Cannibal Corpse, M/C

like legs sprouting from them. And eyes…glossy green eyes like marbles. Dozens of the things hung in clusters and leggy pods as if they were mating, daisy chains of mutant spiders whose jaws dripped a foul sap. There were hundreds of these clusters and literally thousands of individual spiders strung together in snotty harnesses of silk.

Slaughter thought they were like those photographs of social spider colonies in Texas you saw that webbed up forests…except taken to a fantastic extreme.

And then on the roof of the Wagon…thump, thump, thump.

Some of that was the mummies and some of it was the spider-clusters bouncing along the roof, but much of it was individual members dropping onto the War Wagon like it was something to be fed upon, something to be webbed and sipped dry. They could hear them up there scuttling about, perhaps dozens of them, their legs making a skin-crawling ticka-ticka-ticka sound as they raced back and forth over the metal shell.

These are the babies, Slaughter found himself thinking, as afraid as he’d ever been in his life. These are the babies, but somewhere here, somewhere there’s a mother…

There were so many clusters of spiders by then that the Disciples began backing away into the rear of the Wagon. Slaughter and Apache Dan stayed up front with Moondog and, seeing no more wrecked vehicles, he eased the speed up to twenty and then thirty miles an hour and it became louder and louder with the clusters banging off the Wagon and the thumping of the hanging mummies. And then one of those clusters must have broken free of its anchor line and came swinging down at the windshield like a pendulum and the result was instantaneous: two or three of the spiders burst open upon impact with a gush of that brown-black slime and the worst part of it, the very worst part, was that everyone in the Wagon could hear the tinny, shrill, agonized screams of the things.

The windshield was a clotted, oozing mass of spider tissue and spider legs—some of which were still moving—that the wipers knocked from side to side until the spray cleaned the emulsion free.

And it was about this time that something came out of the mist and the webs at them. It was immense… something the size of a pick-up but swollen and shiny with spreading legs like telephone poles and a huge sucking black mouth fanning out with immense fangs. It dropped right on the Wagon and the entire thing shook and groaned, rocking on its springs.

Several of the Disciples cried out.

Slaughter was one of them.

He could see a pair of night-black legs, immense but tapering to surgical points tapping away on the hood… and above, that huge and fleshy thing was tearing at the roof with its fangs and the sound of that was like the blades of shovels scraping iron. The force of those teeth was unbelievable, pushing in dents, and then it did something else, it suckered its mouth to the roof and tried to drain the Wagon. The roof popped out, then in, out, then in, like the shell of an aluminum can in a fist.

“Pour it on, man!” Slaughter cried at Moondog, who stomped the accelerator, and the War Wagon rocketed forward, still sluggish with its rider. And then the spider clusters were thinning and the web was no longer a funnel but threads and wires and ropes, and it was then that the Wagon rocked again with a resounding thump and the thing was gone, jumping back into the mists and webs as the Wagon climbed a hill and broke free from the valley below.

The Disciples let forth a collective sight.

And Fish said, “I think…I think I just pissed my pants.”

Chapter Fourteen

About three hours later, they stopped for the night in a nice wide open field where there was not a lick of fog. The spiders were discussed and dispensed with. Nobody much wanted to dwell on any of that and the entire memory of those webbed bodies and clusters of spiders smashing against the windshield filled Slaughter’s mouth with revulsion so he just shook it out of his head.

He lay on his bunk, smoking, trying to put the day and night in some kind of perspective that would make it all easier to live with. It was something he’d done countless other times after coming down from too much action, too much insanity, too much wild and randy bullshit.

What’re you getting your back up about, Slaughter? he asked himself in a voice that was half-dream and half-awake. You knew there’d be mutations out here. The spiders were just that. Disgusting, made your spine crawl and your belly flop over, but not truly unexpected. There’ll be other things. Some of them not so bad and others a lot fucking worse.

Sure, that was realistic, he knew, lying there in the dark of the Wagon, so close to his hog that he could smell the engine oil coming off her like a seductive sweet perfume.

But he knew that wasn’t what was bothering him.

It was Black Hat.

The idea of that man…or thing…disturbed him in ways he could not fathom. That somehow, some way, Black Hat was the axis upon which everything was spinning now. He told himself he couldn’t possibly know that, yet he was certain of it.

The boys had settled in and even Fish had stopped talking about women, and the others drifted off, snoring and shifting in their sleep, Jumbo muttering things under his breath. Moondog was silent. He never made any noise when he slept and you could never be sure if he was sleeping or not. Slaughter knew it was the sleep of a combat veteran, a guy who’d lived in a war zone. They always slept light like that. He was told he did it himself, and Moondog had seen a lot more action than he had. In a lot of ways, the war had never been over for him. He went from combat Marine to outlaw biker to convict at the federal Atlanta hellhole. In their own way, Slaughter knew, each was a combat duty station.

He pulled off his cigarette, trying to wind down, having trouble as he always did.

He closed his eyes and right away pictured a small, gangly-limbed boy in a blue confirmation suit that he knew was his kid brother Perry. Red Eye. It was funny, but whenever Slaughter thought of the kid he pictured him in that confirmation suit standing there in church, his eyes filled with the bright wonder of the Sacraments and the saints, the mystery of faith. To Slaughter himself it meant nothing. It was a racket. They wanted your money and that’s all it was about: money and power. Even as a kid he knew that. Fuck the trappings and ritual. That was eye candy and soul food, a delightfully delirious drug for the brainwashed Catholic masses who were scared of life and terrified of death and haunted by their own sins and gnawing guilt. The marrow, the blood of it was money.

But not to Perry, not to old fucking Red Eye.

It all meant so much more to him and the shit the priests and sisters spewed out in school were absolute truths not to be questioned. Again, unlike Slaughter himself who as a kid was constantly in the shit for asking questions. But, Father, if children are the lambs of God then why did he let all those kids die in concentration camps? And the priest bearing down on him, whacking him with a ruler until his knuckles bled. Because he loved them, you little bastard, because he loved them. Ah, yes, the mystery of faith which was no mystery at all: just believe it, don’t question it, accept your sedative, drink deep of your tonic of Roman propaganda and dig into your pockets and fill the collection plate.

Old Red Eye.

It was no wonder that he ended up as another little braindead devotee of the Legion of Terror. He’d wanted to belong to something all his life and the small bike clubs he’d hooked up with—imitating his big brother, no doubt—were too hedonistic and narcissistic for his liking. There was no underlying spiritual dogma, no divine godhead, no symbolic ceremony in 1%er clubs. They didn’t celebrate the spirit, they unleashed the animal.

Maybe had Slaughter bought into some of that stuff he wouldn’t be where he was today, and then again, maybe if Perry had rejected more of it, he wouldn’t be where he was today: in a federal lock-up awaiting execution, the only thing standing between death and him, not God or Jesus or the Saints, but his rebellious hardcore brother who believed in nothing but the brotherhood of the road, the Devil’s Disciples, and held up his middle finger to country, flag, and organized religion in general.

Man, all that belief and faith of yours, Red Eye. Look what it got you in the end. Me. One