Cannibal Corpse, M/C

There was a sudden rising of heat like a blast from a seething coke oven and the surviving members of the Red Hand cried out as a searing spontaneous combustion rose up and Slaughter went to his knees thinking the nuke had just been triggered. But it wasn’t that, it was something else. All the zombies began to burn…no, melt. Like plastic army men some kid had decided to torch, they superheated and ran like hot fat, liquefying into a violent, slopping sea of putrescence that rolled across the rooftop, scattering Ratbags into the soup. It was like the spilled cauldron of a witch: a rising flesh and blood and offal stew bobbing with bones.

And then a wind blew clean the gaseous stink of fetid decay and rotten meat and bile and blood and shit. Slaughter slipped in the greasy sea of zombie sludge and got to one knee and saw something like wriggling ectoplasmic threads rise up from the organic sluicing profusion and form an immense and jellied clot of coiling, bubbling motion that bobbed over the rooftop like a hot air balloon. But it was no balloon; it was an obscene fleshy entity that was fetal and gelatinous. An embryonic rushing storm of plasmic life seeding itself, filling and rupturing and fattening and throwing out unformed limbs and feelers and licking black tongues before giving birth to an immense and fragmenting ghost-face which was the face of the hag, the death-hag of Slaughter’s dreams: that fissured graveyard countenance of white corpse-pulp whose hair was fluttering red corpse worms and whose eyes were glistening ruby crystals. Her mouth peeled open and a hot cremating wind blew forth with a freight train roar.

This was the Queen of the Dead.

The bloated white leech that fed upon death and decay.

The thing that hid in the saprogenic depths of Coffin, the true and discarnate evil that was Nemesis and Leviathan and thousands of other nameless and unnamable haunters of the dark to a thousand disparate cultures. Yes, this was the wind demon Pazuzu, the bringer of hot winds of pestilence; it was Uggae, the ten-headed Babylonian personification of rage and graveyards and murder; it was Hebrew Lilith strangling infants in their cribs and feeding upon their pink souls; it was Choronzon, the black fire of hatred, the udders of the cat of slime, the terror of the darkness that crawls upon the sands of Hell; it was Greek Eurynomis, the corpse-eater, flashing its carrion grin and spreading night-black vulture’s wings, its body swollen blue and black like that of corpse-fly. Yes, Canaanite Baalberith and Leviathan, the gatekeeper, the Hell-mouth.

Slaughter was impotent before her.

All men were.

Her mouth continued to open until it was a black storm mouth, a vortex of howling wind, and that face was no longer a face but a tornadic eruption of resurrection worms that fell over the rooftop in a hail of undulant squirming that overflowed the zombie sea and became not inches deep, but feet.

Slaughter knew it was coming because he had seen something similar in his dream.

So by the time the worm-mouth vomited its larva over the world, he was already crawling through the sea of putrefaction and to the door that led below. He barely made it. Even as the surviving Ratbags cried out as the worms tunneled into them by the hundreds and thousands, he pulled them out of his hair and off his vest and out of his beard, smashing them on the stone steps.

And then he was running.

* * *

The thermonuclear funeral couldn’t have been much more than minutes away, if not seconds. He made his way down the stairs and ran down the long corridor, making for the passage that would lead him to the second floor. As a voice in his head told him he would never make it, he found the stairs and half-ran, half-stumbled down them. He saw no zombies. He saw no anything. Then he made the ground floor. It was filled with rolling black smoke and hot with the spreading fire. He had to go to the floor in a crab-crawl to get some breathable air.

He scrambled down the corridor until he saw the bikes left by himself and Apache Dan. The gas tank of Moondog’s Boss Hoss was hot enough to fry an egg on. He sheathed the Kukri and started it up. Before him was a barrier of flame but he had no choice as he saw it. He circled back around and used the length of the corridor to pick up speed.

The roar of the hog was immense.

The building was trembling.

The flames were rising and spreading.

He cracked open the throttle and took that corridor wide open, flying right into the flames, into the burning cauldron of fire, and then he was out of it, going right through the front door and jumping the hog off the steps, airborne right over the flaming wreckage of the War Wagon and coming down in the drive and nearly stacking the bike right there as the forks tried to twist away from him.

But he got it under control, hammering down and soaring through the gates and down the long drive coming in, the bike bouncing over potholes and the ruts of the old tire traps and the pavement was right before him and he squealed onto it, nearly losing it, then cracking open the throttle again and eating it foot by foot. He flogged her down the road, up hills and down into little valleys, and then up onto higher ground again, the pavement twisting and turning through night-dark fields lit only by the white blade of the hog’s headlight.

The straight pipes were roaring and the wind was in his face and he was caning the hog, reaching out for the big end and ripping it wide open. About the time he figured he’d carved a mile between himself and the NORAD complex, the tactical nuke went up with a rumbling/crackling/thundering noise that was deafening and a flash of light that was at his back but still blinded him.

He slowed the bike, trying to avoid the shock wave.

But it hit him as he was braking down to less than ten miles an hour. The shock wave hit him, tossing the bike, surfing it across the pavement in a shower of sparks and he was flipped into the gravel and then into a ditch of cattails and stagnant water.

When he pulled himself out, the heat wave had passed.

The fields around him were burning. There was smoke and fire and embers in the wind. He dragged himself out of the water, pulling bits of gravel from his face and wiping blood and sweat and swamp water free.

He looked back in the direction of the complex and saw it.

He was on a flattened hilltop and he could see the blazing red outlines of the fortress, or the blazing firestorm where it had once been. The sky had gone from black to cobalt to a shimmering atomic green. The fortress had cracked open like an egg and given birth to a huge neon-orange mushroom cloud of energized particles, radioactive dust, and radiant smoke. It was connected to the jagged scar of the bomb site by a smoldering umbilicus. The landscape near it was glowing a phosphorescent yellow. As he watched, he saw something take shape dead-center of the mushroom cloud—a shimmering red grinning skull face that wavered like a heat mirage.

Then it was gone, fading away. Maybe it never was.

“Jesus,” he said.

Leviathan. Regenerated. And you made this happen. You were chosen and you were played. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bleeding, bruised, blackened and filthy, he stumbled down the road to the Boss Hoss and lifted it back up, every muscle and tendon in his body crying out. He worried that the electromagnetic pulse of the blast might have fused the wiring, but she turned over just fine.

Slaughter looked back once, feeling the pain of his dead brothers, then cracked open the throttle again, racing against the cloud of fallout that was coming. He opened her up, reaching for the big end, letting her roll on out. He was clipping at better than a hundred miles per hour when, grinning, he hit the button to release the Nitrox boost and the scoot took off like a rocket. The forks came right off the ground and he rode that wheelie hard for a hundred yards and by then nothing could stop him or touch him because he had reached the old fabled double-T, the 200 mile an hour mark.

He was free.

He was riding.

He was in the wind.

His feet up on the Easy Rider pegs, he cut a path deep into the black beating heart of the night and the destiny that belonged to him and him alone.

Maybe Leviathan would show himself again in a new form.

But it wouldn’t be today.