by Tim Curran
“We go in quiet,” Moondog informed them, clipping a pair of white phosphorus grenades to his leather club vest. “Then we kill anything we find.”
The Disciples grinned.
“I’m smelling me some shiteaters,” Fish said, which was one of the many derogatory names the Disciples had for members of Cannibal Corpse.
“Let’s light this shit up then,” Apache Dan said.
Slaughter led the way through the stunted trees and across the gravel lot, his boys spread out behind him like commandos. There was absolutely no activity in or around the joint, just that hazy blue sky with the sun burning down like a hot yellow coin.
Slaughter motioned for the others to hang back as he went up to the door and tried it. It was open. He gave the Disciples the signal and they crept forward, tensing with anticipation to a man.
“We come across Coffin or Reptile, remember: those pricks are mine and mine alone,” he whispered to the others and they understood perfectly. It would have been a boon if any of them bagged Reptile or Coffin, but Slaughter wanted those two just a little bit more. The way he looked at it, the three Disciples they wasted had been done so on his watch.
He opened the door a crack and listened for activity.
There was nothing.
Either the place was empty, there was an ambush waiting, or the Disciples had caught the owners of those bikes with their pants down. He opened it a bit more and a gassy stink of putrefaction came out. Nothing new there, but it gave him ideas.
“All right,” he told Moondog. “Follow me in.”
Moondog gave him a look that plainly said he didn’t like it, that they didn’t know what they were stepping in here. That he, as warlord and sergeant-at-arms, advised a little reconnoitering first—there could be fifty wormboys out back for all they knew.
But Slaughter shook his head. The look in his eyes said all the warlord needed to know: These boys have been in-stir too long, man, they need to learn how to fight as one again, as a club.
“Let’s go,” Slaughter told him.
* * *
Even with their boots on they were quiet as they moved through the barroom, stepping quietly on the plank floors. Inside, it was a mess…wreckage and trash scattered everywhere. And bones. They were strewn about, heaped in the corners. Human bones that were gnawed and scraped, smashed and broken open for their marrow. The stink of death was strong, but it didn’t come from the remains. Instead, it emanated from the forms lying about like it was siesta time: six dead ones sprawled on the bar top, on the floor, under tables.
And as Slaughter looked at them—faces like seamed leather masks missing eyes and noses, lips shriveled back to reveal jutting teeth—he had to wonder, and not for the first time, if they went dormant like this because they needed to or if it was the worms that needed some down time. No matter. A few were face-down and they wore the colors of Cannibal Corpse.
“Shiteaters, alright,” Jumbo said.
“Do ‘em,” Slaughter said.
Under Moondog’s direction it was carried out calmly, efficiently, and slowly. They each chose a wormboy and put the barrels of their shotguns to the heads of the zombies. It was unbelievably simple and that’s why Slaughter knew it was going to go to shit, and right about the time the Disciples pulled their respective triggers and sent the deadheads back to hell, it hit the fan.
The door behind the bar flew open and at least ten wormboys came charging out. And what a sight they were. Their faces were raging liquiform epidemics of leprous rot…mucid, dripping, fluids oozing from ulcerous sores. Eyes like rotten eggs spilling tears of slime, mouths filled with undulant worm follicles. They came shambling and stumbling, creeping forth to engulf the intruders.
Slaughter was expecting it.
When they came out, he brought up his 12-gauge pump and took out the first Cannibal Corpse with close-range scattershot that blew the zombie’s head apart into a kaleidoscopic eruption of pink, red, black, and gray ribbons that splashed against the others and sprayed the walls in a dripping meat Rorschach blot.
The other Cannibals went right over the top of the flopping husk and Slaughter didn’t have to tell his boys to wade in.
Moondog reacted first.
As one of the wormboys reached for him, he smashed the barrel of his shotgun into its head and kicked it swiftly in the sternum, knocking it aside and giving him the time to blow the face off another pitted skull and get a glancing shot into the advancing horde before three of them crested over him like a rogue wave and he went down fighting with them.
Slaughter ran at them firing and working the pump on his gun.
Apache Dan and Shanks both got off a couple rounds but a really big Cannibal—a real wagonload of crawling carrion—got hold of Irish and lifted him up like he was stuffed with pillow down and threw him at the wall ten feet away. And maybe threw is not nearly descriptive enough, because Irish was fucking launched like cannonshot, going right over the top of the bar and crashing into a Budweiser mirror and coming down in an explosion of glass as his descent upset about a dozen dusty bottles of hootch.
Jumbo, who was about the size of an Abrams tank, grabbed a downed and quite overanxious Cannibal Corpse with a face like a ball of suet by the ankles and proceeded to use him as a bat, swinging him from side to side and sweeping wormboys out of his path so he could get to Irish before the zombies could. When he cleared the way, he swung around again and again like a man throwing a discus and let fly his wormboy right through the window, taking out the neon Leinenkugel’s sign in the process.
Not wanting to fire buckshot with the Disciples so close at hand, Slaughter used the pistol grip of his weapon like a club, battering it into the face of a Cannibal until he went down, then ducking just in time as another deadhead swung a femur at his head. Slaughter moved in and hammered the zombie in the ribs with his left fist until he felt something give in there. Then he darted back, pulled the Kukri from its sheath and started slashing and hacking like a man felling sugarcane. He took off arms, a head, opened two bellies, then brought the blade down overhead, bisecting a Cannibal’s head from cranium to chin like a fork of white-hot lightning splitting a dead oak.
By then Moondog was on his feet and he and another Cannibal Corpse were facing each other, both sprayed with gore and decay, swinging, hitting and getting hit, and it was an old-style bare-fisted punch-up as they kept hammering each other. After they both took six or seven good shots each, Moondog jumped up and brought the cleats of his boot down on the wormboy’s knee and there was a wet snap clear as a pistol shot. The wormboy screamed out in rage and Moondog took him by his greasy hair and slid the blade of his black anodized K-Bar fighting knife under his ear and into his brainpan. The wormboy went over dead as a stump. It was an old Marine Raider quick-kill technique from World War II and it still did the job just fine.
While Moondog was so engaged and Jumbo fought viciously to keep the zombies from lunching on the downed Irish, and Shanks tangled with a pair of Cannibals, both Slaughter and Apache grabbed up shotguns from the floor and walked around, dropping the dead men until their guns were empty.
Then there was silence.
The air was thick with burnt cordite, gunsmoke, and the mist of rot that rose from the dead at the feet of the Disciples.
Irish rose up from behind the bar like a ghost, shards of glass falling from him. He had a bottle of Jack Daniels Old No. 7 by the neck. Eyes rolling, face gashed and bleeding, he said, “Rock and roll, my brothers.” And promptly went down again.
Jumbo scooped him up and Moondog led them out into the fresh air.
Slaughter and Apache Dan remained behind, stepping around over a carpet of tissue, blood, maggots, and seeking worms.
“That was the shit,” Slaughter said.
“We’re lucky we pulled that one off,” Apache Dan said, squeezing blood from his long black ponytail. “Had to be twenty of those muthas, John. We better not go diving into a scene like that again or we’re going to come up short.”
/>
“You’re right,” Slaughter told him, “and I knew it going in there. So did Moondog. But these boys needed some seasoning and there’s only one way to get that, brother.”
“I’m just advising caution. This shit is for keeps.”
Slaughter clapped him on the shoulder and led him outside where Shanks had just taken the head off the Cannibal Corpse that Jumbo threw out the window. He tossed the head into the gravel lot where it rolled. “Sheeeeeeit,” he said.
The others were smoking and laughing, enjoying the buzz of the after-action, with the exception of Moondog, who was off securing the perimeter as he always did. They were bloody and dirty, cut and bruised. And as far as Slaughter was concerned, they were ready now.
Fish was telling a story, and as usual it involved sex.
“…so we’re drinking at this bar up north in the boonies, checking out this three-day festival in Eerie, Penn. All the old bands are up there—Molly Hatchet, Foghat, even Mountain.” Fish went on, “Must’ve been…what? Fifteen years ago. Yeah, at least. So I’m up there with Charley Sweet and Creep—God rest their souls, man—and we’re at this bar getting pissed, just juiced and sloppy, right? Creep…oh, old Creep…never had any respect for his dick. He got his eye on this Indian bitch hanging around the bar. Don’t look like much to me—real dark, long hair, kinda chunky. Doesn’t do shit for me, that one.
“But Creep? Hell, he’s in love. You remember Creep, motherfucker always had an eye for the ladies. If they had a hole at the bottom, they were his type. So pretty soon him and this squaw are hitting it off. Charlie and me just shrug, right? Whatever gives him wood, that’s his business. Maybe an hour before last call, Creep and his Squaw, both pissed to the gills, disappear. Next day—it’s not even noon—Creep’s at the bar throwing back hooks of Wild Turkey, just staring off into space. He keeps shivering all the time, you know, like something’s crawling on his skin. ‘You nail that stuff?’ Charlie asks him. Creep just nods. ‘Any good?’ Charlie asks. Creep, he turns to us…and that look on his face! Shit! Like maybe he’d just eaten a turd sandwich. That bad. ‘Yeah,’ Creep says, ‘we were all over each other last night. Did it in the dark. Fucked like hogs, we did. I wake up this morning next to her and that’s when I realize this pig ain’t even an Indian.’ Charlie looks at me. We both look at Creep. ‘Not an Indian? She was dark like one,’ I say. ‘Sure she was,’ Creep says. ‘Except I wake up this morning and I see her in the light. I mean, I really see her in the light. That’s when I see she ain’t no fucking Indian, man, just a filthy white woman, dirty black. In fact, only clean spots on her were her tits, twat, and lips.’ Creep, he excused himself then. Had to go puke again, you see.”
“Bullshit,” Shanks said while the others laughed.
“Happened just the way I said it,” Fish told them, laughing. “Some time, I’ll tell you about that hooker with the three tits.”
Jumbo was holding up Irish, who was coming around pretty good by then. “I’m okay, my brother, I’m okay. I was just getting warmed up in there. Just getting my sea legs,” he said, taking two steps and going down again. Jumbo scooped him up like his bride. Irish stroked his bald head. “You’re beautiful, man.”
“Put him in the Wagon,” Moondog told Jumbo.
They went back to the War Wagon and their bikes and nobody even mentioned cutting the patches off the Cannibal Corpse members. When they got Irish in the Wagon along with his bike, and after Jumbo had attended to their wounds and his own, Apache Dan, as road captain, told Shanks he was chase, which gave Fish a little time to get out in the wind on his scoot.
“Shit,” Shanks said.
“We’re going to each take our turn on chase,” Slaughter said so everyone could hear it.
Once they had the Wagon secured, they kicked their bikes over and formed up. “Let’s do it,” Slaughter said and off they went, into the wind, into the day, cutting deeper into the Deadlands to whatever came next.
Chapter Twelve
Thick as summer locusts, the dead moved up the road in an enraged swarm. Blown by desert-hot winds, they shambled forward en masse in clouds of dust to meet the invaders, pushing ever closer with a yellow, subterranean stink of mortuary spices. It was Slaughter who saw them at a distance with his Minox binoculars. Men, women, and children, erupting in an army from the city limits of Copton, Minnesota like a flurry of hollow-eyed wraiths breaking out of a midnight cemetery. He got the bikes and their riders into the Wagon.
Since there was no way around, they were going right through.
“We’ll slice ourselves a path right through with our cow-catcher,” Moondog said. “Gonna be ugly, but it’s the only way.”
The closer they got, the thicker the swarm was until they could see hundreds of them, chalk-white funeral sculptures bearing the stigmata of the grave, stalking out like bone-pale mantises stuffed with dry grasses and withered weeds, semi-human ghouls on the march.
All of the Disciples were gathered up front as Moondog pushed the Wagon further, gathering up speed, but not too much, knowing he had to have enough velocity to punch through the horde.
Slaughter waited, tensed like the others.
He’d never seen so many undead in one place before and he would have been lying if he did not admit to himself that he was scared, really scared. Even the wormboys that attacked Rice’s farmhouse had been a drop in a bucket compared to this. And what really bothered him was that it seemed almost as if they knew the War Wagon and its outriders were coming. That was crazy but he did not honestly think the idea sounded as crazy as it should have under less trying circumstances.
It’s like they’re waiting for us, he thought then. Like every walking stiff in the county is gathered there in Copton, waiting for us. Like they were compelled to wait for us.
He’d had the same feeling at Rice’s farmhouse. It had seemed downright odd that the zombies had come down the road and chose Rice’s place to attack. It seemed somehow coordinated and he did not like that.
By the time they got the bikes into the Wagon, a storm began to break over Copton. The sky became a boiling black mass stitched with white seams of lightning, and the land grew dark with shadows. Within ten minutes as that darkness fell and those cloud masses overhead unzipped themselves with hot arcing fingers of electricity, the thunder began to boom so loud it made the windshield of the Wagon tremble in its frame.
Then it really started to hit.
Forking lightning was drawn down to the rooftops and steeples of Copton, the thunder exploding like cluster bombs as a clammy dank ground mist blew through the legs of the zombies.
Then the rain crashed down, except it wasn’t droplets of water, but a rain of red worms falling from high above. They thudded against the bus like soft, rotten hailstones, smashing against the windshield and leaving smears of pulpy red tissue that soon built up into a soggy, runny membrane that the wipers could barely clear. They pelted the zombies and carpeted the road in twitching masses, gathering in undulant red pools that burst their banks and flooded the world until it seemed they were four or five inches deep on the road The sound of the Wagon’s wheels cutting through that was sickening to the extreme…like riding through especially wet, congested leaves.
“Jesus Christ,” Fish said. “I’m about to lose my mind here.”
Jumbo said, “Hang on, Fish. It won’t last long.”
As the wipers worked frantically and the wiper fluid gushed to clear the glass, Slaughter could see that the zombies were sill coming, feverish with worms, but still coming right at them and impact would be in less than a minute.
“Here we go,” he said. “Grab something and hang tight.”
“And that don’t mean my dick, Shanks,” Irish said, his voice high and broken as he tried to calm his own nerves.
Shanks just said, “Shit.”
The worms came down in an ever-thickening rain until the Wagon was painted with a slimy, cold wormjelly that oozed in clots and clumps like the aspic gelatin of a canned ham.
It raged and flashed as forks of lightning came burning down from the heavens, hitting trees and houses and aerials in Copton and fires blazed in every quarter. Slaughter saw a steeple in the distance get hit by branching lightning and there was a blinding flash and then the church and houses to either side went up like kindling, throwing out smoke and flames in sheets. About ten seconds before the Wagon hit the zombies, something in the town detonated with a rolling, sonic boom and three gigantic clouds of fire rose above the roofline.
It must have been a tanker truck filled with gasoline or a storage tank of natural gas, he figured, because it ignited like napalm, creating a wild, raging firestorm that swept through the town, scattering red-hot ashes into the dry wind.
Moondog had the War Wagon up to about forty miles-per-hour then as it reached the outskirts of the town. Every time the wipers cleared the worm goo away, they could all see just what sort of inferno they were driving into, the zombies backlit now by the spreading fires in the gray afternoon dimness.
Then they hit the zombies.
The worms were bad enough, but the zombies were worse.
The cow-catcher did the real work and the wormboys and wormgirls out there literally exploded as it breached their lines like a hot knife. The zombies went up like blood-blown bags of meat, gore and guts raining up and over the Wagon, a few stray limbs bouncing across the hood. The bus shook with each jarring impact. THUD, THUD, THUD, THUD-THUD-THUD! Moondog could barely see where he was driving and the Wagon shook and reeled as it smashed zombies aside and split them in two, rolling right over them, knocking aside wrecked cars and trucks and slicing deep into the bowels of Copton which was a furnace by that point, a great smoldering kiln, and the air inside the bus became thin, rarified, dry and hard to breathe.
But the zombies were still coming.
That was the amazing thing, the disturbing thing: they just kept coming and coming in waves, crowding the streets and pressing closer and closer until the bus crashed into them and their anatomies splashed over the pavement and drenched the others.