Cannibal Corpse, M/C

The troubling thing, he figured, was that the farther they led him through the compound the more riders they picked up. People began to follow them, not just soldiers but women, too, until there was a crowd of at least thirty people with more pressing in all the time. They led him to a “cage” that was about thirty square feet enclosed by walls of high chainlink fence. It looked like it might have been a dog pen at one time.

They shoved him through the doorway.

The crowd ringed the cage.

When they started to part like the Red Sea, Slaughter figured there was probably a very good reason for it and he wasn’t wrong on that: a giant of a man came lumbering along. He was closer to seven feet than six, a huge black zombie with a face of mush. Quilts of decay were threaded into his purple-mottled flesh. He was absolutely gigantic, his body perforated with wounds that oozed a clear slime, and Slaughter figured he weighed well over three-hundred pounds. He was led by five soldiers.

His wrists were tied behind his back and they had a dog collar on him, each pulling him along with lengths of chain attached to it. And they were struggling. The giant was making growling, slobbering noises and that’s about as close to speech as it got with him. There were flies all over him and a violent stink not unlike potatoes rotted to soft white pulp emanated from him.

They led him into the cage and forced him to his knees. They unhooked his collar chains and untied his wrists and then beat hell out the door, chaining it shut and slapping a Masterlock on it.

So this was Maggot.

At first, he paid absolutely no attention to Slaughter. He went right at the chainlink walls, screeching and growling and snapping his teeth. He shook the fence and made the gawkers out there take more than one step backwards. He raged at the walls that held him in, trying to bull his way through and when that didn’t work, he raised his fungi-webbed fingers into the sky and let out an animal roar.

“We told Maggot he could eat you when he was done with you,” Valdez said through the storm fence. “Incentive, you know.”

Maggot turned on Slaughter, just staring at him.

From chin to eye socket, his face was a festering ulcerated cavern eaten through the flesh and right down to the bone in places. He had one good eye, a yellow, rheumy thing swimming in a soup of gummy putrescence; the other was just a ragged pocket of serous drainage. When he opened his mouth, it was filled with maggots.

Slaughter kept his distance as the giant shambled in his direction.

He knew he could only play this game so long.

One thing he was keeping in mind was that Maggot was blind on his left side and his working eye didn’t look like much to begin with. That was something. So Slaughter felt him out, keeping to Maggot’s left, now and again getting into his field of vision to see if the zombie could sight him in. He did, but only when he was close.

Work that, Slaughter told himself. That’s your edge.

He kept moving away to the left, keeping Maggot turning in circles while the crowd jeered and made with their catcalls. He knew he wasn’t putting on the show they wanted and he planned on keeping it that way.

But he got distracted by something—a bottle probably—shattering against the fence. That’s when Maggot charged in for the kill. As he reached out, Slaughter did the only thing he could think of—he jabbed him in the face with clenched fists, four or five good shots that would have put any living man to his knees. But Maggot did not go to his knees. He stumbled back from the ferocity and quickness of the attack, his face breaking open like a sore and spilling a foul-smelling ooze but that was about it.

He grinned with a mouth of broken teeth.

“GET HIM, MAGGOT!” one of the Ratbags called. “TEAR HIS FUCKING THROAT OUT! EAT HIS FUCKING LIVER!”

Slaughter kept to the giant’s left side again.

Maggot kept trying to compensate, probably trying to figure out in his rotting brain why this food would not keep still so he could take a good bite out of it. Still, despite his frustration, Maggot managed to maintain his sunny disposition. He grinned at Slaughter, fixing him with that one flat and lifeless eye like a cow considering the cud it was about to chew.

In a surprising show of stealth, he stumbled about blindly and then lashed out peripherally to where he thought the food might be. But that damn food just would not cooperate. It drilled him with several wild roundhouse punches but it didn’t get away fast enough. Maggot took hold of it and it was wild and squirming in his grip. He lashed out with a meaty black fist and caught the food in the face and just as he was about to reap the rewards with his teeth, the food got one of its legs behind him and brought it back into the undersides of Maggot’s knees, pushing at the same time and Maggot flipped into the dirt.

The crowd hissed and threw more bottles, stones, anything that wasn’t tied down.

As Maggot rolled in the dirt, trying to right himself, Slaughter kicked him in the head with his motorcycle boot and a great chunk of meat and skull dislodged from the impact.

Maggot shrieked.

The crowd screamed.

Slaughter grabbed up a handful of rocks that made it over the top of the fence and threw them back at the crowd. A couple of them hit and people swore. A few bottles came now. Not just at the fence but over the top of it. One of them glanced off the giant’s head as he stood up uneasily, but he never even noticed.

Maggot charged and Slaughter ducked away from him.

When Maggot came around again, Slaughter jumped up and gave him a drop kick that put the zombie back on his ass. As he clawed around, trying to stand, Slaughter kicked him in the face two and then three times. By then, Maggot’s soft and puffy face was a drooping, liquid mass of excrescence.

But it did not slow him.

He was up and ready for more.

Slaughter knew that all he was doing were delaying tactics. Because without a weapon in his hands, he could beat the giant for hours and it would have little effect other than to tire himself out.

Maggot came around again.

Slaughter backpedaled, his boot rolling on one of the bottles, and he lost his balance. That’s all Maggot needed to gain the advantage. Before Slaughter could get his feet under him properly and his equilibrium in line, Maggot came at him like a fighter in the tenth round going in for the kill. He gave Slaughter a shot to the temple with one fist and then another to the jaw in rapid succession. The zombie was incredibly strong and the second blow sent Slaughter spinning in the dirt. He tried to rise up, his head rioting with stars, but another fist from Maggot put him down.

He lay there, dazed, confused, spitting blood, and wondering if he really had anything left to fight with. He saw it all in perspective in that moment as the crowd cried out for his blood, the hate coming off of them hot and rancid. His entire life spent hitting and being hit, fighting with fists and knives, going down and rising up, taking lives and stomping faces. Where had it gotten him? Here, that’s where. In the dusty hard- packed clay of a cage with this flesh-eating monster while the citizens pressed in like hungry dogs. Civilization. He’d never had much respect for it because he’d always been on the outside, but as he looked at Maggot coming for him yet again and saw the near-orgasmic thrill it gave the animals beyond the wire, he knew if there’d ever been such a thing as civilization—which he doubted—that it was long gone now and the human race had finally taken off its genteel mask of sophistication and refinement. It was midnight at the masquerade and all bets were off. The human race showed its yellow fangs and slobbering mouth, it raised its dirty backside to the world and extended its middle finger. Ha, ha, ha, what a good gag it all was! Us…the human race, pretending to be educated and enlightened, compassionate and charitable, the children of a higher god! What a fucking lark! But that’s all done now. So see us, every man and woman and child, in our unfettered primal fuck-you-and-yours-I-got-mine savage, selfish, simian glory! Look upon the true face of the race: hatred and intolerance, bloodlust and gluttony, the killer ape fresh from the dark jungle flaunting every one of the seven deadly sins, reveling in them and rolling in their iniquity like pigs in shit!

“Welcome home…citizens,” Slaughter said under his breath.

Another Zen moment.

Of all times.

But, as usual, it slowed the flow and stilled the frame and let him see reality not as people wanted it to be but as it truly was. Amazing. All these years he thought citizens were limp-wristed, weak, and wan…but the truth