Cannibal Corpse, M/C

She blinked her eyes. “It is a sub-kiloton weapon.”

“What?”

“A tactical nuclear device.”

Slaughter stepped away from it, keeping his light on it. “A fucking suitcase nuke?”

“Yes. Colonel Krigg planned on activating it if the Army came for him. He wanted to go out in a big way. He stole it in the early days of the Outbreak. Now you will activate it. You’ll have enough time to escape.”

“And you?”

“There’s no point in me escaping, now is there?”

She was right and he knew it. But a nuke. A fucking nuke. Why not, man? Why the hell not? This fucking fortress and what it contains is a blight on the landscape, a fucking cancer. You want to erase it and the wormboys who call it home, then this is the way. Good-bye Cannibal Corpse Nation. Do it for Red Eye. Do it for the shit you’ve been put through. Do it for the lies you’ve been fed and the corrupt puppet masters that have been pulling your strings and have cost the lives of your brothers.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

She told him a code and he punched it in. A digital display beeped and read: ARMED AND READY. She gave him another twenty digit code and he punched it in. A shrill alarm sounded and a plastic catch popped open on the display. There was a green button behind it.

“Arm it,” she said. “You’ll have sixty minutes. That’s it. One hour to move your people out of here.”

Sweat running down his face, Slaughter pressed the button.

The alarm shrilled again.

The display read: 59:58.

“You’d better go, Mr. Slaughter.”

Slaughter grabbed his shotgun and Gurkha knife. His palms were so sweaty he could barely hold onto them. He put the light on Katherine Isley but she was gone…no, not dead, but worse: she was moving, twisting, her mouth peeling open in something almost like a blood snarl. And her face…bulging, contorting, rippling with motion just beneath the skin. As he watched, the worms started coming out of her. From her mouth, her nose, even her eyes. Not maggots because this woman was surely not dead and decomposing. These were the red worms. The resurrection worms and she was alive with them. They started tunneling out of her face, pushing out, scarlet and slicked with fluids.

Just like the girl on that video from the compound in Wisconsin.

But Isley was living and that meant breeders were not always corpses, but living human beings.

Not that this jewel of wisdom mattered one bit, for the digital display on the nuke read: 58:43.

And counting…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Shotgun in one hand and Kukri in the other, Slaughter raced down the corridor shouting out for Apache Dan because time had never, ever in his life been so unbelievably goddamn dear. But the corridor was long and there were so damn many rooms and offices and as he ran along he could see that digital readout in the back of his head counting down to doomsday and hear that alarm shrilling in his ears.

Jesus. There just wasn’t time.

They had to get gone.

“APACHE!” he cried out at the very top of his lungs. “APACHE! MOTHERFUCKER, WE GOT TO MOVE! WE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE!”

But the very quality of his voice as it echoed down that lonesome corridor told him that Apache Dan would never answer. Dread deepened in him. Where before it felt like a surgical cut at the base of his belly, now it was yawning wide and becoming a deep and hurting wound that could have swallowed him alive in a coveting and formless blackness of despair. Apache Dan and he went way back, way, way back and it was these memories that assailed him, weakened him, slowing his running feet to a clumsy thudding of motorcycle boots on dusty hardwood flooring.

He called out the name of his brother again, but without any true force behind it. It was like there was no breath in his lungs: “Apache? Apache?”

He stumbled on down the corridor, unsure then if he’d been moving down it for a minute or an hour or a minute that had been squeezed into an hour. His mouth was dry, his skin sweaty and cool. His hair was damp and his limbs felt rubbery. He remembered at that precise moment that he had not felt like this since he was a kid and had to cross the lavender-curtained parlor of the funeral home to look down at his mother lying in that long polished box.

And he was not feeling that way again for no reason.

There was an open door at the end of the corridor and he knew very well what would be in that room. God, how he knew it. Go ahead, Johnny. Go take a look at death and know the pain it inspires and the bleak finality it lays upon the soul like an iron door clanging shut that will never, ever be opened again.

Enough. He would not be ruled by fear and regret and channeled guilt.

He looked in the room.

Apache Dan’s corpse was flopped in a pool of ever-spreading blood that was so darkly red it was nearly black. He sucked in a sharp breath. It was as he had expected, except for the fact that his brother’s head was missing and that was the final indignity of his mortification and degradation.

A frozen terror spread out inside him, chilling all it touched, and he felt like an ice sculpture waiting to melt. His life had not been a good one when you put it under the microscope and dissected it layer by layer. There was suffering and pain. There had been hunger and squalor as a child and petty crime as a teenager followed by violence and murder, drug dealing and misery as an adult, years of incarceration in brutal hardtime joints. And all he’d ever really had through the sad roll of those latter years was his brothers, his patched brothers, the Devil’s Disciples. They were his equilibrium, his support system, his sanity. The cool water in his throat and the hot food in his belly. The hands to clasp and the shoulders to bear his weight.

Gone now.

All gone.

Because he knew, God how he knew, that Moondog was gone, too. It had been that crazy death-happy bastard’s plan from the beginning to ride the War Wagon into his own personal blood-drenched biker heaven of Valhalla. He was gone. Apache Dan was gone. Shanks, Irish, Fish, and probably Jumbo, too.

“I’m sorry, my brother,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

He turned back into the heavy silence of the corridor and breathed deep its air, which was stale and dusty, almost gritty in his throat. Okay. Okay. Time to go, But then—

Thud, thud, thump-thump-thump.

What the fuck?

He stepped around the final bend of the corridor, playing his light around. He saw a set of steps and then something came thudding down them: Apache’s head. Sure, over-the-top, high melodrama and Grand Guignol, but wasn’t it almost to be expected? The head hit the landing and rolled to a stop and other than seeing its whipping blue-black locks, Slaughter did not look at it; there was no point.

He stepped closer to the landing.

He sucked in great whooping gasps of stale air which carried a sickly-sweet after-odor of putrefaction to it. It was getting so the smell of death was the rule rather than the exception.

A peal of chilling laughter drifted down from the landing high above.

The sound of it was telling, for it was the sort of laughter that would echo through subterranean depths and from the dripping hollows of midnight tombs. He went rigid, absolutely rigid, as he brought the beam of the flashlight up to reveal the crooked form that waited at the top of those crooked stairs.

The laughter again.

And in Slaughter, the mourning and grief and self-recrimination of this entire haphazard, perfectly fucked-up affair was shelved, and he felt hatred to his marrow and the need for payback to his core. He didn’t know who or