Cannibal Corpse, M/C

eyes. That’s what he saw…and then it dissolved into worms. The resurrection worms…a boiling, writhing storm of them coming out at him from a black sky seamed red and purple, a vortexual maelstrom of scarlet worms entwining and slithering in a colossal pulsating mass that slowly broke apart to reveal what was beneath: a face. A huge, floating, perfectly obscene face coming at him. It was the face of a hag, marble-gray, seamed and wrinkled and convoluted with deep-etched ruts and hollow pockets, a bubbling white graveyard fungus growing up over the chin and cheeks. There were but three or four blackened, stubby teeth in her mouth. Her eyes were vivid pockets of blood set in pallid sockets. A secret channel of wind rustled her hair, which was not hair at all but worms, thousands of worms threading out of her skull. She kept coming closer and Slaughter thrashed in his sleep, trying to hide his dream-self from her, trying to squeeze himself into a river of shadows…but she only got closer. We’re waiting for you, Disciple, for you have been named. We’re all waiting for you, she said in not one voice but perhaps a dozen, all discordant and screeching, filled with a deranged torment and a limitless suffering. Out here. Out in the west. Out in the Deadlands and cemeteries and the tombs of men, in narrow boxes and seeping charnel depths, we wait for you. Come unto us, Disciple. Bring us our burnt offerings and our racks of meat prepared by thine own hand—

Slaughter came awake, his face shining with sweat.

A nightmare, some crazy distorted nightmare that made no sense, yet he felt it made all the sense in the world and could not get past the feeling that he had just caught a glimpse of something he would soon know much better.

Black Hat. The worms. The hag. All part of the same thing, some monstrous and infernal engine of death.

It was well over an hour before he dared to close his eyes again.

Chapter Fifteen

They were eating their way into North Dakota mile by mile, chewing up the pavement and liking the taste, cracking open those throttles so they could eat their fill. They rode in formation, high and tight, six street-eaters gripping ape hangers with their boots up on the Easy Rider pegs. Jumbo was at the wheel of the War Wagon playing tag with them just behind. Slaughter had it figured that if they could keep moving like this, sliding down the old highway, they could make the Devil’s Lake locale by mid-afternoon tomorrow. And ever since he had that fucked-up fever dream of the worms and the face the night before he wasn’t sure if he wanted to get there or turn around and head back.

You ain’t afraid of a little old dream, are you?

No and yes. Because he had the worst possible feeling deep inside that it was no dream at all. Call it a prophecy. Call it a vision. Call it whatever you wanted, but it was haunting him. It had set down deep, snaking roots in the dry stony soil of his soul and it was planning on hanging around. It was part physical sensation and part psychic certainty. But it was there. It was flowing in his veins like venom.

He had to get to Devil’s Hole.

He had to get to that NORAD complex.

He had to get that bio out of there.

He had to save his brother’s ass.

But even so, even as dangerous as that all was going to be, he felt that it was purely peripheral. It was the skin of this sad tale. The real meat lay beneath. Tucked in the hot red stuff down there in the bones was where he was going to find Black Hat and the hag from his dream. Because they or it were waiting there. Waiting for him.

Around noon they got into it.

Things had been cool and easy and Slaughter figured something was coming. He figured something had to be coming, this deep in the guts of the Deadlands. And then, just ahead, sweeping around the corner and putting on the speed was death: twenty bikers that he knew without a doubt were outriders of Cannibal Corpse. A wolfpack. Unlike the Disciples they chewed the pavement in a loose, sprawling sort of formation.

There was no way to avoid them, no time to slow down and double-back.

No time to get the bikes in the Wagon. No time for anything but to clash head-on and that’s the way it was going to be. If the Disciples ran for cover, the riders would be on them before they could dismount. Jumbo came over the walkie-talkie. “You better go to ground, John. They ain’t slowing down.” But Slaughter told him there was no time. Had they been in the Wagon they could’ve played slice-and-dice with the Cannibals using the cow-catcher, but it wasn’t going to be like that.

Both Slaughter and Moondog agreed that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later (and, realistically, it could have been worse: it could have been the Red Hand coming at them with machine guns and heavy artillery instead of these deadheads). So that morning they broke out the M16A2 rifles they’d gotten from Brightman. They duct-taped the barrels to the handlebar mounts of their bikes with the stocks and trigger guards resting on the gas tanks sideways, making room for the magazines and providing easy access. Moondog said that in World War I the allied pilots of the British, French, and American forces were getting their asses handed to them by the German aces in their Fokkers triplanes. The allies had a gunner in back, while the Germans had a machine gun mounted in front that the pilot fired. The pilot used line-of-sight firing directed by the position of the aircraft instead of some gunner in the back trying to swing his machine gun around at swift moving and dipping planes. Something that never worked.

And that’s what the Disciples would do.

Line-of-sight.

Rider-directed.

He gave the signal to the others to go in flogging, wide open. They throttled up, spread out, made ready to meet the bikers dead-on. Slaughter knew from his extensive prison reading that during the Civil War, the Confederate mounted cavalry was considered invincible, untouchable, unstoppable. Then George Custer re-wrote the book. He led wild charges directly into the heart of Confederate cavalry units, cutting through them like a knife, shooting and hacking with his saber, scattering the enemy to the four winds. And thus ending the myth of Confederate cavalry superiority.

Again, that’s what they were going to do right now.

The riders came at them and there was no doubt by then that these were Cannibal Corpse riders—those that had faces as such were leathery masks pitted with holes and others were eaten right down to the bone. They rode muddy hogs painted flat black or primer red, most on ratbikes that had been thrown together out of spare parts.

When they were in range, the Disciples opened up with a devastating barrage. Seven or eight of the Cannibals were blown off their mounts and it took some serious trick-riding to avoid the spinning bikes and tumbling riders.

They all made it through the first pass save for Irish, who rolled over a Cannibal Corpse rider, lost control, and slammed into one of their bikes, stacking his own mount on the pavement, low-ending it in a violent tabletop slide.

There was no time to go to his aid.

They pulled off the road, circled around just as Jumbo plowed through the zombie ranks, knocking a half dozen more to the road and catching another on the cow-catcher and dragging him and his bike thirty feet in a smear of blood and oil and motorcycle parts.

Slaughter came back around without hesitation.

The Cannibals came to meet him and it was one of those ice-pure, hot/cold Zen moments that he had experienced only once or twice in his life and usually at a time like this—right in the heat of battle. It was like everything momentarily ground to a halt, total slo-mo, video jumping slowly frame by frame by frame. He saw the wormboy bikers, six or seven of them bearing down on him, and was amazed at the sheer wrath and sheer fucking ugliness of them. Their faces were beyond simple comic book rot, but a wild and perpetually maggoty delirium of slack-jawed screams, scarification and random impalements, insect-eaten, flyblown, runny/pus-juicing/vomited- clotted expulsions of pulpous ooze.