The Cutthroat Cannibals

by Craig Sargent

  The plan had worked perfectly. The Three were trapped as the tidal wave of fire, leaping up six, seven feet in the air, swept toward them. They backed up howling with terror right to the edge of the mountain wall, and then tried to climb up the side. But it was too steep, their paws only clicking against the rock with loud scratchings like fingernails dragged across a chalkboard. The wind suddenly gusted and the flames moved right to the dogs like a tsunami of yellow death. The animals screamed out with sirenlike shrieks as their pelts caught on fire.

  The Labrador with its full mat of hair went up like a gas tank, just blazing all of a sudden as it shook violently. The Doberman and the Pit Bull followed close behind. Suddenly both of them were flaming as well, the tails first, then the ears, then the whole bodies, burning, burning bright like an Ntani in the night. They joined together in one deafening death howl audible to other creatures miles off, making them scurry back to shelter in their nests and burrows.

  Then it was over. Fire is as quick as it is painful. The Three were still upright, their burning carcasses standing where they died, skeletons now visible as the outer layers burned to charcoal and then exploded into hundreds of blowing sparks that filled the stiff wind.

  Stone didn’t have time for self-congratulations, for he heard a sound and looked up to see the whole fucking invasion force of mutts, all of them barking and snarling up a storm like the goddamn canine cavalry coming to the rescue. But it wasn’t his rescue.

  “Come on, dog, we’re taking another bath. And to tell you the truth I don’t particularly care if I drown this time,” Stone said with disgust as he dragged himself to the river’s edge and started wading in like an old man setting his toe into the tub to make sure it’s not too hot. The pit bull stood on the bank for a few seconds looking at the advancing ranks now only fifty yards away and coming in hard. He thought about how many he could take out, and decided not all that many. The dog too jumped straight into the river as if it was practicing bellyflops for an upcoming contest.

  Within seconds they were both moving out toward the center of the river. The dogs saw their flaming masters and raced along the shore, howling out their anger and fear. What would they do, what would they be without the Three? The Trio had ruled them for years now. Many of the pack had known only their leadership. Already some of the dogs that had stopped in their tracks were eyeing each other, wondering what the hell to do next. Fights started breaking out all along the shore as the glue that had held the pack together began dissolving.

  But Stone had other things on his mind than the contractual dissolution of a pack of dogs. For as the river whipped them forward with increasing velocity, he swore he heard a sound like a jet engine ahead of them. Stone wondered if somehow someone could have gotten hold of one, though it was hard to believe that there were even runways to handle a plane like that anymore, or men still left alive who knew how to pilot them. But as the river suddenly whipped him and the dog, floating about twenty feet away, around a bend, Stone saw that it wasn’t a jet at all. Ahead was a great curtain of steam and mist rising up high into the sky hundreds of feet. And the roar wasn’t coming from above but from below.

  It was a waterfall—one of the biggest Stone had ever seen—that just seemed to drop forever as if they had come to the very end of the earth and below were the mist-shrouded lands of another world. A great dark arching rainbow a good mile long curved over the dropoff. It damn sure was a beautiful sight. If you were a newlywed, that is. But if you were Martin Stone and traveling pit bull, it was just about the most horrible thing you had ever seen in your lives. Especially since the two of them were heading right toward the falls.

  CHAPTER

  Nineteen

  IT was as if Stone were looking down over the edge of the world, into the fountains of the origins of life. They roared and pounded below him like a thousand dragons breathing foam and uttering screams that pealed across the sky. There was a vast lake below into which the falls emptied, and Stone could see as he looked down that the smashing blast of water churning up the lake for several hundred feet looked as if it could grind metal into scraps. There was no way, no way on this merciless planet that he was going to survive.

  As he got to within about thirty feet of the lip of the falls, Stone felt the river speed up with a sharp pull. He could feel his head snap back as his body was caught in the inescapable grasp of the final drainlike currents. And then he was out there, shot out into space so that for a few seconds it seemed as if he might fly, just hanging up there with the lake below and the falls all around him, the dark clouds rubbing across the sky as if trying to steal the patina of the stars.

  Then he wasn’t flying at all but shooting straight down like a piano dropped from a twelve-story building. He felt remarkably calm as he descended, even turning his head around to see if he could spot the dog. He couldn’t. Then he was hurtling into the foaming waters boiling below like a thousand lobsters cooking. He hit hard, not quite aimed at the right angle, so that his chest and broken leg took most of the blow, creating a huge splash that rose for a fraction of a second above the ten-foot-high wall of foam and bubbles everywhere.

  Stone felt himself churned around in the crushing floor of the falls like something being whipped into butter. There was no way he could even begin to control his direction. He was ripped every which way, bobbing around like a bottle. Stone had no idea which way was up, or for that matter quite who or where he was, as the shock of the fall had knocked half his brain cells into silly putty. He dimly knew that he should be getting some air about now or it was all over. Some air, some air. He really did need the stuff, you know. But when he opened his eyes all there was was water. As if the whole fucking world was made of it. And then, though he knew he really shouldn’t, Stone opened his mouth and sucked in hard, just hoping that somewhere in all that water there might be a bubble or two of oxygen for him. And even as the water rushed into his lungs to fill the vacuum created, Stone knew that after all the murderous bastards he had faced and taken out, he was about to be done in by a few quarts of water.

  When Stone awoke he was looking into the face of a hideously fat and ugly angel. He knew it was an angel because he had to be dead after his descent to the bottom of the falls, and because the face was completely white and pure, dressed in white, with white hair and white skin, white lips. But he had always believed angels to be beautiful, and this one was something that would make the creature from the black lagoon have stomach problems. The skin was all bloated, dripping with oozing sores and boils everywhere. The eyes were red pinpricks that seemed suited more to a rodent than a man or an angel. And the teeth, the rotted black stumps that filled the blubbery lips, looked as if they had all been pulled out, ground up, and glued back in again at any old angle, because they sure didn’t fit right.

  Even as Stone, in his dim-witted state of consciousness, tried to figure out just how God could make something so mismatched, so repulsive, he swore he was seeing double. For suddenly appearing right next to the first was a second virtually identical face. And its lips were moving.

  “Time to wake up. Time to wake up.” Stone knew he was in heaven now because that was exactly how his mother had always awakened him in the bunker. Was this what his mother had turned into in heaven? Then he wasn’t in heaven, he was in hell. And as his head cleared slightly and Stone managed to push himself up to a sitting position he realized that he was in a much worse place than hell. He was on earth.

  And he was looking at two of the most repugnant specimens of humanity that had ever popped out of a womb. As his vision cleared Stone saw that there were two of them, two obese monsters, with not radiant satin-white skin but rotting, pockmocked albino flesh. They were total albinos, white like chalk, like long-rotted meat, like the larval mucous shells of maggots. And they were fat. Jesus Christ, had these two packed it in. They looked like hardly more than heads atop great round snowballs covered in the filthy, bloodstained clothes that draped over them. The men must have weighed someth
ing approaching a half ton between them. And Stone swore, as his eyes seemed to come back into total focus, that they were identical twins. They both had the same ratlike features, the red junkie eyes like blood on the tip of a needle, flaccid cheeks hanging down around their faces like the jowls of a diseased rooster. No necks at all, just those shapeless lumps atop much larger shapeless masses.

  They smelled too: bad. For the mouths laughed—or something that was supposed to be laughter—and the smell that emerged from both pairs of lips reminded Stone of something horrible. But even as he reached for the memory in his mind, one of the foul mouths spoke up.

  “You don’t look like an Indian.” The lips hardly moved, as if the white blob of a face had a hard time exerting the energy to work them.

  “I’m not a fucking Indian,” Stone cursed, the question making him angry for some reason. Suddenly one of the albinos reached out with a fat arm, fingers as white as a servant’s gloves, and, grabbing a piece of flesh around Stone’s upper arm, pinched hard. Stone pulled back, slapping the hand away.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “Keep your fucking hands off me. I may be down, but I can still cause plenty of damage.”

  “Just testing for your fat content,” the albino mouth answered in reply. “Not too good—your fat-to-muscle ratio is very low, just like the damned Indians.”

  “Listen, I don’t know what the hell you fellows are talking about,” Stone said, trying to sound a little more friendly, “but whatever it is—and I thank you for saving me, if you did—really I’ve got to be on my way.” He tried to rise again, wanting to get the hell out of there as fast as he could and find the damn dog, if the creature had survived the fall. But everything just didn’t seem to be working the way he wanted it to. It was as if his nerves were short-circuiting from the near drowning, and his legs suddenly collapsed under him when he was only halfway up. Stone fell back onto the ground thrashing in futile anger.

  “He’s got a lot of life and that’s good,” one of the albinos said. Stone had trouble telling them apart except for the fact that one’s voice was about an octave higher than the other’s. “Makes the meat sharper tasting, perhaps will add the spice that the lack of fat will mean.”

  “No, no, I don’t think so at all,” the other answered, sounding quite depressed, as if he’d been disappointed yet again. “He’ll just be like leather. I know it. Nothing to sink your teeth into, just a lot of chewing, and spitting out half of him.”

  Stone didn’t like what he was hearing, to say the least. He hardly allowed himself to believe what the words implied. Surely they were playing with him. This was all some kind of sadistic game. He found himself a little less dizzy after collapsing on his side and raised his head up again, this time keeping his body flat on the ground, like a baby taking its first crawl. And he didn’t like what he saw. For there were a lot more of them than he thought. There must have been a good dozen of them standing around in a rough semicircle. They were equally foul-looking and clothed in tatters, almost subhuman appearing with dumb, scarred faces. Drool dribbled from their open mouths as the hairy faces just stared like cows. The obese twins who had been addressing him were, Stone saw, sitting in large metal wheelbarrows side by side, which were being held and balanced in back by two men holding onto each handle, the handles reinforced and extended with metal L-braces to support the elephants inside the barrows. The cavemen types who had been pushing the albino brothers were still wiping the sweat from their foreheads though they had put the two down many minutes before.

  “What the hell is going on?” Stone asked angrily. He didn’t like being toyed with, like a mouse by a cat. “Who are you two bastards?”

  “The second question first,” the one on the right replied, his thick legs draped over the front of the wheelbarrow like huge loads of thick white dough about to be baked. “We are the Hungry and these are our people.” He waved his hand around to include the whole motley crew, all of them so pimple ridden that Stone wished he could have had the Clearasil franchise for the area. “We are so named because, as you can see”—he patted his huge stomach—“we are always hungry.”

  “I am Top,” the other one spoke up, “because I like the meats from the top, you know—brains, the heart, the lungs, and of course, the eyeballs.”

  “And I am Bottom,” the other rotted egg spoke up with his higher-pitched voice from the other wheelbarrow, arms resting on the sides like overstuffed pillows. “Because I prefer those meats from the lower portion of the animal.”

  “And as to what is going on,” Top said with a laugh, so Stone’s eyes shot to the closer of the albino brothers, the edge of his wheelbarrow only inches from Stone’s face, “it’s really quite simple. We’re going to eat you as we do all those who fall into the river, Indians mostly. And as my brother says, they’re not very tasty. But you, we’ll see. With a few spices, some oregano, some bat feces to bring out your natural flavorings, I think I can do wonders.” He smiled at Stone as if the future roast should be equally happy about his gastronomical fate.

  “Listen, you fucking slime,” Stone screamed out, filled with an uncontrollable rage at hearing all this talk of cooking and flavoring. He tried to rise again, ready to strike out any way he could at the bastards. But even as he grabbed hold of the edge of the closest wheelbarrow and, pulling himself up, began trying to pound the face of one of the albino cannibals, the army of subhumans closed in from all sides. Baseball bats, shovels, lead pipes all swung out of the mist-splattered haze, the roar of the falls like a thunderous drum behind them. It wasn’t exactly the most aesthetic of attacks. But then when it comes to bashing in someone’s head it doesn’t take a lot of finesse.

  The last words Stone heard before he felt something smack into the side of his head and his brain going back and forth like one of the bells at Notre Dame was, “Watch out, you assholes, don’t bruise his flesh.” Then he was a bloody Peter Pan flying mad circles in Never-Never Land.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty

  WHEN Stone came to, he was bouncing up and down, his hands and feet tied tightly, inside a wheelbarrow. How nice of the cannibals, Stone thought absurdly as he came out of his throbbing black pit of a brain, to give him a ride. He was in the center of the marching band of squat and muscular maneaters, all walking along like the fucking seven dwarfs. Only they had already eaten Snow White and they were hungry for more. Ahead of them he could see the two brothers in their own souped-up wheelbarrows being pushed along by grunting teams of underlings. They were arguing, though he couldn’t quite make out the words, about just who was going to get what and just how he should be cooked, neither of which was very soothing to Stone’s ears. Maybe the damned dog had been better going out the fast way in the falls than having to go through what Stone was about to endure: being eaten. The animal had been too proud in life to have been able to stand that. Its heart would have broken, and hurt even more than the pierced flesh. And suddenly Stone found a small and dark happiness in the fact that the animal would not have to endure this.

  When they reached the edge of the albino brothers’ camp Stone wished that he had perished in the falls too. For the sight was as sickening as the most nauseating photographs he had seen of the Nazi Holocaust. Bodies were everywhere in all stages of rot and decay. Bones littered the ground from the moment they came into the square the size of a city block that the slime bastards had cleared and called home. The place looked like the garbage dump for a slaughterhouse. Only these bones were all human, the skulls those of homo sapiens, with twisted grins of terror set forever on their ivory faces. Half-eaten slabs of dessicated meat lay stacked in piles as if for later snacking, while arms with hands still on them were hanging in a line from a pole, drying out in the little bit of sun that peeked down through the charcoal gray clouds. The albinos had discovered that they didn’t even need to tie the arms up, just to curl the fingers around and the rigor mortis held the things in place as if they were holding on to the straps on a
subway train.

  As the caravan of albinos, caveman dwarfs, and Martin Stone passed deeper into the camp, Stone saw the rest of the “tribe” walk out from their hovels to inspect the newest catch of the day. They walked stooped over, with animallike expressions on their faces. Spittle hung from many mouths as they jumped up and down hungrily. The inhabitants of this quaint little cannibal town looked as if they belonged back in Cro-Magnon days rather than in twentieth-century America. They hardly looked human.

  As some got too close and reached out toward the wheelbarrow Stone was riding in, the brothers Albino let loose with snaps from long horsewhips that they pulled from within their foul flesh-coated robes. The half-humans snarled and pulled back, loping along, their hands almost touching the ground. What a fucking place, Stone thought, shaking his head back and forth in disbelief. The depths to which the human race could sink never ceased to amaze him.

  Then he saw that it was even worse than that. For as the half-humans ran from the whips of their masters, Stone squinted through his swollen eyes and saw that the round structures he had at first taken to be some kind of tents were in fact just that, except their coverings, which consisted of twenty-foot strips attached over branch frames, were made of human flesh. It was obvious because the builders of the wretched structures had left the hands, fingers, knees, and feet all pressed into the dark, taut material. Everything was still there like a rich man’s bear rug in front of the fireplace with head, tail, paws all intact. Just the flesh within, all the muscles, bones, and slime, had been removed, then the quarter inch or so of actual flesh was dried out in the sun until it achieved a leathery but somewhat flexible hardness that was perfect for all-purpose weather protection. When stretched tightly around their frames the human skin structures kept out rain, wind, snow, sun. Stone saw as they passed close by one that the dwellings weren’t exactly sewn together by master craftsmen but more thrown together any which way with thread made from the dead humans’ own intestines. They were like immense purple-tinted canvases of the dead, creations of a macabre colony of artists with a bent for the darkest visions of the human soul.