Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Slaughter sighed. “Yeah. I got that much.”

“They come in packs and murder everyone. Some of the women they carry off to—”

“Figured that, too.”

“They usually attack towards dark like this and the Red Hand knows it. They haven’t been after us in a month or more,” Maria explained. “I think…I think people let their guard down. I think the headhunters knew that and waited for it.”

Out in the darkness below he could hear the unmistakable sounds of the mutants feeding—snapping bones, chewing, now and then shrieking, and howling.

It was going to be a long night.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Out in the compound, it was quiet.

A deathly brooding silence had fallen and Slaughter wasn’t caring for it much. All they needed was for a few of those things to slip up in the dark and make it into the bunker and that would be it. He still had the M-16, but it was nearly out of shot. What he would have given to have his Combat Mag again and a few speedloaders for the close-in stuff. Back in his days as a Marine, they would have set out landmines and Claymores, tripflares and boobytraps to secure the perimeter. Now he just had his five senses. But he had to remain vigilant, which wasn’t easy because he was so damn tired. His eyes kept shutting. Some coffee or a couple of bennies would have been nice.

Maria was awake.

He could feel her behind him. She was breathing softly but now and again she would move. He didn’t know what the hell he was going to do with her. In the old days, he would have probably tossed her to the headhunters if she didn’t earn her keep, but now he was thinking he had to get her somewhere. Somewhere safe. But where exactly was that? He wondered if the other Disciples were still alive, still riding hard and giving hell.

She’s going to be trouble and you know it. She’s like a child and you don’t have the time to be babysitting anyone.

But what the hell could he do?

Things were different now. He just couldn’t leave. And that meant in the morning—if they even saw the morning—she’d have to come with when he made his break out of this place. He had a pretty good idea that by dawn there wouldn’t be any Ratbags left to stop him and was that a good thing or a bad thing?

Now and again he heard a night bird crying out or the distant and terrible roar of some nocturnal predator. It was hard to say what that might have been, but he didn’t think he was being overly-imaginative when he thought it sounded prehistoric.

The eerie silence and blanketing darkness were almost unbearable.

Slaughter dug around next to him.

“What are you doing?” Maria asked him, her voice almost neurotic in its intensity.

“Putting a flare out,” he said.

What he didn’t tell her was that the stillness out there was making his skin crawl and his experience told him that this was more than nerves but a warning signal.

He aimed the flare pistol and fired it. There was a muted pop and the flare went up over the compound, throwing out a flickering red-yellow illumination that swept over the ragged landscape, creating a surreal world of strobing shapes and jumping shadows.

But his instincts had not been wrong.

A dozen headhunters were clawing their way up the hill. When the flare ignited, they froze, staring up at it like it was the eye of their god that had just opened. They watched it with primitive fascination and Slaughter sighted them in and sprayed them down with the fifty. It was a turkey shoot. The slugs ripped them apart and sent their remains tumbling down the hill. He fired on suspicious pockets of darkness and anything that didn’t move fast enough or things that looked like they might be alive. Most of them weren’t, but the hammering of the heavy machine gun and the burning flare disoriented the other mutants, forcing them up out of ditches into the killzone and scattering the rest in fear. He took out sixteen or seventeen of them by his figuring.

When he was done, the barrel was smoking.

He sighed then, lit a cigarette, knowing there was no point in stealth by then. He kept his senses alert and his instincts sharp. “How did you come to be with the Red Hand?” he asked Maria.

“How does any woman come to be with them?”

“You didn’t volunteer, I’m guessing.”

Maria made a sound that was almost laughter. “No. Would any woman in her right mind volunteer to be a camp woman?”

“I suppose not.”

“There are women who join them, though,” Maria admitted. “Some of them just want protection. But others join because they want to be part of the Hand. They want to fight.”

“But you weren’t one of them.”

“No, I wasn’t one of them.” She went silent for a moment, then: “They grabbed me and three other girls in Bismarck. We were making our way east like everyone else.”

“You were going to college when the Outbreak happened?”

“Yeah. I was studying comparative religion.”

“Heavy stuff.”

“Sure.”

She kept talking but he was no longer listening. He was getting that chill up his spine again. He knew someone, or more probably, something was sneaking up on the bunker. He listened. Intuited. Put out feelers hoping to snare something mentally, but whatever it was, it was being very quiet, very patient, something well-practiced in stealth and stalking. He thought about putting out another flare but he knew there was no time for that. He was getting a raw smell of rotting meat and old blood; nothing could disguise it.

It was getting thicker.

Hot, nauseating.

Maria had sensed it now, too. She had stopped talking.

Slaughter swallowed. Something was on top of the bunker working its way forward, inch by inch. The moonlight was very pale but there was enough of it to see by.

He waited.

A face and a trailing mop of hair appeared over the lip of the roof, then hands. They were perfectly silhouetted. Slaughter fired twice with the M-16, catching their intruder in the head. The headhunter made a gurgling sort of sound and dropped to the ground, dead.

But he was only the spearhead of a much larger force.

They saw no more reason for stealth.

Slaughter heard them grunting out there, gnashing their teeth and breathing hard. He put out a flare. Jesus, the hillside was swarming with them. They were crawling upwards on their bellies in shaggy ranks, their eyes glistening in the sudden intrusion of light.

He loaded the flare gun and put out another.

Loaded it again and stuck it inside his jean vest.

He opened up with the .50 cal. machine gun and killed twenty within the first five seconds of firing. But they were coming from every quarter. He laid down suppressive fire to the left and right, straight ahead and down below in the mud bowl. In the flickering light of the flare, it was a sea of gore down there, twitching limbs and blood and looped entrails and blasted heads. But they still kept coming, crawling right through the shattered remains of the others, painting themselves up with the blood of the fallen. Filthy, carrion-stinking, subhuman nightstalkers.

He kept shooting until the barrel was again hot and smoking.

But there were too many of them.