So Slaughter did just that.
He parked his hardtail out in the barn, loving the sweet smell of all that dry hay in there. It reminded him of raw-dogging Dirty Mary out in the barn after some violent foreplay. But he didn’t want to think too much about any of that so he did some maintenance on the scoot and then went back inside.
The old man had boiled water on the stove and drawn him a bath in an old tub which at first got Slaughter to thinking:
By the time he got dressed and had a leisurely cigarette out on the back porch, noticing with interest that Rice had dug a trench around the farm as sort of a defensive perimeter, there was a meal spread out on the table. Potatoes, smoked ham, even some bread and fresh beans. It was good stuff and Slaughter knocked away about three plates until it felt like he was about nine months along.
“You’re heading out in the morning, I assume?” the old man asked him.
“Yeah, I got places to go.”
“You could stay, you know.”
“Sure, I know. But you’d get sick of me before long. I’m not much good when I’m pent up in one place for too long. I get some real badass PMS after awhile.”
Rice raised an eyebrow. “PMS?”
“Parked Motorcycle Syndrome.”
They had a laugh over that and it felt pretty good to laugh, Slaughter figured. It had been so long now he couldn’t seem to remember how at first…but then it came, a smile, a widening grin, then it just rolled out and he realized that he hadn’t much laughed with Dirty Mary, things were always too tense, way too much poison in the air, but with Rice it was easy. Just like it had been easy back in Pittsburgh at the clubhouse with the rest of the boys when they got together for some drinking and card playing or went to Church, which was what they called their monthly meeting.
Rice told a few jokes after that and kept things going, then soon enough he brought out a jug of corn mash and they took one pull after the other until they were nicely lit up and laughing about just about everything and it was nice. Slaughter figured if he could take away anything from this day it should be the memory of drinking with the old man because it was something good, something real, a connection made between them. Something golden he could hold onto when things weren’t so bright in the gray winding days ahead.
Soon enough, though, Rice started asking about things. “None of my business and that’s for sure, but I gotta ask you, son, I just have to: what do you hope to accomplish out in the Deadlands? What do you hope to achieve besides your own death?”
“I already told you that. I’m going to kill zombies.”
“And that’s all?”
“What more could there be?”
But Rice wasn’t having that and he sure as hell wasn’t believing it. “I guess I’m wondering what you left back east that makes you so desperate to push west.”
“Let’s just say I got my reasons,” Slaughter told him, wondering then how much he should be saying about any of it. “There’s people that would like to put me in a cage, but I don’t think they’ll come after me in the Deadlands. And while I go to ground, as they say, I can be a serious thorn in the side of the walking dead.”
“I suppose you can at that,” Rice shrugged. “But if it’s the Deadlands you want, you got your heart set on that cold lick of hell, you might as well wait right here. They’re saying the Deadlands start on the other side of the Mississip, but don’t you believe it. They’re pushing farther east every day, inch by inch.”
“I bet they are.” Slaughter thought about that a moment. “Let me ask you a crazy question. You ever seen or heard of a guy in a black hat? Real ugly, face dead-white and scarred-up. Pink eyes.”
“No, think I’d remember somebody like that. Why?”
Slaughter just shrugged. “Got me a funny feeling our paths are going to cross.”
“I know something else that might interest you, though.”
“What’s that?”
Rice licked his weathered lips. “A bike gang. What you would call a club. I seen some of them riding through. Dead ones. But they wear colors like you—leather vests, denim vests…says Kansas City on ‘em, I think. Couldn’t make out the rest on account I was keeping my head low and out of harm’s way.”
“Cannibal Corpse,” Slaughter said.
“Good name for what they are. You know ‘em?”
Slaughter snorted a cold laugh. “You could say that. Like ten miles of bad road or ten years of hard time, I know ‘em. They’ve been trying to push east for years. My club and a few others like the Outlaws stopped them from doing so. Now they’re all zombies and the old boys are all dead or like them. Nothing to stop them. Nothing but me.”
“Is that what you plan on doing in the Deadlands?”
“Part of it. The ones you saw were outriders out scoping things. They’ll keep coming in packs like that. Back in the day, the Corpse were in Missouri and Kansas, thick as shit-flies in St. Louis and Jefferson City, Springfield and Kansas City. We fought them out there and we fought them as far east as Ohio and Pennsylvania. But they just kept coming. This time, there’s no law to stand in my way and I’m going to send ‘em back to the grave where they belong.”
“Sounds like you got a score to settle, son.”
Slaughter managed something like a smile. “I do. The Kansas City chapter president was a maggot they called Coffin. He ordered the murders of three Disciples. The shiteater who carried it out was a psychopath name of Reptile. I want both of them in the worst way.”
“Maybe you’ll get a medal for that.”
“Probably a good beating and a prison cell if I get dragged back east.”
Rice fell into silence for a time. “I thought about it, you know.”
“Thought about what?”
“Going back east.”
“But…?”
He sighed. “I decided it wasn’t worth it. My whole command got wiped out. I’d be in for the shit. I’d rate a desk job if I was lucky. Better off to spend my remaining time out here in the wild west.”
“But it wasn’t your fault what happened,” Slaughter told him and meant it. “None of it.”
“Thanks, son. But they wouldn’t see it that way, those brass hats and stiff dicks out in Washington. They’d hang me out to dry. None of them have ever seen eight or nine-hundred zombies coming at them in waves. They couldn’t understand. They’d say I should have known better than to get bottled-up in a place like Freemont.”
Slaughter lit a cigarette. “I was there.”
“Freemont?”
“Yeah, lots of skeletons.”
“Sure enough. Those were my boys.” Rice’s eyes misted a moment. “I scavenged what I could from there for weeks, but I haven’t been there in a couple years now.”
“Nothing there but skeletons.”
“No hardware?”
“None.”
Rice said he couldn’t understand it, that there’d been APCs and Stryker vehicles.
“Somebody took ‘em then,” he said. “Maybe the Red Hand.”
Slaughter figured that’s probably who it was. The idea of the Ratbags with fifty cal. machine guns and rocket launchers, armor-piercing shells and anti-tank missiles was a scary thing.
“Saw a helicopter last week, Blackhawk by the looks of it,” Rice said. “It was heading due west. Probably reconnaissance, spotting Red Hand and zombie hotspots.”
