Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Through the haze there was a face above that nightmare cityscape, a face that was the sun but darkest orange giving over to blood-red. A grinning skull-face which was the face of Black Hat the Skeleton Man smirking with satisfaction over the heaped and bird-picked death far below, happy, happy, happy was he. The face faded into the haze but the grin, like that of the storied cat, remained toothsome and smiling.

“That is the ending, favored son,” said Black Hat who was only a grin of teeth himself now. “It’s up to you to fill in the rest.”

When Slaughter again came out of it, he was sitting on the bench. He was breathing, damp with sweat, knowing he had been shown something and knowing that it would never make complete sense to him. Was that post-apocalyptic glimpse he’d been given something he needed to stop from happening or would it happen regardless? And why was it all channeled through his guilt of Dirty Mary, his childhood love—and fear—of a certain children’s book, and his tenure as a member of the dreaded 158 Crew?

The trip was slowing now, coming down to earth, yet the buzz was still owning him, just beginning to release its grip. There was a cigarette in his hand and he smoked it and tried to think, but his head was like a colander and his thoughts were liquid that spilled through the holes. All that remained was gunk and shit, like the stuff caught in a lint trap—guilt, self-doubt, self-recrimination, self-loathing, despair, and melancholy. All the very things that were snares that would trip him up, baggage that would slow him down, shovels that would dig his grave.

He blinked, and somehow the cigarette had burned between his fingers or maybe he had smoked it. As he came down he began to feel how sore his body was, his joints stiff and aching, and he wondered, truly, why he had done it in the first place. Did he really expect revelation from a drug? All he had, in the end, were more questions and half-thoughts, muddled suspicions, and vague apprehensions.

He sighed and stood up.

Time was not disjointed now, it was slow and smooth and orderly. The buzz was fading to a mild exhilaration. Despite the soreness, he felt good, he felt solid and real and grounded. His eyes only saw this world.

And as they saw it, they also saw the occupants of this world: the living dead. For all around him were zombies, twenty or thirty of them at least.

Chapter Twenty-One

How long they had been watching him, he did not know.

He couldn’t say that they were necessarily amused but they did seem almost curious. Twenty or thirty had been his rough guesstimation but that was certainly wrong because there were more now and they were pushing in from every quarter. The stink of them was their symbol of office and it was nauseating and maggoty. They stood about while clouds of meatflies rose and descended, feeding and planting eggs and ensuring the cycle of vermin. The dead cared not. Faces that were bleached and pouchy, raw-boned and oozing, held eyes that were flat black and dull red and pus-yellow and sometimes they held no eyes at all. Here were old men and women, wrinkled and naked in dry flaking skins like yellowed parchment or faded, discolored silk. They were crones and reapers and eye-biters with exaggerated skulls and tousled hair like white straw. With them stood men and women from youth to middle age with bloodgreased faces and bodies cankered with sores and gaping ulcers. Some of the women were obviously pregnant or blown-up with gas…but no, their swollen bellies moved with oily gyrations as the children turned within their wombs. Little ones stood with them, boys and girls, some in moldered burial suits and dresses, most simply naked. They were small and hunched and elfin, some skinless and others wearing borrowed hides and still others appearing as if they had been turned inside-out.

Slaughter knew what this going to be.

He felt it coming off them with the hot corpse-gas that blew out from their orifices and innumerable lacerations: the need to kill. Not just to take life but to feed, to stuff themselves. The majority were already doing that—stuffing themselves with any available carrion whether it came from their own putrescent bodies or goodies yanked or clawed from those standing near them. And that was almost ritual with them, he knew: the stuffing, the filling, the instinctive need to shove meat into their mouths and chew it, crush it to pulp, swallow it and feed again with voracious gluttony until they fell to the earth to become food. The worms inside them demanded it.

As they watched him, he watched them.

He found his pack on the ground and made ready. He strapped on the holster with the Combat Mag and the sheath with the Gurkha knife in it. He stuffed three extra speed loaders into the ammo pouch on the holster. He was thinking that if he could draw them away, out into the town itself and lose them in the streets he might make his way back to his scoot and ride out.

The dead began to move.

At least, half a dozen of them did: children. They were so unspeakably filthy with grave-dirt and corpse-drainage and the festering ordure of what they had been feeding upon, it was hard to tell if they were boys or girls and in the final analysis, it really did not matter. They grinned at him with faces like pocked membranous sheaths and liquid putrefaction. One of them was certainly a little girl that looked oddly like a Raggedy Ann doll with her stitched red grin and bulging black glass eyes, a gray watery discharge running from the holes in her face. The others to either side were like walking bone sculptures or cages of animated bones lightly fleshed in leathery pelts. One of them had an almost ritualistic pattern of sewing needles jutting from her face and what that could mean he did not know.

He began to move.

Their numbers were thinnest off to the right so this is where he went, moving casually, suppressing the desire to whistle, knowing he was in incredible danger but refusing to give in to fear. That was mostly the aftereffects of the peyote, that singular sense of indestructibility and joyous exhilaration at being alive.

They had not grouped to stop him.

But just as he got close to his opening and was already notching up his muscles for a wild run, a woman stepped out to stop him. She wore a finely-tailored business suit…at least it had been until the mildew started growing all over it. When he got within spitting distance, she hiked her skirt up so he could see the ruin of her sex. It looked like a Venus Fly-Trap, spiked and hungry. He brought up the Combat Mag and shot her in the head, the slug making a clean entrance by splitting her septum lengthwise. Although most of her brains and skull were ejected out with the back of her head, she took three or four drunken steps and then vomited out a black, gushing curd of corpse-chum that splattered at his feet before she tipped straight over face-first into the grass. The others covered her like locusts, stuffing themselves and Slaughter charged through their lines, casting three or four aside and blowing the head off another.

Then something looped around his throat and he brought his elbow back and felt it sink into flesh gone to mush and the dead man that had taken hold of him stumbled back.

Three more ringed him in.

But his hand was practiced and sure. The Combat Mag barked and they all went down with perfect headshots. He spun and drilled another, but his aim was off and the slug went into another’s throat. And that was six rounds and he knew it.

No time to reload.

He holstered the .357 and slid the Kukri out.

They screamed and converged and he went straight into their numbers with the Gurkha knife slashing back and forth in lethal arcs, severing limbs and opening guts and splitting open faces. He kept hacking and cutting as they fell and others surged over the top of their comrades and he stumbled through their masses, tripping on entrails and fluids, splashed with their drainage and foul gouts of blood.