Cannibal Corpse, M/C

around the side of the building, wondering how he was going to work this. He had the Kukri and the flare gun, but that was about it. Not exactly the sort of artillery needed to handle a crew of the Corpse Nation.

But he made ready.

He was going to make it work because he had to make it work. He saw the riders coming in: four of them and behind them another vehicle.

Couldn’t be.

Couldn’t possibly be.

But it was: the Devil’s Disciples had arrived.

Chapter Twenty-Six

On the road again.

In the bright sunshine of a bright day, the War Wagon rolled on, moving steadily north-northwest up to Devil’s Lake where the real action would begin. Slaughter slept away the morning and a good piece of the afternoon in the back of the Wagon after the exhilaration of forming up with his brother Disciples again had worn off. Up front, Apache Dan was driving, the others out riding their iron horses with Moondog leading the pack. Slaughter lay on his cot in the back looking at all the military surplus stacked up, smelling engine oil and gasoline, and thinking there wasn’t a finer and more relaxing scent on earth. With what he’d gone through last night, he was starting to wind down and he was glad the Disciples had shown because it had really energized him to the task at hand and that was something he needed badly.

It had only been a few days since they were together last, but out here in the Deadlands a few days could be an awfully long time. In a few days you could meet a crazy old Indian barbecue king who could tell you wild tales about a Skeleton Man and you could trip your brains out on peyote and have visions and hold court with Black Hat and face down a town full of zombies only to be taken prisoner by the Red Hand and be forced to fight a giant wormboy only to barely escape a worm rain and hook up with a neurotic young woman who you began to feel protective of only to see her dragged off by mutants. And then there was always the bit about the woman squeezing out worms and becoming some kind of fucking seer. Yeah, a few days in the Deadlands could be like a lifetime of revelation and pain and horror.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Maria and hoping she had died quickly, because he had felt responsible for her in her helplessness and felt that he had let her down.

You did the best you could do. Since you seem to be believing in karma these days, then you can believe that yours is intact and unsullied as far as Maria goes because you couldn’t have done more.

According to Apache Dan, after Slaughter rode off that day, drawing the Red Hand away from the pack, they had gone to ground for hours, waiting it out in the shelter of some trees. After a time, Apache Dan had led Moondog and Shanks out on their bikes searching for him. They looked for hours but could find no sign of him and then, since Apache Dan was in charge, he did the only reasonable thing and resumed the drive up to Devil’s Lake. None of them wanted to leave Slaughter behind but they figured if they would link up with him anywhere it would be up at their destination. When he wasn’t there, they got down to business anyway and did some reconnaissance of the old NORAD fortress.

“It was worse than we thought,” Apache Dan told him. “We were expecting to see it swarming with the Red Hand, but that’s not what we saw at all.”

“What did you see?” Slaughter asked him.

“Cannibal Corpse.”

According to Apache at some point—fairly recently, he was guessing—the Corpse Nation had overrun the fortress compound and taken over.

It wasn’t good news.

In fact, it was unbelievably bad news.

Apache Dan and Moondog had scouted out the perimeter of the place for some time and from their estimates there were at least forty or fifty members of the Corpse hanging around with more inside. And it looked like they were running themselves a flesh farm out back of the fortress. Somewhere in there, Slaughter knew, would be the bio. The Red Hand had been smart enough to keep her alive for a bargaining chip, but he doubted the same could be said of Cannibal Corpse. There was every likelihood she had either gone on the spit or become one of the walking dead by that point.

It would be no easy bit getting in there.

Finding her would take sheer luck.

And getting out with her in one piece would be akin to an act of God.

It was suicide from beginning to end but there was no backing out of it now. The thing was, even if Slaughter wanted to, the others wouldn’t have it. They all wanted this and wanted it bad. They all wanted to charge in there, if for no other reason than to sort out Cannibal Corpse. To them, Katherine Isley, the bio, was secondary. The woman really meant nothing to them. They wanted payback. They wanted to put an end to the Cannibal Corpse Nation once and for all.

And Slaughter understood that.

He felt that hatred as deeply as they did.

He had not forgotten about Coffin, the Kansas City chapter president of Cannibal Corpse, or his sergeant-at- arms, Reptile. They were responsible for murdering Disciples and Slaughter knew if he accomplished nothing else he would see the both of them hacked to pieces. When he was through with them, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to get up and walk.

But all that aside, there was more on the burner here.

There were bigger things.

Things that involved Black Hat who, he now felt, was the undeads’ god just as that zombie woman in Exodus was their death goddess. They would have to be put down. But if Black Hat was Nemesis and Nemesis was Leviathan, who quite conceivably was a demon of some sort or Death himself…what chance was there?

If you really believe these things and you’ve attained some higher state of consciousness where karma is not just a word but a physical/mystical flow of universal energy, and ethically and morally you’ve been taken up a few notches, then you have to know that going into the fortress with these boys means their death. They will not survive this and neither will you.

And that was it in a nutshell and he knew it.

Did he have a right to make these boys, his brothers, throw away their lives? He could tell himself they wanted to, but if he gave the word he knew that they would forget it and be more than happy to follow him on a road ride out to, say, the Pacific Ocean, fighting and raising hell the entire way. They’d like that. But he couldn’t do that and if he backed down from Cannibal Corpse they might lose respect for him and he couldn’t allow that. He had to follow this through because he knew it was his destiny to do so and he firmly believed this.

But six of them.

Six Devil’s Disciples against an army of Cannibals, an army of nearly un-killable walking dead bikers. What were the chances?

“Live hard and die free,” he said under his breath.

It was the mantra all 1%ers lived by. And when they stopped practicing it they were no longer 1%ers, they were no longer outlaw bikers.

Enough thinking.

Enough.

Slaughter went up front and clapped Apache Dan on the shoulder.

“Did you have a good sleep?”

“Yeah. I fucking needed it.”

“You did.”

“How far are we?”

“We should make Devil’s Lake just before sunset.”