by Curran, Tim
Every time he made to open his mouth, Slaughter pressed the knife up a little tighter.
“C’mon…man,” the kid finally breathed, “don’t kill me…please don’t kill me.”
“Tell me what happened here.”
“I don’t know…ah…”
Slaughter pressed the dagger in until it tasted blood, just piercing the skin of the kid’s throat.
“You get one more chance.”
“We…we came down the road, pulled in here and this crazy bitch started shooting at us, screaming names at us.”
Slaughter smiled. Yeah, that was Dirty Mary, all right.
“Who are we?”
“Red Hand, man. If you’re smart you’ll just let me go and get out of here. There’s some pretty bad dudes in that house.”
“Ratbags,” Slaughter said, which was the general term for members of the Red Hand of Freedom.
The kid scowled.
“They having their fun with the woman?”
“No…not yet. But I think they’re going to take her with.”
“No shit?”
“Like I said, man…we’re the Hand, we’re fucking Red Hand. You don’t wanna fuck with us.”
“Who’s your leader? What’s the puke’s name?”
“Snake,” the kid said. “They call him Snake.”
Slaughter considered it. “How many?”
“Five.”
“Six with you.”
“Sure.”
Slaughter already had the kid figured for a screamer, but he decided out of the goodness of his black little heart that he was going to be compassionate today.
“Okay, kid. I’m going to let you live. When I take the knife away, you run. You run out into the field. You run up that hillside. You keep running and running and you never come back. That sound fair?”
“Sure.”
Slaughter sighed, pulled the knife away and right away the kid scrambled towards the door, calling, “Mike! Rich! He—”
But by then Slaughter had him and he slit his throat with one quick slash. The kid hit the dirt, gagging out blood and trembling in the grass. He didn’t tremble long.
Slaughter took his rifle and moved along the side of the house, he ducked under windows until he began to hear voices. They were in the living room and Dirty Mary was really giving it to them. Slaughter peeked through the corner of the window. She was in a chair. There was blood on her face like she’d been hit. The Ratbags were gathered around her, but not too close. Mary’s shirt was torn and one of her breasts was hanging out. Not that such a thing would bother her, he knew. She liked to flash them like a cop flashed his tin. She had a lot of stories about getting thrown out of bars for showing them around so people could appreciate the inking she had on them.
Yeah, she was some kind of girl.
The Ratbags were probably thinking on raping her, but they didn’t know Dirty Mary. She liked to hand it out like candy at Halloween, you didn’t have to take it by force. But if they did, if those sorry shits put the moves on her…man, were they in for something. In close, Dirty Mary was a real animal with her nails and teeth. And that wasn’t even counting the razor she kept in her belt.
Slaughter decided he’d let it play out a bit, see what happened.
He figured it would be good.
Chapter Three
He’d met Dirty Mary at a roadhouse outside Milwaukee called Angelz, a hardcore biker bar where the juke played renegade country and hard rock and the clientele were all patched members of various clubs who wore their colors proudly. Most of the clubs had been decimated by the Outbreak and the resultant blood wars, but there were still some pretty mean cliques in there—the Outlaws and Highwaymen, Grim Reapers and Blood Brothers, even a few Vagos from California that had headed east to avoid the trouble west of the Mississippi.
The beauty of Angelz was that it was solid road warriors and street-eaters, no RUBs—Rich Urban Bikers—or weekenders on their Honda or Yamaha rice rockets. No wannabes or pretenders, only the real thing: blood members of various clubs along with their prospects, supporters, and hang-arounds. Lots of tough biker bitches and plenty of sheep making the scene, flashing their titties and shaking their asses. Nothing else. The police didn’t bother going there because these days they had enough trouble without trying to roust seventy or eighty juiced-up bikers.
Slaughter had gone in there, picking his way west, needing to get away from the citizens and the John Laws which had his number and wanted to put him away. He wore his Devil’s Disciples colors and he knew a lot of people from the other clubs. The booze was flowing and the boys were snorting coke and meth right off the bar and challenging anyone to mention the fact. Slaughter chatted with some old friends, got his beak wet, and watched the shit hit the fan because the moment he walked in there, he knew it would…and it did.
Hard to say whose buttons got pushed first, but a Vago and a Reaper got into a punch-up and pretty soon a dozen others were drawn into it, and it became increasingly brutal as knives and shanks, chains and broken bottles found their way into hands. Pretty soon you had blood and broken faces, stab wounds and fractured limbs, bleeding skulls and boys spitting out their teeth.
Slaughter stayed out of it for the most part.
That was until some 300 pound maniac from the Blood Brothers—eyes like white diamonds from all the meth he’d been spiking—came at him with a bloodied chair leg. Slaughter stepped under his swing and kneed him in rapid succession in the balls and belly and then gouged his knuckles into the Brother’s eyes, burying them in there and twisting them with a violent motion while the man went down screaming. A boot to the head finished the job and as Slaughter did that, turning to see if any more action was coming his way, the woman he’d come to know as Dirty Mary came at him with a hunting knife. She went at him like a panther out of a cage, smelling blood. He got the knife away from her, slapped her down…then another big boy from the Reapers slammed into them and knocked them both under a table which took them out of the fight.
But Dirty Mary wasn’t done.
She fought under Slaughter with teeth and nails, burning hot and turned on from the blood and action, so he shoved her aside. She came right back for more so he gave her what she wanted right there under the table and when she came she bit into his shoulder and drew blood.
So that was their first date—dark, sleazy, and smarmy, like a five-dollar peep show.
When the soldiers started dragging their club brothers off, Slaughter told her, “My scoot’s outside. Be on it.”
“Fuck I will,” she said.
But five minutes later they were choppering down the highway and Dirty Mary was holding onto him tight and pressing her breasts into him and he knew he had an old lady.
* * *
The first night together they spent in an abandoned motel just outside Sun Prairie. There were people—real, living people—in the town itself, but that’s not what Slaughter wanted. He tolerated zombies only slightly less than he tolerated citizens with their rules and laws and hang-ups. The deserted motel was fine. They had a suite with a fireplace and plenty of logs to feed it. After they killed a bottle of wine and got it on proper, they lay there in bed watching the firelight reflected on the walls.
“So tell me about it,” Slaughter said. “Lay it all on me.”
“Jibb,” she said. “You mean Jibb? My old man?”
“Sure. If that’s what you want.”
“He was a mean dude.”
“I bet.”
“He was. He was sergeant-at-arms and he broke a lot of heads and kicked a lot of ass.” Dirty Mary let that lay like it was the best epitaph she could come up with or the only one that Jibb might have appreciated. “He was tough and he was smart. Then he got funny.”
“Yeah?”
“He started getting religious. He’d been through so many scraps and wars and hardtime lock-ups and never came out of any of it with much more than a scratch. He started thinking he was God’s chosen son.”
So he smoked and tried to keep his mouth shut.
“He really did,” Dirty Mary said. “He thought he was God’s chosen son. And once he started believing that, there was no talking sense to him. He was crazier than before. Meaner. He thought he was ten-feet tall and bulletproof, man. You know?”
“Yeah.”
“That was about the time of the Outbreak. People were dying, and a lot of ‘em were rising back up. Jibb decided it was his personal mission to kill zombies being that he was God’s chosen and they were things from hell. So he killed them. All day long he killed them. Day after day.”
“And then?”
She sighed and he could see the tears glistening in her eyes. “Then, one night, he got caught in a worm rain. He could have made it to cover. That’s what Stumpy, his club brother, told me. But Jibb didn’t believe the worms could touch him. Well, he was fucking wrong, wasn’t he?”
Slaughter could see it playing out in his mind. Jibb, all messed-up with a fucking messiah complex, thinking he was invincible when he was only just crazy and deluded. Lot of ‘em got like that, though. People would stand out in the worm rains laughing. Christian fundamentalist congregations would do the same, acting like it was some kind of baptismal or putting the might of their god against the one that made the worms. In the end, it was always the same—they came out of their graves looking for something to chew on, usually their friends and neighbors. He figured it was probably the same with Jibb.
“I was there when he came back,” Dirty Mary said, lancing a sore of memory and letting the bad blood run. “It was three days after the funeral. The man was saying all bodies had to be burned…remember that? But they didn’t enforce it. Not then. Not at the beginning. Not like they did later when the dudes in the white bio-suits came with guns and took the dead.”
She said that for the first two nights, Stumpy and some of the other Warlocks and their old ladies stayed with her in case something happened and they had to sort out Jibb. But after a few days and he didn’t come back, they figured it was cool. Then the first night she was alone, he was at the door.
“It was the middle of the night, man, the dead of night,” she told Slaughter. “It was a weird night. Kind of warm with a hot wind blowing, dogs were barking. I heard the front door jiggle and I thought, oh, it’s gotta be one of the Warlocks, probably Stumpy had a load on and needed somewhere to crash. Maybe he was looking for a piece of ass. You know how the brothers get sometimes…”
She said she went to the door and was about to call out to whoever was out there when she felt something go right up her spine. The knob was turning. She’d forgotten to lock it. It wasn’t the first time, but when your old man was sergeant-at-arms of a 1%er club, you didn’t worry much about locked doors. But Jibb was dead and somebody was coming in and she had a pretty good idea of who it might be.
The door opened and Jibb was standing there. “Daddy’s home,” he said.
“I backed away. I screamed. All I remember is the clump-clump-clump of his motorcycle boots. We buried him in his rags, his colors, and they just hung on him…Jibb was a big guy and by then he was only a big corpse, like a skeleton wearing skin. His face was white and blotchy, and there were maggots in his hair and beard. His eyes were all red like they were filled with blood or maybe something worse. I got this real perverse idea, man, that he hadn’t come home just to put his teeth in me but to get me in bed, to do things like we used to do.” She broke off for a moment, breathing really hard. “He said he was going to eat me. He said he was going to start with my pussy and work his way up. There was green slime coming out of his mouth and cockroaches—I think they were cockroaches—coming out of holes in his face. He smelled like death, man. Like roadkill. Dirt fell from him as he walked, and he was grinning like a sewer grate. I did the only thing I could do, and took up his .44 Magnum from the kitchen drawer and I shot him. I shot him right in the chest and that fucking .44 almost broke my wrist with the recoil. Jibb made a growling sound and came at me so I shot him in the head the way Stumpy had told me to. Jibb shook and squirmed, the top of his head gone…then he dropped to his knees and vomited out this black bile that looked like crude oil. Then he fell over and he was dead again. He was still grinning, man.”
Slaughter held her tight and she trembled. She had opened her soul to him and that night he really loved her. It didn’t last, of course, but that night he really loved her because she was open and vulnerable and no woman had ever needed him so much. He held her as she shook, listening to the wind howling out in the deserted lot, the rain speckling the windows. After a time she calmed and she wanted him again or maybe she needed him, needed something physical and exhausting that would wipe the slate of her mind clean the way only good sex or good drugs could.
Later, she said, “Tell me now if you’re like that.”
“Like what, baby?”
“Like Jibb. Crazy.”
“I’m crazy, all right. I don’t have a lick of sense, but I know I’m not God’s chosen. I’m a Devil’s Disciple, man. Does that mean God hates me and the Devil loves me? No, it just means that neither have any use for biker trash like me. But one thing you can be sure of: I don’t stand out in worm rains. I’m scared shitless of them and that’s the truth.”
“I think you’ll do then.”
“Any port in a storm?”
“Something like that,” she said, putting her head on his chest.
* * *
They took it easy for a few days after that. No hurry. Just pushing along slow down the pavement. In Sauk City, which was mostly empty except for some Army units patrolling the streets that paid them no mind, and the locals who were armed behind their fenced-in yards, Dirty Mary decided she wanted some candles of all things. She had a real love of candles, and didn’t like getting it on unless candles were burning. That’s the way she was. So Slaughter pulled his hog over before a big gift shop and in they went.
He stood around paging through dusty magazines while Dirty Mary looted the candle section and that’s when a form came shambling out of the back, a big man in a dirty khaki uniform and a badge. “I’m the law around here and I caught you,” he said. “I caught you and you’re mine. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”
The cop had been dead a couple weeks at least, but was still a big boy that was boiling hot with rot. His stiff white crew cut was patchy, as was the scalp below, like birds had been picking at it. His face was gray, mottled, and scabrous, skinless from his nose on down, loops of black slime foaming from his mouth, staining the front of his uniform shirt.
It was nothing Slaughter hadn’t expected. What bothered him, though, was that the cop still had his service pistol on his hip.
“We can come to agreement,” said the cop, his voice scratchy like something from a wind-up phonograph. “Suck my cock and we call it an even trade.”
For one second Slaughter thought John Law was talking to him but that’s when he realized that the cop did not even seem aware of his presence. He was addressing Dirty Mary. He had eyes for nothing or no one else. Maybe in life he’d once been sucked-off by some runaway or desperate woman and that was just replaying in the rotting spools of his brain.
“You suck it, woman,” he said, a long white worm coming out of his ear and dropping to the floor. “How’s about it? Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”
Dirty Mary could have panicked and made it all worse, but she kept her head and did not once look over at Slaughter who the cop had not sighted by that point.
“Okay,” she said.
The cop unzipped his pants and took out a cancerous-looking trouser snake that was bloated black-red like a blood sausage. It was singularly the most vile-looking thing that Slaughte
r had ever seen. And what made it worse was that it was moving from the larval action within.
Dirty Mary, cool as December ice, went down on her knees. She was so absolutely believable that for one crazy—and disturbing—moment, Slaughter actually thought she was really going to take that hose of rotten pork in her mouth, but it was just a play.
“Pull your pants down,” she said, wrinkling her nose against the stink that was so close to her now.
The cop did, and that was real sharp thinking on her part because his gunbelt went down with his pants. He stood there, his penis engorged, flies flitting about the bulbous head.
That’s when Slaughter stepped around the magazine rack with the .357 Combat Mag in his hand. The cop saw it. Saw him. And a dopey sort of look came over what remained of his face. His teeth gnashed, his penis shrank, and black foam came out of his mouth. It was honestly hard to say at that moment whether he was angry or embarrassed…again, he was probably just playing out some past memory. Maybe he’d gotten caught in the act with his pants down way back when, too.
Regardless, he was certainly caught this time.
“Winner, winner, chicken dinner?” he asked.
Slaughter shot him in the forehead and the slug pierced his brain, tumbled around in there and exited the side of his head, taking his ear with it. He stumbled around and then went over like a nine pin, his skull shattered and loose from the slug so that it blew apart when it struck the floor.
Dirty Mary collected her candles and they got out of there.
She was really something. Slaughter had a lot of respect for the balls the woman had. And other than breaking a bottle over his head and trying to stab him once or twice, she was good to him in those rare moments when they weren’t fighting. Like the old song said, she was dirty-sweet, oh yeah.