Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“What about the law?”

“The law exists for citizens,” Slaughter told him. “And now, out here, they’re ain’t no fucking law, so I fit right in, man.”

At the gates, Slaughter blew the locks off so the old man wouldn’t have to climb back over which was how he’d exacerbated his leg injuries in the first place.

“Nice looking ride you got there, son,” Rice said when he saw the hardtail.

“She gets the job done.”

They climbed on and Slaughter took them on down the road, showing the old man exactly what his scoot could do when called upon to eat some street.

Chapter Seven

Rice directed them off of 94 onto a dusty secondary road and Slaughter took it slowly, avoiding all the potholes and dips. The sun rose higher as he followed it, and was hot against the back of his neck. In the bitch seat, the old man said nothing and that was fine because there was nothing worse than having some needledick on the back that couldn’t hold his mud. It fucked up the whole experience of being one with the wind.

As he grannyed the hog along in low gear, Slaughter watched the countryside roll by. Acres and acres of farmland burnt yellow by the summer sun and unrelieved by a single drop of rain. Even the ditches were dry, the cattails withered and drooping. His mouth tasted like dry wheat chaff, his skin layered in dust. Just miles of farmland. Repetitive. Monotonous. Got under your skin after a time. All those fields and pastures, nothing to break it up but tired-looking silos, collapsing barns, farmhouses weathered as gray as tombstones.

He started, thinking about the Deadlands again because that’s what he wanted, not this, not this rural ma- and-pa shit. Even despite that woman in the lab back at the compound, he wanted it. He wanted to go out there and get in the thick of it.

But the old man’s nice, he told himself, so be nice back. He offers you supper and a bed, take it. He needs help with something, help him. He’s a citizen but he’s okay.

They came around a wild stand of honeysuckle and black cherry that blocked their view and the first thing they saw was the screaming man. He was down on his knees, shirt soaked bright red with blood, and two zombies were standing over him. They had knives and they were using them, almost playfully slashing him to death. They took their time, slitting off his nose, hacking off an ear, taking a few fingers from an upraised hand. The wormboy on the right didn’t have a face as such, just a swollen, perforated mass that oozed a black jelly; the one on the left had a face, but most of it was hanging off the gray, maggoty skull beneath by strings of gristle.

“Better get your widowmaker ready,” Rice said, still holding his empty shotgun.

Slaughter figured he was right because there was no way they were going to get around this scene, so they might as well join the dance and lighten the earth of a few more walking corpses.

He parked the bike off the shoulder and right away he could smell the stink of putrescence. The two zombies paid them little attention, but kept at their butchering until their victim curled up in the dusty road like a dead snake. Standing just off a ways was an old woman in a frayed calico dress, dark stains all over the bosom, a morbid fungi growing up the sleeves and collar line, settling around her throat in a furry scarf. Some kind of grave mold had grown out of her nostrils and eaten away one side of her face like an ulcer.

“That’s Iris McClew,” Rice said, fighting the urge to take his hat off in the presence of a lady. “I’ll be damned. She had the farm down the road from mine. She’s been in the ground a month. Worms must have found her.”

Slaughter studied her.

She must have been a real pistol in life, wound tighter than a corset, a real terror by the looks of her: acid- tongued, opinionated, intolerant, a bible-thumping spinster who’d gone to the grave with her legs crossed and virginity intact. She still carried some of that and you could see it in her one good eye…even though it was filmed yellow.

“This is no concern of yours, George Rice,” she said in a cracking, dry voice. “I would ask you to mind your own business.”

“Like you ever minded yours,” Rice told her.

She gave him a wicked glare, still uppity and proud, a prayer book in one hand and a basket in the other. She raised the prayer book above her head, filled with righteous condemnation. “The Lord has prepared a burning place for thee!” she said, flies exiting her mouth. “And down onto the grass of thy host shall ye go! Amen, amen!”

Rice ignored her as one of the zombies came stumbling over in his direction, the one whose face wasn’t much more than black jelly. He tried to say something but all that came out was more of that black drainage. Slaughter shot him first in the belly and he opened up, viscera spilling down to his knees in unsightly tangles like his abdomen had just burst a seam. Slaughter shot him next in the head, killshot, vaporizing everything from the eyes on up in a fine meaty spray. He took two or three comical steps forward, then rolled into the ditch where he did not move again.

The other zombie came at them. He still had his gore-encrusted knife and he planned on using it. “Gonna cut off yer balls, son,” he said to Slaughter. “Then I’m gonna roast ‘em on a stick like marshmellers.”

“Like hell,” the biker told him.

He sighted and jerked the trigger on the .357 Combat Mag. It went off like a cannon, echoing through the fields and shaking birds out of trees. The effect of a 158 grain .357 slug at such close range was devastating: it cored the zombie right between the eyes and with such force and velocity that it split his head in two like a ripe muskmelon. He hit the road flopping.

“Hmmmph,” said Iris McClew, indignant as always, it would appear. She crouched down next to the murdered man. Taking a fine carving knife from her basket, she slit him open and began stuffing his entrails in her basket. While Slaughter and Rice watched, she slit out a nice flank of liver and shoved it in her mouth, gore dropping from her lips.

After she swallowed, she shook a bloody finger at Slaughter. “You have not the gumption to raise that firearm at me, sir! For your place is known and in it ye shall lay! A gentlemen would not brandish a weapon at a lady!”

“I ain’t no gentleman.”

She laughed with a bubbling, liquid sort of sound. “I know you! We all know you! You bear the mark! You have been named!”

“Hell, you going on about, Iris?” Rice asked her.

But she only laughed as if she knew something they did not and maybe she did at that.

Slaughter shot her dead and that was that.

“Too bad,” Rice said. “She was a real stick in life and she still had it going on in death. Too bad.”

Slaughter didn’t comment on that.

When they rose back up he stopped thinking about who or what they had been. Walking death was walking death. It was a pestilence and you eradicated it and that’s all there really was to it.

Regardless, what she had said haunted him. I know you! We all know you! You bear the mark! You have been named! What mark and named by whom? He didn’t like it. He tried to tell himself that Iris McClew’s brain had gone to rice pudding, but he could not make himself believe it. First the mysterious face on the video back at the compound (Black Hat, as Slaughter now referred to him) and now that shit Iris said. Why did he have the most terrible feeling that it was connected? That taken separately, each incident was a horror, but together they were prophetic?

The farm was just up the road. A barn thirsty for a coat of paint, an old silo, a broken down farmhouse. Typical of the countryside. This was the face the Midwest showed the world these days.

Slaughter got the old man inside and like he’d figured, Rice wanted him to stay for supper and spend the night, which was okay. Why not kick it for a night, work out the kinks? Besides, Rice seemed cool for a citizen and maybe he’d have some good war stories. The farmhouse was a real mess with tools spread around, green metal boxes of U.S. Army ordinance, racks of rifles, survival gear, you name it. It definitely lacked a woman’s touch. The windows were all boarded-up and gunports were cut into them.

Rice found his cane and hobbled around okay with it. “Why don’t you take care of your ride and I’ll get us something to eat,” he said.