what was up there but he was going after them, he was going to gut them, he was going to stuff them, he was going to mount their gamey ass on a fucking wall, so help him God. So as he charged up those stairs and that crooked shape retreated, he felt like he was put together out of heat and electricity; voltage looking for something to fry. In essence, about 110% pure undiluted death.
At the top, he saw the crooked figure, its back to him. He had the light on it and he saw the three-piece patch very clearly: the fanged skull in its pool of red, that single bloodshot eye staring out at him. The upper rocker: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And the lower: KANSAS CITY.
His blood ran hot.
The figure turned.
Death and resurrection hadn’t been exactly kind to Reptile. He had been a big, strapping fellow bulging with muscle and attitude, death kept at a low simmer in his black eyes…but now he was shrunken, leathery like brown hide, his face looking a little too much like the logo on the back of his denim vest: a skull covered in papery flesh like poorly dried papier mache, a living deathshead aswarm with red beetles that chewed and tunneled and devoured the thin scraps of face-meat that were left. His eyes were dun pockets of pestilence lidded by gray flaps, his bare chest crudely stitched like a stuffed Sunday chicken.
The beetles had been busy, as had the worms, for in the end the worm conquered all…even this walking heap of grave matter. White bones extruded from his chest, black bloodgrease bubbling from open wounds. His mouth was a blackened corpse-grin that extended ear to ear in a ghoulish smirk. Dead insects dropped from his tongue as he spoke: “Well, lookee here, it’s Johnny Slaughter, prez of the mother chapter of the Devil’s Disciples. Another one for my collection.” He laughed, coughing out a dustball sputum of carapaces. “I think it’s just you and me, Johnny. Now that old Apache Daniel went to meet his maker. But don’t let that eat your guts, prez, because I did it quietly, just like I did the other Disciples. Apache never knew he was dead until his head bounced over the floor.”
Slaughter, feeling a mixture of repulsion, pity, and razor-edged hatred, flipped the
“Man you came to meet is up above, but you’ll never get there, Johnny,” Reptile said, seething with a blackness that was death fermented in its own vile juices and maybe even something
Slaughter brought the shotgun up. “Then quit jawing, Reptile, and slither on over here.”
Reptile made a sound that he probably thought was laughter but sounded more like a scream echoing up an elevator shaft. And then he moved. He was in rough condition and Slaughter did not expect much and that’s why he was shocked: because Reptile did not shamble towards him with a slow and drunken zombie crawl, he exploded, he filled the air like chain lightning and blooming black smoke, flesh and motion and Jack-in-the-Box surprise, a raging carrion gelatin smear in the air that got within about six inches of the shotgun barrel before Slaughter squeezed the trigger and his head was atomized into a spray of pink-black mucilage that sprayed against the wall with the tinkling of pellets.
The head was gone.
The forward momentum of the body struck Slaughter and flattened him, knocked the wind from him, but he gathered himself quickly enough and kicked himself free of the carrion.
He wondered how much time was left before the nuke pissed death to the four winds.
He decided he didn’t really care.
Because up above, that’s where Coffin was waiting and he had a pretty good idea by then that he would wear a black hat.
Now it comes to a close.
Now the beginning seeks its end.
Now the circle closes and in closing, nooses itself tight.
It didn’t take Slaughter long to find the stairs that could only lead to the roof and he took them slowly, calmly, the threat of thermonuclear annihilation like some fairy tale he’d heard long ago and never really believed. In his mind were feelings and sensations that went far beyond the mere five and into another realm, an undiscovered country that was part terror, part revelation, and pure fission.
He could feel Coffin waiting for him.
More so, he could feel what hid behind Coffin: an entity in a black hat who described his kingdom in bones and ashes and wrote his name in a blood mist upon the marrow of the sky again and again like a silly, bored, and sadistic child obsessed by its own identity:
The name rang out in his head and he feared its echo, its discord, its resonance. But as he feared it he knew that ultimately in some small and possibly insignificant way that it feared him, too. Had it not once called him a favored son? Maybe that was in the whirlpool apparitional phantasmagoria of a peyote dream, but he still felt that it had weight. Black Hat had shown him a future that was an atomic Armageddon wasteland of skeletons and blowing dust and cities that were graveyards. He claimed that was the end of the game, that Slaughter himself would have a hand in it and there was a certain truth in that as death ticked away downstairs, only it would not play out exactly as Leviathan had hoped, just as nothing from the beginning of this sordid little mess had played out the way Slaughter had expected it.
That was life and destiny and fate intertwined:
Yes, that was it, for even spoilers bleed and gods die and demons themselves are caught in the web of forever, the lathe of cosmic eternity and resolution and chaos.
As he moved up those steps, he felt Coffin and Black Hat and Nemesis and Leviathan, that destroyer of worlds. But he felt something more than that. It was thrumming through him. Nemesis. Leviathan. A discarnate death entity that had built its house bone by bone and corpse by corpse and skull by skull, a castle then, a cathedral of the dead and the damned where this abomination might walk in tomblike malignant grandeur, his monolithic eyes sweeping over the vast charnel empire he had built with the help of stupid men with brilliant minds who had handed him the trump card that he had longed for in the form of a weaponized biological death: the resurrection worms. He had called to them in their vanity and animal aggression from his den of bone-picked darkness and they had heeded the summons. The worms rained from heaven’s split flesh and the dead rose in tomb legions, cavorting and feasting and spreading the pall of death and giving unto him their burnt offerings which were the souls of the innocent which he craved and the worshipful adoration of graveyard faces which he ached for. His realm was no longer some interdimensional sucking black hole of mausoleum delight but an entire world, a world given unto him like a sacrificed firstborn, a world remade into death, an ossuary without border.
This is what Slaughter felt and knew and understood.
Leviathan was vain.
He had been for so long reviled. Hated.
Now he was worshipped by the risen.
Humanity was desecrated by its oldest enemy and somebody, somehow, somewhere, needed to put an end to Leviathan’s little evil playground.
So his favored son moved up the steps with killing and cessation in mind and nothing could stop him.
When Slaughter stepped out onto the rooftop and smelled the night air and felt the billowing heat of human
