crushing him until his bones popped like bubble wrap and red mush spurted from his mouth and she chortled with obscene laughter, blowing out a hot sulfuric steam that was acrid and burning.
Apache Dan shouted and Slaughter hooked him by the arm and pulled him away, taking out a white phosphorus grenade from his ammo sack, pulling the pin, counting the seconds, and then tossing it at her. And as he did so, he threw himself and Apache into the dirt and there was a resounding explosion, an outpouring of heat and acrid smoke…and as they looked backward, the death goddess was caught in a hot-white blazing firestorm that spread out, lighting up the hanging bodies and seeking dry tinder at every quarter.
She screamed.
She laughed.
She sobbed.
She cried out at Slaughter the way she had the first time she died.
But in the end, she collapsed into herself, burning and popping, throwing out gouts of flame and greasy curls of black smoke as she was incinerated and cremated into drifting black ash.
They lobbed two more WP grenades into that slaughterhouse so all would burn, all would be cleansed by fire, and all would go to ash.
Then, coughing and gagging, they stumbled off into the other chamber.
Jumbo was waiting for them. He was carrying the corpse of Shanks who looked like some bloody, slit, and broken ragdoll. “Fish?” he said.
“He’s gone,” Apache Dan told him and said no more.
They brought Shanks outside and laid him in the grass. There was no service, nothing but thoughts and remembrance. There was time for little else. Then, heeding the cries of the prisoners, they moved methodically from one to the other cutting the leather thongs that bound their wrists. Most were on their feet immediately if somewhat unsteadily. Others never lost the glazed look in their eyes. They had to be pushed along by the healthier, saner ones towards the opening.
Slaughter kept asking them the same question again and again: “Which one of you is Katherine Isley?”
He got no responses and that only deepened his dread.
The three Disciples got the prisoners out of the cave and into the relatively fresh air of the night.
“Get out of here,” Slaughter told them. “Go back where you came from or grab a vehicle out front. But go! Just go!”
They need no further urging. They moved off into the night, all except for one young boy who said, “You’re looking for Kathy Isley?”
“Yes.”
He pointed towards the fortress looming in the night. “Colonel Krigg was keeping her in there.” Then the kid ran off.
Krigg was the leader of the Red Hand. Slaughter figured he was probably dead by now and maybe the bio, too, but he had to go look. Much as he hated to, he had to go into that fucking mausoleum.
“Jumbo,” he said as they climbed on their hogs. “Get out front. See if you can find Moondog. Get us an APC. Whatever you can find. When we come out, we’re going to be in a hurry.”
Jumbo fired up his Panhead and roared off into the night.
“You sure you wanna go in there with me?” Slaughter asked Apache Dan as they reloaded their pump shotguns.
He just laughed. “Quit with the stupid fucking questions, John.”
Together, side by side, they rode off towards the fortress.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
There was only one way in and they took it: right through the front doors which had now been nicely widened by the explosion of the War Wagon which was still burning…what was left of it. They rode their bikes right through curtains of flame and funneling smoke until they got clear of it in a corridor.
“Goddamn place is going up, John.”
“We better be quick then.”
Other than the flames, the fortress was shadowy. They pulled out tactical flashlights from their ammo bags (noticing with some unease that they had no shells left, only a couple of grenades) and bracketed them to the barrels of their shotguns. They clicked them on and started hunting. The place was immense and they went room to room to room and, other than a few Cannibal Corpse zombies they killed, they found nothing. Just offices and storerooms and emptiness. From what they could see, the first floor was untouched.
So they climbed the stairs to the second.
More corridors, a labyrinthine maze of them in fact. Many doors were locked. They saw no wormboys and from the screaming they heard outside and the occasional gunfire—Jumbo, no doubt, and hopefully Moondog—the wormboys were probably in hot pursuit of the prisoners which provided a diversion, even if an unwanted one.
They kept scouting around and downstairs they heard rumbling sounds like explosions. Slaughter didn’t think it was ordinance at all, but the fire spreading, finding new rooms to engulf. Things were getting hairy and time was running out and where in the fuck was the bio?
He kept thinking about his brother and that brought to mind Brightman. The two were connected and he wondered, really wondered, how much he could trust that spook.
Funny. But as he poked his nose into room after room, he heard a voice in the back of his mind praying to God that he could find the woman, get her out, get what remained of his brothers away from this place in one piece. He felt hypocritical. Absolutely hypocritical. When he was a kid, he thought maybe he believed in God. Before Catholic school had destroyed his faith. But for a time, he thought he had. Part of him in these last desperate hours wanted to reconnect with that but it just wasn’t there. Yet, in the back of his brain, that voice kept praying and wasn’t that just amazing? Wasn’t that a wonderful comment on the human species?
In the beams of the flashlights, dust motes swam like pillow down, drifting and floating. And it was the dust itself that guided them. Certain corridors had an undisturbed layer of it and others had trails pounded through it.
More rumbling from below.
A couple of them shook the fortress.
“John…” Apache Dan started to say.
“I know, man. Just a few more minutes and we’re out.”
They came to yet another corridor and by then they were so mixed up and turned around that Slaughter had to wonder if they’d ever find their way back out even if they did locate Isley. The corridor had been well-trod, judging from the dust. It had possibilities. Unfortunately, it was almost as long as a city block.
“All right,” he said, feeling hope fading in him. “We check the rooms and then we’re out.”
“You take this side, I’ll take the other.”
Slaughter didn’t like separating, but what choice was there? Time was a factor now and they had to move it and get it done. He checked three rooms, coughing on the dust he stirred up. Three more. A fourth. Then a fifth. Then—
He threw open the door and was looking into an empty room except it wasn’t empty because there were three people in there: two women and a man he recognized: Brightman. They were tied to a bench. One of the women was clearly dead.
He blinked again and again because he really thought he was seeing things. He panned the light over them.
“Jesus Christ, you finally made it,” Brightman said.
“I told you I would.” Slaughter set his shotgun aside and lit a cigarette. “What’re you doing here?”
Brightman stared at him with shining eyes set in a grimy face. “The Red Hand. They attacked the base and
