Cannibal Corpse, M/C

them demanded it.

As they watched him, he watched them.

He found his pack on the ground and made ready. He strapped on the holster with the Combat Mag and the sheath with the Gurkha knife in it. He stuffed three extra speed loaders into the ammo pouch on the holster. He was thinking that if he could draw them away, out into the town itself and lose them in the streets he might make his way back to his scoot and ride out.

The dead began to move.

At least, half a dozen of them did: children. They were so unspeakably filthy with grave-dirt and corpse- drainage and the festering ordure of what they had been feeding upon, it was hard to tell if they were boys or girls and in the final analysis, it really did not matter. They grinned at him with faces like pocked membranous sheaths and liquid putrefaction. One of them was certainly a little girl that looked oddly like a Raggedy Ann doll with her stitched red grin and bulging black glass eyes, a gray watery discharge running from the holes in her face. The others to either side were like walking bone sculptures or cages of animated bones lightly fleshed in leathery pelts. One of them had an almost ritualistic pattern of sewing needles jutting from her face and what that could mean he did not know.

He began to move.

Their numbers were thinnest off to the right so this is where he went, moving casually, suppressing the desire to whistle, knowing he was in incredible danger but refusing to give in to fear. That was mostly the aftereffects of the peyote, that singular sense of indestructibility and joyous exhilaration at being alive.

They had not grouped to stop him.

But just as he got close to his opening and was already notching up his muscles for a wild run, a woman stepped out to stop him. She wore a finely-tailored business suit…at least it had been until the mildew started growing all over it. When he got within spitting distance, she hiked her skirt up so he could see the ruin of her sex. It looked like a Venus Fly-Trap, spiked and hungry. He brought up the Combat Mag and shot her in the head, the slug making a clean entrance by splitting her septum lengthwise. Although most of her brains and skull were ejected out with the back of her head, she took three or four drunken steps and then vomited out a black, gushing curd of corpse-chum that splattered at his feet before she tipped straight over face-first into the grass. The others covered her like locusts, stuffing themselves and Slaughter charged through their lines, casting three or four aside and blowing the head off another.

Then something looped around his throat and he brought his elbow back and felt it sink into flesh gone to mush and the dead man that had taken hold of him stumbled back.

Three more ringed him in.

But his hand was practiced and sure. The Combat Mag barked and they all went down with perfect headshots. He spun and drilled another, but his aim was off and the slug went into another’s throat. And that was six rounds and he knew it.

No time to reload.

He holstered the .357 and slid the Kukri out.

They screamed and converged and he went straight into their numbers with the Gurkha knife slashing back and forth in lethal arcs, severing limbs and opening guts and splitting open faces. He kept hacking and cutting as they fell and others surged over the top of their comrades and he stumbled through their masses, tripping on entrails and fluids, splashed with their drainage and foul gouts of blood.

Stumbling, tripping, Slaughter hopped forward, fell again, rolled free and came up running.

Breaking free momentarily he ran out of the park and saw there was no way in hell he could make it to the hog. He dashed towards a row of storefronts, gasping as he tried doorknob after doorknob and the dead poured in at him from every direction.

An open one.

A hardware store. He locked the door, ran behind a counter thick with grime and went down on one knee, pulling out the Combat Mag and a speedloader. He dumped the spent cartridges, quickly inserted the speedloader drum, twisted the knob, and the Mag was loaded.

By then they were thick outside.

They battered into the door and threw themselves against the dusty plate glass windows until cracks began to appear. He took aim and fired at a wormboy leading the charge and the slug took out the window and his target. The others surged forward in a sea of rot, spearing themselves on shards of glass that didn’t even slow them down.

At the same time the window went, the door crashed open and seven, then eight, of them pushed through. He dropped two more, kept firing, emptying the gun as the zombies were felled like dead trees and their fellows began to feed on them.

Slaughter quickly made it into the back of the store, slamming the door shut and throwing the lock. He was in a short corridor with two doors. Think fast, man: door number one or door number two. Fuck it. He tried them both. The first led into a cramped storeroom and the other led into the alley…he hoped.

He threw it open and an immense woman was waiting for him.

She was flabby and quite naked, her face huge like an ashen moon, eyes sunken into pockets of flab and fungus. Her breasts were lolling sacks of flour, the nipples like corded hazelnuts leaking gray milk. Black autopsy stitching ran from her crotch to her throat and it was feathered with a blue-green mold.

There was no time for anything but shock.

Slaughter hesitated with the empty .357 in his hand for just one second and she came at him. Before he could ward it off, one gas-plump hand stiff-armed him in the chest and knocked him flat. Not just flat, but sliding him across the floor.

Definitely no time for reloading.

She stood in the doorway, filling it, blocking out the sunlight behind her. She gnashed yellowed teeth together, gagged out a dust of dead flies, and licked her lips with a tongue like a fat black leech. It left a trail of slime on her puckered mouth.

It was then, as his hand gripped the Kukri, that he noticed she carried something in one of her arms. What he had taken to be another meaty roll of flab was a child…a little wormkid infant with a face like a caul, its body a rolling, distended mass like a prenatal sack full of sloshing embryonic juice.

The woman took two lumbering steps into the room as the dead pounded on the door in the corridor, wanting in, wanting not just to feed, Slaughter thought, but to view the festivities.

The woman cocked her head to the side as he stood.

Was this defiance? She just wasn’t sure.

The baby in her arms made a gurgling sound like its mouth was full of gruel. It dug spiny fingers into its mother’s bulk, something like a face moving behind the caul, grinning, chewing, feeding on itself.

Slaughter was beginning to think he might be able to get a speedloader in, but when he reached for the gun, the woman shivered and clots of black wormy earth dropped from the mossy purple-black crevice between her legs which were stout marble pillars.

“Glhhhh,” she said as if trying to form word. “Glhhhh?”

A question. One without an answer.

Her hair was a dull, weed-dry gold that must have been beautiful and luxurious at one time. Now it was patchy, crawling with insects. Coffin beetles, mottled black-and-red like bloodstones, were chewing at her scalp, pushing themselves under the skin.

Slaughter held the Kukri in one blood-spattered, white-knuckled fist.

The woman stepped forward.

Lips peeled open, yellow teeth were unsheathed.

She reached for him and he slashed out with the Gurkha knife and cleaved one of her breasts open. It split like a casket pillow, scattering filth and drainage and she roared, maybe not so much out of pain but out of damage.

She reached her free arm out at him, scabrous black nails coming within inches of his face and then he jumped back. The zombies were still beating at the other door and he knew it wouldn’t hold. His choice was to go through them or go through this woman.

There was no choice.