Cannibal Corpse, M/C

left side of his face discolored by a livid bruise, blood on his mouth, a smear of grease over his face like warpaint. When Slaughter met his eyes, he just shook his head.

Slaughter wiped his blade off on the colors of a Cannibal Corpse and sheathed it.

He stooped down by Irish who had gotten mangled in the slide he took. He put his hand in Irish’s hair, brushed a few strands from his face, said something silently and stood up.

“Let’s plant him proper,” he said.

They buried Irish in the field, in a hole set there amongst the waving yellow switchgrass. When they had filled it in, they stood around somberly and stared down at the grave. No one spoke. There were things that could have been said for their fallen comrade but no one had the heart to speak. They just stared down and remembered the hard rides and fast times and how it all came rushing to an end out here when he stacked his bike. He would have been happy knowing he’d gone out on his scoot. It was all he could have asked for.

Wiping moisture from his eyes, Fish bent down, scooped up some grave-dirt in his palm and let it fall through his fingers. “See you on the other side, my brother.”

The others followed him back to the road, silently.

Chapter Sixteen

Freak weather pattern.

That’s what Slaughter thought as they entered another valley and the fog swept up to meet them. One of those freak weather patterns that happened from time to time and it really meant nothing. Warm southern air sweeping up and meeting cold air coming down from Canada. That’s all it was. Yet…the way it seemed to shimmer, lighting from slate-gray to a dull and luminous yellow…it was unnerving. Unnatural. He couldn’t stop thinking about the last foggy valley they’d gone through and he wasn’t about to put himself or his brothers through that again. They’d been through enough.

“Nobody’s blaming you, man,” Apache Dan said. “Irish went out the way he would have wanted.”

Slaughter just stared into the fog. He was at the wheel of the War Wagon and when he was driving a cage like this—or any cage—he started thinking too much and feeling too much until his insides seemed to twist up and get sucked down into a black hole inside of him. And Apache Dan always seemed to know. Always.

“Yeah, but I can’t help feeling like shit about it. Irish knew what he was getting into, but if he was still in- stir—”

“If he was still in-stir, man, he’d be rotting away in a fucking cell. This way he got to be with his brothers. He was a Disciple again. Wearing the colors meant the world to him. Same as it does to you and me and the rest of these animals,” Apache Dan told him. “He got to ride again. He got to fight again. He died in the saddle with his fucking boots on and that’s all any Disciple wants.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“I’m always right, bro. Just like when I tell you I don’t like how this is shaking—another valley, more fog. It gives me bad thoughts.”

“Me, too.”

“The boys are getting nervous back there.”

Slaughter listened to them fooling around in the back. Playing cards. Betting with both hands. Insulting each other. Fish telling more lurid tales of his sex life. Seemed like they were doing okay…but were they? He thought their voices sounded strained, their laughter a little too forced and a little too loud as if they were overcompensating.

“I hear you,” he said. “I’m nervous, too. I’m taking her in slow. We see anything…spiders or anything…we turn around. You got my word on that.”

“That’s good enough for me, bro.”

But what if this isn’t just garden-variety fog? Slaughter asked himself after Apache Dan went to sit in on a hand in the back. What if it’s something else? Something worse? Something… dangerous?

He knew it sounded paranoid…but what if there was something funny about it? What if this wasn’t just fog but some cloud of radioactive waste that had drifted down from a leaking reactor or oozed up out of the earth from some toxic waste dump set free by the use of multi-megaton nukes? And hadn’t he heard something about a nuclear power plant in Nebraska going supercritical with a core meltdown since the Outbreak? Clouds of fallout could drift for hundreds of miles before coming to earth. He knew that much. Maybe that explained the Valley of the Spiders (as he was now calling it) and maybe that explained this valley, too.

Then again, man, maybe it’s just fog.

Lacking a Geiger counter or those little radiation detection badges people wore around atomic reactors, there was no way to know. Slaughter decided he’d keep the radiation thing to himself.

The fog kept coming, rolling and billowing like a breeze was pushing it along, making it foam and expand and thicken in some sort of chemical reaction like when vinegar and baking soda mix.

Slaughter kept the War Wagon rolling at around thirty an hour, plenty fast enough in that soup. It was like a noxious weave out there, thickening, fuming. He was thinking things, of course. Mutant spiders. Radioactivity. A breakdown…damn, they blew a tire in this shit and somebody would have to go out and fix it. The idea of that was unthinkable…as if the mist might swallow them alive or reveal things that might turn their hair white.

Jesus, you better get a grip, man. These boys are counting on your cool head, your ability to think. Don’t let them down.

He lit a cigarette, thinking it was amusing—and more than a little disturbing—how this foggy valley was making him feel, pushing him back towards superstition and childhood fears. Him. Goddamn John Slaughter, chapter president of the Pittsburgh Devil’s Disciples, member of the feared 158 Crew. A guy who’d served time in some of the worst joints in the system. A guy who’d fought and killed for his club. A guy who’d been shot twice and stabbed half a dozen times and once took on three inmates with pipes out in the yard at Leavenworth.

Afraid? Is that it, man? This is scaring you?

But fear wasn’t a word he was comfortable with. He preferred to think he was feeling extremely cautious and extremely hesitant. That went down better.

But it was the fog.

It had to be the fog.

It was so very dense and endless, an ocean of mist. It made him feel, again, like maybe he was the last person on earth. The way a sailor might feel at sea when he was trapped in a fog bank, knowing it could be hours or even days before he slipped out the back door. It made Slaughter feel claustrophobic, like he was pressed down in a dark tunnel or buried alive, the air becoming thin and foul and unbreathable.

“Enough of that shit,” he said under his breath.

Looking in the rearview, he could see nothing but the fog bunching behind the Wagon, tinted red by the brake lights. To either side, it was the same. And in front, almost worse, as if it was getting thicker and more congested. Jesus, like driving into the mouth of a foundry smokestack. It looked almost frothy like something whipped up with a whisk. In the headlights, he could see it coalescing and building, drowning the Wagon in that brooding haze.

It was getting worse, there was no doubt of that, like some steam valve had been left wide open.

There was fear in him even if he did not want to admit it. He could feel it prickling his insides like he’d swallowed pins.

Apache Dan came up front. “I checked the map. We should be out of this valley in fifteen, twenty minutes tops.”

“Sure.”

Together, they couldn’t seem to stop staring out into the fog.

It was thick and fine and consuming like the guts of a blizzard. Also like a blizzard, it was in constant swirling, rolling motion, spinning and seething, a busy storm cloud building and covering. It had a funny, almost metallic sheen to it as if it was saturated with microscopic flakes of aluminum. The headlights bounced right off it, filling the cab of the War Wagon with a moonish glow. Slaughter didn’t know if it was his imagination or not, but he