Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Seven

Rice directed them off of 94 onto a dusty secondary road and Slaughter took it slowly, avoiding all the potholes and dips. The sun rose higher as he followed it, and was hot against the back of his neck. In the bitch seat, the old man said nothing and that was fine because there was nothing worse than having some needledick on the back that couldn’t hold his mud. It fucked up the whole experience of being one with the wind.

As he grannyed the hog along in low gear, Slaughter watched the countryside roll by. Acres and acres of farmland burnt yellow by the summer sun and unrelieved by a single drop of rain. Even the ditches were dry, the cattails withered and drooping. His mouth tasted like dry wheat chaff, his skin layered in dust. Just miles of farmland. Repetitive. Monotonous. Got under your skin after a time. All those fields and pastures, nothing to break it up but tired-looking silos, collapsing barns, farmhouses weathered as gray as tombstones.

He started, thinking about the Deadlands again because that’s what he wanted, not this, not this rural ma-and-pa shit. Even despite that woman in the lab back at the compound, he wanted it. He wanted to go out there and get in the thick of it.

But the old man’s nice, he told himself, so be nice back. He offers you supper and a bed, take it. He needs help with something, help him. He’s a citizen but he’s okay.

They came around a wild stand of honeysuckle and black cherry that blocked their view and the first thing they saw was the screaming man. He was down on his knees, shirt soaked bright red with blood, and two zombies were standing over him. They had knives and they were using them, almost playfully slashing him to death. They took their time, slitting off his nose, hacking off an ear, taking a few fingers from an upraised hand. The wormboy on the right didn’t have a face as such, just a swollen, perforated mass that oozed a black jelly; the one on the left had a face, but most of it was hanging off the gray, maggoty skull beneath by strings of gristle.

“Better get your widowmaker ready,” Rice said, still holding his empty shotgun.

Slaughter figured he was right because there was no way they were going to get around this scene, so they might as well join the dance and lighten the earth of a few more walking corpses.

He parked the bike off the shoulder and right away he could smell the stink of putrescence. The two zombies paid them little attention, but kept at their butchering until their victim curled up in the dusty road like a dead snake. Standing just off a ways was an old woman in a frayed calico dress, dark stains all over the bosom, a morbid fungi growing up the sleeves and collar line, settling around her throat in a furry scarf. Some kind of grave mold had grown out of her nostrils and eaten away one side of her face like an ulcer.

“That’s Iris McClew,” Rice said, fighting the urge to take his hat off in the presence of a lady. “I’ll be damned. She had the farm down the road from mine. She’s been in the ground a month. Worms must have found her.”

Slaughter studied her.

She must have been a real pistol in life, wound tighter than a corset, a real terror by the looks of her: acid-tongued, opinionated, intolerant, a bible-thumping spinster who’d gone to the grave with her legs crossed and virginity intact. She still carried some of that and you could see it in her one good eye… even though it was filmed yellow.

“This is no concern of yours, George Rice,” she said in a cracking, dry voice. “I would ask you to mind your own business.”

“Like you ever minded yours,” Rice told her.

She gave him a wicked glare, still uppity and proud, a prayer book in one hand and a basket in the other. She raised the prayer book above her head, filled with righteous condemnation. “The Lord has prepared a burning place for thee!” she said, flies exiting her mouth. “And down onto the grass of thy host shall ye go! Amen, amen!”

Rice ignored her as one of the zombies came stumbling over in his direction, the one whose face wasn’t much more than black jelly. He tried to say something but all that came out was more of that black drainage. Slaughter shot him first in the belly and he opened up, viscera spilling down to his knees in unsightly tangles like his abdomen had just burst a seam. Slaughter shot him next in the head, killshot, vaporizing everything from the eyes on up in a fine meaty spray. He took two or three comical steps forward, then rolled into the ditch where he did not move again.

The other zombie came at them. He still had his gore-encrusted knife and he planned on using it. “Gonna cut off yer balls, son,” he said to Slaughter. “Then I’m gonna roast ‘em on a stick like marshmellers.”

“Like hell,” the biker told him.

He sighted and jerked the trigger on the .357 Combat Mag. It went off like a cannon, echoing through the fields and shaking birds out of trees. The effect of a 158 grain .357 slug at such close range was devastating: it cored the zombie right between the eyes and with such force and velocity that it split his head in two like a ripe muskmelon. He hit the road flopping.

“Hmmmph,” said Iris McClew, indignant as always, it would appear. She crouched down next to the murdered man. Taking a fine carving knife from her basket, she slit him open and began stuffing his entrails in her basket. While Slaughter and Rice watched, she slit out a nice flank of liver and shoved it in her mouth, gore dropping from her lips.

After she swallowed, she shook a bloody finger at Slaughter. “You have not the gumption to raise that firearm at me, sir! For your place is known and in it ye shall lay! A gentlemen would not brandish a weapon at a lady!”

“I ain’t no gentleman.”

She laughed with a bubbling, liquid sort of sound. “I know you! We all know you! You bear the mark! You have been named!”

“Hell, you going on about, Iris?” Rice asked her.

But she only laughed as if she knew something they did not and maybe she did at that.

Slaughter shot her dead and that was that.

“Too bad,” Rice said. “She was a real stick in life and she still had it going on in death. Too bad.”

Slaughter didn’t comment on that.

When they rose back up he stopped thinking about who or what they had been. Walking death was walking death. It was a pestilence and you eradicated it and that’s all there really was to it.

Regardless, what she had said haunted him. I know you! We all know you! You bear the mark! You have been named! What mark and named by whom? He didn’t like it. He tried to tell himself that Iris McClew’s brain had gone to rice pudding, but he could not make himself believe it. First the mysterious face on the video back at the compound (Black Hat, as Slaughter now referred to him) and now that shit Iris said. Why did he have the most terrible feeling that it was connected? That taken separately, each incident was a horror, but together they were prophetic?

The farm was just up the road. A barn thirsty for a coat of paint, an old silo, a broken down farmhouse. Typical of the countryside. This was the face the Midwest showed the world these days.

Slaughter got the old man inside and like he’d figured, Rice wanted him to stay for supper and spend the night, which was okay. Why not kick it for a night, work out the kinks? Besides, Rice seemed cool for a citizen and maybe he’d have some good war stories. The farmhouse was a real mess with tools spread around, green metal boxes of U.S. Army ordinance, racks of rifles, survival gear, you name it. It definitely lacked a woman’s touch. The windows were all boarded-up and gunports were cut into them.

Rice found his cane and hobbled around okay with it. “Why don’t you take care of your ride and I’ll get us something to eat,” he said.

So Slaughter did just that.

He parked his hardtail out in the barn, loving the sweet smell of all that dry hay in there. It reminded him of raw-dogging Dirty Mary out in the barn after some violent foreplay. But he didn’t want to think too much about any of that so he did some maintenance on the scoot and then went back inside.

The old man had boiled water on the stove and drawn him a bath in an old tub which at first got Slaughter to thinking: I smell that bad? But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cleaned up so he got in there, scrubbing and soaping and sudsing the dirt and grease from his hair and beard. He spent a good hour in there, just resting in the warm water and drifting off again and again. When he woke, Rice had washed his clothes—jeans and socks, shorts and oily denim vest—in an old wringer washer and dried them over the stove. Slaughter was grateful… except for his rags, his colors, he hadn’t washed them in a long time thinking that it was only the dirt and patches that held them together.

By the time he got dressed and had a leisurely cigarette out on the back porch, noticing with interest that Rice had dug a trench around the farm as sort of a defensive perimeter, there was a meal spread out on the table. Potatoes, smoked ham, even some bread and fresh beans. It was good stuff and Slaughter knocked away about three plates until it felt like he was about nine months along.

“You’re heading out in the morning, I assume?” the old man asked him.

“Yeah, I got places to go.”

“You could stay, you know.”

“Sure, I know. But you’d get sick of me before long. I’m not much good when I’m pent up in one place for too long. I get some real badass PMS after awhile.”

Rice raised an eyebrow. “PMS?”

“Parked Motorcycle Syndrome.”

They had a laugh over that and it felt pretty good to laugh, Slaughter figured. It had been so long now he couldn’t seem to remember how at first… but then it came, a smile, a widening grin, then it just rolled out and he realized that he hadn’t much laughed with Dirty Mary, things were always too tense, way too much poison in the air, but with Rice it was easy. Just like it had been easy back in Pittsburgh at the clubhouse with the rest of the boys when they got together for some drinking and card playing or went to Church, which was what they called their monthly meeting.

Rice told a few jokes after that and kept things going, then soon enough he brought out a jug of corn mash and they took one pull after the other until they were nicely lit up and laughing about just about everything and it was nice. Slaughter figured if he could take away anything from this day it should be the memory of drinking with the old man because it was something good, something real, a connection made between them. Something golden he could hold onto when things weren’t so bright in the gray winding days ahead.

Soon enough, though, Rice started asking about things. “None of my business and that’s for sure, but I gotta ask you, son, I just have to: what do you hope to accomplish out in the Deadlands? What do you hope to achieve besides your own death?”

“I already told you that. I’m going to kill zombies.”

“And that’s all?”

“What more could there be?”

But Rice wasn’t having that and he sure as hell wasn’t believing it. “I guess I’m wondering what you left back east that makes you so desperate to push west.”

“Let’s just say I got my reasons,” Slaughter told him, wondering then how much he should be saying about any of it. “There’s people that would like to put me in a cage, but I don’t think they’ll come after me in the Deadlands. And while I go to ground, as they say, I can be a serious thorn in the side of the walking dead.”

“I suppose you can at that,” Rice shrugged. “But if it’s the Deadlands you want, you got your heart set on that cold lick of hell, you might as well wait right here. They’re saying the Deadlands start on the other side of the Mississip, but don’t you believe it. They’re pushing farther east every day, inch by inch.”

“I bet they are.” Slaughter thought about that a moment. “Let me ask you a crazy question. You ever seen or heard of a guy in a black hat? Real ugly, face dead-white and scarred-up. Pink eyes.”

“No, think I’d remember somebody like that. Why?”

Slaughter just shrugged. “Got me a funny feeling our paths are going to cross.”

“I know something else that might interest you, though.”

“What’s that?”

Rice licked his weathered lips. “A bike gang. What you would call a club. I seen some of them riding through. Dead ones. But they wear colors like you—leather vests, denim vests… says Kansas City on ‘em, I think. Couldn’t make out the rest on account I was keeping my head low and out of harm’s way.”

“Cannibal Corpse,” Slaughter said.

“Good name for what they are. You know ‘em?”

Slaughter snorted a cold laugh. “You could say that. Like ten miles of bad road or ten years of hard time, I know ‘em. They’ve been trying to push east for years. My club and a few others like the Outlaws stopped them from doing so. Now they’re all zombies and the old boys are all dead or like them. Nothing to stop them. Nothing but me.”

“Is that what you plan on doing in the Deadlands?”

“Part of it. The ones you saw were outriders out scoping things. They’ll keep coming in packs like that. Back in the day, the Corpse were in Missouri and Kansas, thick as shit-flies in St. Louis and Jefferson City, Springfield and Kansas City. We fought them out there and we fought them as far east as Ohio and Pennsylvania. But they just kept coming. This time, there’s no law to stand in my way and I’m going to send ‘em back to the grave where they belong.”

“Sounds like you got a score to settle, son.”

Slaughter managed something like a smile. “I do. The Kansas City chapter president was a maggot they called Coffin. He ordered the murders of three Disciples. The shiteater who carried it out was a psychopath name of Reptile. I want both of them in the worst way.”

“Maybe you’ll get a medal for that.”

“Probably a good beating and a prison cell if I get dragged back east.”

Rice fell into silence for a time. “I thought about it, you know.”

“Thought about what?”

“Going back east.”

“But…?”

He sighed. “I decided it wasn’t worth it. My whole command got wiped out. I’d be in for the shit. I’d rate a desk job if I was lucky. Better off to spend my remaining time out here in the wild west.”

“But it wasn’t your fault what happened,” Slaughter told him and meant it. “None of it.”

“Thanks, son. But they wouldn’t see it that way, those brass hats and stiff dicks out in Washington. They’d hang me out to dry. None of them have ever seen eight or nine-hundred zombies coming at them in waves. They couldn’t understand. They’d say I should have known better than to get bottled-up in a place like Freemont.”

Slaughter lit a cigarette. “I was there.”

“Freemont?”

“Yeah, lots of skeletons.”

“Sure enough. Those were my boys.” Rice’s eyes misted a moment. “I scavenged what I could from there for weeks, but I haven’t been there in a couple years now.”

“Nothing there but skeletons.”

“No hardware?”

“None.”

Rice said he couldn’t understand it, that there’d been APCs and Stryker vehicles.

“Somebody took ‘em then,” he said. “Maybe the Red Hand.”

Slaughter figured that’s probably who it was. The idea of the Ratbags with fifty cal. machine guns and rocket launchers, armor-piercing shells and anti-tank missiles was a scary thing.

“Saw a helicopter last week, Blackhawk by the looks of it,” Rice said. “It was heading due west. Probably reconnaissance, spotting Red Hand and zombie hotspots.”

Slaughter didn’t care for that much. A chopper? Way out here? The word back east was that the Army was going to push west but nobody really believed it. Maybe it was so. He highly doubted the military would come after him. Still, it worried him. Maybe it was just egotism whispering in his ear, telling him they had to be coming after him because he was John fucking Slaughter, cop killer and notorious outlaw biker and all around bad boy. A wanted man. But he didn’t believe that.

The old man locked down the doors and went off to bed and Slaughter stayed up. He went out on the back porch and watched a light rain fall, thinking about that interstate out there calling to him.