Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Eight

Like the bloodthirsty redskins in an old movie, the zombies came at dawn. Rice saw them marching down the road, forty or fifty of them, and there was no doubt where they were headed. They came up the drive carrying axes and pipes and broomsticks sharpened like spears.

“Looks like we’re in for a siege,” Rice said.

He broke out the rifles—nice lever action .30-30s—boxes of ammunition and single-shot Snakecharmer shotguns for back up.

“Headshots, son,” Rice said. “We conserve ammo that way. Just drop ‘em and move onto the next kill.”

They came on thick with stink and flies, bits of them dropping off in their wild flight at the farmhouse. Rice opened up first, then Slaughter started popping off rounds, shooting, levering, shooting again, dropping the dead in their tracks. Zombie heads came apart in meaty, gushing sprays of putrescence and soon the puddles outside were dark with blood and fluids and bits of tissue… and worms, of course, because as soon as the bodies went down, the worms crawled out, searching for something else to infest and finding only broken husks.

Though the dead were not exactly smart by any shakes, most of them anyway, they were smart enough to soon realize that their numbers were being dropped by rounds fired from the gunports, so they attacked these with fury.

The wormboys came on, charging the gunports, hitting them with their pipes and chewing up the boards with their axes and, when that failed, pressing in and digging their hands through the slots.

Slaughter kept darting from gunport to gunport, popping off rounds until the dead congested again and moving on to the next slot. When they thickened he drew the .410 Snakecharmer and blasted away at them again and again.

But then some crafty little kid zombie crept up under the gunport, reached up and got his or her hand around the barrel and would not let go. Slaughter yanked and yanked, banging the kid off the outside of the farmhouse with moist, mushy sounds and spraying a lot of decay and goo around, but by then two or three adults had the Snakecharmer and pulled it right through the port, tossing it away into the muddy drive.

Slaughter knew that wasn’t a mistake he could afford to make again.

He dropped a little boy that brandished a bone.

He dropped a man with a hatchet.

He dropped twin girls with kitchen knives.

Still they came on, rushing the ports in crazy human—or inhuman—wave attacks.

He put down three more and was amazed that they did not follow their usual behavioral patterns and stop to feed on their own dead. They always had before, scavenging for scraps.

But this time they were interested only in getting at Slaughter and Rice.

A woman with a sloughing skin speckled with purple blotches took three rounds from Slaughter’s .30-30, shots to the torso to drive her back so he could get a clear headshot. But she just kept coming on. Her breasts burst open like balloons filled with rancid milk and her belly split open releasing a tide of foul gray slime, but all that did was piss her off.

He finally got a bead on her and took her down with a headshot that made her scream and gurgle, vomiting out gouts of something like white glistening cheese curds. But it didn’t go the way he wanted. Not in the least. Even with her face shot off and the side of her head hanging by a few threads of gristle, she propelled herself at the gunport with incredible velocity and struck it like a swollen bladder filled with rot, smashing into it, wedging her flabby arm in there, corpse jelly flooding through the port and slopping down the wall.

“Never seen ‘em come like this!” Rice called out. “Not since Freemont!”

He kept shooting and Slaughter did the same until his ammunition was sorely depleted. And by then there were maggoty arms reaching through the ports and several enterprising wormboys or wormgirls were shoving a bloated, blackened infant through one of them. Something with a mouth like a lamprey filled with tiny sharp teeth.

Slaughter blew it back out with five or six shots and then, from the kitchen, they heard a constant thumping and pounding that could only be axes cutting into the door.

They heard it split open.

“I got this!” Rice called, hobbling off into the kitchen and Slaughter kept shooting until he had less than a half a box of shells and the .30-30 was smoking hot in his hands, the air thick with the stink of burnt gunpowder.

And outside, Jesus, the dead piled in heaps and ramparts as more and more rushed in. The thirty or forty Rice had spied coming down the road had not only doubled but tripled, then quadrupled.

There was no way in hell they could hold off an army like this.

That’s when Rice screamed.

Slaughter ran in there just in time to see what remained of the door bursting off its hinges as seven or eight axe-wielding zombies pushed in on a hot putrid wave. He dropped three of them but the others just poured right over the top and Rice was buried in their numbers, shrieking and kicking as they bit into him.

Slaughter ran.

He looked back once and Rice, poor goddamned Rice, they had him in their filthy hands and a young girl opened her mouth inches from Rice’s own and a twisting red worm came out in a slushy bile and slithered right up his left nostril.

The zombies came after Slaughter.

He killed three more, then he was out of shot.

He made ready to die a horrible death.

And then… just as they closed in for the kill… there was a rumbling sound of heavy engines from outside followed by the clatter of heavy machine guns, the thump of grenades and mortar rounds. The farmhouse shook. It shook again. Slaughter was thrown off his feet and the zombies were cast like dice as an artillery round punched into the kitchen and blasted it into wreckage.

Cavalry… the fucking cavalry is here.

But as to whether that was the U.S. Army or the Red Hand with purloined APCs and ordinance from the 25th Infantry, he did not know. Either way, he figured it would be trouble for him.

Boom, boom, boom.

More shells landed. A great section of ceiling collapsed, burying the zombies that had managed to pull themselves up. Even then, they struggled in the debris. Slaughter dusted himself off and pulled himself up to a gunport and saw the action out there. There were four or five wheeled armored vehicles that had encircled the farmhouse. With mounted fifty caliber machine guns, they were chopping up the zombies into gore and gristle. They launched mortar rounds. Built-in flamethrowers on their front ends gushed out twenty and thirty-foot flames that lit up the walking dead like match heads, incinerating them into stumbling blackened husks.

And the rounds came whistling through the air.

Incoming.

Slaughter dove to the floor as anti-tank shells hit the farmhouse and the wall across the room disintegrated into a rain of burning shards and plaster dust and flaming refuse.

The next volley would bring the whole goddamn farmhouse down and he knew it.

He crawled across the floor, kicked through some lathing and loose singed planks, and dove out into the yard, crab-crawling until he saw dead zombies and worms crawling in the grass. He found his feet, running for cover behind a tree as more anti-tank rounds hit the farmhouse and there was a great hot whooshing of air and the farmhouse collapsed like a house of cards, sending up plumes of fire and rolling clouds of black smoke that blew through the farm yard.

Still clutching the spent .30-30, he used the smoke as cover as the armored vehicles moved in, pounding away with their big fifties, lighting up the remains of the farmhouse with their flamethrowers and cremating anything that still had the will to walk.

A zombie came at him out of the smoke and Slaughter smashed the stock of the .30-30 into its face. He broke open the head of a little boy, jumped through a ring of naked women with burning hairdos and drop-kicked a man chewing on his own entrails.

The barn.

He threw the door open and was glad his saddlebags were packed. He had to move. Those guns would be trained on the barn and silo next and he had to be out of there. He fired up the hog and with all the noise from outside, her roaring straight pipes sounded like the purr of a kitten. A zombie that was on fire stepped through the doorway, but by then Slaughter had popped his scoot into gear and throttled up. The hog jumped forward, knocking the zombie aside.

Already Slaughter could taste the freedom of the road.

Outside, not only the razed structure of the farmhouse was burning, but so were the trees and outbuildings, and even the meadows and fields, smoke tangling in the air that was acrid with the stink of smoldering human flesh. It was a crazy ride, zigzagging through the flames and debris and heaped bodies, trying to avoid the notice of the gunners on the armored vehicles. He worked the clutch and throttle all the way, using every trick he knew, carving his path hard and fast, taking sharp corners with the bike nearly horizontal to the ground and then he was flying down the drive and out onto the rutted road.

Not that he escaped unnoticed, for a few mortar rounds exploded in his path far behind him, nearly throwing him off the bike, but then he was on the road and there were no citizens ahead and he figured he had it and he owned it.

Go west, my brother.