Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Maybe five minutes.

The Hummers were closing and he couldn’t throttle the hog any more or he was going to spill her. The road was rough and potholed, the gravel was loose. Things like that meant nothing to the Hummers, of course. They poured it on even more. And here came that fucking chopper again, the gunner firing off rounds, throwing lead like rice at a wedding: crack! crack! ca-rack!

But there was the thicket beyond…cool, shadowy depths where he could fade.

It was going to work.

He was almost there.

And that was the point at which everything went right straight to hell because out of the thicket came another Hummer straight at him and there was a gunner with a mounted recoilless rifle just waiting for the order. Slaughter knew the weapon well. Back in the days before he earned his Disciples patch when he was a grunt he had shot one. 106mm. It would make scrap metal of the hog and turn Slaughter himself into a greasy smear of gore.

They had him bottled.

He didn’t have a chance to decelerate. He swung the bike to the left and the culvert he hadn’t noticed in the heavy growth came up at him and the bike thumped into it, went up in the air like a rocket and Slaughter was thrown twenty feet, rolling through the grass.

When he came to his senses, soldiers with M16A2s were bearing down on him and he stood up slowly, hands over his head.

“DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!” one of them screamed at him. “EAT THAT GROUND, MOTHERFUCKER!”

“Slow down, man, you got me,” Slaughter said, cool and easy.

Then they came up behind him and knocked him to the ground with their rifle butts and then they were kicking him. Sometime during the process, he rolled over cold as canned fish, thoughts rolling through his mind of the big bad west, the Deadlands, the Rockies, and the Pacific Ocean on the other side.

He fell into a dream where he was swimming in the night sea.

Chapter Ten

Who they were and what they wanted, he did not learn. When Slaughter woke up, he was in a hole. It took some time to come around and make sense of his surroundings because he kept slipping in and out of consciousness. They’d given him a good beating and everything hurt. Everything ached. But when his head finally cleared, he saw that he was indeed in a hole. A perfectly round shaft like a sewer with earthen walls and a rough woolen blanket beneath him. It smelled like piss and blood because he’d been pissing himself and bleeding, maybe pissing blood, too.

About eight feet up there was a grate. The whole thing looked like a pit they kept POWs in from one of those Chuck Norris movies where they free the MIAs in Vietnam or something. Crazy ass shit, but that was the reality of it.

He was in a pit.

Naked.

Bruised and bloodied.

Thirsty.

Hungry.

That first day and into the second he kept calling up to the soldiers he saw peeking through the grating but they ignored him. Only when he started calling their mothers names did he get a short, Fuck off! But that was it. At night it got cold and he shivered in his blanket. During the day the sun streamed down on him and he sweated. There were bugs, too. Black beetles that nipped. They kept him in the hole for a week. He lived in there. Pissed in there. Shit in there. Slept in his own waste like an animal. Twice a day they’d lower down food—a tin cup of water, some bread, a few scraps of meat—and on the third day, he grabbed the rope and nearly pulled the soldier down in there with him, which would have been fun, because he would have killed that fucking G.I. Joe, snapped his neck and gouged out his eyes, taken his weapon and blown away anyone that looked down into the pit. Of course, these were soldiers or cops or both, and they would have tossed tear gas down at him, or maybe a grenade.

Problem solved.

After that little play he got no food or water for two days. That’s when he stopped acting like a cunning animal and starting acting like a thinking man. If they had wanted him dead, he would be dead. That’s not what they wanted at all. This was psychological bullshit and he recognized it as such. They were pushing him to the limits of human endurance the way sadistic guards did with captured soldiers. They were trying to break him. They wanted him to beg for mercy.

That just showed how stupid they were, how they did not know him.

But it was a game and he would play. He honestly did not know if this was about those killings in New Castle, but he knew that in time they would show their hand. But he had to make them do it. And to do that he had to sit silent and take whatever they gave him but never, ever show weakness or beg for mercy.

Let them make the first overture.

Let them show their hand.

The longer he thought about it, the more it began to make sense to him. They had brought him here for a reason. It was not some accidental or coincidental thing where they just happened to grab him on a raid. They came down on him, rode herd on him, spent a lot of time and resources trying to bring him in. If he was just another thug, why waste the time? They would have killed him and left his corpse bleeding out in the sun.

No, they wanted something.

But they wanted to break him first.

On the fifth day, he knew that to be certain, for a voice called down to him, “Hey, Slaughter? You need anything?”

“No. I’m good.”

“Okay, smartass. You had you chance.”

In other words, you had your chance to beg. Okay. So if they spent all that time and manpower to bring in just one man—him—then that meant that not only did they want something, but time was probably a factor, too. He kept that in mind.

On the evening of the sixth day, the voice came again: “Slaughter? You cooperate and I can get you out of there.”

“That’s okay. I like it down here.”

Whoever that voice belonged to, they went away swearing under their breath. And as Slaughter lay there in his own waste, his skin paling, bug bites all over him, his ribs beginning to make themselves known, he started to realize that as miserable as he was—and oh Christ Jesus, was he ever fucking miserable— that the tables were starting to turn. That he was learning this psychological game and playing it against them…whoever them were.

Wait it out, man.

Just fucking wait it out.

They went to a lot of trouble, and each day this goes on is probably fouling them up. Let them get desperate. Real desperate. Because they will.

You’ll see.

Then on the seventh afternoon, the voice: “You wanna come out of there, Slaughter? You wanna come up and talk business? Take a shower? Get some clothes? Have some food?”

And in Slaughter’s own mind, a voice cried out from absolute broken desperation, Yes! Oh God, yes! Please, please, please let me out of here! But he did not give that voice vent. In fact, he said nothing. Nothing at all. He did not even move.

“Slaughter?”

No answer.