by Tim Curran
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.
Chapter Ten
Who they were and what they wanted, he did not learn. When Slaughter woke up, he was in a hole. It took some time to come around and make sense of his surroundings because he kept slipping in and out of consciousness. They’d given him a good beating and everything hurt. Everything ached. But when his head finally cleared, he saw that he was indeed in a hole. A perfectly round shaft like a sewer with earthen walls and a rough woolen blanket beneath him. It smelled like piss and blood because he’d been pissing himself and bleeding, maybe pissing blood, too.
About eight feet up there was a grate. The whole thing looked like a pit they kept POWs in from one of those Chuck Norris movies where they free the MIAs in Vietnam or something. Crazy ass shit, but that was the reality of it.
He was in a pit.
Naked.
Bruised and bloodied.
Thirsty.
Hungry.
That first day and into the second he kept calling up to the soldiers he saw peeking through the grating but they ignored him. Only when he started calling their mothers names did he get a short, Fuck off! But that was it. At night it got cold and he shivered in his blanket. During the day the sun streamed down on him and he sweated. There were bugs, too. Black beetles that nipped. They kept him in the hole for a week. He lived in there. Pissed in there. Shit in there. Slept in his own waste like an animal. Twice a day they’d lower down food—a tin cup of water, some bread, a few scraps of meat—and on the third day, he grabbed the rope and nearly pulled the soldier down in there with him, which would have been fun, because he would have killed that fucking G.I. Joe, snapped his neck and gouged out his eyes, taken his weapon and blown away anyone that looked down into the pit. Of course, these were soldiers or cops or both, and they would have tossed tear gas down at him, or maybe a grenade.
Problem solved.
After that little play he got no food or water for two days. That’s when he stopped acting like a cunning animal and starting acting like a thinking man. If they had wanted him dead, he would be dead. That’s not what they wanted at all. This was psychological bullshit and he recognized it as such. They were pushing him to the limits of human endurance the way sadistic guards did with captured soldiers. They were trying to break him. They wanted him to beg for mercy.
That just showed how stupid they were, how they did not know him.
But it was a game and he would play. He honestly did not know if this was about those killings in New Castle, but he knew that in time they would show their hand. But he had to make them do it. And to do that he had to sit silent and take whatever they gave him but never, ever show weakness or beg for mercy.
Let them make the first overture.
Let them show their hand.
The longer he thought about it, the more it began to make sense to him. They had brought him here for a reason. It was not some accidental or coincidental thing where they just happened to grab him on a raid. They came down on him, rode herd on him, spent a lot of time and resources trying to bring him in. If he was just another thug, why waste the time? They would have killed him and left his corpse bleeding out in the sun.
No, they wanted something.
But they wanted to break him first.
On the fifth day, he knew that to be certain, for a voice called down to him, “Hey, Slaughter? You need anything?”
“No. I’m good.”
“Okay, smartass. You had you chance.”
In other words, you had your chance to beg. Okay. So if they spent all that time and manpower to bring in just one man—him—then that meant that not only did they want something, but time was probably a factor, too. He kept that in mind.
On the evening of the sixth day, the voice came again: “Slaughter? You cooperate and I can get you out of there.”
“That’s okay. I like it down here.”
Whoever that voice belonged to, they went away swearing under their breath. And as Slaughter lay there in his own waste, his skin paling, bug bites all over him, his ribs beginning to make themselves known, he started to realize that as miserable as he was—and oh Christ Jesus, was he ever fucking miserable—that the tables were starting to turn. That he was learning this psychological game and playing it against them…whoever them were.
Wait it out, man.
Just fucking wait it out.
They went to a lot of trouble, and each day this goes on is probably fouling them up. Let them get desperate. Real desperate. Because they will.
You’ll see.
Then on the seventh afternoon, the voice: “You wanna come out of there, Slaughter? You wanna come up and talk business? Take a shower? Get some clothes? Have some food?”
And in Slaughter’s own mind, a voice cried out from absolute broken desperation, Yes! Oh God, yes! Please, please, please let me out of here! But he did not give that voice vent. In fact, he said nothing. Nothing at all. He did not even move.
“Slaughter?”
No answer.
“Slaughter?”
Silence.
“Goddammit, Slaughter!” the voice shouted, and he could tell by the tone that it was used to shouting and used to getting answered when it did so. “Slaughter? Sonofabitch.” The owner stomped away and started bitching at one of the soldiers. “Has he been like that all day?”
“He’s always like that, sir.”
“He hasn’t spoken?”
“He never speaks, sir.”
“Shit. All right. Get his ass out of there.”
“Now, sir?”
“No, a week from fucking Tuesday, you meathead. Yes, now.”
And that’s what they did. They lowered a sling and Slaughter just laid there like he was too sick to move because that was his latest trump card. A couple of lowly privates climbed down into that filthy shit-stinking hole and lifted him onto the sling, bitching and complaining the entire time. When he was brought up, they had medics with a stretcher waiting. He wanted to scream for joy at being out in the world again. He saw that he was in some sort of military compound, Quonset huts and drab gray buildings, lots of jarheads scurrying about.
“Slaughter?”
The voice belonged to some round little man in khakis who did not look military at all. More like a CEO with his white coiffed hair and shiny pink cheeks: overfed and overpaid.
“I could use a shower,” Slaughter said.
He took two showers as a matter of fact. The medics gave him cream for the insect bites, then they put him in a room with a bed. They gave him fatigues to wear, fried chicken and potatoes to eat, an apple crumb for dessert, and ice cold water to drink. When he was done with that he ordered two cheeseburgers and a chocolate shake. He wanted to keep eating but he’d figured he’d burst so he took a nap.
When he woke up, his clothes were waiting for him: clean, freshly folded. His black jeans, scuffed motorcycle boots, and even his rags, his colors. He pulled them on and was amazed that his club vest had withstood two washings in as many weeks and not fallen apart.
He found his cigarettes on the nights
tand and smoked.
Then he waited for it.
About an hour later, two MPs came for him. “All right,” one of them said, “come with us. It’s time.”
“Time for what, friend?”
“You’ll see, dipshit.”
* * *
They took him to the round little man who said his name was Colonel Brightman. Brightman made no claim of being in the Army or Marines or any of that, and Slaughter pegged him right off as a spook. He had that look about him, like he might suck the blood out of his own mother. Slaughter sat in a metal folding chair across from him and listened to him go on about it all, about the threat to the country and the awful possibility that if the worm rains weren’t contained, the Deadlands would reach clear across to the Atlantic.
“Something has to be done,” he said. “Something…decisive.”
“How did you find me?” Slaughter finally asked.
“We took in some boys from the Red Hand. They said some biker had torn them a new asshole at a farmhouse in St. Croix County. We tied that in with reports of some hellraiser wearing the colors of the Devil’s Disciples burning a path west. After that, it was easy enough. We knew you were with Rice at his farm. You were seen.”
“So you set up a little net?”
“That’s it.” But Brightman was not interested in any of that and he waved it away. “As I was saying, we need decisive action on the worm rain issue. Something has to be done to save the country.”
Slaughter lapsed into silence again. If Brightman wanted him to jump up and salute and wave his fucking flag, he had the wrong guy.
“It’s not by accident we brought you in, Slaughter.”
“I was kind of figuring that.”
“And it wasn’t by accident that we threw you in that hole out there.”
“I figured that, too.”
Brightman just stared at him, dabbing sweat from his face with a hankie. “Did you?”
Slaughter allowed himself a sarcastic laugh. “You think I was born yesterday, citizen? I know how shit works. You were trying to break me down, trying to get me begging for release. And you did that because you wanted me to be desperate, to get me down on your terms so you could spring it on me and I’d bite like a good little soldier.”
“Spring what?”
Slaughter pulled off his cigarette. “Yeah, what exactly.” He shook his head. “All right, citizen. Let’s play cat-and-mouse until you get the nuts to tell me what’s on your mind. Let’s play it like that.”
“You killed two cops in New Castle, PA,” Brightman said then. “You murdered an innocent woman.”
“If you say so.”
“Quit the shit, Slaughter. You left your goddamn prints all over everything, and you did it specifically so that everyone would know what happens to enemies of the Devil’s Disciples. Am I right on this?”
“Damn right,” Slaughter said. “Those cops murdered my brother Neb in cold blood. I saw it happen. He gave ‘em no shit, and he wasn’t armed. They pulled their pieces and put him down like a fucking dog, so I returned the favor. Two less shit-eating cops in the world. So what? And that woman? Not so fucking innocent, citizen. She rolled over. She dropped a dime on Neb. She fingered him to the cops and that brought about his death. She deserved what she got.”
“She deserved to be…gutted?”
“You’re fucking right she did, citizen. The lowest of the low: a rat.”
Brightman just sighed and shook his head. “I’m trying real hard here, Slaughter, to see you as a stand-up guy with some twisted, convoluted sense of underworld honor and not some dirty bloodthirsty animal.”
Slaughter just laughed. “You don’t know shit.”
“Don’t I?”
“No, you don’t. Just as you have your laws, citizen, we’ve got ours. You’re good to us, we’re better to you. You shit on us, we bury you alive. Simple as that.”
“Is it?”
“That’s right,” Slaughter said. “I’m your best friend or your worst enemy, but there’s nothing in-between.”
Brightman finally sat down. He did not look amused by any of it. “I talked with some gang experts back east, and they told me some things. They told me who you are and what you are. I know you, Slaughter. And I know you because I can read those tattoos you have. They tell me who you are, where you came from, what you did, and who you did. For example, I know that black diamond on your vest means that you’ve killed for the club. And I also know that the black Waffen SS deathshead on the back of your left hand indicates that you are a member of 158 Crew.”
Slaughter smiled. Brightman had done his homework. The 158 Crew were an elite group of enforcers and contract killers within the Devil’s Disciples. “158” was shorthand for “1958”, the penal code of the federal statute given to “murder for hire.”
“Okay, citizen. You got me. So show me the cheese and see if I nibble.”
Brightman acted like he had no idea what the biker was talking about. He had a thick file on Slaughter, and it was pretty well-thumbed by the looks of it. “You’ve been a bad boy, Slaughter. Your sheet is longer than my left arm. Twelve county lockups on minor offenses ranging from disturbing the piece to street brawls to possession of a deadly weapon. Two years in SCI Frackville for aggravated assault. You split a guy’s head open with…let’s see here…” he paged through the file “…a monkey wrench? I like that. Three more in Yardville for battery of a police officer. This one’s better. There’s a little notation here. Apparently the cop was a narc and he caught you flushing packets of meth down the toilet. When he tried to stop you, you beat him so badly he spent six weeks in the hospital. Nice, real nice. Only reason you didn’t get twenty years on that is because that idiot came in without a search warrant and you, being the good upstanding citizen you are, were only defending your life and property. Let’s see…ten years at FCI Leavenworth for armed robbery…sentence commuted after two years. You got lucky on that one. Witnesses couldn’t be sure it was you so your lawyer managed to have it overturned. Nice. I’m guessing your shithead club brothers had something to do with the hazy memories of those witnesses. What’d they do? Threaten to kill their kids? Rape their wives?” Brightman laughed. “At Yardville you were brought up on charges twice for stabbing other inmates with homemade knives…both times, charges thrown out for lack of witness corroboration. I like that. I’m guessing those other cons were scared to open their mouths. And look at this, another six convictions overturned or thrown out of court—gun running, narcotics distribution, murder conspiracy, assault with a deadly weapon, possession of explosives, grand theft.” Brightman had himself a little laugh. “Slaughter you’re nothing but a goddamned scab on society’s ass.”
“You got it, citizen.”
“A parasite.”
“Sure.”
“A fucking predator.”
“One-hundred percent. So throw me in a cell and get it done with so I don’t have to listen to any more of your high-handed shit.”
Brightman threw the file on his desk. “We’re willing to pretend this file doesn’t exist. We’re willing to ignore the three bodies you left behind you in New Castle. In fact, we’re willing to give you a clean slate if you’re willing to play ball.”
“Whose ball?”
“Mine,” Brightman said, “and those I represent.”
“Uh-huh. Go on.”
Brightman finally got down to it. It was simple, really. Since it was already quite apparent by his path west that Slaughter was going into the Deadlands, they were going to clean his slate if he went in there not just to raise hell, but to achieve a very specific objective: to free a high-level biologist being held by the Red Hand of Freedom in a fortress outside Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. Grab her, bring her back. According to Brightman she was a former employee of the CDC that had been kidnapped out of Denver by the Red Hand. Her name was Katherine Isley, she held doctorates in virology and biogenetics, and she was the only one still living who knew the mathematical model
for a synthetic biological agent that could zap the worms out of existence.
“What sort of agent?”
Brightman explained that Isley had been part of a team that produced an artificial virus loaded with a particular DNA sequence that would latch on to the reproductive cells of the worms and literally make them sterile. That would mean, in time, no more worms. The worms—origin unknown, Brightman claimed—followed a very peculiar life cycle. One out of every fifty reanimates (he disliked the word zombie) became something of a breeding ground for the worms themselves. What genetic or biochemical factors determined this were also unknown, only that they were always female. In a very strange biological ritual which was yet to be explained, the walking dead would choose a single female and disgorge their worms into her and die…given their rate of decay, most zombies only lasted so long. Several hundred worms usually parasitized a breeder (which, Slaughter figured, explained that girl on the video back at the compound: she was a breeder). The infestation went on until the worms completed their reproductive cycle. Like ordinary worms, they reproduced asexually by parthenogenesis—from unfertilized eggs. These pregnant worms would escape the host, swollen with eggs, and literally burst, each worm releasing thousands of eggs that were lighter than air because of hydrogen pockets within the cell membranes. The eggs then floated upwards, usually in great clusters of hundreds of thousands, and possibly even millions where they would gather in the lower troposphere, about fifteen kilometers up, and slowly mature. Rain was born in the troposphere and when a good cloudburst occurred, down came the worm larva, most less than an inch in length. The larva would seek hosts and reanimate them as cannibalistic corpses.
The cycle began anew.
Slaughter listened to this and he supposed that Brightman thought it was all beyond him, over the head of an outlaw biker, but the reverse was true. Slaughter’s IQ had been tested by the prison psychologist at Leavenworth and had been rated at 150, which was below genius level but well within the superior intelligence classification. In all his years in hardtime joints he’d read one book after the other so none of what the colonel was saying was incomprehensible to him. His brain worked just fine.