Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Fourteen

About three hours later, they stopped for the night in a nice wide open field where there was not a lick of fog. The spiders were discussed and dispensed with. Nobody much wanted to dwell on any of that and the entire memory of those webbed bodies and clusters of spiders smashing against the windshield filled Slaughter’s mouth with revulsion so he just shook it out of his head.

He lay on his bunk, smoking, trying to put the day and night in some kind of perspective that would make it all easier to live with. It was something he’d done countless other times after coming down from too much action, too much insanity, too much wild and randy bullshit.

What’re you getting your back up about, Slaughter? he asked himself in a voice that was half-dream and half-awake. You knew there’d be mutations out here. The spiders were just that. Disgusting, made your spine crawl and your belly flop over, but not truly unexpected. There’ll be other things. Some of them not so bad and others a lot fucking worse.

Sure, that was realistic, he knew, lying there in the dark of the Wagon, so close to his hog that he could smell the engine oil coming off her like a seductive sweet perfume.

But he knew that wasn’t what was bothering him.

It was Black Hat.

The idea of that man… or thing… disturbed him in ways he could not fathom. That somehow, some way, Black Hat was the axis upon which everything was spinning now. He told himself he couldn’t possibly know that, yet he was certain of it.

The boys had settled in and even Fish had stopped talking about women, and the others drifted off, snoring and shifting in their sleep, Jumbo muttering things under his breath. Moondog was silent. He never made any noise when he slept and you could never be sure if he was sleeping or not. Slaughter knew it was the sleep of a combat veteran, a guy who’d lived in a war zone. They always slept light like that. He was told he did it himself, and Moondog had seen a lot more action than he had. In a lot of ways, the war had never been over for him. He went from combat Marine to outlaw biker to convict at the federal Atlanta hellhole. In their own way, Slaughter knew, each was a combat duty station.

He pulled off his cigarette, trying to wind down, having trouble as he always did.

He closed his eyes and right away pictured a small, gangly-limbed boy in a blue confirmation suit that he knew was his kid brother Perry. Red Eye. It was funny, but whenever Slaughter thought of the kid he pictured him in that confirmation suit standing there in church, his eyes filled with the bright wonder of the Sacraments and the saints, the mystery of faith. To Slaughter himself it meant nothing. It was a racket. They wanted your money and that’s all it was about: money and power. Even as a kid he knew that. Fuck the trappings and ritual. That was eye candy and soul food, a delightfully delirious drug for the brainwashed Catholic masses who were scared of life and terrified of death and haunted by their own sins and gnawing guilt. The marrow, the blood of it was money.

But not to Perry, not to old fucking Red Eye.

It all meant so much more to him and the shit the priests and sisters spewed out in school were absolute truths not to be questioned. Again, unlike Slaughter himself who as a kid was constantly in the shit for asking questions. But, Father, if children are the lambs of God then why did he let all those kids die in concentration camps? And the priest bearing down on him, whacking him with a ruler until his knuckles bled. Because he loved them, you little bastard, because he loved them. Ah, yes, the mystery of faith which was no mystery at all: just believe it, don’t question it, accept your sedative, drink deep of your tonic of Roman propaganda and dig into your pockets and fill the collection plate.

Old Red Eye.

It was no wonder that he ended up as another little braindead devotee of the Legion of Terror. He’d wanted to belong to something all his life and the small bike clubs he’d hooked up with—imitating his big brother, no doubt—were too hedonistic and narcissistic for his liking. There was no underlying spiritual dogma, no divine godhead, no symbolic ceremony in 1%er clubs. They didn’t celebrate the spirit, they unleashed the animal.

Maybe had Slaughter bought into some of that stuff he wouldn’t be where he was today, and then again, maybe if Perry had rejected more of it, he wouldn’t be where he was today: in a federal lock-up awaiting execution, the only thing standing between death and him, not God or Jesus or the Saints, but his rebellious hardcore brother who believed in nothing but the brotherhood of the road, the Devil’s Disciples, and held up his middle finger to country, flag, and organized religion in general.

Man, all that belief and faith of yours, Red Eye. Look what it got you in the end. Me. One seriously fucked-up savior.

Yet, for all that and for his many malfunctions of character, Slaughter was going to pull it off. Even laying there, wired tight from the day, with his brothers sleeping around him, he knew he was going to pull it off somehow and that was probably because he had to pull it off.

But why am I thinking that if I do my problems are only just beginning?

Because he was dealing with the feds. Dealing with a bloated bureaucracy of parasites, rats, blood-suckers, and self-promoting career junkies. What Slaughter knew of them—the ATF, the DEA, the FBI, federal prosecutors, the judicial system itself that was rotten from the inside out—gave him little hope that they’d hold up their part of the bargain. These were spin doctors and perception managers, leeches in three-piece suits. They would fuck him (and Perry) as easily and casually as they fucked each other and the Constitution they were supposed to uphold.

Which is why you better get yourself some insurance, something that’ll screw them as they screw you. Allow the fuck-ee to become the fuck-er.

Yeah, that’s how you played the system.

Problem was, as always, they had the power.

Slaughter closed his eyes but sleep still would not come. His mind raced around through its memories, holding them, examining them, minutely examining the dirt stuck to them.

Before joining the Devil’s Disciples when he was twenty, Slaughter had a history of violent crime behind him ranging from strong-arm robbery to obstruction of justice to arson. But he had never killed anyone. He had beaten guys, stabbed them, and once, as a member of a club called the Night Hawks, he had taken a meat cleaver to a pimp who did not pay his protection money in Youngstown. The guy had lived, minus three fingers, an ear, and a lot of blood.

What he was good at, he realized through the years, was intimidation. At 6’3 and 225 pounds, he was a rangy guy with broad shoulders, a barrel-chest, legs like pistons and a fearsome upper body strength acquired from playing football in high school and religiously doing 2,000 pushups a day and working the weights with a fanatic zeal, a habit practiced in-and-out of prison where he also worked the punching bag at least an hour every morning.

Back in the days of the Night Hawks his specialty was squeezing payments from drug dealers, businessmen, and street-level criminals. He was an enforcer and he enjoyed it. When he went after someone he was aggressive to the point of savagery. Fear was his tool and when his victims saw him coming, bristling with muscle, his beard shaggy and unkempt, his club vest greasy and dirty, his eyes filled with acid, they knew they were in for it and they were right. He usually came at them with a baseball bat or a tire iron, sometimes with his bare hands. After he seriously injured half a dozen people, word of mouth did the rest and his reputation grew, though now and again he still had to get rough, and that was what had bought him the first of three prison terms when he was twenty.

It also brought him to the attention of the Devil’s Disciples.

By the time he got out of Frackville he was hooked up pretty good with the club by doing time with several of their members. The Night Hawks had been brought down by the police for a variety of criminal endeavors, so Slaughter hung around the Disciples’ clubhouse in Youngtown. He caught the eye of a tough old biker named Sean Cady who put him up for membership and before long, Slaughter was a prospect. It was a hairy, scary sort of time when Cady tested him, as did the other members of the club. Cady started fights and made Slaughter finish them, sometimes with one guy, sometimes with two or three. He was asked to rob and steal, to torch houses and supply the club with drugs and hookers. One time he had to balance beer bottles on his head while the other members shot at them with .22 pistols. It was a test. All a test. Were you tough? Were you dependable? Were you loyal? Did you have guts?

That’s what it all came down to.

He proved himself, made patch, then murdered for the club when he was twenty-six by shotgunning a rival biker that had killed a Disciple and was immediately put up for the 158 Crew. Ironic thing about that was the biker he did—a dumb violent fuck named Bobo—used to be his club brother in the Night Hawks. Shifting loyalties meant shifting priorities.

When he became part of the 158 Crew after a unanimous vote, he crawled through the dark underbelly of the outlaw biker world and he did most of his crawling with Sean Cady, another 158er. What he remembered most about all that was his early days as a 158er. One afternoon he pulled his hog up behind the Pittsburgh clubhouse and Sean Cady was standing there with another 158er named Arthur Vituro whom everyone called “Butch.”

Whereas Cady was trim and hard, looking more like a seasoned hardass longshoreman than a biker with his steel-gray crewcut, pock-marked face, and muscular arms, Butch was a stereotypical 1%er in every way. Massive as a human gorilla with a belly like a feedbag and arms like dock pilings, at 6’5, 300 or so pounds, a shaggy beard trailing to his chest, long greasy hair hanging down to his shoulders, he was an absolute animal. His face was scarred, lips twisted in a sardonic smirk, and it was rumored in the Disciples underworld that he had at least a dozen bodies out there before he lost count. He was also the nephew of Popeye Scarpetti, the reigning crime boss in Pittsburgh at the time, which gave him enormous power and flexibility in criminal circles.

Slaughter knew two things for sure about him: he was not only insane but he was a psychopath that killed for the sheer pleasure of it. When he jointed a body, cut it up for disposal, he drooled. When he killed someone, he foamed at the mouth. Later, he was murdered by the Hell’s Angels for blowing up one of their clubhouses, but that day in the lot behind the Pittsburgh clubhouse, he was in his prime.

Cady motioned Slaughter over and popped the truck on a black sedan. In the back was a black guy who had been beaten so savagely he was blown-up purple, limbs broken, face just a swollen mass of livid flesh.

“We got some trash we got to take out,” Cady told Slaughter.

They took the body out to the Beaver Run Reservoir in Westmoreland County and rowed out into the deeps in a rowboat that belonged to Butch who, amazingly, was an avid fisherman when he wasn’t slitting throats and busting heads.

“Watch how this is done,” Cady said, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip. “You’ll wanna remember this.”

Butch pulled out a carving knife that was sharp enough to bisect a hair lengthwise. “You don’t want your stiff floating back up, Johnny, so you got to puncture it.” Drool hanging from his mouth, Butch stabbed the corpse in the belly seven or eight times so the gas could escape. He giggled while he did it. Then he punctured the lungs. “You don’t mind if I let the air out of your tires, do you?” he asked the stiff. Afterwards, the body was wrapped in chains and hooked to cinderblocks and down it went to the bottom where, Slaughter figured, its bones were to this day.

There hadn’t been a lot of murders, but enough so that at night, when he closed his eyes, he started seeing his victims. But that was life in the criminal world of the 158 Crew and once you were in, like wearing the Disciples patch, you were in. Blood in, blood out, they called it. You killed to get in the 158 Crew and only death would get you out.

He lay there, smoking again, thinking about his kid brother and the killing and violence that had led up to this moment, and felt absolutely nothing. The only warmth in him was for the club and his kid brother. He let himself feel for nothing else.

He could hear trees rustling in the night wind, a deeper and abiding silence just beneath. Somewhere out there a wolf howled out its despair and the silence returned, zipping up the world. Now the night was dead and he told himself that nothing living could inhabit such a dark and primordial silence.

There was only him.

Nothing else.

The last man on earth, the last living thing in a poisoned, sickened, and gutted world. Even if it wasn’t true, he felt it to his core and believed it, if only for a few short moments of panic.

He butted the cigarette and rolled over in the womb of night. He was filled with a hundred conflicting emotions no one would ever know about or truly suspect—hatred and anger, formless terror and creeping fear, the far-away love for his brother and the knowledge that he couldn’t afford to fuck this one up. Inch by inch, it was all banished as sleep came over him, coveting him, owning him, sinking him into the dark cradle of oblivion. He drifted off, sliding away, seeing the walking dead and mutant spiders and all manner of frightful and ravenous night stalkers… then something else, something much worse invading the byways of dream: Black Hat. The clown-white, horribly pitted face of Black Hat riding the sky like a harvest moon. The grinning sardonic mouth and glistening pink eyes. That’s what he saw… and then it dissolved into worms. The resurrection worms… a boiling, writhing storm of them coming out at him from a black sky seamed red and purple, a vortexual maelstrom of scarlet worms entwining and slithering in a colossal pulsating mass that slowly broke apart to reveal what was beneath: a face. A huge, floating, perfectly obscene face coming at him. It was the face of a hag, marble-gray, seamed and wrinkled and convoluted with deep-etched ruts and hollow pockets, a bubbling white graveyard fungus growing up over the chin and cheeks. There were but three or four blackened, stubby teeth in her mouth. Her eyes were vivid pockets of blood set in pallid sockets. A secret channel of wind rustled her hair, which was not hair at all but worms, thousands of worms threading out of her skull. She kept coming closer and Slaughter thrashed in his sleep, trying to hide his dream-self from her, trying to squeeze himself into a river of shadows… but she only got closer. We’re waiting for you, Disciple, for you have been named. We’re all waiting for you, she said in not one voice but perhaps a dozen, all discordant and screeching, filled with a deranged torment and a limitless suffering. 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—

Slaughter came awake, his face shining with sweat.

A nightmare, some crazy distorted nightmare that made no sense, yet he felt it made all the sense in the world and could not get past the feeling that he had just caught a glimpse of something he would soon know much better.

Black Hat. The worms. The hag. All part of the same thing, some monstrous and infernal engine of death.

It was well over an hour before he dared to close his eyes again.