Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Slaughter waited for it to begin because it was only minutes away now and he knew it. He could feel the excitement—and dread—coming right up from the balls of his feet as he waited in the darkness on Moondog’s Boss Hoss 375 Horse. It was like energy was funneling up from deep inside the earth and his feet on the ground were plugged right into it.

Moondog was in the bus and it was starting to roll.

Slaughter and the others waited on their bikes. They carried the arsenal Brightman had supplied them with: 12-gauge pistol-gripped Mossberg pump shotguns, white phosphorus grenades, and Hardballer .45s. Full auto weapons like the M-16 wouldn’t do much good against wormboys, you needed real punch for clean headshots.

Slaughter lit a cigarette, watching the bus picking up speed as it made for the gates. There were about twenty Cannibals out in front of the fortress gathered with their ratbikes and there would be twenty less of them once Moondog made contact. He had rigged a pressure switch to the cow-catcher on the front of the War Wagon that was wired to two-hundred pounds of C-4. When he got within fifty-feet of the fortress he would dive out the door.

Things were about to get loud.

The other Devil’s Disciples were waiting out at the end of the drive that led into the compound.

The War Wagon passed through the gates.

Moondog turned the headlights on.

The Disciples fired up their scoots and made ready.

It was only a matter of seconds now before the fireworks began. Every man was tense and exhilarated, pumped-up and ready to roll. And then they heard it—WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP-WHUMP! The War Wagon went up like a dying sun, shooting out a barrage of fire and clouds of rolling black smoke. The first two explosions were the C-4 loads going, the second two were the twin fuel tanks. And now the front of the fortress was a blazing firestorm. The Cannibal Corpse wormboys in front were either blasted into fragments or lit up like napalm. Even from their distance—two city blocks away—the Disciples felt the shock wave and the heat that followed it.

There was the diversion, time to ride into hell.

“THE SHIT IS ON!” Slaughter cried out and the Disciples rode in hell-for-leather, whooping and hollering, shouting their rebel yells.

As Slaughter opened the throttle and led the pack in, he could see wormboys staggering around on fire. Many more were on the ground in burning pieces.

Slaughter came firing through the gates and a dazed wormboy came out to meet him, his face like an open infected wound, his hair smoking. Slaughter roared right at him and gave him a round from the Mossberg that took his head right off. Apache Dan fired into a group of three or four, scattering them.

With the blazing remains of the War Wagon and the burning ratbikes of the Cannibals, it was like daylight in the front of the fortress. The blast had blown open the doors and taken a huge bite out of the concrete wall. Inside, the flames were spreading as more wormboys stumbled out, patting themselves wildly to put out the fires that licked at them.

What worried Slaughter at that moment was that he did not see Moondog anywhere. He should have been in the grass, coming out to meet them. But he was nowhere and that gave Slaughter a very bad feeling.

But there was no time.

He led the pack around the side of the fortress and as they roared out of its moonlit shadow they saw the rising rock wall and the mouth of the immense cave hewn into it. There was no missing it. A paved road led from the fortress to the cave and it was lit on either side by smoldering torches that threw a shifting, dirty orange illumination.

But the stink.

That godawful stink.

Slaughter knew by then what he was going to see even before he saw it: corpses. Just like in Victoria, dozens of people had been impaled on sharpened stakes driven into the ground and lit on fire. They burned with a constant guttering like corpsefat candles and he figured they had been soaked in oil or something similar so they would burn on and on.

It was a ghoulish ride down that road with the human torches blazing and blackened and stinking to either side. When they reached the mouth of the cave, they ditched their bikes and went in.

It was immense inside and lit by more human torches.

In the silence they could hear them sputtering and sizzling, dripping globs of hot fat. The floor of the cave was dirt and it was littered with gnawed bones, bits of flesh and tissue, maggoty heads, and great splotches of blood. It was a dining hall for the Cannibals and what made it even worse was that to either wall, prisoners were shackled together like slaves. There were dozens of them and they were all terrified or completely out of their minds. Some called out to the Disciples but many more just stared off into space. They were citizens, Slaughter saw, many innocents and many more members of the Red Hand.

And they were made to watch as the wormboys had their nightly feast, knowing that each day more of them would be slaughtered for food.

All the Disciples wanted to go to them but they had other concerns right then: a group of Cannibals were feeding on the remains of a woman. Such was their gluttony and the need to fill those empty spaces below that they paid no attention whatsoever that their hated rivals had appeared.

Jumbo made to open up on them but Slaughter held up his hand.

Not yet.

This was too easy.

The wormboys were wearing their colors, which by that point were saturated with corpse goo and cemetery slime, stained by dozens of ghoulish feasts, feathered with rot and mildew. One of the Cannibals, gore dripping from his cankerous mouth, looked over at the Disciples, watching them with fish-white eyes as he chewed ravenously.

He made a grunting noise, but that was about it.

The others were even less interested than he.

The hunger of the worms that inhabited them was such that simple survival mechanisms of defense and attack were overridden in the need to shove meat into their mouths. They were fixated on the corpse of the woman who not too long ago, Slaughter guessed, had been shackled to the walls with the others. They tore at her, snapped at each other, pulling limbs free and yanking at what they found inside her open belly.

The Devil’s Disciples waited no more.

They opened up and dropped all four Cannibals into the gore of their meal.

“Watch out!” someone yelled.

And that’s when Slaughter saw the others coming at them. Not three or four, but fifteen or twenty Cannibals carrying chains and hatchets and skinning knives.

The wormboys burst out of the darkness at the rear of the cave, and if their dead compatriots had no longer felt the hate for the rival club, they certainly did, and they planned on doing something about it.

Slaughter watched them come on, letting them get within killing range of the shotguns, his brother Disciples at his side, spaced evenly as they did when taking on a rival gang.

Slaughter, at that moment, felt more alive than he had in days, if not weeks. Because when you were a 1%er this is what it was about. Nothing like a good turf battle or blood war to remind you what it was to be alive again… even if your adversaries weren’t strictly human or strictly even living things as such.

“Grenade?” Apache Dan said.

But Slaughter shook his head. “Not with all these people in here. Can’t risk it.”

The dead came on.

The Devil’s Disciples faced them.

When they got in range, Slaughter and his boys opened up with their shotguns and within five seconds, eight of the Cannibals were down with heads blown to confetti. And then it got close in and personal, the way the Disciples liked it. They were outnumbered by the deathless horrors but that had never stopped them before and it did not stop them now. Ten wormboys converged on the five of them and they went at it, shooting when they could, using their guns as clubs, hitting and kicking, avoiding chains and hatchets, pulling knives and using them.

Slaughter had no time to watch out for his brothers because his own skin was in danger and he was fighting tooth and claw with his Gurkha knife, the shotgun tossed aside now. He ducked under a chain and took out the throat of a Cannibal Corpse with one swing and decapitated another with a second. A chain snapped against his back, throwing him forward into a pair of wormboys who tried to get a hold of him so they could use their teeth. But Slaughter was a greased eel, twisting and sliding, nearly boneless as he fought against them. The Cannibal Corpse with the chain swung it again and he dipped under it, the chain shattering the face of one of his tormentors.

Then the one with the chain took hold of him in a bear hug from behind, lifting him up in a squeezing killing embrace.

Slaughter allowed it.

He let the wormboy lift him into the air and when he did, Slaughter kicked the second zombie in the chest, flattening him, and brought the Kukri down in a savage arc, sinking it into the knee of the one that held him.

Then he was free, the wormboy hobbled, and he took his head off with one vicious and powerful swing of the blade.

He saw Shanks go down fighting in a crowd of five Cannibals and he ran in their direction, swinging the Kukri like a farmer scything wheat. The zombies fell like trees. He hacked, stabbed, pivoted, ducked, hacked and hacked again. Then something hit him in the face. Not hard enough to draw blood but with enough force to make him lose his footing and trip over the crawling remains he had just made.

Slaughter rolled through them.

He saw Shanks get up.

He saw him smile crookedly, blood spattered over his face and then a wormboy—one that was fast and surprisingly lithe—jumped through the fighting bodies and brought his hatchet down clean into the crown of Shanks’ head.

Shanks went down, still wearing the same goofy smile.

“MOTHERFUCKER!” Slaughter shouted and then a strength that was pure hate and pure adrenalin rippled through him like high voltage and he fought through the remains, finding his knees, then his feet, kicking and hacking, and going after the zombie that had put Shanks down.

Not a gang fight anymore.

Not just bloodsport.

Now it was personal.

He knocked a wormboy aside and the one with the hatchet whose face was mottled blue and black came to meet him. He swung the hatchet forehand and backhand, the strokes powerful and devastating. Slaughter barely got out of the way. But as he did, he swung the Gurkha knife and sliced nearly a pound of meat from the wormboy’s left forearm.

Being a zombie, the wound didn’t bother the Cannibal Corpse much. It was more of a surprise and a minor inconvenience than anything else.

He looked at his arm.

Then he looked at Slaughter.

He grinned and black bile poured from his mouth in a bubbly foam. He swung the hatchet. Slaughter swung the Kukri. The blades met in midair, clanging and throwing sparks. The impact stopped both man and zombie, made them stagger back a bit and reassess the prowess of their adversaries.

But if the wormboy Cannibal Corpse was hesitant to engage again, Slaughter was not. For in his mind he saw this walking carrion taking down Shanks, a brother Disciple, and that’s all it took. Letting out a war cry, he went right at the wormboy, slashing and cutting with a ferocity that made the zombie stumble back, but not before Slaughter took his hand off at the wrist and his other arm at the elbow. Then the wormboy stumbled about almost comically and Slaughter went at him again, a voice in his head saying, it’s only a flesh wound, and then he split the zombie’s face open and was splattered with his gore.

The zombie went down, his attendant worm sliding out of his bisected skull.

Three more Cannibals came at Slaughter with chains.

He dove away from them and brought up his Mossberg, blowing the head off one and wiping the face off another. The third swung his chain and it connected with Slaughter’s left arm in a blazing white-hot explosion of pain that dropped him and he lost the shotgun.

Maybe it would have been over then but Apache Dan, smeared with gore and crying out in the voices of his Shawnee ancestors, came bounding in and sank one of the Cannibal’s own bloodied hatchets into the head of the zombie, dropping him. Apache didn’t stop until that head was so much hamburger spread over the floor.

And that’s when the others scattered.

Slaughter pulled himself up, grabbing his Mossberg and his Gurkha knife.

Only three of the ten were left but they were moving off deeper into the cave as if summoned.

Shanks was dead, Jumbo and Apache Dan and Fish were badly battered but alive.

In the rear of the cave, more torches were lit, more human candles, and Slaughter knew without a doubt they hadn’t been lit by accident. It was an invitation. They wanted him and the other Disciples to follow them and this is exactly what they did even though the prisoners against the walls cried out for them not to go any further.

Drawn to the flickering torches, smelling the greasy vile stench of roasting human flesh, Slaughter led the Disciples deeper into the cave and what waited there.

Maybe he should have known it was a mistake.

Maybe he should have known it was some kind of trap.

And maybe he should have practiced some restraint and common sense. But he was too amped up by that point, mainlining death and hate, his belly a boiling mass of need for retribution. He wanted to kill every last Cannibal Corpse he could find until the trail of mutilated cadavers led him to the ones he wanted most of all: Reptile and Coffin.

I’ll go to my grave, I’ll crawl through the foulest fucking tracts of hell to get them, he thought. To sort them out proper and see their heads hanging in the wind where I’ll anoint them with my piss.

The flickering human torches were not in the same chamber. An archway—artificial like everything else in there—led into a sister chamber that was much smaller than the first and if they thought it smelled bad where they were, the stink in here was absolutely toxic. It was like greening meat shoved up their noses and corpse-worms slicked freshly with the drainage of dead men twisting on their tongues. It was so raw and savage and unbelievably violent it nearly put them to their knees.

Apache Dan and Fish stood there, trembling.

It was only Slaughter that stepped forward. This chamber was the real flesh farm, the other was more of a stockyard. This was where the stunning and cutting and rendering came down, this was the abattoir where human meat was processed. This was the corpse factory.

Fish, is what Slaughter thought as he got a good look. Like a fucking fish cannery.

Which was something he knew about because he’d worked at one long ago one summer. Except it wasn’t fish, of course, but humans. They were netted and brought here to be cleaned. Dozens of them were hanging from the ceiling by the feet, each of them ghastly white and thoroughly hollowed. Heads were speared on sharpened dowels and arranged in great racks upon the walls. Corpses, in whole, were pressed like witches beneath slabs of stone until their intestines burst from their asses and mouths. Most of it was old death, three or four days, a fine and putrescent vintage, slimy and rotten and falling apart, carpeted in ants and beetles and noodly pockets of worms. A great number of victims were held immobile by the throats in something like wooden stocks, the tops of their heads sawn off, the brains either missing or decayed to a soft gray pulp. Along one of the walls, hearts—at least thirty or forty of them—had been speared with knitting needles and driven into corkboards. Eyes were secreted into jars like kernels of corn for proper aging.

Children were skinned and heaped in red piles.

Women had been violated with pitchforks.

Men were strung by nooses of their own viscera.

It was all appalling, but what was even worse and nearly inconceivable to the sane mind were the vats of creamy oil that held living humans with mad staring eyes glazed like windows. They were huge, bloated, greasy with oil and lubricated with their own septic foulness, fattened calves that were soaked in seasoned brine like rare cuts of meat or exotic pickles, allowed to absorb the fatty excretions until they swelled up into soft, tasty shanks of delicate sweetmeat for the palettes of discerning ghouls.

Slaughter had to look away, for the insanity etched into those fly-specked faces was simply too much. But everywhere there was more and more and more until he was so utterly physically ill he had to cough out a tangle of bile, steadying himself by momentarily dropping his shotgun and placing one gore-speckled, shaking hand on a barrel. There were many barrels and all of them were packed with human organs and human meat, floating in sharp-smelling serums.

He grabbed up his shotgun, breathing in the dank rot and exhaling.

There were maybe seven or eight wormboys in there, but they were almost pedestrian compared to the thing that sat in an altar chair of knotted human bone high above all else, three prostrate and shivering boys kneeling at her feet. When Slaughter saw her, he knew who she was. This was the death-goddess, as he had called her, from Exodus. The one that had pointed at him and gotten inside his mind for those few brief moments before the Red Hand rolled in.

Here she was now, looking down at him.

She wore the fresh and bloody skins of slain children over veils of mold-specked spiderweb silk, scarves of human bowels lovingly wrapped around her throat. Over her head was the same tanned mask of the hag she had worn the last time. He could see her mouth, the puckered lips, the gloss-black fangs awaiting something to tear.

“How does thee fare, biker boy?”

It was a voice he knew. At first it was that of Black Hat, scraping and dry and worn like bones in a catacomb rubbing together, but gradually it became another voice and he tried to place it but his thoughts scurried madly in his skull. They could find neither common ground nor cohesion.

“Who are you?” he heard himself say.

“Who exactly, biker boy?”

She stood now and the veils parted so he could see, yet again, her porcelain-white belly with its black autopsy stitching running from pubis to breast, the symbolic signature of Leviathan burned deep into the flesh. Her vulva was engorged and teeming with parasites. Gouts of black menstrual blood dripped from between her thighs. He knew her voice, he knew it well. But all his mind could see was the death goddess, the consort of Leviathan, the zombie witch, the black Madonna who gave birth to children that she in turn fed upon and skinned. These were the stark and haunting images in his mind.

But he had to remember.

Remember.

And, yes, of course, then he knew. He saw himself in New Castle after those shit-eating cops had gunned down Neb and he himself had returned the favor with the MAC-10. Word had reached him that Neb’s old lady, Indiana, had dimed them, turned evidence on them to the police to avoid another drug-related conviction. For days Slaughter had hunted her, the only thing keeping him going was the all-pervading, all-filling, all-nourishing hatred and need for revenge. He tracked her like a stalking cat. He followed her to a bar. Sometime after midnight she came out with some drunken scooter tramp and Slaughter slipped out of the shadows.

The tramp said, “Wha—”

Slaughter punched him in the face and kneed him in the groin. When he went down in the gravel lot, Slaughter kicked him in the ribs and booted him in the head until his eyes rolled back white.

Then it was just him and Indiana.

Why she hadn’t run he didn’t know.

She waited there. In fact, she went down on her knees and begged him for mercy, that it wasn’t her or if it was then the cops had forced her to do it.

Slaughter took her by the hair and yanked her to her feet. His face inches from her own, he said, quite calmly, “You fucking skank. You fucking whore. You fucking grubbing dirty little cunt. Neb. They killed fucking Neb and you’re the rotten fucking cunt who put them onto him.”

She was crying and shaking, but all her little girl tears were wasted on Slaughter’s stony demeanor.

“Oh please, oh God… John, please, John, don’t kill me,” she whimpered. “Oh please, John, please please please…”

“Here’s your please,” he told her, the knife in his hand. “Here it is for you, you fucking cunt.”

He sank the blade to the hilt into her belly and she gasped at the violation of cold steel. Then, still holding her head by the hair so that her face was but inches from his own, he pulled the knife right up to her sternum, gutting the hog and dropping her, leaving her to die in her own pooling blood and bowels.

That’s what he had done to her, that fucking rat.

Indiana.

Indiana…

So now he knew. Indiana. Goddamn Indiana.

“You,” he said.

Her mask was stripped away and dispensed with now and he looked at her fissured corpse-face that was like the root of a dead tree. The boys before her stood—lambs to slaughter, offerings of meat—and she flayed them with her black thorny nails. Like scalpels, they sheared the skins of the boys free and then gutted them in turn, eviscerating them as Slaughter had once done to her. Before they dropped at her feet, those nimble white fingers pulled an offering from each of them: their still beating hearts. Then, each in turn, her lacquered black fangs bit into them, mouth spilling candy-red sauce, biting and ripping at them, engorging the pink-muscled masses nearly whole.

Sacrifice had been taken.

Slaughter vaguely heard Apache Dan and Fish call to him, but he was transfixed by the atrocity he witnessed, and maybe equally by Indiana’s bile-yellow eyes that swam with maggots, the scarab beetles that poured from the skullish cavern of her nose, and the bulimic gush of vomited human meat she spat at his feet.

Hissing like a serpent, she said, “I am become death, the devourer of worlds.”

The words of Lord Shiva, the Hindu death god, in the Bagavad Gita, Slaughter knew, but never had it been so appropriate, so fitting, and so very prophetic.

As she descended from her throne of human bone, Slaughter did not back away from her. No, he waited for her and maybe in some psychic realm of his mind he went to her as fast. His brain was rioting with conflicting emotions—rage, terror, disgust, and maybe even pity. For maybe it was another sparkling and impossibly lucid Zen moment, but he saw very clearly himself killing Indiana and knowing it was ugly and brutal and very wrong in the human sense of things, but resurrecting her like this as wormgirl incarnate, the Queen of the Dead, Dark Maiden of Destruction, Extermination, and Necrotic Dissolution, Mistress of Dank Tombs and Graveyard Rats… it was an atrocity and one, he knew, he had played a hand in.

As he raised the Mossberg, he wanted to shout, to cry out something melodramatically Hollywood like, Die you evil cunt or Back to hell where you belong but there were no words extant that could encompass what was in his brain so he simply opened up on her, blasting her into writhing fragments until the shotgun was empty. But as he reloaded and fired again, he saw something that he would never have believed. If the identity of the death goddess as Indiana was the first revelation then here was the second: although she was blown apart in fleshly corruption, she did not stay apart. As he killed her, she was reborn; as he unmade her, she was remade; as he atomized her remains she reparticulated.

She was deathless, eternal, immortal.

He killed her again and again. Each time she exploded into a storm of tissue, blood mist, and winging white deathshead moths only to be reanimated and remade in a fleshstorm of corpse ropes, blood trains, scab and suture, creeping beetle and squirming maggot, all coming together and pressing out another copy of her like hot plastic formed in a mold. And then she would be standing there with glaring yellow eyes of leprosy and a toothy grin of charnel delight, things dropping from her, things squirming in and out of her, fetal cemetery rats pushing from her flesh and sprouting greasy hair and rabid teeth and glaring red rodent eyes. Like her, they reformed and fleshed out.

Again, Slaughter destroyed her and again she became a steaming, smoking fleshshow of liquid polymer that sought and found the same form again and again.

But by then—and it had probably only been seconds since he’d killed her the first time—Fish and Apache Dan were with him and all three of them stood there like the Magnificent Seven minus four, blasting away at the death goddess until she fell apart and came back together in a whirling storm of graveyard waste. They put her down and she stood back up. They kept shooting until their weapons were hot and smoking in their fists and that’s when Fish totally lost control. Because it had been too much for him for a long time now. The spider-things in the mist had unhinged him as had the sporing mutants and now, his shotgun empty, he went into a blind, hating rage and charged the death goddess with his Mossberg held like a club.

He went at her, swinging.

Slaughter heard his own voice cry out in desperation.

But too late.

The death goddess had already accepted Fish as an offering.

In a whirlwind hallucinogenic eruption of writhing white limbs, she embraced him, pulling him into her and crushing him until his bones popped like bubble wrap and red mush spurted from his mouth and she chortled with obscene laughter, blowing out a hot sulfuric steam that was acrid and burning.

Apache Dan shouted and Slaughter hooked him by the arm and pulled him away, taking out a white phosphorus grenade from his ammo sack, pulling the pin, counting the seconds, and then tossing it at her. And as he did so, he threw himself and Apache into the dirt and there was a resounding explosion, an outpouring of heat and acrid smoke… and as they looked backward, the death goddess was caught in a hot-white blazing firestorm that spread out, lighting up the hanging bodies and seeking dry tinder at every quarter.

She screamed.

She laughed.

She sobbed.

She cried out at Slaughter the way she had the first time she died.

But in the end, she collapsed into herself, burning and popping, throwing out gouts of flame and greasy curls of black smoke as she was incinerated and cremated into drifting black ash.

They lobbed two more WP grenades into that slaughterhouse so all would burn, all would be cleansed by fire, and all would go to ash.

Then, coughing and gagging, they stumbled off into the other chamber.

Jumbo was waiting for them. He was carrying the corpse of Shanks who looked like some bloody, slit, and broken ragdoll. “Fish?” he said.

“He’s gone,” Apache Dan told him and said no more.

They brought Shanks outside and laid him in the grass. There was no service, nothing but thoughts and remembrance. There was time for little else. Then, heeding the cries of the prisoners, they moved methodically from one to the other cutting the leather thongs that bound their wrists. Most were on their feet immediately if somewhat unsteadily. Others never lost the glazed look in their eyes. They had to be pushed along by the healthier, saner ones towards the opening.

Slaughter kept asking them the same question again and again: “Which one of you is Katherine Isley?”

He got no responses and that only deepened his dread.

The three Disciples got the prisoners out of the cave and into the relatively fresh air of the night.

“Get out of here,” Slaughter told them. “Go back where you came from or grab a vehicle out front. But go! Just go!”

They need no further urging. They moved off into the night, all except for one young boy who said, “You’re looking for Kathy Isley?”

“Yes.”

He pointed towards the fortress looming in the night. “Colonel Krigg was keeping her in there.” Then the kid ran off.

Krigg was the leader of the Red Hand. Slaughter figured he was probably dead by now and maybe the bio, too, but he had to go look. Much as he hated to, he had to go into that fucking mausoleum.

“Jumbo,” he said as they climbed on their hogs. “Get out front. See if you can find Moondog. Get us an APC. Whatever you can find. When we come out, we’re going to be in a hurry.”

Jumbo fired up his Panhead and roared off into the night.

“You sure you wanna go in there with me?” Slaughter asked Apache Dan as they reloaded their pump shotguns.

He just laughed. “Quit with the stupid fucking questions, John.”

Together, side by side, they rode off towards the fortress.