“We’re going to have to make a run for it!” he told Maria between shots, but she was hysterical and crying.
Two of them came out of the darkness, diving into the bunker. Slaughter was hit by something that knocked him on his ass. Maria screamed. His head filled with stars, he saw two hunched-over forms taking her out of the bunker. She fought and screamed in the orange glow of the flare, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Their silhouettes were everywhere. They were hissing and growling and squealing like boars. The air was foul with the vile, musky scents of their pelts. He could smell their acrid urine, the pungent stench of their glandular secretions, the hot-blood smell of the meat they’d been chewing on. It was a concentration of death and graveyards that sickened him and made him want to vomit. This is what Hemingway had meant by death: the carrion breath of blood-drinking hags from a slaughterhouse.
He felt them grab his ankles, dragging him up and out of the bunker. He reached blindly for the M-16 and his hands closed around a flare magazine with five rounds in it. He stuffed it inside his vest as they pulled him out of the bunker and through the dirt. In the distance, he thought he heard Maria screaming.
Making himself go limp, he let them drag him down the path and out of the main body of headhunters. In the moonlight he could see the forms of the two that had his ankles. They were taking him somewhere private to feed upon him and take his head, no doubt.
Slaughter let that happen.
He didn’t want too many mutants around when he made his move. When they got him down to the next tier and within hailing distance of the hut, he reached a hand inside his vest and pulled out the flare gun. When he got a clear silhouette and saw that the snarling simian bastards were shoulder to shoulder, he kicked out with his legs to get their attention. They dropped his ankles and turned to feed (he was thinking). He covered his eyes and put a flare right into the face of the one on the left who cried out in agony as it exploded in a shower of red sparks, lighting his hair on fire. The flare bounced off him and drilled into the other—a woman—burning across her breasts, bouncing off her legs and hitting the man again, this time in the groin.
Slaughter rolled away, scrambling off on his hands and knees.
They were screeching and growling, the man blinded, the woman seared, both of them burning now.
He made his getaway.
He ran off towards the hut but there were shapes moving all around him, so he cut down the hillside, avoided three or four more that shrieked at him, and ducked past still more. A throng of them came hobbling in his direction and more came from behind. He put a flare right into the throng and they vaulted away, screeching and burning, and he cut through them, trying to navigate in the flickering light. Then he tripped over something—a tree root, a half-buried bone, it was hard to tell—and went rolling down the hillside and found himself in the mud bowl.
There were dozens of them.
He ran and ran, found a ditch not far from the cage where he’d fought Maggot, and jumped in.
He listened to them for hours, killing and maiming, raping the women and dismembering the men, feeding on the wounded and chopping off heads. They didn’t find him. They had plenty of prey and he bided his time, shivering in the muddy ditch, just praying for dawn, his ears ringing with the screams of their victims.
As inconceivable as it seemed, he must have fallen asleep at some point because when he opened his eyes it was silent. The sun was rising over the hills in the east in a red, shimmering ball, burning away a damp early morning mist.
For some time he laid there, afraid to move.
The encampments were silent.
Nothing moved.
Nothing stirred.
He carefully raised his head from the ditch. He saw nothing. The mutants were gone. A few vehicles were burning, casting plumes of smoke into the air, but that was about it. The headhunters had left with the rising sun.
Slaughter pulled himself out of the ditch, slicked with drying mud, face painted with grime. He saw a few headless Ratbag corpses that were badly mauled or eaten, but no dead mutants. They’d dragged off their dead along with the corpses of their prey. In fact, the area was very sterile in appearance. Not so much as a stray bone or a shank of meat. He saw bloodstains; they were everywhere. But there were no corpses save a few Ratbags sunken in the mud that had been overlooked. The headhunters were very efficient scavengers, apparently.
He pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of his vest and lit it.
He wondered about Maria. Poor kid was a mess, a real basket case, a collection of neuroses, but she’d been through a lot and that was understandable. He hoped they’d killed her. He honestly hoped for that because he didn’t think any woman could remain sane after the
He wanted to mourn her.
More so, he wanted to track the mutants to their lair with a hundred well-armed 1%ers and sort them out, but that was wish fulfillment and fantasy retribution. He had to be practical. He needed a vehicle. He needed to link up with the Disciples and, if that was impossible, to get to that fortress and get that bio out of there.
He looked for a vehicle, but every one he found was wrecked. The Red Hand must have deserted during the night, those few survivors driving off in anything that ran. Slaughter was hoping for a Hummer or an APC, but he couldn’t find so much as a skateboard. He was on foot. His scoot was back in Exodus and he really doubted it had survived the all-out attack by the Red Hand.
Damn.
On foot.
That was a hell of a thing for an old scooter tramp. He kept walking, keeping his eyes open for trouble and wondering how he was going to get out of this one and how far it might be to the nearest town where he could possibly hook up with a ride. He came closer to the main gate and he began to see a few stragglers roaming around. They ignored him. Even when he called out to them, they ignored him. They weren’t interested in him or what he was selling. He wondered how many of them had been watching him dance with Maggot.
There was a row of clapboard buildings and that’s where Slaughter had his first piece of luck of the day. The corpse of a man was impaled to the wall of one of the buildings. One of the mutants must have done it and it was a testament to the strength of those things. A knife had been driven through the belly of the corpse and into the wall, pegging it there.
The corpse belonged to Valdez.
And the knife belonged to Slaughter.
It was his Gurkha knife, his
When he put his eyes on them, they scattered.
All except one: a Ratbag with a .38 on his belt.
“You know where I can get a ride?” Slaughter asked him. “A car, a truck, anything?”
“No. But when you find one, you let me know.”
He was about to turn away when there came a rumbling in the distance. Slaughter recognized what it was: there was no mistaking the roar of hogs, the sound of a pack coming in on their iron horses. The only thing akin to it was the sound of heavy armor riding in formation. It was thunder and blitzkrieg and sweet music, the banging of Thor’s hammer and the echo of sheer wrath.
Problem was: who were the riders?
Slaughter couldn’t see yet because of the bend in the road out there. If it was Cannibal Corpse, the stragglers were going to wish that the headhunters had got them the night before. But if it was the Corpse, then Slaughter had already decided he was going to liberate one of those carrion-eaters of his ride.
The stragglers scattered.
They saw death coming and they weren’t hanging around. They crawled back into their holes and coverts and made for the next round which would be no less bloody and savage than the first, they figured. Slaughter slipped
