It was all planned out and everyone knew their parts and Slaughter didn’t bother reiterating any of it in his head. Moondog had a special way in mind to breech the fortress and lay waste to most of the Cannibal Corpse wormboys at the same time. It would take daring and real guts, but Slaughter had no doubt that these boys were the ones for the job. He lit a cigarette and watched them out there—Jumbo and Shanks, Moondog and Fish. They were riding high and tight and as he watched them, feeling joy at seeing it and remorse knowing he would never see it again, in his mind he could see other road runs of the past where sixty or seventy Disciples rode in the pack and everything and every
“Can’t help thinking,” Apache Dan said then, “that you were real vague about the past few days.”
“Was I?”
“Sure. Let’s see. You took a wild ride with the Red Hand on your ass. You carved out through fields and back roads. Met an old Indian and ate some antelope. Fought some wormboys in a town called Exodus. Got taken by the Red Hand and fought some big wormboy and held your own against a mutant attack.”
“That about sizes it up,” Slaughter said, pulling off his cigarette.
“Sure. But seems to me you’re leaving out the in-betweens.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah. And I think we both know it.”
“What if I told you those in-betweens were the sort of thing you wouldn’t believe?”
Apache Dan laughed. “Listen to me, man. For twenty-odd years we been riding together, drinking together, fighting and whoring and raising hell together and wearing the same patch…you think I wouldn’t believe your word, my brother? You think there’s anyone in this world I trust more than you? Have more faith in or more respect for? Any man I love more or wouldn’t die for if you asked me to?”
Slaughter swallowed something down in his throat and thought about trying to bullshit the man but he knew he couldn’t do it, so he told him everything and with the telling it sounded even worse than he thought it would.
When he was done, Apache Dan said, “Leviathan. Leviathan, man. Dig it. That’s heavy shit. The Lord of the Dead. Goddamn.”
“You still want to go through with this?”
Apache Dan smiled. “I want it more than ever, John. This is epic. This is the shit sagas are written about. If you’re going to go out, I always say, then go out
“You are one crazy mother,” Slaughter told him.
“That’s why I wear the patch, my brother. Because I earned the right.”
As the sun set, they were sitting on a grassy hilltop beneath the cover of some trees scoping out the NORAD complex below which looked like the castle of a witch in some evil fairy tale. The place was much as Brightman had described it: three stories of gray concrete, drab and deathly and utilitarian. Boxlike with a flat roof and rectangular windows, all of which were covered in steel mesh. The compound surrounding it was faced off by a circular drive and a huge parking lot that was now cracked open with sprouting weeds. There was a courtyard of high yellow grasses that stretched out about three hundred feet in every direction until it reached a high chainlink fence topped with razor wire. The road leading up to the main gate was long and straight and set out with lots of abandoned guard shacks. With his binoculars, Slaughter could see where the tire traps had been—sheaths of spikes that would rise up out of the road at intervals to snag any vehicle that tried to make a run at the complex. He could also see obvious scars in the landscape outside the main fence where a series of fences had been taken out after the complex closed up shop. At one time, the fences would have held dog runs in-between with vicious German Shepherds that would have stopped anybody from even getting close to the place. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s and probably right up into the 1980’s, if you would have been even as close as they were on the hilltop you would have been arrested by MPs and tossed in a military prison. It had been secure during the Cold War, but now it was wide open.
The main gate was thrown wide and why not? Cannibal Corpse feared no one. And who in their right mind would willingly go through those gates into a nest of flesh-eaters?
“You can’t see the flesh farm from here,” Apache Dan said. “It’s out back behind the place.”
Slaughter could see a rising rock wall back there and Apache said there was a high cave in it that was not natural but hewn-out and must have held some kind of top security facility in the NORAD days.
“From what I could see of it when Moondog and me scoped it from the other side, it looks big enough to drive three or four tanks into at the same time. Hard to say what was in there or what’s in there now. Might have been a bunker or a bomb shelter. Who knows?”
“But that’s probably where our bio will be if she’s anywhere.”
“That’s what we think.”
Sitting there, Slaughter saw the ratbikes of the Cannibals parked in the lot, in the drive, on the grass. They were everywhere. He counted fifty-seven of them so that meant they had at least fifty-seven members of the Nation to deal with. Not good odds for six men, even if they were hard-charging bullet-eating members of the Devil’s Disciples Nation.
He thought over the plan Moondog had come up with. As warlord and sergeant-at-arms and a combat veteran, his plan was good. It was workable. But it was full of holes and that wasn’t poor planning or strategy, but the fact that with six men there was only so much that could be foreseen and mapped out. A good part of it was going to be the element of surprise combined with luck.
Slaughter had been over it from start to finish a dozen times at least and he honestly couldn’t come up with anything better.
Parked in the lot amongst the ratbikes were the vehicles of the Red Hand—APCs, Hummers, and pickup trucks. If all went successful, they’d be charging out of there in a pair of APCs. Once they started rolling, with their weapons systems and heavy armaments, nothing could stop them.
Slaughter stood up. He saw maybe a dozen Cannibals moving around down there, shambling about as their kind did. Inside the fortress, he thought, was where Reptile and Coffin would be if they were still in fact walking.
“I guess that about does it,” he said.
“I guess so, man. Now we wait for dark.”
Slaughter nodded, feeling his blood running hot. “Then we get it on.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Slaughter waited for it to begin because it was only minutes away now and he knew it. He could feel the excitement—and dread—coming right up from the balls of his feet as he waited in the darkness on Moondog’s Boss Hoss 375 Horse. It was like energy was funneling up from deep inside the earth and his feet on the ground were plugged right into it.
Moondog was in the bus and it was starting to roll.
Slaughter and the others waited on their bikes. They carried the arsenal Brightman had supplied them with: 12-gauge pistol-gripped Mossberg pump shotguns, white phosphorus grenades, and Hardballer .45s. Full auto weapons like the M-16 wouldn’t do much good against wormboys, you needed real punch for clean headshots.
Slaughter lit a cigarette, watching the bus picking up speed as it made for the gates. There were about twenty Cannibals out in front of the fortress gathered with their ratbikes and there would be twenty less of them once Moondog made contact. He had rigged a pressure switch to the cow-catcher on the front of the War Wagon that was wired to two-hundred pounds of C-4. When he got within fifty-feet of the fortress he would dive out the door.
Things were about to get loud.
The other Devil’s Disciples were waiting out at the end of the drive that led into the compound.
The War Wagon passed through the gates.
