Cannibal Corpse, M/C

ears like scarlet snakes. They were huge and bloated unlike any he had seen before.

The girl offered the camera a cadaverous smile and more of the worms came pouring out of her mouth in a slimy, stringy bile and by then she was shuddering and contorting, her flesh cracking open and spilling an oozing tide of the things that swarmed over her, coiling and undulant, until she became just a hothouse gush of putrescent infestation that existed only to birth the worms in ever-increasing numbers.

It was hideous.

As he made to shut it off, that face, that ghoulish white face with the pink eyes, flashed across the screen three more times. He knew he had seen it. He backed the video up but it was not there. It was just not there. His unease grew. He began to get the most unsettling feeling that something was going on, something of a personal nature. Something intended for him and him alone.

Slaughter killed the video.

That was enough.

If that face was intended for you then what the hell does it mean? What can it mean?

He watched two more videos but saw nothing. Nothing at all. He stood there, balanced between belief and skepticism, between sanity and a yawning black pit of madness.

He refused to think about it anymore. The girl. He thought about that girl on the video.

He didn’t know exactly what that was about either but he didn’t like it. In his experience, which was considerable, the worms came out of the sky in worm rains. Check. They crawled into the dead and reanimated them. Check. If you got caught in the rains, they would get inside you as small crawling larval things and you would die within twelve hours and then, sooner or later, you’d rise back up. Check. Generally, when you killed a worm zombie (as they were often known) a single worm would crawl out, looking for a new corpse to invade. Check. These were the things he knew to be true, but never, ever had he seen something like the girl in the video who apparently was like some kind of worm nursery.

And did that mean the worms had jumped up a step in evolution and found a better way to multiply or, and worse, had the scientists at the compound in their research created that situation on purpose?

Slaughter did not know.

Right then, he did not know about a lot of things.

He went over to the wall to the breaker box and killed the juice. Time to get back out on the road. It was at that moment that he heard sounds from the other room…stealthy footsteps that were not so stealthy with the sound of glass crushed beneath them.

Shit.

He drew the Combat Mag and, trying to be quiet, stepped over to the doorway. As he got there he heard a voice in the other room, scratching and discordant like a fork drawn over a blackboard: “I can smell the meat…I want to taste the meat,” it said, pausing and making a slurping noise that sounded, if anything, like a kid sucking up noodles from a bowl of soup. “Where is that meat…I can smell it…but where is it? Why won’t it come closer?”

He walked out into the lab and there was a zombie standing amongst the wreckage, a woman…or something with the general form a woman, a pulping, bioplasmic, gangrenous, fleshrot mass of female anatomy that was glistening and dripping, alive with the swollen vermicular motion of dozens of glossy green hoses that snaked out from between her legs and pulsed from her belly like slit bowels. They erupted from her tits, filled her mouth and eye sockets and grew out of her head in creeping, pulsating ropes like the snakes of Medusa. They were parasitic and jelly-slimed, a peristaltic crawling mass with tiny barbed mouths that pissed a cabbage-green milk as they infested the hobbling necrotic husk of liquescent decay.

Slaughter had seen some shit in his time that made his blood run like Freon and filled his belly with dry ice, but this was beyond all that.

He took one fumbling step back and then another, his head rioting with the flyblown sewer stench of the thing.

“I smell the meat,” she said, moving ever forward, knowing he was there and smelling him, but having no eyes with which to locate him, and Slaughter didn’t think those suckering green tubes counted.

The noodle-sucking sound he heard in the office was the sound of those hoses sliding in and out of her mouth with a moist and rubbery noise like greased eels.

The idea of being embraced by the walking dead was bad enough in of itself, but the idea of this thing taking hold of him and burying him in the carious depths of its own pupal, ichorous flagellation was too much even for the strongest stomach.

As she came forward, he brought up the Combat Mag.

He didn’t hesitate because he couldn’t hesitate.

She heard him, began shambling in his direction, hissing with the motion of those green hoses and he opened up on her. The first round put a hole through her as big around as a fist, spraying black blood and wormy mucilage against the faces of the cages. She screamed with a shrill whining sound that was utter defeat and he put the next bullet right in her face, blowing her head apart into a thousand flying bits of bone, blood, brain matter, and oily green tissue. She took two more ungainly steps and did not fall down so much as she collapsed into a fleshy graveyard emulsion of yeasty and putrid raw matter boiling with red worms and wriggling green hoses tangled in the yellow-gray lattice of her bones.

Slaughter wasted no more time: he ran past her remains and out of that building into the dry heat outside, going down to his knees and gagging out a foamy vomit from his mouth. He breathed in and out, his hand so sweaty the .357 dropped into the dirt.

Finally, when his head stopped reeling, he picked up the gun and stood uneasily in the afternoon sunlight. He lit a cigarette and smoked it carefully, almost lovingly, letting the charge of nicotine chase the ghosts from his head.

As he smoked, he knew the smart thing to do, the reasonable thing, was to get on his scoot and eat some road.

But no one ever said he was smart.

Determined, maybe, and fatalistic, probably, but never smart.

He knew there was more here and he felt that right into his shivering marrow and before he left this fucking cemetery, he planned on finding out what.

* * *

That he wasn’t alone in the compound became more apparent with each step he took. He had no doubt there were more zombies here…or, mutations of the same…but that wasn’t all. He was certain he was being watched by someone that hailed from this side of the grave and he wished they’d show themselves already or take a shot at him. After what he’d seen in the lab, a little running gunplay would be just the thing to purge the darkness that filled him like a cup.

He kept going, out past another row of blockhouses until he came to a wide open field that was cut by a ditch that had to have been 200 feet long and at least half that in width.

It was filled with bones.

One skeleton could either unnerve you or make you feel somewhat sympathetic for the plight of its owner, but a mass grave like this that was nearly filled with them…well, it inspired awe and fear and despair. It looked like one of those bone pits from Majdanek or Birkenau that you saw on the old newsreels. There had to have been at the very least the remains of hundreds and hundreds of people in there. Adults, children, like some kind of wicker sculpture made of bones and skulls. None of them had died recently, for this was old death, bones gray or gleaming white with ancient dark stains upon them, riddled from the teeth of rats and the beak work of carrion crows and buzzards.

If any of it had been remotely recent or there had been but a single shred of meat to be had there would be flies below and ravens circling overhead.

Slaughter stared down in it, kicking a jawless skull into the pit that had been wedged precariously on the edge. It leered at him. It mocked him. He could almost hear its hollow laughter in the back of his head. All you are, boy, I was once, and what I am, you shall soon be. Hee, hee, hee. Ain’t that just a