Cannibal Corpse, M/C

He’d have to hack straight through her.

One of her eyes pushed out of its seam of fat and winked open, a glossy ova serrated by red veins. She puckered her lips like she wanted to kiss him, expectorated in her throat, and spat a globby/stringy ball of bile at him. He ducked and it splattered against the wall.

She made a chortling sound as if amused.

She dug her fingers between her legs, tearing out a slimy blob of something that dripped a thin watery red sap.

And threw it.

He ducked away from that one, too, and she chortled again. And, worse, her child made a moist giggling noise that sounded like somebody vomiting.

She took two steps forward and Slaughter took two backward.

She was grinning.

He was shaking.

She made a retching sound and gagged up a ball of mucus and slime and spit it at him. As quickly as he ducked it, another came and then another and then another, spattering against the walls like red, juicing inkblots. She repeated the process two, then three times, wiping maggots from her lips and then tossed her child at him.

Slaughter stepped aside and it hit the floor with rubbery, slick sound like a water balloon. It rolled towards him, mewling. He gave it a kick and it squealed, its hide ruptured and black juice spilling out.

The woman cried out and launched herself forward.

Slaughter came at her, meeting her, bringing the Kukri down with full force and slicing her bulbous head open lengthwise. She let out a scream that was almost too human and sank to her knees, pudgy pulp fingers exploring her cleaved-open head. Brains ran down what remained of her face in a gray, inching slop like something yanked from a corpse with a funerary hook by an Egyptian embalmer. Blood and pus and clotty drainage poured out, then nests of roaches and pockets of silverfish.

She pitched over, trembling.

The wormkid oozed over the floor and Slaughter gave it a kick that caved in its caul and it slithered about like a rent jellyfish.

He hopped over it and out into the day.

There were more out there and he saw them. He shook the shells from the Combat Mag and inserted his last speedloader with a twist of the drum knob.

Six more rounds.

That’s all you got. You better make it count.

By the time he got to his feet and made ready for the killing there were dozens and dozens of them. Like worms sliding free of carrion, they came out of houses and stores, sheds and garages, attics and crawlspaces and weedy drainage ditches. There was a solid mob of them that encircled him now and he knew there was no way, just no way, he could fight through them.

He looked around as they tightened their noose.

Nowhere but up.

If he could shimmy up a raingutter, somehow get up above them onto the roofs, he might stand a chance.

God, the entire rotting population of the town was out there now and then…they parted. They made way for another that stepped into view. A wormgirl. But a special one and even he could see that. She wore a hooded poncho of human skin and a corpse mask which had been stripped from some old hag and carved to look almost totemic.

Slaughter just stared as a voice in his head said, remember this one. She’s important. She’s different than the others. She’s like a death-goddess to them and you can see the authority she commands.

Which was something that was very obvious when two wormkids stepped in front of her, offering themselves to her and she took her expiation, her burnt offerings, her sacrifice of flesh without hesitation. White fingers with black, hooked talons in place of nails lashed out and slit the offerings at her feet. They stood still, embracing the ritual. She yanked out their entrails and looped them around her throat in pink scarves. She lifted her mask precious inches to reveal a face that was fissured like pine bark, a drab yellow-white, a hollow skullish cavern where her nose had been. Lips opened and red scarab beetles ran from her mouth. Her teeth were impossibly lustrous black fangs. She stuffed entrails into her mouth and chewed on them.

Then she pointed a clawed finger right at Slaughter.

There was no mistaking it.

And as she did so, he felt a distant rumbling in the back of his skull as if she were not walking meat like the others but something of a higher, spiritually defiled office and wanted him to know this. Her thoughts speared into his own and made him quiver as what she sent out to him nested happily in the dark nether regions of his brain.

Does thee fare well, biker boy?

It was the voice of Black Hat and Slaughter knew it instinctively. There could be no other voice like that…dry and scraping, like a skeleton key scratched over a rusting iron tomb door. It was him. The death-goddess was part of him, they were joined together in something. And that was obvious when she lifted the veil that covered her pubis and belly. Her bone-white legs were stained with something like dark menstrual blood or afterbirth and across her gleaming white autopsy-stitched belly something was burned black into the flesh:

That word, that symbol, whatever in the Christ it was. It was everywhere and it was the core of this thing. If he could translate it and know what it meant it would reveal many things. But there was no time to contemplate it because the zombies were massing. They would tear him to bits.

Then the cavalry rolled in.

Once again, the Red Hand arrived.

They came in armored vehicles with shock troops pressing in behind. Light machine guns opened up, cutting down the dead and shooting gouts of fire at them from mounted flame throwers. Then the troops moved in and cut the others down. Slaughter hit the ground and knew there was no escape.

They had him, if that’s what they wanted.

But one thing they didn’t get was the death-goddess for she was nowhere to be seen.

Once the zombies were nothing but blackened, smoldering refuse in the streets, the troops moved in on Slaughter. He still had the Kukri and Combat Mag in his hands.

“The wise thing to do,” one of them said with a submachine gun pointed at him, “would be to drop that hardware.”

So Slaughter did just that.

And they charged in at him.

Chapter Twenty-Two

When he came to the next morning, he was hanging from a crude framework by his wrists. The Ratbags had taken him from Exodus and none too gently. They gave him a quick beating to take the fight out of him and after what he’d been through, there wasn’t much fight left. They roped him, gagged him, and threw him in the back of a truck. Whether it was the beating or the rest of it, he couldn’t say, but he went out cold and woke up like this. He was still dressed, still wearing his colors, and still sprayed down with gore from the zombies.

Every fucking day, he thought as he peered around the Red Hand encampment, things just get worse. You get farther away from your brother Disciples and farther away from that compound and the bio there. And farther away from Red Eye.

Now what?