallow, sputtering like hot grease. It showed Slaughter faces—Dirty Mary and the Skeleton Man, the Mad Hatter and Black Hat, Coffin and Reptile, Frank Feathers and Indiana, too many to properly catalog. Then it began to dissolve, not like acid was eating into it but as if it were being eaten away by flesh-eating bacteria in fast, hyper-fast motion.

Then, before it got any worse, Slaughter took Coffin’s head off with a fierce swing.

And a voice in his head, that of Black Hat said, Good work, biker boy. Well-played and well-met. Long have I been earthbound in this ragged hide and now you’ve set me free. Blessed be the name of John Slaughter who birthed death unto the world of men. Blessed be my favorite son and beloved puppet. Now, now comes the time of re-birth. Now comes the moment of regeneration—

And what followed was something Slaughter never expected.

There was a sudden rising of heat like a blast from a seething coke oven and the surviving members of the Red Hand cried out as a searing spontaneous combustion rose up and Slaughter went to his knees thinking the nuke had just been triggered. But it wasn’t that, it was something else. All the zombies began to burn… no, melt. Like plastic army men some kid had decided to torch, they superheated and ran like hot fat, liquefying into a violent, slopping sea of putrescence that rolled across the rooftop, scattering Ratbags into the soup. It was like the spilled cauldron of a witch: a rising flesh and blood and offal stew bobbing with bones.

And then a wind blew clean the gaseous stink of fetid decay and rotten meat and bile and blood and shit. Slaughter slipped in the greasy sea of zombie sludge and got to one knee and saw something like wriggling ectoplasmic threads rise up from the organic sluicing profusion and form an immense and jellied clot of coiling, bubbling motion that bobbed over the rooftop like a hot air balloon. But it was no balloon; it was an obscene fleshy entity that was fetal and gelatinous. An embryonic rushing storm of plasmic life seeding itself, filling and rupturing and fattening and throwing out unformed limbs and feelers and licking black tongues before giving birth to an immense and fragmenting ghost-face which was the face of the hag, the death-hag of Slaughter’s dreams: that fissured graveyard countenance of white corpse-pulp whose hair was fluttering red corpse worms and whose eyes were glistening ruby crystals. Her mouth peeled open and a hot cremating wind blew forth with a freight train roar.

This was the Queen of the Dead.

The bloated white leech that fed upon death and decay.

The thing that hid in the saprogenic depths of Coffin, the true and discarnate evil that was Nemesis and Leviathan and thousands of other nameless and unnamable haunters of the dark to a thousand disparate cultures. Yes, this was the wind demon Pazuzu, the bringer of hot winds of pestilence; it was Uggae, the ten-headed Babylonian personification of rage and graveyards and murder; it was Hebrew Lilith strangling infants in their cribs and feeding upon their pink souls; it was Choronzon, the black fire of hatred, the udders of the cat of slime, the terror of the darkness that crawls upon the sands of Hell; it was Greek Eurynomis, the corpse-eater, flashing its carrion grin and spreading night-black vulture’s wings, its body swollen blue and black like that of corpse-fly. Yes, Canaanite Baalberith and Leviathan, the gatekeeper, the Hell-mouth.

Slaughter was impotent before her.

All men were.

Her mouth continued to open until it was a black storm mouth, a vortex of howling wind, and that face was no longer a face but a tornadic eruption of resurrection worms that fell over the rooftop in a hail of undulant squirming that overflowed the zombie sea and became not inches deep, but feet.

Slaughter knew it was coming because he had seen something similar in his dream.

So by the time the worm-mouth vomited its larva over the world, he was already crawling through the sea of putrefaction and to the door that led below. He barely made it. Even as the surviving Ratbags cried out as the worms tunneled into them by the hundreds and thousands, he pulled them out of his hair and off his vest and out of his beard, smashing them on the stone steps.

And then he was running.

The thermonuclear funeral couldn’t have been much more than minutes away, if not seconds. He made his way down the stairs and ran down the long corridor, making for the passage that would lead him to the second floor. As a voice in his head told him he would never make it, he found the stairs and half-ran, half-stumbled down them. He saw no zombies. He saw no anything. Then he made the ground floor. It was filled with rolling black smoke and hot with the spreading fire. He had to go to the floor in a crab-crawl to get some breathable air.

He scrambled down the corridor until he saw the bikes left by himself and Apache Dan. The gas tank of Moondog’s Boss Hoss was hot enough to fry an egg on. He sheathed the Kukri and started it up. Before him was a barrier of flame but he had no choice as he saw it. He circled back around and used the length of the corridor to pick up speed.

The roar of the hog was immense.

The building was trembling.

The flames were rising and spreading.

He cracked open the throttle and took that corridor wide open, flying right into the flames, into the burning cauldron of fire, and then he was out of it, going right through the front door and jumping the hog off the steps, airborne right over the flaming wreckage of the War Wagon and coming down in the drive and nearly stacking the bike right there as the forks tried to twist away from him.

But he got it under control, hammering down and soaring through the gates and down the long drive coming in, the bike bouncing over potholes and the ruts of the old tire traps and the pavement was right before him and he squealed onto it, nearly losing it, then cracking open the throttle again and eating it foot by foot. He flogged her down the road, up hills and down into little valleys, and then up onto higher ground again, the pavement twisting and turning through night-dark fields lit only by the white blade of the hog’s headlight.

The straight pipes were roaring and the wind was in his face and he was caning the hog, reaching out for the big end and ripping it wide open. About the time he figured he’d carved a mile between himself and the NORAD complex, the tactical nuke went up with a rumbling/crackling/thundering noise that was deafening and a flash of light that was at his back but still blinded him.

He slowed the bike, trying to avoid the shock wave.

But it hit him as he was braking down to less than ten miles an hour. The shock wave hit him, tossing the bike, surfing it across the pavement in a shower of sparks and he was flipped into the gravel and then into a ditch of cattails and stagnant water.

When he pulled himself out, the heat wave had passed.

The fields around him were burning. There was smoke and fire and embers in the wind. He dragged himself out of the water, pulling bits of gravel from his face and wiping blood and sweat and swamp water free.

He looked back in the direction of the complex and saw it.

He was on a flattened hilltop and he could see the blazing red outlines of the fortress, or the blazing firestorm where it had once been. The sky had gone from black to cobalt to a shimmering atomic green. The fortress had cracked open like an egg and given birth to a huge neon-orange mushroom cloud of energized particles, radioactive dust, and radiant smoke. It was connected to the jagged scar of the bomb site by a smoldering umbilicus. The landscape near it was glowing a phosphorescent yellow. As he watched, he saw something take shape dead-center of the mushroom cloud—a shimmering red grinning skull face that wavered like a heat mirage.

Then it was gone, fading away. Maybe it never was.

“Jesus,” he said.

Leviathan. Regenerated. And you made this happen. You were chosen and you were played. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bleeding, bruised, blackened and filthy, he stumbled down the road to the Boss Hoss and lifted it back up, every muscle and tendon in his body crying out. He worried that the electromagnetic pulse of the blast might have fused the wiring, but she turned over just fine.

Slaughter looked back once, feeling the pain of his dead brothers, then cracked open the throttle again, racing against the cloud of fallout that was coming. He opened her up, reaching for the big end, letting her roll on out. He was clipping at better than a hundred miles per hour when, grinning, he hit the button to release the Nitrox boost and the scoot took off like a rocket. The forks came right off the ground and he rode that wheelie hard for a hundred yards and by then nothing could stop him or touch him because he had reached the old fabled double-T, the 200 mile an hour mark.

He was free.

He was riding.

He was in the wind.

His feet up on the Easy Rider pegs, he cut a path deep into the black beating heart of the night and the destiny that belonged to him and him alone.

Maybe Leviathan would show himself again in a new form.

But it wouldn’t be today.