Cannibal Corpse, M/C Page 7

  “Maybe you’ll get a medal for that.”

  “Probably a good beating and a prison cell if I get dragged back east.”

  Rice fell into silence for a time. “I thought about it, you know.”

  “Thought about what?”

  “Going back east.”

  “But…?”

  He sighed. “I decided it wasn’t worth it. My whole command got wiped out. I’d be in for the shit. I’d rate a desk job if I was lucky. Better off to spend my remaining time out here in the wild west.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault what happened,” Slaughter told him and meant it. “None of it.”

  “Thanks, son. But they wouldn’t see it that way, those brass hats and stiff dicks out in Washington. They’d hang me out to dry. None of them have ever seen eight or nine-hundred zombies coming at them in waves. They couldn’t understand. They’d say I should have known better than to get bottled-up in a place like Freemont.”

  Slaughter lit a cigarette. “I was there.”

  “Freemont?”

  “Yeah, lots of skeletons.”

  “Sure enough. Those were my boys.” Rice’s eyes misted a moment. “I scavenged what I could from there for weeks, but I haven’t been there in a couple years now.”

  “Nothing there but skeletons.”

  “No hardware?”

  “None.”

  Rice said he couldn’t understand it, that there’d been APCs and Stryker vehicles.

  “Somebody took ‘em then,” he said. “Maybe the Red Hand.”

  Slaughter figured that’s probably who it was. The idea of the Ratbags with fifty cal. machine guns and rocket launchers, armor-piercing shells and anti-tank missiles was a scary thing.

  “Saw a helicopter last week, Blackhawk by the looks of it,” Rice said. “It was heading due west. Probably reconnaissance, spotting Red Hand and zombie hotspots.”

  Slaughter didn’t care for that much. A chopper? Way out here? The word back east was that the Army was going to push west but nobody really believed it. Maybe it was so. He highly doubted the military would come after him. Still, it worried him. Maybe it was just egotism whispering in his ear, telling him they had to be coming after him because he was John fucking Slaughter, cop killer and notorious outlaw biker and all around bad boy. A wanted man. But he didn’t believe that.

  The old man locked down the doors and went off to bed and Slaughter stayed up. He went out on the back porch and watched a light rain fall, thinking about that interstate out there calling to him.

  Chapter Eight

  Like the bloodthirsty redskins in an old movie, the zombies came at dawn. Rice saw them marching down the road, forty or fifty of them, and there was no doubt where they were headed. They came up the drive carrying axes and pipes and broomsticks sharpened like spears.

  “Looks like we’re in for a siege,” Rice said.

  He broke out the rifles—nice lever action .30-30s—boxes of ammunition and single-shot Snakecharmer shotguns for back up.

  “Headshots, son,” Rice said. “We conserve ammo that way. Just drop ‘em and move onto the next kill.”

  They came on thick with stink and flies, bits of them dropping off in their wild flight at the farmhouse. Rice opened up first, then Slaughter started popping off rounds, shooting, levering, shooting again, dropping the dead in their tracks. Zombie heads came apart in meaty, gushing sprays of putrescence and soon the puddles outside were dark with blood and fluids and bits of tissue…and worms, of course, because as soon as the bodies went down, the worms crawled out, searching for something else to infest and finding only broken husks.

  Though the dead were not exactly smart by any shakes, most of them anyway, they were smart enough to soon realize that their numbers were being dropped by rounds fired from the gunports, so they attacked these with fury.

  The wormboys came on, charging the gunports, hitting them with their pipes and chewing up the boards with their axes and, when that failed, pressing in and digging their hands through the slots.

  Slaughter kept darting from gunport to gunport, popping off rounds until the dead congested again and moving on to the next slot. When they thickened he drew the .410 Snakecharmer and blasted away at them again and again.

  But then some crafty little kid zombie crept up under the gunport, reached up and got his or her hand around the barrel and would not let go. Slaughter yanked and yanked, banging the kid off the outside of the farmhouse with moist, mushy sounds and spraying a lot of decay and goo around, but by then two or three adults had the Snakecharmer and pulled it right through the port, tossing it away into the muddy drive.

  Slaughter knew that wasn’t a mistake he could afford to make again.

  He dropped a little boy that brandished a bone.

  He dropped a man with a hatchet.

  He dropped twin girls with kitchen knives.

  Still they came on, rushing the ports in crazy human—or inhuman—wave attacks.

  He put down three more and was amazed that they did not follow their usual behavioral patterns and stop to feed on their own dead. They always had before, scavenging for scraps.

  But this time they were interested only in getting at Slaughter and Rice.

  A woman with a sloughing skin speckled with purple blotches took three rounds from Slaughter’s .30-30, shots to the torso to drive her back so he could get a clear headshot. But she just kept coming on. Her breasts burst open like balloons filled with rancid milk and her belly split open releasing a tide of foul gray slime, but all that did was piss her off.

  He finally got a bead on her and took her down with a headshot that made her scream and gurgle, vomiting out gouts of something like white glistening cheese curds. But it didn’t go the way he wanted. Not in the least. Even with her face shot off and the side of her head hanging by a few threads of gristle, she propelled herself at the gunport with incredible velocity and struck it like a swollen bladder filled with rot, smashing into it, wedging her flabby arm in there, corpse jelly flooding through the port and slopping down the wall.

  “Never seen ‘em come like this!” Rice called out. “Not since Freemont!”

  He kept shooting and Slaughter did the same until his ammunition was sorely depleted. And by then there were maggoty arms reaching through the ports and several enterprising wormboys or wormgirls were shoving a bloated, blackened infant through one of them. Something with a mouth like a lamprey filled with tiny sharp teeth.

  Slaughter blew it back out with five or six shots and then, from the kitchen, they heard a constant thumping and pounding that could only be axes cutting into the door.

  They heard it split open.

  “I got this!” Rice called, hobbling off into the kitchen and Slaughter kept shooting until he had less than a half a box of shells and the .30-30 was smoking hot in his hands, the air thick with the stink of burnt gunpowder.

  And outside, Jesus, the dead piled in heaps and ramparts as more and more rushed in. The thirty or forty Rice had spied coming down the road had not only doubled but tripled, then quadrupled.

  There was no way in hell they could hold off an army like this.

  That’s when Rice screamed.

  Slaughter ran in there just in time to see what remained of the door bursting off its hinges as seven or eight axe-wielding zombies pushed in on a hot putrid wave. He dropped three of them but the others just poured right over the top and Rice was buried in their numbers, shrieking and kicking as they bit into him.

  Slaughter ran.

  He looked back once and Rice, poor goddamned Rice, they had him in their filthy hands and a young girl opened her mouth inches from Rice’s own and a twisting red worm came out in a slushy bile and slithered right up his left nostril.

  The zombies came after Slaughter.

  He killed three more, then he was out of shot.

  He made ready to die a horrible death.

  And then…just as they closed in for the kill…there was a rumbling sound of heavy engines from ou
tside followed by the clatter of heavy machine guns, the thump of grenades and mortar rounds. The farmhouse shook. It shook again. Slaughter was thrown off his feet and the zombies were cast like dice as an artillery round punched into the kitchen and blasted it into wreckage.

  Cavalry…the fucking cavalry is here.

  But as to whether that was the U.S. Army or the Red Hand with purloined APCs and ordinance from the 25th Infantry, he did not know. Either way, he figured it would be trouble for him.

  Boom, boom, boom.

  More shells landed. A great section of ceiling collapsed, burying the zombies that had managed to pull themselves up. Even then, they struggled in the debris. Slaughter dusted himself off and pulled himself up to a gunport and saw the action out there. There were four or five wheeled armored vehicles that had encircled the farmhouse. With mounted fifty caliber machine guns, they were chopping up the zombies into gore and gristle. They launched mortar rounds. Built-in flamethrowers on their front ends gushed out twenty and thirty-foot flames that lit up the walking dead like match heads, incinerating them into stumbling blackened husks.

  And the rounds came whistling through the air.

  Incoming.

  Slaughter dove to the floor as anti-tank shells hit the farmhouse and the wall across the room disintegrated into a rain of burning shards and plaster dust and flaming refuse.

  The next volley would bring the whole goddamn farmhouse down and he knew it.

  He crawled across the floor, kicked through some lathing and loose singed planks, and dove out into the yard, crab-crawling until he saw dead zombies and worms crawling in the grass. He found his feet, running for cover behind a tree as more anti-tank rounds hit the farmhouse and there was a great hot whooshing of air and the farmhouse collapsed like a house of cards, sending up plumes of fire and rolling clouds of black smoke that blew through the farm yard.

  Still clutching the spent .30-30, he used the smoke as cover as the armored vehicles moved in, pounding away with their big fifties, lighting up the remains of the farmhouse with their flamethrowers and cremating anything that still had the will to walk.

  A zombie came at him out of the smoke and Slaughter smashed the stock of the .30-30 into its face. He broke open the head of a little boy, jumped through a ring of naked women with burning hairdos and drop-kicked a man chewing on his own entrails.

  The barn.

  He threw the door open and was glad his saddlebags were packed. He had to move. Those guns would be trained on the barn and silo next and he had to be out of there. He fired up the hog and with all the noise from outside, her roaring straight pipes sounded like the purr of a kitten. A zombie that was on fire stepped through the doorway, but by then Slaughter had popped his scoot into gear and throttled up. The hog jumped forward, knocking the zombie aside.

  Already Slaughter could taste the freedom of the road.

  Outside, not only the razed structure of the farmhouse was burning, but so were the trees and outbuildings, and even the meadows and fields, smoke tangling in the air that was acrid with the stink of smoldering human flesh. It was a crazy ride, zigzagging through the flames and debris and heaped bodies, trying to avoid the notice of the gunners on the armored vehicles. He worked the clutch and throttle all the way, using every trick he knew, carving his path hard and fast, taking sharp corners with the bike nearly horizontal to the ground and then he was flying down the drive and out onto the rutted road.

  Not that he escaped unnoticed, for a few mortar rounds exploded in his path far behind him, nearly throwing him off the bike, but then he was on the road and there were no citizens ahead and he figured he had it and he owned it.

  Go west, my brother.

  Chapter Nine

  Fifteen minutes later he sighted the big slab, that beautiful winding snake of pavement known as the I and he squealed onto it, taking the humps and bumps standing straight up with his boots on the footpegs. The exhilaration was such that he felt like opening the old hog up and doing a little trick riding like squatting no hands on the seat or steering with his feet…but no, that was crazy old bullshit from the crazy old days of bullshit that no longer existed.

  And he had to get his ass far and away.

  The bike roared under him as he took the I mile by mile, the wind blowing his hair back and parting his shaggy beard, making his face sting and his eyes water. Shit, yes. A few bugs slapped his cheeks and forehead and that was all part of it.

  He had not felt so free in years.

  He thought about Rice for a moment. He was a good guy for a citizen. He could have been a good biker. Too bad. At least he’d been burned up back there and wouldn’t have to wander around with a worm sliding around in his brain making him go cannibal. It wasn’t much, but it was something. At least the old man had been spared that.

  Slaughter thought no more about it.

  He was feeling really good, really charged, still buzzing from the action. He had that feel-good sort of soul rapture, that pure euphoria he only got after a good conflict. It was like coming down from tripping your brains out on the good stuff. It reminded him of that field event back in the good old days in Harrisburg. The Disciples were there, along with members of the Outlaws and Pagans, the Warlocks and the Dirty Dozen, countless other clubs big and small. Slaughter and Jumbo, Neb and Apache Dan were barrel riding on their bikes, getting low down and crazy, their minds blown clean on tabs of Red Dragon.

  That’s exactly how he felt now: free without a care. The way a patched-in outlaw biker was supposed to feel: high and proud and randy in the saddle. That was the tribal lifestyle—who rode the best, who fucked more women, who kicked more ass. Absolutely primal, the barbarian life.

  The only thing that brought him down was that he could not share it with any of his brothers of the Disciples Nation.

  On the good side, the I was clean; there were very few wrecks and absolutely no citizens. That was one good thing that had come out of the Outbreak, it kept the citizens off the road with their cages, cleared away the rice rockets and weekenders.

  The sun was getting warm, burning off the morning mist, and he could feel it warming up his arms and all that intricate inking—the snakes and skulls, dragons and tombstones, the bright red swastikas on each bicep overlaying the serpents and gargoyles beneath, the black SS deathshead on the back of his left hand.

  He was feeling good about things, starting to think that—

  Wait a minute now.

  Wait a fucking minute.

  In the distance he could see something. And not just one thing but many. Vehicles. They weren’t wrecks. They were heading in his direction at full steam. He popped the clutch and decelerated, slowing until he came to a stop. He dug in his saddlebag and pulled out the Minox binoculars, held them to his eyes and tightened the field…shit and shit. Those were Hummers. Military Humvees.

  He had a sudden bad feeling about things, which became even worse when he heard the thunk-thunk-thunk of the chopper as it came over the tree line in the distance, sweeping through the sky above him.

  He had to get off the I.

  He throttled up, cutting across fields of yellow grass and stunted corn, over humps and down into little vales, pushing along, giving the hog some speed but not so much that he’d lose her on the uneven terrain. Any thought he’d had that it was all purely coincidental vanished when the chopper passed overhead again, and behind him the Hummers entered the field as well, pushing forward in a solid line, chewing through the corn like harvesters.

  Fuck.

  They had his number.

  He gunned up a hill, came out on a gravel road and opened the bike up, wary of a skid, but knowing he had to get some real estate between him and the Hummers. That chopper kept circling overhead. It was eyeing him and unless he could get to some cover, some trees, it was all over with. He kept riding, throwing a contrail of dust behind him.

  The gravel road wound out through open country and that was bad. In the distance it entered a pine thicket. If he could jus
t make it into the trees he might have a chance. He throttled up a bit, gaining speed and momentum. In the rearview he could see that the Hummers were on the road, too, coming fast.

  He cut onto a side road that circled through some heavier brush and then onto a footpath. Up a hill, down another, over a footbridge and then off the path into the grass again, finding what looked like a dry ravine bedded by flat sandstone. He followed it, nearing the pine thicket and knowing he just wasn’t going to make it. Overhead, the helicopter came veering down in a strafing run. He heard the crack! crack! of a high-powered rifle. Bullets thudded into the stones around him, splitting some in two with little puffs of rock dust. The rifle kept firing and the rounds landed in front of him, behind him, to either side.

  They could have pegged you if they wanted, Slaughter thought as he pulled up out of the ravine and cut onto the gravel road again. They’re herding you. They want you alive.

  He decided he would not make it easy on them, whoever in the hell they were. His scoot could go places they couldn’t and once he got into the trees the helicopter would be useless. First, he had to get into the trees, though. And once he was there, if it came down to it…he would fight to the end.

  Okay. Not far now.

  Maybe five minutes.

  The Hummers were closing and he couldn’t throttle the hog any more or he was going to spill her. The road was rough and potholed, the gravel was loose. Things like that meant nothing to the Hummers, of course. They poured it on even more. And here came that fucking chopper again, the gunner firing off rounds, throwing lead like rice at a wedding: crack! crack! ca-rack!

  But there was the thicket beyond…cool, shadowy depths where he could fade.

  It was going to work.

  He was almost there.

  And that was the point at which everything went right straight to hell because out of the thicket came another Hummer straight at him and there was a gunner with a mounted recoilless rifle just waiting for the order. Slaughter knew the weapon well. Back in the days before he earned his Disciples patch when he was a grunt he had shot one. 106mm. It would make scrap metal of the hog and turn Slaughter himself into a greasy smear of gore.