Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Well, what’s it gonna be? Slaughter asked himself. You gonna sit here until them ugly pricks find their way in or are you gonna hit that gas pedal and paste ‘em?

There wasn’t much a choice.

Not really.

“Fuck this,” he said.

He revved the engine and blared the horn. The mutants stepped back, began mulling in tight little throngs as if they were trying to figure out what to do. Slaughter threw the Wagon in drive and as it started to roll, something incredible happened. One by one, the mutants began to leave the ground, began to drift upwards like they were filled with helium. Like gas-filled bags they levitated and steadily began to rise.

Slaughter stomped on the accelerator.

The Wagon vaulted forward, knocking aside a few of the mutants that hadn’t as yet begun to ascend. The impact made splashing sounds like they were living water balloons. A few others that were not above the level of the Wagon got battered aside, exploding into rains of fluid and flesh and mulch. Slaughter kept his foot on the pedal and plowed forward, finding the road and staying on it. Part of his mind had shut down now and he felt like he was operating completely on remote control. He turned the wipers on high to brush away the oozing anatomies of the things he had smashed open.

Then the town was falling behind them, consumed by the mist.

The fog did not abate, but the road was open.

“Push it, John!” Fish said. “Get us out of here!”

Pavement now.

Good old blacktop.

Later, maybe, they could try and make sense of this. Explain it if they could. But for now there was the simple animal act of evasion and escape—

But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

Something thudded onto the roof of the Wagon.

Then something else.

Soon lots of things were bumping into it, sounding like a dozen men walking around up there. But it was not men, Slaughter knew. And they were not walking. It was those mutants. They were drifting along in the fog, keeping pace with the Wagon, a swarm of them, and they were dropping down like marionettes from time to time and landing on the roof. He saw a couple of them—one lacking arms—drop down onto the hood and then leap back up into the fog. If any of it had hinted at madness before, this was out and out insanity. A mushy, dripping hand slid down from the roof and slapped against the passenger side window. A slimy, waxy face pressed itself against the windshield and then retreated. Lots of them were doing that now. Upside down, they were descending headfirst, just hanging there, staring.

Fish was beyond himself. “JUST LEAVE US ALONE!” he screamed at them. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM US!”

But they were not leaving.

A few daring individuals began lowering themselves from the fog just in front of the Wagon, dropping and rising, dropping and rising with almost comical timing. One of them came swooping out of the fog like a moth and the cow-catcher slammed right into it. Unlike the others, this one did not explode into juice and jelly and muck…it simply vaporized into a great cloud of yellow dust that spattered against the windshield, the wipers brushing it aside with chalky yellow streaks.

Another came.

And another, each one exploding into a cloud of yellow mist that covered the windshield and nearly forced Slaughter off the road. Three, then four, and finally five of them committed suicide in the same way, darting out of the fog directly into the speeding path of the War Wagon. Each one vaporizing into the same yellow, profuse cloud.

Then he knew.

They were not killing themselves.

They were sporing.

Like stepped-on puffballs, they were vomiting out millions of tiny spores. Spreading their seed. Reproducing. Like fungi. Fruiting bodies. They required an external stimulus to set their spores free. Slaughter could smell them…sickening and sweet, bitter and sharp.

But they were gone now, the mutants. Just gone, and there was only that gaseous envelope of fog which began to thin. Visibility increased. The fog went thin and membranous, became nothing more than straggling tendrils of mist that blew away and then Slaughter could see the world again, see the fields and forest and the road climbing up out of that terrible valley. When the Wagon got to the top, he saw freedom and it had never tasted so good.

“I’m glad to be out of that,” Apache Dan said.

“In the future we might want to steer clear of valleys,” Moondog said.

“I can dig that,” Jumbo said, breathing out.

“But what was that place back there?” Fish said to Slaughter, not only wanting to know but needing to know. It had all scared him badly and like most people, he had the tendency to dwell on things like that. To overanalyze and over-scrutinize them. It was his way of pulling their teeth so they couldn’t bite him anymore. And this one in particular needed to be minutely dissected, labeled, and stuck in its jar of alcohol where it would do no more harm.

“I don’t know,” Slaughter told him. “We got out of it, so who cares? Mutants and shit. That’s what it was.”

“But that place…it looked fucking Medieval or something.”

“Sure. Crazy. Maybe some tourist trap designed to look Medieval.”

“But what do you think, John? I mean, what do you really think?”

Slaughter lit a cigarette and watched the road. “I don’t think, bro. Things are easier that way.”

Chapter Seventeen

The next morning, he was out riding point on his hardtail an easy half a mile in front of the pack. It was something Moondog and he had come up with. Traveling together, bunched-up, they were begging for an ambush, so they decided that someone had to be point. Someone that could warn the others.

Slaughter took it.

The others didn’t want him to, but this was his thing as far as he was concerned. He was the leader of this ratpack, the Disciples were under his wing, and they were here because of him. He had more at stake than the others. It was personal with him, therefore the biggest risk should be his.

So he rode out front and the pack hung far back because that’s the way it had to be. When he was on a good stretch of straightaway he could see the pack behind him kicking up dust, but when the road curved or dipped down he lost sight of them and then he was the last man on earth riding into the mouth of hell.

As he ate up those miles, knowing that Devil’s Lake was maybe four or five hours away now, he thought about Poe’s poem The Conqueror Worm, and the grim inevitability of death. Funny how he hadn’t thought about that in many, many years until he’d capped that Cannibal Corpse on the highway. Now he couldn’t seem to get it out of his head, and it seemed that the farther west he went, the more it took hold of him and the more it seemed to be saying to him. It was morbid shit, but the Deadlands were a morbid place, and as far as he was concerned he had only scratched the skin.

He passed through a couple of little towns that were deserted and devastated. One of them was burned nearly flat. The others just empty. Not a scavenging dog or a wormboy to be had. Nothing and no one. Outside the last one there was a crossroads and some kind of half-assed pagan altar had been tacked together. He went by it fast so he didn’t get a real good look at it, but what he did see was a heap of bones, big bones, maybe from a cow or a buffalo, lots of feathers and braided cornshocks, a scarecrow up on a crossbar splashed with paint. At least…he thought it was a scarecrow.

Then the country was open prairie save for scrub pine and juniper, clustered silverberry and bushy staghorn