Cannibal Corpse, M/C

voices for the flesh of the invaders as the fire withered them and scattered them like crematory ashes in a whirling, scorching wind.

Sweat beading his face, his throat scratchy and dry, Slaughter held onto the dashboard as Moondog held onto the wheel and pushed them down narrow streets and arteries clogged with debris and blackened stick-forms.

In was a yellow-orange jungle out there and its trees and vines and creepers were made of fire. Copton was overgrown by the combustion, flooded, drowning in searing brimstone growths, black smoke rolling through the streets and sparks sweeping down byways. The houses and buildings were red glowing bricks. And the zombies… fire ghosts, feral red things reaching out with gnarled fingers, breathing embers, and flaking away like coals in the sizzling, crackling purgatory, the steam and smoke boiler of the holocaust.

“Hey! Did you fucking see that?” Moondog asked.

Slaughter looked at him.

Moondog just shook his head. “I’m losing it. I saw…I thought I saw…”

“What?”

“I don’t know…a guy standing there in the flames. Just standing there, only he wasn’t burning. Weird. Like an old-time preacher,” Moondog said. “Long black coat…and a black hat.”

Slaughter sat down because his knees felt weak. Well, then, now somebody besides himself had seen Black Hat. He tried to convince himself that it wasn’t so, but he didn’t believe it for a moment.

Maybe what you need to do is quit trying to rationalize shit. Quit trying to make sense of things. Take ‘em as they come.

Which was fine and dandy, only it didn’t explain a thing and he badly needed some explanations. Black Hat was occupying a zone of darkness in his head that was widening its perimeters by the hour and Slaughter was beginning to worry that he’d fall in and never find his way out again. There was both rhyme and reason to all this, only it was beyond his limited faculties of comprehension to understand. But it was big. It was important. Black Hat was prophecy and fate, doom and destiny, twisted divination and mad-dog Karmic retribution all rolled into one and Slaughter felt that right into his marrow.

That Black Hat was evil was absolute.

That they would meet was inevitable.

And that they would clash was predestined.

This was all Slaughter really knew for sure. Some dark night on some dark lick of pavement, we’re going to come together. And before the pain and the dying and the bloodshed, there just might be a few answers.

Moondog eased the War Wagon out of Copton and the town faded into thankful memory. Then they were on the road and the temperature dropped and the Disciples began to breathe again. Behind them, the horizon glowed red.

The storm still raged but the worms had been replaced by sweeping sheets of rain, real rain that washed the worm and zombie remains from the Wagon and brought a welcoming chill to the air, cleaning away the stink of death and cremation that was the special smell of Copton, Minnesota.

“Sheeee-iiit,” Shanks said, and everyone agreed silently, for what else was there to say?

Chapter Thirteen

By nightfall, they were on their bikes again, punching through northwest Minnesota, skirting the outer edge of North Dakota. They saw very little after the madhouse of Copton, just lots of little towns with the dead wandering the streets. But no armies; just stragglers. Slaughter led them straight through every town, only stopping for a bite to eat or a fluid exchange, emptying bladders and filling gas tanks in wide open, uninhabited country.

Around sundown, in Clay County, the forest to either side of the road became thick and impenetrable, cut by an occasional river or creek, the ragged finger of a dirt road. Nothing but woods and tree-covered hills frosted by moonlight. No cabins. Not even so much as a boarded-up roadside stand.

The road forked to the left, then the right, snaked over a series of low hills, tall pines rising above looking like they might fall at any moment. And then a valley opened up before them, the road sliding down into its belly. Slaughter was keeping a close watch on just about everything, as he knew the others were, too. He was expecting an ambush at just about every turn. Then the pack was heading down into that sullen valley, a patch of boiling mist rising to greet them. They were in it before they could even think of slowing down or stopping altogether. It was a thick and roiling mist like the sort that would blow in from the sea, gray and gauzy, rolling through the hi-beams like smoke. Suddenly, visibility was down to less than twenty feet and they all downshifted, riding the clutch, cutting their speed to a safe level, navigating the crazy twists and turns the road threw at them.

Apache Dan, as road captain, gave the signal and they all rolled to a stop. He and Slaughter checked the maps Brightman had given them by penlight.

“I don’t like this fog, John. Too easy to stack a bike out in that,” Apache explained. “All it would take is a log lying in the road, a wrecked car. Anything.”

“Yeah. We better pile into the Wagon.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

They lowered the ramp and rolled the bikes up into the War Wagon and got inside themselves. Moondog took the wheel again and Shanks sat in the back with Jumbo and Irish, listening to more of Fish’s randy tales of life on the road, which left Slaughter and Apache Dan up front with Moondog.

With the arrival of the fog, things began to change.

The air no longer smelled chill and clean, but dank and moist and almost noisome, like swamp gas blown off a rotting bog. And it was warm. Hot almost. Sweat trickled down Slaughter’s neck and beaded his forehead. Moondog had to turn the wipers on to cut through the moisture clinging to the windshield.

It just wasn’t natural.

That’s what Slaughter was thinking and wondering why he was surprised by any of it. What did you expect out here? The Outbreak was a lot worse out here, man. Shit, they used nukes in Denver and Oklahoma City, half a dozen other places. You don’t let off a charge of radiation like that within the same twenty-four hour period and not have consequences.

But maybe he’d hoped they’d avoid things like that.

Maybe that was hoping too much.

The wormboys and Cannibal Corpse was one thing, as were the ragtag militias and the Red Hand. Those were known. It was the unknown things that worried him, those crazy nameless things you heard about from time to time: the mutations, the crawling nightmare abominations spawned by the release of atomic radiation. He wasn’t about to let his imagination carry him away into realms of darkness, yet he was not closing his mind to the things that might be out there, things he hoped he’d never have to look upon.

“Like fucking soup,” Apache Dan said. “Getting thicker.”

Moondog nodded. “Sure as shit.”

Slaughter sighed, lighting a cigarette. He could hear Fish in the back going on and on, telling one whopper after another. The boys were laughing nervously and Slaughter would have bet right then that the fog was getting to them, too. The night. The fog. The unknown.

“No, she was a beauty, this one,” Fish was saying, “tall and blonde. A Swede. Naomi Ericksen was her name. Don’t that just give you a hard on? Naomi Erickson. Her old man had bucks. Shit, I could’ve had the easy life with her. Too good for a fucking road rat like me. But she thought I was exciting. I took her to a couple club events and I’m not sure if she was turned on by it all or sick to her stomach. Maybe both. Then I made a big mistake…”

Slaughter watched the road.

The fog was thick and stayed thick. The headlights of the Wagon bounced right off it, reflecting back at them, and Moondog kept the speed down to less than thirty miles an hour because there was no way in hell to know what was out there with visibility down under twenty feet. The trees were black and thick-boled, their limbs hanging out over the road like the tentacles of giant squid. They passed a long-abandoned service station and the mist turned the pumps into stalking, mechanistic things like the Daleks on Dr. Who.

“Looks like it’s getting thinner,” Apache Dan said.