Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

The Disciples let forth a collective sight.

And Fish said, “I think…I think I just pissed my pants.”

Chapter Fourteen

About three hours later, they stopped for the night in a nice wide open field where there was not a lick of fog. The spiders were discussed and dispensed with. Nobody much wanted to dwell on any of that and the entire memory of those webbed bodies and clusters of spiders smashing against the windshield filled Slaughter’s mouth with revulsion so he just shook it out of his head.

He lay on his bunk, smoking, trying to put the day and night in some kind of perspective that would make it all easier to live with. It was something he’d done countless other times after coming down from too much action, too much insanity, too much wild and randy bullshit.

What’re you getting your back up about, Slaughter? he asked himself in a voice that was half-dream and half-awake. You knew there’d be mutations out here. The spiders were just that. Disgusting, made your spine crawl and your belly flop over, but not truly unexpected. There’ll be other things. Some of them not so bad and others a lot fucking worse.

Sure, that was realistic, he knew, lying there in the dark of the Wagon, so close to his hog that he could smell the engine oil coming off her like a seductive sweet perfume.

But he knew that wasn’t what was bothering him.

It was Black Hat.

The idea of that man…or thing… disturbed him in ways he could not fathom. That somehow, some way, Black Hat was the axis upon which everything was spinning now. He told himself he couldn’t possibly know that, yet he was certain of it.

The boys had settled in and even Fish had stopped talking about women, and the others drifted off, snoring and shifting in their sleep, Jumbo muttering things under his breath. Moondog was silent. He never made any noise when he slept and you could never be sure if he was sleeping or not. Slaughter knew it was the sleep of a combat veteran, a guy who’d lived in a war zone. They always slept light like that. He was told he did it himself, and Moondog had seen a lot more action than he had. In a lot of ways, the war had never been over for him. He went from combat Marine to outlaw biker to convict at the federal Atlanta hellhole. In their own way, Slaughter knew, each was a combat duty station.

He pulled off his cigarette, trying to wind down, having trouble as he always did.

He closed his eyes and right away pictured a small, gangly-limbed boy in a blue confirmation suit that he knew was his kid brother Perry. Red Eye. It was funny, but whenever Slaughter thought of the kid he pictured him in that confirmation suit standing there in church, his eyes filled with the bright wonder of the Sacraments and the saints, the mystery of faith. To Slaughter himself it meant nothing. It was a racket. They wanted your money and that’s all it was about: money and power. Even as a kid he knew that. Fuck the trappings and ritual. That was eye candy and soul food, a delightfully delirious drug for the brainwashed Catholic masses who were scared of life and terrified of death and haunted by their own sins and gnawing guilt. The marrow, the blood of it was money.

But not to Perry, not to old fucking Red Eye.

It all meant so much more to him and the shit the priests and sisters spewed out in school were absolute truths not to be questioned. Again, unlike Slaughter himself who as a kid was constantly in the shit for asking questions. But, Father, if children are the lambs of God then why did he let all those kids die in concentration camps? And the priest bearing down on him, whacking him with a ruler until his knuckles bled. Because he loved them, you little bastard, because he loved them. Ah, yes, the mystery of faith which was no mystery at all: just believe it, don’t question it, accept your sedative, drink deep of your tonic of Roman propaganda and dig into your pockets and fill the collection plate.

Old Red Eye.

It was no wonder that he ended up as another little braindead devotee of the Legion of Terror. He’d wanted to belong to something all his life and the small bike clubs he’d hooked up with—imitating his big brother, no doubt—were too hedonistic and narcissistic for his liking. There was no underlying spiritual dogma, no divine godhead, no symbolic ceremony in 1%er clubs. They didn’t celebrate the spirit, they unleashed the animal.

Maybe had Slaughter bought into some of that stuff he wouldn’t be where he was today, and then again, maybe if Perry had rejected more of it, he wouldn’t be where he was today: in a federal lock-up awaiting execution, the only thing standing between death and him, not God or Jesus or the Saints, but his rebellious hardcore brother who believed in nothing but the brotherhood of the road, the Devil’s Disciples, and held up his middle finger to country, flag, and organized religion in general.

Man, all that belief and faith of yours, Red Eye. Look what it got you in the end. Me. One seriously fucked-up savior.

Yet, for all that and for his many malfunctions of character, Slaughter was going to pull it off. Even laying there, wired tight from the day, with his brothers sleeping around him, he knew he was going to pull it off somehow and that was probably because he had to pull it off.

But why am I thinking that if I do my problems are only just beginning?

Because he was dealing with the feds. Dealing with a bloated bureaucracy of parasites, rats, blood-suckers, and self-promoting career junkies. What Slaughter knew of them—the ATF, the DEA, the FBI, federal prosecutors, the judicial system itself that was rotten from the inside out—gave him little hope that they’d hold up their part of the bargain. These were spin doctors and perception managers, leeches in three-piece suits. They would fuck him (and Perry) as easily and casually as they fucked each other and the Constitution they were supposed to uphold.

Which is why you better get yourself some insurance, something that’ll screw them as they screw you. Allow the fuck-ee to become the fuck-er.

Yeah, that’s how you played the system.

Problem was, as always, they had the power.

Slaughter closed his eyes but sleep still would not come. His mind raced around through its memories, holding them, examining them, minutely examining the dirt stuck to them.

Before joining the Devil’s Disciples when he was twenty, Slaughter had a history of violent crime behind him ranging from strong-arm robbery to obstruction of justice to arson. But he had never killed anyone. He had beaten guys, stabbed them, and once, as a member of a club called the Night Hawks, he had taken a meat cleaver to a pimp who did not pay his protection money in Youngstown. The guy had lived, minus three fingers, an ear, and a lot of blood.

What he was good at, he realized through the years, was intimidation. At 6’3 and 225 pounds, he was a rangy guy with broad shoulders, a barrel-chest, legs like pistons and a fearsome upper body strength acquired from playing football in high school and religiously doing 2,000 pushups a day and working the weights with a fanatic zeal, a habit practiced in-and-out of prison where he also worked the punching bag at least an hour every morning.

Back in the days of the Night Hawks his specialty was squeezing payments from drug dealers, businessmen, and street-level criminals. He was an enforcer and he enjoyed it. When he went after someone he was aggressive to the point of savagery. Fear was his tool and when his victims saw him coming, bristling with muscle, his beard shaggy and unkempt, his club vest greasy and dirty, his eyes filled with acid, they knew they were in for it and they were right. He usually came at them with a baseball bat or a tire iron, sometimes with his bare hands. After he seriously injured half a dozen people, word of mouth did the rest and his reputation grew, though now and again he still had to get rough, and that was what had bought him the first of three prison terms when he was twenty.