Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Seventeen

The next morning, he was out riding point on his hardtail an easy half a mile in front of the pack. It was something Moondog and he had come up with. Traveling together, bunched-up, they were begging for an ambush, so they decided that someone had to be point. Someone that could warn the others.

Slaughter took it.

The others didn’t want him to, but this was his thing as far as he was concerned. He was the leader of this ratpack, the Disciples were under his wing, and they were here because of him. He had more at stake than the others. It was personal with him, therefore the biggest risk should be his.

So he rode out front and the pack hung far back because that’s the way it had to be. When he was on a good stretch of straightaway he could see the pack behind him kicking up dust, but when the road curved or dipped down he lost sight of them and then he was the last man on earth riding into the mouth of hell.

As he ate up those miles, knowing that Devil’s Lake was maybe four or five hours away now, he thought about Poe’s poem The Conqueror Worm, and the grim inevitability of death. Funny how he hadn’t thought about that in many, many years until he’d capped that Cannibal Corpse on the highway. Now he couldn’t seem to get it out of his head, and it seemed that the farther west he went, the more it took hold of him and the more it seemed to be saying to him. It was morbid shit, but the Deadlands were a morbid place, and as far as he was concerned he had only scratched the skin.

He passed through a couple of little towns that were deserted and devastated. One of them was burned nearly flat. The others just empty. Not a scavenging dog or a wormboy to be had. Nothing and no one. Outside the last one there was a crossroads and some kind of half-assed pagan altar had been tacked together. He went by it fast so he didn’t get a real good look at it, but what he did see was a heap of bones, big bones, maybe from a cow or a buffalo, lots of feathers and braided cornshocks, a scarecrow up on a crossbar splashed with paint. At least… he thought it was a scarecrow.

Then the country was open prairie save for scrub pine and juniper, clustered silverberry and bushy staghorn verging the road, dogwood along streams and river cuts. The road was meandering, serpentine, left to right and right to left, lots of Day-Glo yellow signs with squiggly arrows on them.

He came around a bend thick with enshrouding juneberry and that’s when the first shot rang out. Even over the roar of the hog he heard it. Then he heard another and another after that and it was about that time as he cut off the highway and into the prairie grass that he realized he’d driven right into a fucking ambush. Maybe if he’d been paying a little closer attention, it might not have happened.

No matter.

In the rearview he could see two pickup trucks with riders in the beds carrying rifles pulling off the road in hot pursuit. They were shooting, and thank God they were no marksmen. The reports of the rifles echoed again and again and a few rounds came close, but not too close. Slaughter was caning the hardtail now, riding fast and aggressively, seesawing this way and that, hoping they couldn’t get a bead on him. The trucks behind him were thumping along into dips and holes and the shooters were barely hanging on. There was no way they’d get a clear shot like that.

Slaughter brought the scoot into a stand of heavy brush, dropped it and cut the M16 free of its bracket. He slipped through the bushes and fired two three-round bursts at the lead vehicle. The first volley went wild, the second hit the pickup, peppering the hood and popping a spiderwebbed hole in the windshield.

That slowed them.

They were shooting wildly now, expending cartridges everywhere. In the distance, an armored APC entered the field. The Red Hand. No doubt of that.

Slaughter got down low and pulled the walkie-talkie out of the inside of his vest. He got Apache Dan right away. “Ambush up ahead,” he said over the box. “Get everyone off the road and into cover.” There was some static, then, “But what about you, bro?” Slaughter thumbed the button. “Get ‘em to cover! They got an APC here, probably heavy machine guns! Get lost!” More static. “Will do, bro. Keep it tight.”

Slaughter came up out of the brush with the M16 again.

He zeroed in on one of the shooters in the back. He missed with his first volley and then popped the guy with the second. He cried out and fell from the bed of the truck and the second pickup couldn’t stop in time: it rolled right over him.

More shooting.

Lots of swearing and shouting.

But the trucks had stopped rolling.

Now was the time. Slaughter jumped on his hog, kicked it into life, and went flying out of the bushes, zigzagging again. More shots. But he rode low and fast, cutting around stands of brush and following a dry ravine until he was out of range. He came out into the grass and there were woods ahead, along a ridgeline. There was a footpath and he aimed the scoot up it. He could still hear the engines of the trucks and the APC, but distant now.

But they would compensate.

He couldn’t give them time to do that.

The path was rocky in the woods and the scoot bumped along, but he knew the Red Hand couldn’t follow him up here unless they came in on foot and if they did, then it would be his kind of fighting: close-in and personal. He cut across a stream then up a hill, down another, through another dry ravine and up a hillock and across a little footbridge. He kept his speed low. The hog wasn’t made for this off-road shit and with the hardtail frame, he felt every little bump hard right up into his hips. He kept going until the trees thinned and there was a two-rut dirt road below him. He cut down onto it and followed it maybe a mile and then cut into more open prairie, then into a cedar stand. By then, the Red Hand were nowhere to be seen or heard. He moved through the switchgrass until he found a gravel road that he guessed might swing back around and bring him within sight of the highway, but several miles back before he ran into the ambush. He kept going but saw no highway.

Finally, he rolled the hardtail into a stand of withered juniper and killed the engine. It was quiet. Real quiet. He tried to raise Apache Dan on the walkie-talkie but all he got was dead air. He hoped they were hid good and tight.

That’s all he cared about.

Because for right now, he himself was hopelessly lost.

Maybe an hour later, Slaughter came out of cover onto some pavement and overhead, there were dozens of buzzards circling. There was death nearby and the birds knew it. And to draw them in such numbers it must have been real thick, real good, and real meaty, none of which remotely concerned Slaughter because what was death in the big bad new world as envisioned by the Outbreak? Death was just death. It held little significance in the greater scheme of things. The living envied the dead, as it was said.

He followed the pavement as it moved through the countryside, knowing it was a secondary road and not the I, but hoping the two would meet up. He cracked open the throttle, kept an eye on the buzzards overhead, and eased his hog on down the road. Death was on his mind like it had been for so long now.

He thought about Black Hat.

He thought about the Hag.

And the more he thought about the both of them the more he thought he was probably fucking crazy.

But as he rode on, thinking death and such, that poem by Poe he’d memorized in the eighth grade kept bouncing around in his skull like a catchy tune you just can’t rid yourself of:

Yeah, that was it. That was the meat of the thing and he knew it: puppets. Puppets that come and go to the bidding of vast and formless things. It made all the sense in the world to him because it seemed that day by day it was all some crazy stage he was playing on and something above was manipulating his strings. And whoever or whatever that might have been must have been one real sadistic motherfucker with an absolutely cruel sense of humor.

He drove on.

The road wound down into a little grassy glen and then came up through a sparse thicket and under a train bridge, right outside a little town called Victoria. Set out at the crossroads was another of those freaky little altars.

This time he was in no hurry, so he stopped.

He parked his scoot and hopped off, looking around carefully and strapping on the Combat Mag in case the shit started flying. The town was just before him and he could tell it was a dead place. The buzzards were circling directly overhead and he knew that there was death, recent death, in its streets. The wind was slight, warm, and dry. It smelled like hay and corn husks. When it shifted direction, it brought the stink of the town out to him: a hot, maggoty odor of decomposition.

But the altar…

Like the other one he’d passed, there were bones scattered all around it. Some were human—femurs and ulnas, a couple of ribcages, a few jawless skulls—but most were animal bones. Big, staff-like leg bones that must have belonged to antelope and heavy trains of vertebrae and rib baskets that were probably from buffalo or cow. Above them, nailed to a crude wooden cross was another scarecrow… except, as Slaughter looked closer, he saw it was a weathered, wind-dried corpse, a brown-skinned mummy with jutting bones who’d been slit open, emptied, then stuffed with things and stitched back up. The suturing looked like it had been done with shoelaces, and was haphazard at best. The corpse was bursting open, spilling an eclectic and bizarre collection of items: feathers and dried sacks of weeds, tiny bones braided together with sinew and little blackened things that looked like mummified rodents and reptiles.

Somebody had splashed yellow paint on the framework in the form of symbols that were long and slender, triangular and wedge-shaped, oddly cuneiform like ancient Sumerian glyphs. Slaughter had seen them in books when he was in-stir.

And that was not only weird, but frightening to see out here on the dirty backside of North Dakota. It made him think about things he did not want to think about at all.

He hopped back on the hardtail and rolled down the road to Victoria and the closer he got, the more that stench of death came out at him in a thick, cloying mist of putrefaction. He was going to see something here that he would be better off not seeing and he knew it, yet, despite his feelings to the contrary, he rode on in. At first glance, Victoria was just like any other little ghost town: dusty windows, overgrown yards, fallen tree limbs and rusting cars at the curbs. Same old, same old.

Then it changed.

Radically.

There was a wide open sort of grassy field dead center of the town that might have been called a village green in another day and age. There was a monument there, probably to war dead. An old cannon, a few peeling benches, a weed-choked fountain. And… corpses.

This is what made him bring the scoot to a stop.

The green was set with wooden poles upon which were mounted what appeared to be hundreds of corpses. And not old withered things, but fresh cadavers bloating with charnel gases, distended and rubbery with decay, eyes pecked out by birds, faces boiling with worms, throats bearded with corpse flies. Many of those faces, if not all, were contorted and disfigured, mouths yawning wide as if they had died screaming in considerable agony. And Slaughter did not doubt that. For the poles they were set upon were dark with blood and drainage and he had no doubt that these men, women, children had been speared on the poles eight feet in the air while they were still alive. That the poles were sharpened to lethal points there was no doubt, for several corpses had gone soft to the point where they became mucid and mushy, sliding down the shafts until the points jutted from their throats like snapped vertebrae.

Though the stink was black and rotten and nauseating, the air thick and moist with it, he stood there and stared, feeling the necessity to take it all in, to absorb it, to catalog and shelve it for future nightmares and long afternoons of yellow despair. For he would see this always. He would smell it and feel it and know it and remember it and forever it would rot inside of him, turning his core black with hate for the architect of this particular episode of massacre.

He realized at this point that he was not standing still at all, that he was tottering from one foot to the other like maybe that invasive and purely revolting corpse-gas had made him weak in the knee and funny in the head the way miners got once upon a time in the deep shafts when the air below thinned to a seam of poison.

None of these were zombies, he thought then. If they were, they’d still be kicking. These were living people. Citizens. Innocent people who probably banded together here in Victoria for protection… only something got to them. Maybe the wormboys but probably something far worse. It got to them, sharpened up these stakes, then took them out here, one by one, and speared them through the crotches, probably tittering with cold, black laughter as they screamed and bled and writhed.

The idea of it almost put Slaughter to his knees.

This was a badness, an atrocity, far beyond the living dead. And the most awful part of it was that he could still feel it in the air, the pain and horror and absolute terror of what had happened. The atmosphere was rank with suffering, soured by depravity.

But what did it mean?

Because, honestly, it had to mean something. Maybe he was worn out (he was) and maybe his mind wasn’t exactly riding smoothly along its rails these days (it wasn’t), but he was seeing a pattern. Old Black Hat was behind it or involved in it right to the core, as was the Hag. It was all part of something that made the wormboys themselves seem almost pedestrian in comparison.

But what?

Oh, don’t be so stupid, Johnny. You know. You thought it the moment you saw it. Now just unlock your jaw and say it aloud.

So he did. Standing there with a burning cigarette in his trembling fingers, he gave it voice and spoke it unto the wind: “Sacrifice.”

Because, yes, that’s what this was and the only thing it could really, truly, possibly be. These people weren’t killed out of anything as mundane as human sadism or even for food. They were murdered to appease something. Expiation. Burnt fucking offerings laid at the thorny feet of some nameless, pagan, malefic god of graveyards, gallows, and body pits.

That’s what this was.

Blowing smoke out through his nostrils and nearly swooning with the smell of carrion, he kept staring at those violated bodies, perhaps seeking truths or secrets in their insect-ravaged faces. Buzzards were walking around, spreading their darkened wings, tearing at bits of flesh that had sloughed off the corpses, their scaly heads glistening with corpse-slime and grave-waste. Crows were cawing, perched on shoulders, picking away at holes in faces, digging untouched eyeballs from hollow-vaulted sockets.

It was too much.

Slaughter turned away… or tried to. But the best he could manage was a slow-shuffling backward gait.

He found he could not think clearly any longer.

Forcing himself to stand still so he did not fall down, making himself drag cool and easy off the cigarette in his fingers, he felt the sun above, felt it burning on the back of his neck and tossing his own shadow at his feet as the innumerable dead things about him continued to swell and green and cry tears of subterranean slime. He felt at that moment, as he listened to the buzz of flies and the popping mucid sounds the corpses made, that he had never been quite so exhausted in his life.

That’s when he heard someone humming.

Humming.

It was insane, but he heard it. It filled him with a strange, dreamlike sense of terror. He dropped his cigarette, which tasted like death anyway, and pulled the Combat Mag.

Humming? No, they were singing.

And Slaughter could hear the song very clearly. A childhood ditty he had long forgotten about:

He looked across the host of impaled corpses but it wasn’t them, of course. It was coming from the other side. He moved around the edge of the green, beneath the shadows of the impaled and saw a naked man crouching there. An old man who looked much like a living corpse himself. He was on his knees, facing Slaughter, swaying his head from side to side as he sang his dirge:

Slaughter went over to him cautiously.

The old man looked at him. He had no eyes. The skin had been peeled from his face and there was only a red-crusted deathmask there now. Though he had no eyes with which to see, he looked right at Slaughter and sang,

A madman. Some crazy old coot who had been tortured yet had escaped the fate of the others. Slaughter stood over him wondering if he was too far gone.

The old man stopped singing and said, “You, oh it’s you. I knew you’d be coming and I waited for it because my last hour was growing long and he said there would be no death for me. Not until you came.”

Slaughter had a lot of questions, but all he said was, “What in the hell happened here? Who did this to you?”

The old man laughed uncontrollably and it was a hideous sight with no skin and no lips… just that peeled anatomy, the yellow teeth jutting from the gums. When he stopped laughing he started singing again:

“Stop it,” Slaughter told him. He’d had enough and he wasn’t in the mood for any grade school graveyard poetry. He was barely holding himself together by that point and he intended on having answers one way or another. The old man had been badly used and was out of his head from it, but that didn’t mean he would go easy on him if it came to that.

Because right about then all that fear and weird terror had built up in him and broke open like a boil and he was feeling dirt mean. He was feeling capable of just about anything if he didn’t get what he wanted.

“I’m going to ask you again: What happened here and who in the fuck did this?” he said.

The muscles of the old man’s face hitched up into something like a grin. “He came in the dead of night,” the old man said. “There was a hot wind blowing, the hot plague wind of the Hellmouth blowing strong. And I knew. I knew he would be coming. I think we all knew he would be coming. He was dressed in black. All in black, you see? Death must be dressed in black. He looked like a preacher with them duds and that wide-brimmed black hat. He carried no bible, stranger, only the Book of Hell in one hand and a branding iron in the other. He wore black boots that clumped along as he walked. You should have seen his face… white as marble, scarred and pitted and flaking, them eyes like pink frog spawn, staring, never blinking, just staring and showing you things and making you think things that you wanted to forget. He said we were named in his book, every last one of us and that’s when everyone went on the stakes. I hid. I didn’t see it. But I heard ‘em screaming, oh yes, I heard the screaming of the dying and those that wished they were dead. But I was a coward and I hid and then he sought me out and did this to me, told me I would not know death… not until a stranger came and you are that stranger and, praise glory, I go to the good earth now and the mercy of my God…”

“Who?” Slaughter heard himself ask. “Who was this man?”

But the old man just shook his head as if he dared not say. “He was Death. He was Death. He showed me the death-in-life. He had holes in his face and he pulled worms out of them holes. Crawling worms. He pulled one out and dropped it on a corpse and the worm crawled in and the corpse was alive. That was my choice. I was to be like them, the dead that walk… or I could wait for you. I made my choice.”

“Who was he?”

“Him.”

“Tell me.”

The old man began humming and Slaughter realized it was some sort of Sunday school hymn he’d probably learned as a child. He was crazy. His mind had been laid bare… yet, Slaughter knew that what he was saying was essentially true. It was Black Hat. It could be no other.

“His name,” Slaughter said. “Tell me.”

“I asked him… I sure did… I asked him…”

“And?”

The old man began to shake. “He smiled at me and black blood came from his mouth in gouts. And he said… he said… ‘Nemesis… I am Nemesis.’ That’s what he said and I knew him by other names as you shall know him…”

Then the old man fell over, going face-first into the grass. He shuddered and died. Slaughter stared down at him, hearing the carrion birds feeding and cawing and hissing. The old man said Nemesis carried a branding iron and there could be no doubt of that because he had used it on him. For burned into the old man’s back was:

It made no sense.

It covered nearly his entire back and was seared black to a depth of half an inch into the flesh there. Some kind of stylized word and accompanying symbol that looked cabalistic and mystical and made Slaughter tremble. He told himself it made no sense and yet it made all the sense in the world if he could only figure out what it all meant. The altar. The sacrifice of the people of Victoria. Black Hat who carried a branding iron and the Book of Hell (as the old man called it). Black Hat who called himself Nemesis who, Slaughter knew, had been a Greek goddess of revenge and divine retribution but was sometimes referred to as the Christian devil himself.

Was that what this was about?

The Devil?

The fucking Devil?

Slaughter could not be sure. It seemed both a possibility and a complete absurdity. Too simple. Too pat. Maybe Black Hat was not the devil, but if he wasn’t then he was surely something like that.

“All right,” Slaughter heard his own voice say. “Enough. Now get on out.”

He jumped on the hardtail and blew on out of Victoria until he was eating pavement again and the wind was fresh and the sun was warm and that awful fetid stink was blown off him and the defiled atmosphere of the town was out of his head.