Cannibal Corpse, M/C

She wore the fresh and bloody skins of slain children over veils of mold-specked spiderweb silk, scarves of human bowels lovingly wrapped around her throat. Over her head was the same tanned mask of the hag she had worn the last time. He could see her mouth, the puckered lips, the gloss-black fangs awaiting something to tear.

“How does thee fare, biker boy?”

It was a voice he knew. At first it was that of Black Hat, scraping and dry and worn like bones in a catacomb rubbing together, but gradually it became another voice and he tried to place it but his thoughts scurried madly in his skull. They could find neither common ground nor cohesion.

“Who are you?” he heard himself say.

“Who exactly, biker boy?”

She stood now and the veils parted so he could see, yet again, her porcelain-white belly with its black autopsy stitching running from pubis to breast, the symbolic signature of Leviathan burned deep into the flesh. Her vulva was engorged and teeming with parasites. Gouts of black menstrual blood dripped from between her thighs. He knew her voice, he knew it well. But all his mind could see was the death goddess, the consort of Leviathan, the zombie witch, the black Madonna who gave birth to children that she in turn fed upon and skinned. These were the stark and haunting images in his mind.

But he had to remember.

Remember.

And, yes, of course, then he knew. He saw himself in New Castle after those shit-eating cops had gunned down Neb and he himself had returned the favor with the MAC-10. Word had reached him that Neb’s old lady, Indiana, had dimed them, turned evidence on them to the police to avoid another drug-related conviction. For days Slaughter had hunted her, the only thing keeping him going was the all-pervading, all-filling, all-nourishing hatred and need for revenge. He tracked her like a stalking cat. He followed her to a bar. Sometime after midnight she came out with some drunken scooter tramp and Slaughter slipped out of the shadows.

The tramp said, “Wha—”

Slaughter punched him in the face and kneed him in the groin. When he went down in the gravel lot, Slaughter kicked him in the ribs and booted him in the head until his eyes rolled back white.

Then it was just him and Indiana.

Why she hadn’t run he didn’t know.

She waited there. In fact, she went down on her knees and begged him for mercy, that it wasn’t her or if it was then the cops had forced her to do it.

Slaughter took her by the hair and yanked her to her feet. His face inches from her own, he said, quite calmly, “You fucking skank. You fucking whore. You fucking grubbing dirty little cunt. Neb. They killed fucking Neb and you’re the rotten fucking cunt who put them onto him.”

She was crying and shaking, but all her little girl tears were wasted on Slaughter’s stony demeanor.

“Oh please, oh God…John, please, John, don’t kill me,” she whimpered. “Oh please, John, please please please…”

“Here’s your please,” he told her, the knife in his hand. “Here it is for you, you fucking cunt.”

He sank the blade to the hilt into her belly and she gasped at the violation of cold steel. Then, still holding her head by the hair so that her face was but inches from his own, he pulled the knife right up to her sternum, gutting the hog and dropping her, leaving her to die in her own pooling blood and bowels.

That’s what he had done to her, that fucking rat.

Indiana.

Indiana…

So now he knew. Indiana. Goddamn Indiana.

“You,” he said.

Her mask was stripped away and dispensed with now and he looked at her fissured corpse-face that was like the root of a dead tree. The boys before her stood—lambs to slaughter, offerings of meat—and she flayed them with her black thorny nails. Like scalpels, they sheared the skins of the boys free and then gutted them in turn, eviscerating them as Slaughter had once done to her. Before they dropped at her feet, those nimble white fingers pulled an offering from each of them: their still beating hearts. Then, each in turn, her lacquered black fangs bit into them, mouth spilling candy-red sauce, biting and ripping at them, engorging the pink-muscled masses nearly whole.

Sacrifice had been taken.

Slaughter vaguely heard Apache Dan and Fish call to him, but he was transfixed by the atrocity he witnessed, and maybe equally by Indiana’s bile-yellow eyes that swam with maggots, the scarab beetles that poured from the skullish cavern of her nose, and the bulimic gush of vomited human meat she spat at his feet.

Hissing like a serpent, she said, “I am become death, the devourer of worlds.”

The words of Lord Shiva, the Hindu death god, in the Bagavad Gita, Slaughter knew, but never had it been so appropriate, so fitting, and so very prophetic.

As she descended from her throne of human bone, Slaughter did not back away from her. No, he waited for her and maybe in some psychic realm of his mind he went to her as fast. His brain was rioting with conflicting emotions—rage, terror, disgust, and maybe even pity. For maybe it was another sparkling and impossibly lucid Zen moment, but he saw very clearly himself killing Indiana and knowing it was ugly and brutal and very wrong in the human sense of things, but resurrecting her like this as wormgirl incarnate, the Queen of the Dead, Dark Maiden of Destruction, Extermination, and Necrotic Dissolution, Mistress of Dank Tombs and Graveyard Rats…it was an atrocity and one, he knew, he had played a hand in.

As he raised the Mossberg, he wanted to shout, to cry out something melodramatically Hollywood like, Die you evil cunt or Back to hell where you belong but there were no words extant that could encompass what was in his brain so he simply opened up on her, blasting her into writhing fragments until the shotgun was empty. But as he reloaded and fired again, he saw something that he would never have believed. If the identity of the death goddess as Indiana was the first revelation then here was the second: although she was blown apart in fleshly corruption, she did not stay apart. As he killed her, she was reborn; as he unmade her, she was remade; as he atomized her remains she reparticulated.

She was deathless, eternal, immortal.

He killed her again and again. Each time she exploded into a storm of tissue, blood mist, and winging white deathshead moths only to be reanimated and remade in a fleshstorm of corpse ropes, blood trains, scab and suture, creeping beetle and squirming maggot, all coming together and pressing out another copy of her like hot plastic formed in a mold. And then she would be standing there with glaring yellow eyes of leprosy and a toothy grin of charnel delight, things dropping from her, things squirming in and out of her, fetal cemetery rats pushing from her flesh and sprouting greasy hair and rabid teeth and glaring red rodent eyes. Like her, they reformed and fleshed out.

Again, Slaughter destroyed her and again she became a steaming, smoking fleshshow of liquid polymer that sought and found the same form again and again.

But by then—and it had probably only been seconds since he’d killed her the first time—Fish and Apache Dan were with him and all three of them stood there like the Magnificent Seven minus four, blasting away at the death goddess until she fell apart and came back together in a whirling storm of graveyard waste. They put her down and she stood back up. They kept shooting until their weapons were hot and smoking in their fists and that’s when Fish totally lost control. Because it had been too much for him for a long time now. The spider-things in the mist had unhinged him as had the sporing mutants and now, his shotgun empty, he went into a blind, hating rage and charged the death goddess with his Mossberg held like a club.

He went at her, swinging.

Slaughter heard his own voice cry out in desperation.

But too late.

The death goddess had already accepted Fish as an offering.

In a whirlwind hallucinogenic eruption of writhing white limbs, she embraced him, pulling him into her and