by Tim Curran
The fog kept coming, rolling and billowing like a breeze was pushing it along, making it foam and expand and thicken in some sort of chemical reaction like when vinegar and baking soda mix.
Slaughter kept the War Wagon rolling at around thirty an hour, plenty fast enough in that soup. It was like a noxious weave out there, thickening, fuming. He was thinking things, of course. Mutant spiders. Radioactivity. A breakdown…damn, they blew a tire in this shit and somebody would have to go out and fix it. The idea of that was unthinkable…as if the mist might swallow them alive or reveal things that might turn their hair white.
Jesus, you better get a grip, man. These boys are counting on your cool head, your ability to think. Don’t let them down.
He lit a cigarette, thinking it was amusing—and more than a little disturbing—how this foggy valley was making him feel, pushing him back towards superstition and childhood fears. Him. Goddamn John Slaughter, chapter president of the Pittsburgh Devil’s Disciples, member of the feared 158 Crew. A guy who’d served time in some of the worst joints in the system. A guy who’d fought and killed for his club. A guy who’d been shot twice and stabbed half a dozen times and once took on three inmates with pipes out in the yard at Leavenworth.
Afraid? Is that it, man? This is scaring you?
But fear wasn’t a word he was comfortable with. He preferred to think he was feeling extremely cautious and extremely hesitant. That went down better.
But it was the fog.
It had to be the fog.
It was so very dense and endless, an ocean of mist. It made him feel, again, like maybe he was the last person on earth. The way a sailor might feel at sea when he was trapped in a fog bank, knowing it could be hours or even days before he slipped out the back door. It made Slaughter feel claustrophobic, like he was pressed down in a dark tunnel or buried alive, the air becoming thin and foul and unbreathable.
“Enough of that shit,” he said under his breath.
Looking in the rearview, he could see nothing but the fog bunching behind the Wagon, tinted red by the brake lights. To either side, it was the same. And in front, almost worse, as if it was getting thicker and more congested. Jesus, like driving into the mouth of a foundry smokestack. It looked almost frothy like something whipped up with a whisk. In the headlights, he could see it coalescing and building, drowning the Wagon in that brooding haze.
It was getting worse, there was no doubt of that, like some steam valve had been left wide open.
There was fear in him even if he did not want to admit it. He could feel it prickling his insides like he’d swallowed pins.
Apache Dan came up front. “I checked the map. We should be out of this valley in fifteen, twenty minutes tops.”
“Sure.”
Together, they couldn’t seem to stop staring out into the fog.
It was thick and fine and consuming like the guts of a blizzard. Also like a blizzard, it was in constant swirling, rolling motion, spinning and seething, a busy storm cloud building and covering. It had a funny, almost metallic sheen to it as if it was saturated with microscopic flakes of aluminum. The headlights bounced right off it, filling the cab of the War Wagon with a moonish glow. Slaughter didn’t know if it was his imagination or not, but he began to see shapes in it, weird, darting forms like figures in motion dancing away just out of sight. And above too, shapes circling in the fog like witches taking to the air.
But he figured it was like staring into static on an old TV…sooner or later, your eyes would begin to see patterns and contours where none really existed. That’s all it was.
Then he saw something.
A man…something like a man…with shining eyes at the side of the road.
“You see that?”
Apache Dan’s voice was dry. “Yeah,” he said.
By that point, Slaughter’s teeth were clenched and his scalp felt tight and crawling, a chill running down his shoulders and over his chest.
Keep it together, man, just keep it together.
Now and again, the fog thinned enough where he could catch an occasional glimpse of the countryside and what he saw was like some netherworld of dark, blasted earth cut by jagged gullies and craters, a few dead trees rising up like withered skeletons. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but he was certain that North Dakota did not look like that. If anything, it looked like France or Belgium in World War I, scarred and gutted and stripped by artillery barrages.
It wasn’t right.
None of it was right.
Some kind of battle or something had been waged here. He hoped it had been with conventional weapons and that they weren’t all being saturated with radiation.
“This is the shit, all right,” Apache Dan said as if reading his mind.
Maybe it was the fear of atomic fallout or that business with the spiders, but his nerves were steadily fraying and his guts were pulled up into his chest now in cold, knotted tangles.
“We gotta ride out of this soon.”
Another five minutes of white-knuckled driving and Slaughter saw a hulking shape in the gloom: the remains of a high stone wall that was crumbling now into debris. There were great holes punched through it like it had been hit by rockets. And then, everywhere, countless buildings and towers and huts rising up into the mist, every one of them derelict and shattered like London after the blitz. Some were nothing but great heaps of rubble, others standing but set with yawning chasms and ragged voids, roofs ripped free and walls gone to wreckage. He glimpsed low doorways and hooded windows, nothing beyond them but a grainy blackness. It looked like some Medieval town after a siege…just gutted and broken and pulverized. What did still stand looked ready to fall. No life there, just cloying shadows and drifting pockets and tendrils of mist.
“Where the hell are we?” he said under his breath.
“Don’t look much like North Dakota, does it?” Apache admitted.
Slowly then, the other Disciples bunching up front with them, Slaughter moved the Wagon through twisting streets, the tires bumping along, maybe over rubbish and bricks and maybe over a road that was no longer pavement, but cobblestones. And as disconcerting as that was, what was worse was that the tombyard of fragmented ruins stretching around them might have been dead and ancient, but they were not unoccupied. He kept seeing vague shapes moving through the rot and devastation, like men or women, hunched and shambling. But every time it seemed like he might glimpse one dragging itself into view through a ruptured doorway, the mist rolled back in, obscuring his view.
Something was telling him that might be a good thing.
“What kind of fucking place is this?” Fish said.
Jumbo and Moondog said nothing; they just watched.
The half-glimpsed figures sliding from the fog stopped when they heard or saw the Wagon coming. They stood there, swaying from side to side, until Slaughter got in close and then they scampered off. Not running or fleeing as men would, but moving with an almost pained loping or hopping motion.
There.
Right before the Wagon now, a figure standing in the middle of the road.
It was not going to move.
“Run that fucker down,” Fish said
The mist blew around it, making it look like steam was coming off it. As the War Wagon got in closer, splashing the figure with headlights, it lifted its arms and waved back and forth like it wanted them to stop. Slaughter did not stop—didn’t dare to—but he slowed. Slowed so that he saw the figure wore little better than rags. Huge, shapeless filthy garments like gunny sacks or motheaten tarps.
“Maybe…maybe we better see what they want,” Jumbo said, a huge and bear-like man, fearsome in battle and loyal as hell…but down deep, oddly compassionate for an outlaw biker. Almost motherly.
“Don’t do it,” Moondog said. As warlord he only cared about the skins of the Disciples.
Slaughter slowed to a stop, sighing, wondering if he was fucking up big this time. Worse than usual.
Give ‘em the benefi
t of the doubt. They try anything, run ‘em down.
The figure kept waving its arms frantically and even that close, there was no telling if it was a she or a he, though it seemed a better choice as it got closer.
“Man,” Apache Dan said. “Would you look at that…”
The figure’s head looked like a lopsided ball of decayed suet, lumpy and leprous, set with numerous holes like worms had been tunneling through it. You could not tell where the eyes were or if it even had hair, but there was a jagged crevice that might have been called a mouth. The hands it waved over its head were equally as grotesque…gnarled growths of white meat ending in limp digits like gloves with no fingers in them.
“Mutants,” Moondog said. “Fucking mutants.”
Others were gathering now.
Two and three, and then five and six. Finally a dozen with more coming out of the mist all the time, gathering around the Wagon in a mob of maimed, inhuman faces and distorted bodies. Like lepers or the victims of some horrendous atomic fallout, every one of them hunched and deformed, faces like puddled and congealed wax riddled with holes and scabrous sores. Even with the windows closed, you could hear them grunting and squealing as they attempted something like speech.
“C’mon, man,” Fish said. “Get us the fuck out of here.”
Slaughter sat there, gripping the wheel, eyes peeled wide, mouth set in a narrow white line. What held him there, making him stare and making his heart hitch painfully in his chest was just a dumb and senseless mute horror. It sucked the will from him. He could not move, could not think of doing so, some childlike instinct telling him that if he waited like that long enough, like a bird trying to fool a snake by remaining motionless, they would leave the Wagon alone.
“John…shit, let’s go,” Fish said.
“Take it easy,” Moondog told him.
“Take it easy? Look at those fucking things.”
Slaughter let out a long, low sigh. “I wanna see what they’re going to do.”
The figures made no threatening movements, not really, they just stood there in the rolling mist, swaying from side to side, those hideously scarred faces peering through the windows. Some of them gestured, trying to get those in the Wagon to come out, it seemed.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
Slaughter wasn’t exactly uncharitable. He’d decided when he first got the idea of going into the Deadlands that if somebody needed help, he’d help them. Like he had with Rice.
But this…no, the idea of physical contact with one of those abominations was unthinkable. The sight of them was bad enough, let alone coming into close physical proximity with them.
The mutants were not leaving.
They began making loud, slobbering noises, almost as if they were getting excited about something. A few pressed their faces to the plexiglass window ports on the door, leaving sticky strands of something behind. It looked almost like snot. One of them began slapping a diseased hand against the driver’s side window and it actually smashed like a rotting mushroom, leaving a juicy smear on the glass.
They were all getting excited now, thudding their hands against the War Wagon and making those awful sounds.
Well, what’s it gonna be? Slaughter asked himself. You gonna sit here until them ugly pricks find their way in or are you gonna hit that gas pedal and paste ‘em?
There wasn’t much a choice.
Not really.
“Fuck this,” he said.
He revved the engine and blared the horn. The mutants stepped back, began mulling in tight little throngs as if they were trying to figure out what to do. Slaughter threw the Wagon in drive and as it started to roll, something incredible happened. One by one, the mutants began to leave the ground, began to drift upwards like they were filled with helium. Like gas-filled bags they levitated and steadily began to rise.
Slaughter stomped on the accelerator.
The Wagon vaulted forward, knocking aside a few of the mutants that hadn’t as yet begun to ascend. The impact made splashing sounds like they were living water balloons. A few others that were not above the level of the Wagon got battered aside, exploding into rains of fluid and flesh and mulch. Slaughter kept his foot on the pedal and plowed forward, finding the road and staying on it. Part of his mind had shut down now and he felt like he was operating completely on remote control. He turned the wipers on high to brush away the oozing anatomies of the things he had smashed open.
Then the town was falling behind them, consumed by the mist.
The fog did not abate, but the road was open.
“Push it, John!” Fish said. “Get us out of here!”
Pavement now.
Good old blacktop.
Later, maybe, they could try and make sense of this. Explain it if they could. But for now there was the simple animal act of evasion and escape—
But it wasn’t going to be that easy.
Something thudded onto the roof of the Wagon.
Then something else.
Soon lots of things were bumping into it, sounding like a dozen men walking around up there. But it was not men, Slaughter knew. And they were not walking. It was those mutants. They were drifting along in the fog, keeping pace with the Wagon, a swarm of them, and they were dropping down like marionettes from time to time and landing on the roof. He saw a couple of them—one lacking arms—drop down onto the hood and then leap back up into the fog. If any of it had hinted at madness before, this was out and out insanity. A mushy, dripping hand slid down from the roof and slapped against the passenger side window. A slimy, waxy face pressed itself against the windshield and then retreated. Lots of them were doing that now. Upside down, they were descending headfirst, just hanging there, staring.
Fish was beyond himself. “JUST LEAVE US ALONE!” he screamed at them. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM US!”
But they were not leaving.
A few daring individuals began lowering themselves from the fog just in front of the Wagon, dropping and rising, dropping and rising with almost comical timing. One of them came swooping out of the fog like a moth and the cow-catcher slammed right into it. Unlike the others, this one did not explode into juice and jelly and muck…it simply vaporized into a great cloud of yellow dust that spattered against the windshield, the wipers brushing it aside with chalky yellow streaks.
Another came.
And another, each one exploding into a cloud of yellow mist that covered the windshield and nearly forced Slaughter off the road. Three, then four, and finally five of them committed suicide in the same way, darting out of the fog directly into the speeding path of the War Wagon. Each one vaporizing into the same yellow, profuse cloud.
Then he knew.
They were not killing themselves.
They were sporing.
Like stepped-on puffballs, they were vomiting out millions of tiny spores. Spreading their seed. Reproducing. Like fungi. Fruiting bodies. They required an external stimulus to set their spores free. Slaughter could smell them…sickening and sweet, bitter and sharp.
But they were gone now, the mutants. Just gone, and there was only that gaseous envelope of fog which began to thin. Visibility increased. The fog went thin and membranous, became nothing more than straggling tendrils of mist that blew away and then Slaughter could see the world again, see the fields and forest and the road climbing up out of that terrible valley. When the Wagon got to the top, he saw freedom and it had never tasted so good.
“I’m glad to be out of that,” Apache Dan said.
“In the future we might want to steer clear of valleys,” Moondog said.
“I can dig that,” Jumbo said, breathing out.
“But what was that place back there?” Fish said to Slaughter, not only wanting to know but needing to know. It had all scared him badly and like most people, he had the tendency to dwell on things like that. To overanalyze and over-scrutinize them. It was his way of pulling their teeth so they couldn’t bite him anymore. And this one in particular needed to
be minutely dissected, labeled, and stuck in its jar of alcohol where it would do no more harm.
“I don’t know,” Slaughter told him. “We got out of it, so who cares? Mutants and shit. That’s what it was.”
“But that place…it looked fucking Medieval or something.”
“Sure. Crazy. Maybe some tourist trap designed to look Medieval.”
“But what do you think, John? I mean, what do you really think?”
Slaughter lit a cigarette and watched the road. “I don’t think, bro. Things are easier that way.”
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.