Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Moondog turned the headlights on.

The Disciples fired up their scoots and made ready.

It was only a matter of seconds now before the fireworks began. Every man was tense and exhilarated, pumped-up and ready to roll. And then they heard it—WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP-WHUMP! The War Wagon went up like a dying sun, shooting out a barrage of fire and clouds of rolling black smoke. The first two explosions were the C-4 loads going, the second two were the twin fuel tanks. And now the front of the fortress was a blazing firestorm. The Cannibal Corpse wormboys in front were either blasted into fragments or lit up like napalm. Even from their distance—two city blocks away—the Disciples felt the shock wave and the heat that followed it.

There was the diversion, time to ride into hell.

“THE SHIT IS ON!” Slaughter cried out and the Disciples rode in hell-for-leather, whooping and hollering, shouting their rebel yells.

As Slaughter opened the throttle and led the pack in, he could see wormboys staggering around on fire. Many more were on the ground in burning pieces.

Slaughter came firing through the gates and a dazed wormboy came out to meet him, his face like an open infected wound, his hair smoking. Slaughter roared right at him and gave him a round from the Mossberg that took his head right off. Apache Dan fired into a group of three or four, scattering them.

With the blazing remains of the War Wagon and the burning ratbikes of the Cannibals, it was like daylight in the front of the fortress. The blast had blown open the doors and taken a huge bite out of the concrete wall. Inside, the flames were spreading as more wormboys stumbled out, patting themselves wildly to put out the fires that licked at them.

What worried Slaughter at that moment was that he did not see Moondog anywhere. He should have been in the grass, coming out to meet them. But he was nowhere and that gave Slaughter a very bad feeling.

But there was no time.

He led the pack around the side of the fortress and as they roared out of its moonlit shadow they saw the rising rock wall and the mouth of the immense cave hewn into it. There was no missing it. A paved road led from the fortress to the cave and it was lit on either side by smoldering torches that threw a shifting, dirty orange illumination.

But the stink.

That godawful stink.

Slaughter knew by then what he was going to see even before he saw it: corpses. Just like in Victoria, dozens of people had been impaled on sharpened stakes driven into the ground and lit on fire. They burned with a constant guttering like corpsefat candles and he figured they had been soaked in oil or something similar so they would burn on and on.

It was a ghoulish ride down that road with the human torches blazing and blackened and stinking to either side. When they reached the mouth of the cave, they ditched their bikes and went in.

It was immense inside and lit by more human torches.

In the silence they could hear them sputtering and sizzling, dripping globs of hot fat. The floor of the cave was dirt and it was littered with gnawed bones, bits of flesh and tissue, maggoty heads, and great splotches of blood. It was a dining hall for the Cannibals and what made it even worse was that to either wall, prisoners were shackled together like slaves. There were dozens of them and they were all terrified or completely out of their minds. Some called out to the Disciples but many more just stared off into space. They were citizens, Slaughter saw, many innocents and many more members of the Red Hand.

And they were made to watch as the wormboys had their nightly feast, knowing that each day more of them would be slaughtered for food.

All the Disciples wanted to go to them but they had other concerns right then: a group of Cannibals were feeding on the remains of a woman. Such was their gluttony and the need to fill those empty spaces below that they paid no attention whatsoever that their hated rivals had appeared.

Jumbo made to open up on them but Slaughter held up his hand.

Not yet.

This was too easy.

The wormboys were wearing their colors, which by that point were saturated with corpse goo and cemetery slime, stained by dozens of ghoulish feasts, feathered with rot and mildew. One of the Cannibals, gore dripping from his cankerous mouth, looked over at the Disciples, watching them with fish-white eyes as he chewed ravenously.

He made a grunting noise, but that was about it.

The others were even less interested than he.

The hunger of the worms that inhabited them was such that simple survival mechanisms of defense and attack were overridden in the need to shove meat into their mouths. They were fixated on the corpse of the woman who not too long ago, Slaughter guessed, had been shackled to the walls with the others. They tore at her, snapped at each other, pulling limbs free and yanking at what they found inside her open belly.

The Devil’s Disciples waited no more.

They opened up and dropped all four Cannibals into the gore of their meal.

“Watch out!” someone yelled.

And that’s when Slaughter saw the others coming at them. Not three or four, but fifteen or twenty Cannibals carrying chains and hatchets and skinning knives.

* * *

The wormboys burst out of the darkness at the rear of the cave, and if their dead compatriots had no longer felt the hate for the rival club, they certainly did, and they planned on doing something about it.

Slaughter watched them come on, letting them get within killing range of the shotguns, his brother Disciples at his side, spaced evenly as they did when taking on a rival gang.

Slaughter, at that moment, felt more alive than he had in days, if not weeks. Because when you were a 1%er this is what it was about. Nothing like a good turf battle or blood war to remind you what it was to be alive again… even if your adversaries weren’t strictly human or strictly even living things as such.

“Grenade?” Apache Dan said.

But Slaughter shook his head. “Not with all these people in here. Can’t risk it.”

The dead came on.

The Devil’s Disciples faced them.

When they got in range, Slaughter and his boys opened up with their shotguns and within five seconds, eight of the Cannibals were down with heads blown to confetti. And then it got close in and personal, the way the Disciples liked it. They were outnumbered by the deathless horrors but that had never stopped them before and it did not stop them now. Ten wormboys converged on the five of them and they went at it, shooting when they could, using their guns as clubs, hitting and kicking, avoiding chains and hatchets, pulling knives and using them.

Slaughter had no time to watch out for his brothers because his own skin was in danger and he was fighting tooth and claw with his Gurkha knife, the shotgun tossed aside now. He ducked under a chain and took out the throat of a Cannibal Corpse with one swing and decapitated another with a second. A chain snapped against his back, throwing him forward into a pair of wormboys who tried to get a hold of him so they could use their teeth. But Slaughter was a greased eel, twisting and sliding, nearly boneless as he fought against them. The Cannibal Corpse with the chain swung it again and he dipped under it, the chain shattering the face of one of his tormentors.

Then the one with the chain took hold of him in a bear hug from behind, lifting him up in a squeezing killing embrace.

Slaughter allowed it.

He let the wormboy lift him into the air and when he did, Slaughter kicked the second zombie in the chest, flattening him, and brought the Kukri down in a savage arc, sinking it into the knee of the one that held him.

Then he was free, the wormboy hobbled, and he took his head off with one vicious and powerful swing of the blade.

He saw Shanks go down fighting in a crowd of five Cannibals and he ran in their direction, swinging the Kukri like a farmer scything wheat. The zombies fell like trees. He hacked, stabbed,