Cannibal Corpse, M/C

weeks in the hospital. Nice, real nice. Only reason you didn’t get twenty years on that is because that idiot came in without a search warrant and you, being the good upstanding citizen you are, were only defending your life and property. Let’s see…ten years at FCI Leavenworth for armed robbery…sentence commuted after two years. You got lucky on that one. Witnesses couldn’t be sure it was you so your lawyer managed to have it overturned. Nice. I’m guessing your shithead club brothers had something to do with the hazy memories of those witnesses. What’d they do? Threaten to kill their kids? Rape their wives?” Brightman laughed. “At Yardville you were brought up on charges twice for stabbing other inmates with homemade knives…both times, charges thrown out for lack of witness corroboration. I like that. I’m guessing those other cons were scared to open their mouths. And look at this, another six convictions overturned or thrown out of court—gun running, narcotics distribution, murder conspiracy, assault with a deadly weapon, possession of explosives, grand theft.” Brightman had himself a little laugh. “Slaughter you’re nothing but a goddamned scab on society’s ass.”

“You got it, citizen.”

“A parasite.”

“Sure.”

“A fucking predator.”

“One-hundred percent. So throw me in a cell and get it done with so I don’t have to listen to any more of your high-handed shit.”

Brightman threw the file on his desk. “We’re willing to pretend this file doesn’t exist. We’re willing to ignore the three bodies you left behind you in New Castle. In fact, we’re willing to give you a clean slate if you’re willing to play ball.”

“Whose ball?”

“Mine,” Brightman said, “and those I represent.”

“Uh-huh. Go on.”

Brightman finally got down to it. It was simple, really. Since it was already quite apparent by his path west that Slaughter was going into the Deadlands, they were going to clean his slate if he went in there not just to raise hell, but to achieve a very specific objective: to free a high-level biologist being held by the Red Hand of Freedom in a fortress outside Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. Grab her, bring her back. According to Brightman she was a former employee of the CDC that had been kidnapped out of Denver by the Red Hand. Her name was Katherine Isley, she held doctorates in virology and biogenetics, and she was the only one still living who knew the mathematical model for a synthetic biological agent that could zap the worms out of existence.

“What sort of agent?”

Brightman explained that Isley had been part of a team that produced an artificial virus loaded with a particular DNA sequence that would latch on to the reproductive cells of the worms and literally make them sterile. That would mean, in time, no more worms. The worms—origin unknown, Brightman claimed—followed a very peculiar life cycle. One out of every fifty reanimates (he disliked the word zombie) became something of a breeding ground for the worms themselves. What genetic or biochemical factors determined this were also unknown, only that they were always female. In a very strange biological ritual which was yet to be explained, the walking dead would choose a single female and disgorge their worms into her and die…given their rate of decay, most zombies only lasted so long. Several hundred worms usually parasitized a breeder (which, Slaughter figured, explained that girl on the video back at the compound: she was a breeder). The infestation went on until the worms completed their reproductive cycle. Like ordinary worms, they reproduced asexually by parthenogenesis—from unfertilized eggs. These pregnant worms would escape the host, swollen with eggs, and literally burst, each worm releasing thousands of eggs that were lighter than air because of hydrogen pockets within the cell membranes. The eggs then floated upwards, usually in great clusters of hundreds of thousands, and possibly even millions where they would gather in the lower troposphere, about fifteen kilometers up, and slowly mature. Rain was born in the troposphere and when a good cloudburst occurred, down came the worm larva, most less than an inch in length. The larva would seek hosts and reanimate them as cannibalistic corpses.

The cycle began anew.

Slaughter listened to this and he supposed that Brightman thought it was all beyond him, over the head of an outlaw biker, but the reverse was true. Slaughter’s IQ had been tested by the prison psychologist at Leavenworth and had been rated at 150, which was below genius level but well within the superior intelligence classification. In all his years in hardtime joints he’d read one book after the other so none of what the colonel was saying was incomprehensible to him. His brain worked just fine.

“So I hit the fortress, grab this woman and bring her back?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“That’s all there is to it?”

“Sure. If you survive the walking dead, assorted mutants, and the drifting clouds of fallout. Other than that, Slaughter, it’s a cake walk.”

“You’re a funny guy.”

Brightman told him that the fortress was a former NORAD complex that dated from the Cold War: three stories of steel-reinforced concrete, with another two levels below ground. It was, more or less, a bunker that had been appropriated by the Red Hand.

Slaughter chuckled. Lit another cigarette. “And you want me, some dirtbag biker, to play Delta Force and go on some kind of James Bond fucking commando raid? You’re more fucked up than I am.” He blew smoke out of his nostrils. “Why don’t you send in special ops or something?”

“Because we don’t want to waste them,” Brightman said with all honesty. “The chances of success are very slim. No sense getting highly-trained soldiers killed when we’ve got people like you.”

“And if I don’t do this?”

“You’ll either spend the rest of your life in a supermax prison or you’ll go to the death house.” Brightman smiled then, something better up his sleeve. “But there’s more incentive…John. You don’t mind me calling you John, do you?”

“Yeah, I do. That’s what my friends call me. You can call me Slaughter.”

Brightman was unperturbed. “As I said, there’s more incentive. There’s your brother to be considered.”

Shit.

This was how they made it personal. Slaughter had one brother, Perry, who was known as Red Eye for the copious amounts of dope he used to smoke. He’d been a hang-around—a potential prospect for membership—with a few different small 1%er clubs out east, then drifted west to Illinois, got nailed on a few petty charges, did some county time, and the last Slaughter had heard of him was that he was hooked up with some half-ass religious cult. That was Red Eye to the core: always looking for something.

Slaughter butted his cigarette. “All right, lay it on me.”

So Brightman did. Red Eye had been busted. The feds took him down on charges of treason, sedition, arms trafficking, and six counts of terrorism for plotting the military overthrow of Chicago with a fanatic known as The Puritan, who headed an ultra-right wing Christian fundamentalist militia known as the Legion of Terror. They were like the Seventh Day Adventists. With guns.

“Shit,” Slaughter sighed.

“Yes, shit indeed. He’s being held in a federal correctional institution.”

“And if I don’t play ball he stays there?”

“No, he gets the death penalty.”

Well, there you had it. Slaughter knew there had to be an agenda behind all the resources and manpower spent bringing him in and here it was. Not only an agenda, but one with serious incentives to back it up. There was no choice. Not really.

“He goes free if I do this?”

“He’ll do five years, maybe. But no more.”

“I suppose that’s something.”

Brightman leaned back in his chair. “From where you’re sitting, Slaughter, it’s everything. Your life. Your brother’s. You get Isley back and everything’s clean. If you don’t…scratch one brother.”

“What if this woman’s already dead?”

“Then bring us her corpse.”

“Shit.” Again, no choice. “So I have to go in there alone? One fucking man?”