Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Slaughter thought so, too.

“We’re coming up a hill,” Moondog said.

It was a low, gradual grade, but it kept moving upward and that was the good thing because Slaughter was all for getting out of that goddamn valley. But then the hill crested and they started down again. Just before the fog began to thicken like pale gelatin, the hi-beams of the Wagon swept over a lonely meadow at the side of the road and what they saw—just for that briefest of moments—was something unbelievable.

“Holy shit,” Apache said.

That summed it up. The meadow was lit by the moonlight and they saw great ramparts and heaps of white, shining things: bones. Not human bones, of course, but the bones of animals lying about in a great crazy ossuary architecture of rib slats and skulls and disarticulated skeletons. They only saw it for a moment before the night swallowed it and the fog came pushing in again, but it was burned into their brains.

“Buffalo, I bet,” Moondog said.

Slaughter nodded. “Could be.”

“Maybe they all starved,” Apache Dan put in, but the idea, of course, was ludicrous with all the heavy grasses growing wild to either side of the road.

“Maybe,” Slaughter said.

But he wasn’t buying it and he knew they weren’t either. It didn’t look like those animals had lain down and died, it looked like their bones had been dumped there in a litter pile.

“…well,” Fish went on in the back, “I made my biggest mistake when I turned Naomi onto crank. I mean, who am I kidding? I cooked the shit. I sold it. I made serious scratch off it. But one thing you don’t do is turn on anyone you care about to that shit. I never used. Well, Naomi found her drug of choice and she became a first class fucking methamphibian. Fucking crazy, wild, eyes glazed over, hair falling out, sores on her face…ah, she ended up in dry out and her old man threatened to kill me. So that’s how I fucked up my sweet thing. Man, before the Outbreak, I could have had the life, but you know what?”

“You’re fucking stupid?” Irish said.

“That’s it, man. That’s it.”

Fish started laughing then and nobody seemed to get it until he jumped and shook his ass in Jumbo’s face and started dancing around, humming the tune to “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz. Jumbo and Irish were laughing by then, too, and Shanks was just shaking his head as he often did with Fish. Since Fish had an audience, he danced around like the scarecrow from the movie, singing:

“I could while away the hours, smokin’ up them flowers,

If I only had a brain.

With Naomi I’d be busy copulatin’,

I could swear off masturbatin’,

If I only had a brain…”

They all burst out laughing at that, even Shanks who generally did not find anything humorous in life. They started really carrying on then but Slaughter wasn’t in the mood for that locker room shit so he told them to cool it.

“Hey, we’re just fucking around, John,” Jumbo said.

And Slaughter was going to tell them that now wasn’t the time and maybe they’d better get their shit together because they were playing for keeps here, but then he started seeing the vehicles. Moondog slowed the Wagon down. There were pick-up trucks, military Hummers, all of them smashed up like they’d been picked up by a giant and dropped. They were scattered over the road, in and out of the ditch. Slaughter thought he saw some skeletons in the cab of a pick-up truck, but he couldn’t be sure. As they passed a Hummer with an open top, moving around it slowly, he saw a camouflage fatigue shirt dark with blood stains draped over the driver’s side door—no body to go with it, just the shirt, and that made it somehow worse: like the owner had been sucked out of his clothes.

“Red Hand?” Apache said.

“Gotta be,” Moondog told him. “I wonder what happened?”

He moved the Wagon slowly through the maze of wrecked vehicles and every time they thought they were free of them, more were revealed in the fog like grim headstones. All had flat tires or torn off bumpers, crushed-in quarter panels or doors missing. Something absolutely devastating had happened here. Slaughter told himself it could have been a battle…but he didn’t believe it. He saw no bullet holes, no burned vehicles, no sign of exchanged ordinance…just those smashed Hummers and trucks. Some of them had huge, gouging scrapes in their sides.

The Wagon moved on, the fog heavier now, misting and drifting about them like fine lace. More abandoned vehicles, badly used. And then…what looked to be dangling thin cables that were hanging everywhere. They were perfectly white and freakish. They came down from the trees and out of the mist overhead, dozens and dozens of them, some drawn taut where they were connected to Hummers but most hanging limp and fraying, many broken and dangling in the slight breeze like broken clothesline wires.

At first, Slaughter thought he was looking at power cables, but power cables weren’t white and there wouldn’t be this many. The farther they went, the more they saw. Like driving through a forest of spaghetti. No, these weren’t power lines. There was only one thing they could be—

“Fucking webs,” Moondog said. “Spider webs.”

“That’s bullshit,” Apache Dan said.

“You think so?”

The others had moved up front now and were looking, feeling the flesh along their spines begin to crawl. Webs or not, there were so many strands of that white material now it became decidedly eerie. Vehicles and trees were festooned in great sheets of the stuff like gigantic cobwebs and blown cotton, spokes and threads, ropes and anchor lines and spreading white nets. It was everywhere. Combining with the pale mist, the webbing looked ghostly and surreal. The Wagon pushed through, snapping strands as it went, pushing through spokes of the stuff and woven filigree. The vehicles they saw now did indeed have human skeletons in them.

This was a graveyard, a great webbed graveyard.

“Maybe we should go back,” Apache Dan said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice and doing a real poor job of it.

“I agree,” Jumbo said. “Something spun this. I don’t want to see what.”

“Nowhere to turn around,” Moondog informed him.

“Keep pushing through,” Slaughter told him.

The web kept getting thicker, so thick that the wrecked vehicles were swallowed in networks of white mesh. The road ahead was a sold mass of the stuff, an immense funnel web that covered the trees and road and was spun overhead.

Then Apache Dan said, “What in the fuck is that?”

Moondog slowed the bus but it didn’t seem like it could possibly slow enough because that thing that came hopping and scuttling out like some cyclopean blind insect was right in front of them. From where Slaughter was standing he couldn’t be sure what it was with the fog wrapped around it, only he thought it had maybe a dozen eyes that were perfectly liquid and perfectly golden. It had a huge bulbous body that was black-red and shiny, hairs standing out on it like the bristles of a hog. And then the Wagon hit it. The cow-catcher sheared right into the thing and it made a weird, wavering, mewling sort of sound that made everyone’s hair stand on end and some brown- black juice sprayed up over the windshield and the wipers pushed it around in dirty smears.

Nobody said anything.

They knew what it was.

Slaughter felt that he finally knew what it was like to be a fly caught in the web of a house spider as they pushed on, tearing through that intricate network of white gossamer. In the headlights the stuff was shiny, glistening with something that might have been the saliva of spiders. It was about that time that they began seeing things dangling in cocooned pockets—animals, men, lots of men—dangling by threads, shriveled husks sucked dry. Then the mummies were everywhere, hanging like executed men on gallows’ nooses, bumping into the windshield, thumping against the side of the Wagon, and then it wasn’t just the mummies but spiders…or things like spiders: huge, round, bloated bodies the size of basketballs, horribly glistening black-red, hairless and shiny, fans of needle-