by Curran, Tim
The beetles had been busy, as had the worms, for in the end the worm conquered all…even this walking heap of grave matter. White bones extruded from his chest, black bloodgrease bubbling from open wounds. His mouth was a blackened corpse-grin that extended ear to ear in a ghoulish smirk. Dead insects dropped from his tongue as he spoke: “Well, lookee here, it’s Johnny Slaughter, prez of the mother chapter of the Devil’s Disciples. Another one for my collection.” He laughed, coughing out a dustball sputum of carapaces. “I think it’s just you and me, Johnny. Now that old Apache Daniel went to meet his maker. But don’t let that eat your guts, prez, because I did it quietly, just like I did the other Disciples. Apache never knew he was dead until his head bounced over the floor.”
Slaughter, feeling a mixture of repulsion, pity, and razor-edged hatred, flipped the Kukri in his fist, sheathing it expertly like a gunslinger slipping his Navy Colt into its scabbard. He racked the pump on the Mossberg.
“Man you came to meet is up above, but you’ll never get there, Johnny,” Reptile said, seething with a blackness that was death fermented in its own vile juices and maybe even something beyond death. “I think you’re gonna scream, Disciple. I think you’re gonna scream real loud when I eat your soul.”
Slaughter brought the shotgun up. “Then quit jawing, Reptile, and slither on over here.”
Reptile made a sound that he probably thought was laughter but sounded more like a scream echoing up an elevator shaft. And then he moved. He was in rough condition and Slaughter did not expect much and that’s why he was shocked: because Reptile did not shamble towards him with a slow and drunken zombie crawl, he exploded, he filled the air like chain lightning and blooming black smoke, flesh and motion and Jack-in-the-Box surprise, a raging carrion gelatin smear in the air that got within about six inches of the shotgun barrel before Slaughter squeezed the trigger and his head was atomized into a spray of pink-black mucilage that sprayed against the wall with the tinkling of pellets.
The head was gone.
The forward momentum of the body struck Slaughter and flattened him, knocked the wind from him, but he gathered himself quickly enough and kicked himself free of the carrion.
He wondered how much time was left before the nuke pissed death to the four winds.
He decided he didn’t really care.
Because up above, that’s where Coffin was waiting and he had a pretty good idea by then that he would wear a black hat.
* * *
Now it comes to a close.
Now the beginning seeks its end.
Now the circle closes and in closing, nooses itself tight.
It didn’t take Slaughter long to find the stairs that could only lead to the roof and he took them slowly, calmly, the threat of thermonuclear annihilation like some fairy tale he’d heard long ago and never really believed. In his mind were feelings and sensations that went far beyond the mere five and into another realm, an undiscovered country that was part terror, part revelation, and pure fission.
He could feel Coffin waiting for him.
More so, he could feel what hid behind Coffin: an entity in a black hat who described his kingdom in bones and ashes and wrote his name in a blood mist upon the marrow of the sky again and again like a silly, bored, and sadistic child obsessed by its own identity:
The name rang out in his head and he feared its echo, its discord, its resonance. But as he feared it he knew that ultimately in some small and possibly insignificant way that it feared him, too. Had it not once called him a favored son? Maybe that was in the whirlpool apparitional phantasmagoria of a peyote dream, but he still felt that it had weight. Black Hat had shown him a future that was an atomic Armageddon wasteland of skeletons and blowing dust and cities that were graveyards. He claimed that was the end of the game, that Slaughter himself would have a hand in it and there was a certain truth in that as death ticked away downstairs, only it would not play out exactly as Leviathan had hoped, just as nothing from the beginning of this sordid little mess had played out the way Slaughter had expected it.
That was life and destiny and fate intertwined:
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
Yes, that was it, for even spoilers bleed and gods die and demons themselves are caught in the web of forever, the lathe of cosmic eternity and resolution and chaos.
As he moved up those steps, he felt Coffin and Black Hat and Nemesis and Leviathan, that destroyer of worlds. But he felt something more than that. It was thrumming through him. Nemesis. Leviathan. A discarnate death entity that had built its house bone by bone and corpse by corpse and skull by skull, a castle then, a cathedral of the dead and the damned where this abomination might walk in tomblike malignant grandeur, his monolithic eyes sweeping over the vast charnel empire he had built with the help of stupid men with brilliant minds who had handed him the trump card that he had longed for in the form of a weaponized biological death: the resurrection worms. He had called to them in their vanity and animal aggression from his den of bone-picked darkness and they had heeded the summons. The worms rained from heaven’s split flesh and the dead rose in tomb legions, cavorting and feasting and spreading the pall of death and giving unto him their burnt offerings which were the souls of the innocent which he craved and the worshipful adoration of graveyard faces which he ached for. His realm was no longer some interdimensional sucking black hole of mausoleum delight but an entire world, a world given unto him like a sacrificed firstborn, a world remade into death, an ossuary without border.
This is what Slaughter felt and knew and understood.
Leviathan was vain.
He had been for so long reviled. Hated.
Now he was worshipped by the risen.
Humanity was desecrated by its oldest enemy and somebody, somehow, somewhere, needed to put an end to Leviathan’s little evil playground.
So his favored son moved up the steps with killing and cessation in mind and nothing could stop him.
* * *
When Slaughter stepped out onto the rooftop and smelled the night air and felt the billowing heat of human corpse-candles burning high above him and dripping their clotted wax, he saw that he was in a nest of zombies. The rooftops of the NORAD fortress were roughly the size of a mall parking lot and the dead were crowded there, waiting for him. How to take in the living dead in ranks of rot and ruin, crumbling things and slime-oozing things and upright skeletons and yellow-eyed cadavers? He looked at the rows of his enemies, the members of Cannibal Corpse in their colors, in various states of dissolution. But amongst them, oh yes, Ratbags of the Red Hand—alive and uninfected, it seemed—that hadn’t gone on the spit. They all held rifles and every last one was trained on Slaughter as the mannequin dead ringed him in, trying to suffocate him with their boneyard stenches. He offered no resistance as those bloated white hands like clown gloves held him in place.
The crowds parted and here was Coffin and he did indeed wear a Black Hat that he removed and tipped towards his guest with sardonic courtly manner.
“Well, Johnny K. Slaughter,” he said and his voice was like a throat burnt by lye and scratched red by ground glass. “A long road it has been and a deserved end it is, my friend. Did you have a dance with Reptile and did you enjoy it?”
Slaughter didn’t struggle; he was held and that was acceptable for now. “I killed him. I blew his fucking head off and I stamped the worm that crawled out.”
“Well, that’s fine, Johnny. Just fine and peachy.”
“Just like I’m going to do to you, maggot.”
Slaughter stared at Coffin. The others did not exist. They were only part of him. This was Coffin. This was the piece of shit that had ordered the death of his brothers. This was Death. This was the slimy, crawling casket-worm that crept through the hair of corpses and adorned itself with tubes of gut and swam through rivers of poisoned blood and tunneling through shattered anatomies and dancing in the flayed skins of children, gnawing on o
rgans and fondling the severed breasts of mothers and sisters and daughters uncounted.
Death laid bare.
Coffin was dressed in typical 1%er chic: black jeans and motorcycle boots. He wore a black leather vest with no shirt beneath. He was a bloated walking torso, a sun-swollen fish that was gutted then stitched back together…poorly. It looked like his arms and legs had been pulled off and then shoved back in their sockets. Everything was out-of-sync. He was bulging with corpse-gas and pockets of larva like there were innumerable hungry ghosts just beneath the skin trying to push their way out. His eyes were dead suns sinking into pockets of blood, his face was pocked and pitted and riven with tiny holes as if nails had been pounded into it, the flesh cold dead white, crosshatched by intensive suturing to hold it together. The lower lip was gone, the upper swollen thick as an engorged leech, the teeth stained pink. He was so pale he was luminously white, yet it looked like he had been peeled, his flesh regenerating itself not as a smooth cutaneous membrane but in ropy corded strands of gut.
He laughed at Slaughter, slow and deadly, brushing strands of coal-black hair from his distorted face. “Ha, ha. Don’t worry about that worm, Johnny. Always more where that came from, always more.” And as if offering proof, three or four of them slid from the holes in his face and dropped writhing to his boots. “Right now you’re thinking, if I can just shed these deadheads long enough to get at my shotgun or that .45 on my belt, I’ll blow this fucker’s head clean off. End of story. Only, see, Johnny, it won’t be the end of the story but the beginning of a new chapter and you ain’t gonna like the story it tells.”
Slaughter just stared and waited. It was coming. What he was waiting for, oh yes, it was most surely coming.
“Too bad about your Disciples, Johnny. You had some good boys. Apache Dan. He would have made a good Cannibal. Too bad he wasted his life with shiteaters and rat-suckers like the Disciples. I hear my boys took out Irish. Glad to know it. Fish is gone, Shanks is dead, and you know damn well that Moondog went out with a bang. Like I said, too bad.”
Baiting him. That’s all this was. It could be nothing more. The death of Moondog came as no real surprise, of course. The only thing he didn’t know and would never know is if Moondog couldn’t get out of the War Wagon in time or if he just decided to ride it straight into hell. He favored the latter because that was exactly how Moondog would have wanted it to end.
“The thing I love about you, Johnny, is that you’re so fucking predictable,” Coffin said, uttering that horrible laugh, his long pale fingers lightly brushing the bulging pockets and sacs of his face, all of which seemed to be moving. His eyes were pink, juicy meat. “I wanted you here on the roof so I had Reptile do Apache, knowing that you’d have to come. You’d have to come to right the wrong against your club. Ha, ha. I love that about you, Johnny. That misplaced, convoluted sense of honor. I knew you’d come here to this place and you did. I knew you’d bring meaty sacrifices of your own Disciples and goddamned if you didn’t.”
Slaughter kept breathing evenly and deeply.
He could not let Coffin scent what he was feeling, because there was terror, great shivering amounts of terror. He knew at that moment in the greater scheme of things that everything that had led up to this moment had been neither accidental nor coincidental; it was planned. All planned out. Probably from the moment he killed those two cops in New Castle. He had been baited every step of the way and he had taken the bait offered. Taken it? No, he had jumped for it, sinking his teeth into it, enjoying every bite. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Coffin had wanted not only him but offerings of the very things that meant the most to him: his brother Disciples.
That was the definition of true sacrifice: the offering of that which you loved best and by your own hand.
Slaughter thought of the dream.
That hag-face rising up and then that voice, that terrible, terrible voice speaking prophecy on the dead wind: We’re waiting for you, Disciple, for you have been named. We’re all waiting for you, she had said. Out here. Out in the west. Out in the Deadlands and cemeteries and the tombs of men, in narrow boxes and seeping charnel depths, we wait for you. Come unto us, Disciple. Bring us our burnt offerings and our racks of meat prepared by thine own hand—
Yes, it was there and it always had been.
The answers he sought were most simple: he was a puppet carefully manipulated and his brother Disciples were nothing but fucking offerings to this obscenity, to Coffin/Nemesis/Black Hat/Leviathan.
“I got a little present for you, Johnny.”
A group of Cannibal Corpse zombies dragged a man out. He was handcuffed, gagged, ankles tied together. They dumped him at Coffin’s feet. It was Jumbo. He was gagged, his eyes wild and pissed-off.
Slaughter tried to break free but he was held firmly.
“I want you to watch how Disciples die, Johnny,” Coffin said. “I want you to see your last boy flip patches.”
The zombies dragged Jumbo to his feet and he looked through the crowd at Slaughter and there was no hatred or recrimination in his eyes. There was only a look that signified friendship. We ride hard and we die hard, John. That’s why they call us the Devil’s Disciples. Slaughter felt something breaking open inside him. A blackness filled his guts and clouded his skull and it was the blinding blackness of sheer hate.
As Jumbo was held, Coffin pulled a looping red worm from one of the holes in his face and dangled it over Jumbo’s lips. Jumbo thrashed his head back and forth, a sweat breaking out on his face, but finally they held him so tightly he could not move so much as an inch.
“Welcome to Cannibal Corpse,” Coffin said and dropped the worm on Jumbo’s face, grinning as it slid up his nostril.
They dropped Jumbo and he convulsed on the ground for some time. Before he disappeared back into the greedy hands of the crowding undead, Coffin had one more indignity for him. He pulled out a knife and slit the colors off his leather vest. The violation and degradation were complete.
Or were they?
For now there was no knife in Coffin’s hand. There was a flat-black branding iron, the branding head of which glowed red.
Slaughter wanted to scream, but there was no point.
The Cannibals yanked Jumbo’s shirt and vest up until a nice wide expanse of back was revealed. The flesh sizzled as the branding iron burnt deep and sure. And then Jumbo was marked:
“Man, Johnny,” Coffin said. “I can’t wait to brand you. You have no idea how much I’m gonna enjoy it.”
Regardless of what evil possessed Coffin now, he was still a Cannibal Corpse at his dark core and what he had done, right in front of the president of the mother chapter of the Devil’s Disciples, was basically ritual defilement.
Slaughter knew it had all been staged to weaken him and break him down on some essential level. And it had done that, all right, at least for a few moments. Now the hate was back and it owned him, it clung to his back like a monkey, it squatted in his belly in a hot mass of boiling tar. It was a grinning, toothy goblin in his head and it was hungry. It was very hungry.
Coffin held a large leather book in his hand now.
Slaughter knew it was The Book of Hell. There was no mistaking it. “Too bad about Jumbo,” Coffin said. “But his name is written in here. As is yours, Johnny K. Slaughter.”
“Any time you’re ready, maggot.”
Coffin laughed. “Ah, yes. You know what comes next, don’t you, Johnny? Oh yes, you know. Now we fight. But not with guns, we fight with blades. Because hasn’t that always been your secret death wish fantasy?”
Slaughter could not deny that. He had dreamed of killing Coffin countless times and it had never, ever been with anything as impersonal as a gun. It was always with a knife. And each and every time he had gutted him and let him a die a slow, agonizing death.
“You wanna kill me, Johnny? Kill me? Kiiiiiillllll me? Yes, that’s good. That’s the way it needs to happen. I knew I could count on you. Right from the beginning, I knew.” Coffin laughed. “
So predictable. But that’s good and that’s fine. You’re maybe the only man left who can kill me, Johnny. The others are afraid. But not you. Never you.”
“So let’s get to it.”
“You dreams are mine, Johnny,” Coffin told him, still uttering that terrible laugh as if he knew the punchline to a wonderful joke. “I’m going to gut you, Disciple. Then I’m going to eat your still-beating heart. Then I’ll take your soul.”
Slaughter was released as Coffin produced a machete.
Pulling the Kukri from its sheath, Slaughter said, “If you could have taken it, you would have by now…maggot.”
Then it wasn’t Coffin facing him but Black Hat. He smiled like a well-polished skull. “Well played, biker boy. Indeed. Well played.”
Then it was Coffin again and it began.
They circled each other like blood-hungry animals in a cage and that’s essentially what they were, each scoping out the other as experienced fighters will do, looking for weak spots, advantages. Slaughter saw many with Coffin because the dead man was barely held together by catgut and wire. But that did not mean he was not dangerous because he was, he most certainly was.
Then Coffin moved.
He went after Slaughter with a couple of quick slashes, feigning moves more than anything else to draw him out, but Slaughter didn’t bite. He’d taken too much bait by that point. He would take no more. He moved around and around as quick as he could, going faster and faster, trying to force Coffin into something and it worked: Coffin let out a war cry and came at him, slashing wildly. Slaughter barely got out of the way of the blade. He ducked and darted, then swung the Gurkha knife. He caught Coffin across the ribs and freed some wriggling parasites but that was about it.