Cannibal Corpse, M/C

began to see shapes in it, weird, darting forms like figures in motion dancing away just out of sight. And above too, shapes circling in the fog like witches taking to the air.

But he figured it was like staring into static on an old TV…sooner or later, your eyes would begin to see patterns and contours where none really existed. That’s all it was.

Then he saw something.

A man…something like a man…with shining eyes at the side of the road.

“You see that?”

Apache Dan’s voice was dry. “Yeah,” he said.

By that point, Slaughter’s teeth were clenched and his scalp felt tight and crawling, a chill running down his shoulders and over his chest.

Keep it together, man, just keep it together.

Now and again, the fog thinned enough where he could catch an occasional glimpse of the countryside and what he saw was like some netherworld of dark, blasted earth cut by jagged gullies and craters, a few dead trees rising up like withered skeletons. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but he was certain that North Dakota did not look like that. If anything, it looked like France or Belgium in World War I, scarred and gutted and stripped by artillery barrages.

It wasn’t right.

None of it was right.

Some kind of battle or something had been waged here. He hoped it had been with conventional weapons and that they weren’t all being saturated with radiation.

“This is the shit, all right,” Apache Dan said as if reading his mind.

Maybe it was the fear of atomic fallout or that business with the spiders, but his nerves were steadily fraying and his guts were pulled up into his chest now in cold, knotted tangles.

“We gotta ride out of this soon.”

Another five minutes of white-knuckled driving and Slaughter saw a hulking shape in the gloom: the remains of a high stone wall that was crumbling now into debris. There were great holes punched through it like it had been hit by rockets. And then, everywhere, countless buildings and towers and huts rising up into the mist, every one of them derelict and shattered like London after the blitz. Some were nothing but great heaps of rubble, others standing but set with yawning chasms and ragged voids, roofs ripped free and walls gone to wreckage. He glimpsed low doorways and hooded windows, nothing beyond them but a grainy blackness. It looked like some Medieval town after a siege…just gutted and broken and pulverized. What did still stand looked ready to fall. No life there, just cloying shadows and drifting pockets and tendrils of mist.

“Where the hell are we?” he said under his breath.

“Don’t look much like North Dakota, does it?” Apache admitted.

Slowly then, the other Disciples bunching up front with them, Slaughter moved the Wagon through twisting streets, the tires bumping along, maybe over rubbish and bricks and maybe over a road that was no longer pavement, but cobblestones. And as disconcerting as that was, what was worse was that the tombyard of fragmented ruins stretching around them might have been dead and ancient, but they were not unoccupied. He kept seeing vague shapes moving through the rot and devastation, like men or women, hunched and shambling. But every time it seemed like he might glimpse one dragging itself into view through a ruptured doorway, the mist rolled back in, obscuring his view.

Something was telling him that might be a good thing.

“What kind of fucking place is this?” Fish said.

Jumbo and Moondog said nothing; they just watched.

The half-glimpsed figures sliding from the fog stopped when they heard or saw the Wagon coming. They stood there, swaying from side to side, until Slaughter got in close and then they scampered off. Not running or fleeing as men would, but moving with an almost pained loping or hopping motion.

There.

Right before the Wagon now, a figure standing in the middle of the road.

It was not going to move.

“Run that fucker down,” Fish said

The mist blew around it, making it look like steam was coming off it. As the War Wagon got in closer, splashing the figure with headlights, it lifted its arms and waved back and forth like it wanted them to stop. Slaughter did not stop—didn’t dare to—but he slowed. Slowed so that he saw the figure wore little better than rags. Huge, shapeless filthy garments like gunny sacks or motheaten tarps.

“Maybe…maybe we better see what they want,” Jumbo said, a huge and bear-like man, fearsome in battle and loyal as hell…but down deep, oddly compassionate for an outlaw biker. Almost motherly.

“Don’t do it,” Moondog said. As warlord he only cared about the skins of the Disciples.

Slaughter slowed to a stop, sighing, wondering if he was fucking up big this time. Worse than usual.

Give ‘em the benefit of the doubt. They try anything, run ‘em down.

The figure kept waving its arms frantically and even that close, there was no telling if it was a she or a he, though it seemed a better choice as it got closer.

“Man,” Apache Dan said. “Would you look at that…”

The figure’s head looked like a lopsided ball of decayed suet, lumpy and leprous, set with numerous holes like worms had been tunneling through it. You could not tell where the eyes were or if it even had hair, but there was a jagged crevice that might have been called a mouth. The hands it waved over its head were equally as grotesque…gnarled growths of white meat ending in limp digits like gloves with no fingers in them.

“Mutants,” Moondog said. “Fucking mutants.”

Others were gathering now.

Two and three, and then five and six. Finally a dozen with more coming out of the mist all the time, gathering around the Wagon in a mob of maimed, inhuman faces and distorted bodies. Like lepers or the victims of some horrendous atomic fallout, every one of them hunched and deformed, faces like puddled and congealed wax riddled with holes and scabrous sores. Even with the windows closed, you could hear them grunting and squealing as they attempted something like speech.

“C’mon, man,” Fish said. “Get us the fuck out of here.”

Slaughter sat there, gripping the wheel, eyes peeled wide, mouth set in a narrow white line. What held him there, making him stare and making his heart hitch painfully in his chest was just a dumb and senseless mute horror. It sucked the will from him. He could not move, could not think of doing so, some childlike instinct telling him that if he waited like that long enough, like a bird trying to fool a snake by remaining motionless, they would leave the Wagon alone.

“John…shit, let’s go,” Fish said.

“Take it easy,” Moondog told him.

“Take it easy? Look at those fucking things.”

Slaughter let out a long, low sigh. “I wanna see what they’re going to do.”

The figures made no threatening movements, not really, they just stood there in the rolling mist, swaying from side to side, those hideously scarred faces peering through the windows. Some of them gestured, trying to get those in the Wagon to come out, it seemed.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

Slaughter wasn’t exactly uncharitable. He’d decided when he first got the idea of going into the Deadlands that if somebody needed help, he’d help them. Like he had with Rice.

But this…no, the idea of physical contact with one of those abominations was unthinkable. The sight of them was bad enough, let alone coming into close physical proximity with them.

The mutants were not leaving.

They began making loud, slobbering noises, almost as if they were getting excited about something. A few pressed their faces to the plexiglass window ports on the door, leaving sticky strands of something behind. It looked almost like snot. One of them began slapping a diseased hand against the driver’s side window and it actually smashed like a rotting mushroom, leaving a juicy smear on the glass.

They were all getting excited now, thudding their hands against the War Wagon and making those awful sounds.