fated.
But one thing was for sure: he wasn’t about to ascend the throne of death. It wasn’t his calling. If he had one, it was to purge Leviathan from the world.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The shadows were growing very long and they knew they weren’t about to spend the night in the hut with the corpse of the worm-witch, so they struck out for something better. And about that time, they heard screams coming from across the encampments. The sound of gunfire. Down in the mud bowl below people were running. Shouting. It was coming from every direction.
Maria was nervous.
So was Slaughter.
He led her up to the next tier and they came across a man lying in the dirt. His throat was torn out and recently, they knew, from the blood pooling around him that was still fresh, still very wet. Another man was tangled in the barbwire. Like the first, he was dressed in fatigues. Ratbags. There was an arrow in his back. Not a modern streamlined thing but a crude shaft that looked like it had been carved from a stick of wood, but deadly just the same.
His head was missing.
“We have to find a place to hide!” Maria said. “We have to hurry!”
“What’s going on?”
She looked around frantically, her eyes beady and filled with fear. “Mutants,” she said. “Headhunters.”
Slaughter was going to ask her what she was talking about and then, from below, near to the hut, a man ran screaming and four hobbling shapes took him down. He saw that they were both men and women, judging from the pendulous breasts on a couple.
And then Maria cried out.
A woman came running from a bunker in their direction, a look of absolute desperation and absolute horror on her face. And it didn’t take long to see why: the mutants were hunting her.
A trio of them hemmed her in and took her down.
Slaughter got a good look at them.
None of them were more than five feet in height. They were thick-bodied and bow-legged, apelike, with long dangling muscular arms. They were all naked, bodies greased with clotted gray mud that was so thick in places it was cracking open like parched earth. Where the mud had worn away he could see that their skeletons were exaggerated, jutting, their seamed yellow skins barely covering the architecture of bones beneath. Their hair was long and tangled like ditchweed, knotted up ritualistically with sticks and bonepipes, pulled into crude roped dreadlocks with snakeskin thongs and feather clusters.
He fired on semi-auto, busting two 5.56 mm slugs into the back of one of them. The creature—a male— jerked from the impact, but did not go down. He turned and snarled, bearing a mocking grin of crooked, protruding teeth and loops of saliva. The incisors and canines were sharp and doglike.
As the other two mutants literally tore the poor woman apart, this one charged with a hatchet in its gnarled hand.
Slaughter did not hesitate: he fired on full auto, spraying the mutant in the chest. This time the creature went down, making a low grunting sound that could have been pain or pleasure or both. He rose back up, spilling blood from his wounds, and Slaughter put three more in his head and he pitched into the mud, convulsing.
The other two had succeeded in eviscerating the woman now and were fighting over her entrails. A couple more, excited by the smell of blood, loped over there and two more began sniffing around the corpse of the one Slaughter shot. One of them chopped off the woman’s head with an axe and held it high like a trophy.
“C’mon!” Slaughter said, dragging Maria to her feet. “Don’t fold up on me for chissake!”
More mutants were massing now. There was no way in hell they could hold off those primal monsters with an M-16; there were too many and Slaughter was pretty sure he was down to four or five rounds by that point, but he didn’t dare take the time to check. From all across the encampments he could hear shooting, screaming, people dying. The Red Hand had superior weapons, but against the sheer number of mutants it was hopeless. The mutants were loosely organized into hunting bands, but driven into a psychotic kill-frenzy by hunger. They didn’t fear death. They celebrated it, glorified in bloody carnage. A wolf pack with only a vague resemblance to men.
Slaughter led Maria away, only firing when they were threatened.
They climbed quickly to the uppermost tier which seemed to be mutant-free. The bunkers up there were arranged so that they had a perfect, unobstructed killzone before them. The only way the enemy could get at these was to climb the hillside or drop down from above. The first bunker they checked was collapsed, the second was filled with sand and had no weapons. But the third was exactly what they were looking for. It was reinforced concrete, sandbagged, with a .50 caliber machine gun emplacement and a barbwire perimeter. Military surplus was stacked along the low walls. Apparently the Red Hand was using it for storage.
It had been years since he had fired a fifty cal, but it came back to him quick enough. He pulled back the bolt and fed in the belt from the ammo box.
“Please…please don’t let them get me,” Maria said. “You don’t know what they do.”
“I can imagine,” Slaughter told her.
In the setting sunlight, he saw a group of mutants climbing the muddy hillside up at them. They clawed their way up, using their powerful arms and swinging themselves in rapid ascension like monkeys climbing trees. There were a series of barbwire perimeters confronting them, but they crawled up and over the first, torn and bloody, but undaunted in their hunt for meat.
“Okay,” Slaughter said. “This is going to get loud.”
Maria was hunched over behind him and now she curled up in a ball and, if he hadn’t known it before, he knew now that she was going to be absolutely no use in a fight. It made him think of Dirty Mary. She would have relished something like this. Oh, she’d have been scared, too, but once her claws were out, he knew, you’d never have suspected it. He was beginning to really miss her…or maybe he was only now allowing himself to admit it.
In the dying light, Slaughter got a bead on the mutants. They were smeared with blood and one of them brandished a severed arm like a club. He opened up and the fifty did its work just fine. The mutants literally exploded when the .50 cal slugs ripped into them. They were cut in half, throwing up mists of blood and bone fragments. A few more tried to climb either to feed on their downed brothers or to get up at the bunker and Slaughter cut them down. He scattered a few more packs, driving them into the shadows and out of sight.
As darkness came on, he could still hear the screams of the dying from the encampments. That and the grunting and growling of the mutants as they fed.
“Maria?” Slaughter said.
She was still curled up behind him, just shaking.
“Listen,” he said. “I need your help here, man. I can’t do it all myself. You gotta pitch in.”
She sat up. “What do I have to do?”
“Start going through those crates and see what we have.”
Hesitantly, she did. She found a few more ammo boxes for the .50 cal, some medical supplies, bottled water, military MREs, some flares, but no grenades. That was the one thing that he had been hoping for. She passed out food and water, arranged some flares for the long night and then just sat there, staring, practically comatose again.
By the time it was fully dark, the screams out there had all but subsided. They could still hear the mutants from time to time but even that was lessening. The hot wind carried a raw, evil stink of death and suffering.
“You need to tell me about these things out there,” Slaughter said, knowing he had to somehow slap her out of her current state.
In a low, weak voice she said, “They’re flesh-eaters.”
“I figured that.”
“Headhunters. That’s what people call them because they always take heads.”
