Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Nine

Fifteen minutes later he sighted the big slab, that beautiful winding snake of pavement known as the I and he squealed onto it, taking the humps and bumps standing straight up with his boots on the footpegs. The exhilaration was such that he felt like opening the old hog up and doing a little trick riding like squatting no hands on the seat or steering with his feet… but no, that was crazy old bullshit from the crazy old days of bullshit that no longer existed.

And he had to get his ass far and away.

The bike roared under him as he took the I mile by mile, the wind blowing his hair back and parting his shaggy beard, making his face sting and his eyes water. Shit, yes. A few bugs slapped his cheeks and forehead and that was all part of it.

He had not felt so free in years.

He thought about Rice for a moment. He was a good guy for a citizen. He could have been a good biker. Too bad. At least he’d been burned up back there and wouldn’t have to wander around with a worm sliding around in his brain making him go cannibal. It wasn’t much, but it was something. At least the old man had been spared that.

Slaughter thought no more about it.

He was feeling really good, really charged, still buzzing from the action. He had that feel-good sort of soul rapture, that pure euphoria he only got after a good conflict. It was like coming down from tripping your brains out on the good stuff. It reminded him of that field event back in the good old days in Harrisburg. The Disciples were there, along with members of the Outlaws and Pagans, the Warlocks and the Dirty Dozen, countless other clubs big and small. Slaughter and Jumbo, Neb and Apache Dan were barrel riding on their bikes, getting low down and crazy, their minds blown clean on tabs of Red Dragon.

That’s exactly how he felt now: free without a care. The way a patched-in outlaw biker was supposed to feel: high and proud and randy in the saddle. That was the tribal lifestyle—who rode the best, who fucked more women, who kicked more ass. Absolutely primal, the barbarian life.

The only thing that brought him down was that he could not share it with any of his brothers of the Disciples Nation.

On the good side, the I was clean; there were very few wrecks and absolutely no citizens. That was one good thing that had come out of the Outbreak, it kept the citizens off the road with their cages, cleared away the rice rockets and weekenders.

The sun was getting warm, burning off the morning mist, and he could feel it warming up his arms and all that intricate inking—the snakes and skulls, dragons and tombstones, the bright red swastikas on each bicep overlaying the serpents and gargoyles beneath, the black SS deathshead on the back of his left hand.

He was feeling good about things, starting to think that—

Wait a minute now.

Wait a fucking minute.

In the distance he could see something. And not just one thing but many. Vehicles. They weren’t wrecks. They were heading in his direction at full steam. He popped the clutch and decelerated, slowing until he came to a stop. He dug in his saddlebag and pulled out the Minox binoculars, held them to his eyes and tightened the field… shit and shit. Those were Hummers. Military Humvees.

He had a sudden bad feeling about things, which became even worse when he heard the thunk-thunk-thunk of the chopper as it came over the tree line in the distance, sweeping through the sky above him.

He had to get off the I.

He throttled up, cutting across fields of yellow grass and stunted corn, over humps and down into little vales, pushing along, giving the hog some speed but not so much that he’d lose her on the uneven terrain. Any thought he’d had that it was all purely coincidental vanished when the chopper passed overhead again, and behind him the Hummers entered the field as well, pushing forward in a solid line, chewing through the corn like harvesters.

Fuck.

They had his number.

He gunned up a hill, came out on a gravel road and opened the bike up, wary of a skid, but knowing he had to get some real estate between him and the Hummers. That chopper kept circling overhead. It was eyeing him and unless he could get to some cover, some trees, it was all over with. He kept riding, throwing a contrail of dust behind him.

The gravel road wound out through open country and that was bad. In the distance it entered a pine thicket. If he could just make it into the trees he might have a chance. He throttled up a bit, gaining speed and momentum. In the rearview he could see that the Hummers were on the road, too, coming fast.

He cut onto a side road that circled through some heavier brush and then onto a footpath. Up a hill, down another, over a footbridge and then off the path into the grass again, finding what looked like a dry ravine bedded by flat sandstone. He followed it, nearing the pine thicket and knowing he just wasn’t going to make it. Overhead, the helicopter came veering down in a strafing run. He heard the crack! crack! of a high-powered rifle. Bullets thudded into the stones around him, splitting some in two with little puffs of rock dust. The rifle kept firing and the rounds landed in front of him, behind him, to either side.

They could have pegged you if they wanted, Slaughter thought as he pulled up out of the ravine and cut onto the gravel road again. They’re herding you. They want you alive.

He decided he would not make it easy on them, whoever in the hell they were. His scoot could go places they couldn’t and once he got into the trees the helicopter would be useless. First, he had to get into the trees, though. And once he was there, if it came down to it… he would fight to the end.

Okay. Not far now.

Maybe five minutes.

The Hummers were closing and he couldn’t throttle the hog any more or he was going to spill her. The road was rough and potholed, the gravel was loose. Things like that meant nothing to the Hummers, of course. They poured it on even more. And here came that fucking chopper again, the gunner firing off rounds, throwing lead like rice at a wedding: crack! crack! ca-rack!

But there was the thicket beyond… cool, shadowy depths where he could fade.

It was going to work.

He was almost there.

And that was the point at which everything went right straight to hell because out of the thicket came another Hummer straight at him and there was a gunner with a mounted recoilless rifle just waiting for the order. Slaughter knew the weapon well. Back in the days before he earned his Disciples patch when he was a grunt he had shot one. 106mm. It would make scrap metal of the hog and turn Slaughter himself into a greasy smear of gore.

They had him bottled.

He didn’t have a chance to decelerate. He swung the bike to the left and the culvert he hadn’t noticed in the heavy growth came up at him and the bike thumped into it, went up in the air like a rocket and Slaughter was thrown twenty feet, rolling through the grass.

When he came to his senses, soldiers with M16A2s were bearing down on him and he stood up slowly, hands over his head.

“DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!” one of them screamed at him. “EAT THAT GROUND, MOTHERFUCKER!”

“Slow down, man, you got me,” Slaughter said, cool and easy.

Then they came up behind him and knocked him to the ground with their rifle butts and then they were kicking him. Sometime during the process, he rolled over cold as canned fish, thoughts rolling through his mind of the big bad west, the Deadlands, the Rockies, and the Pacific Ocean on the other side.

He fell into a dream where he was swimming in the night sea.