corpse-candles burning high above him and dripping their clotted wax, he saw that he was in a nest of zombies. The rooftops of the NORAD fortress were roughly the size of a mall parking lot and the dead were crowded there, waiting for him. How to take in the living dead in ranks of rot and ruin, crumbling things and slime-oozing things and upright skeletons and yellow-eyed cadavers? He looked at the rows of his enemies, the members of Cannibal Corpse in their colors, in various states of dissolution. But amongst them, oh yes, Ratbags of the Red Hand—alive and uninfected, it seemed—that hadn’t gone on the spit. They all held rifles and every last one was trained on Slaughter as the mannequin dead ringed him in, trying to suffocate him with their boneyard stenches. He offered no resistance as those bloated white hands like clown gloves held him in place.
The crowds parted and here was Coffin and he did indeed wear a Black Hat that he removed and tipped towards his guest with sardonic courtly manner.
“Well, Johnny K. Slaughter,” he said and his voice was like a throat burnt by lye and scratched red by ground glass. “A long road it has been and a deserved end it is, my friend. Did you have a dance with Reptile and did you enjoy it?”
Slaughter didn’t struggle; he was held and that was acceptable for now. “I killed him. I blew his fucking head off and I stamped the worm that crawled out.”
“Well, that’s fine, Johnny. Just fine and peachy.”
“Just like I’m going to do to you, maggot.”
Slaughter stared at Coffin. The others did not exist. They were only part of him. This was Coffin. This was the piece of shit that had ordered the death of his brothers. This was Death. This was the slimy, crawling casket-worm that crept through the hair of corpses and adorned itself with tubes of gut and swam through rivers of poisoned blood and tunneling through shattered anatomies and dancing in the flayed skins of children, gnawing on organs and fondling the severed breasts of mothers and sisters and daughters uncounted.
Death laid bare.
Coffin was dressed in typical 1%er chic: black jeans and motorcycle boots. He wore a black leather vest with no shirt beneath. He was a bloated walking torso, a sun-swollen fish that was gutted then stitched back together… poorly. It looked like his arms and legs had been pulled off and then shoved back in their sockets. Everything was out-of-sync. He was bulging with corpse-gas and pockets of larva like there were innumerable hungry ghosts just beneath the skin trying to push their way out. His eyes were dead suns sinking into pockets of blood, his face was pocked and pitted and riven with tiny holes as if nails had been pounded into it, the flesh cold dead white, crosshatched by intensive suturing to hold it together. The lower lip was gone, the upper swollen thick as an engorged leech, the teeth stained pink. He was so pale he was luminously white, yet it looked like he had been peeled, his flesh regenerating itself not as a smooth cutaneous membrane but in ropy corded strands of gut.
He laughed at Slaughter, slow and deadly, brushing strands of coal-black hair from his distorted face. “Ha, ha. Don’t worry about that worm, Johnny. Always more where that came from, always more.” And as if offering proof, three or four of them slid from the holes in his face and dropped writhing to his boots. “Right now you’re thinking, if I can just shed these deadheads long enough to get at my shotgun or that .45 on my belt, I’ll blow this fucker’s head clean off. End of story. Only, see, Johnny, it won’t be the end of the story but the beginning of a new chapter and you ain’t gonna like the story it tells.”
Slaughter just stared and waited. It was coming. What he was waiting for, oh yes, it was most surely coming.
“Too bad about your Disciples, Johnny. You had some good boys. Apache Dan. He would have made a good Cannibal. Too bad he wasted his life with shiteaters and rat-suckers like the Disciples. I hear my boys took out Irish. Glad to know it. Fish is gone, Shanks is dead, and you know damn well that Moondog went out with a bang. Like I said, too bad.”
Baiting him. That’s all this was. It could be nothing more. The death of Moondog came as no real surprise, of course. The only thing he didn’t know and would never know is if Moondog couldn’t get out of the War Wagon in time or if he just decided to ride it straight into hell. He favored the latter because that was exactly how Moondog would have wanted it to end.
“The thing I love about you, Johnny, is that you’re so fucking predictable,” Coffin said, uttering that horrible laugh, his long pale fingers lightly brushing the bulging pockets and sacs of his face, all of which seemed to be moving. His eyes were pink, juicy meat. “I wanted you here on the roof so I had Reptile do Apache, knowing that you’d have to come. You’d have to come to right the wrong against your club. Ha, ha. I love that about you, Johnny. That misplaced, convoluted sense of honor. I knew you’d come here to this place and you did. I knew you’d bring meaty sacrifices of your own Disciples and goddamned if you didn’t.”
Slaughter kept breathing evenly and deeply.
He could not let Coffin scent what he was feeling, because there was terror, great shivering amounts of terror. He knew at that moment in the greater scheme of things that everything that had led up to this moment had been neither accidental nor coincidental; it was planned. All planned out. Probably from the moment he killed those two cops in New Castle. He had been baited every step of the way and he had taken the bait offered. Taken it? No, he had
That was the definition of true sacrifice: the offering of that which you loved best and by your own hand.
Slaughter thought of the dream.
That hag-face rising up and then that voice, that terrible, terrible voice speaking prophecy on the dead wind:
Yes, it was there and it always had been.
The answers he sought were most simple: he was a puppet carefully manipulated and his brother Disciples were nothing but fucking offerings to this obscenity, to Coffin/Nemesis/Black Hat/Leviathan.
“I got a little present for you, Johnny.”
A group of Cannibal Corpse zombies dragged a man out. He was handcuffed, gagged, ankles tied together. They dumped him at Coffin’s feet. It was Jumbo. He was gagged, his eyes wild and pissed-off.
Slaughter tried to break free but he was held firmly.
“I want you to watch how Disciples die, Johnny,” Coffin said. “I want you to see your last boy flip patches.”
The zombies dragged Jumbo to his feet and he looked through the crowd at Slaughter and there was no hatred or recrimination in his eyes. There was only a look that signified friendship.
As Jumbo was held, Coffin pulled a looping red worm from one of the holes in his face and dangled it over Jumbo’s lips. Jumbo thrashed his head back and forth, a sweat breaking out on his face, but finally they held him so tightly he could not move so much as an inch.
“Welcome to Cannibal Corpse,” Coffin said and dropped the worm on Jumbo’s face, grinning as it slid up his nostril.
They dropped Jumbo and he convulsed on the ground for some time. Before he disappeared back into the greedy hands of the crowding undead, Coffin had one more indignity for him. He pulled out a knife and slit the colors off his leather vest. The violation and degradation were complete.
Or were they?
For now there was no knife in Coffin’s hand. There was a flat-black branding iron, the branding head of which glowed red.
Slaughter wanted to scream, but there was no point.
The Cannibals yanked Jumbo’s shirt and vest up until a nice wide expanse of back was revealed. The flesh sizzled as the branding iron burnt deep and sure. And then Jumbo was marked:
