Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Stumbling, tripping, Slaughter hopped forward, fell again, rolled free and came up running.

Breaking free momentarily he ran out of the park and saw there was no way in hell he could make it to the hog. He dashed towards a row of storefronts, gasping as he tried doorknob after doorknob and the dead poured in at him from every direction.

An open one.

A hardware store. He locked the door, ran behind a counter thick with grime and went down on one knee, pulling out the Combat Mag and a speedloader. He dumped the spent cartridges, quickly inserted the speedloader drum, twisted the knob, and the Mag was loaded.

By then they were thick outside.

They battered into the door and threw themselves against the dusty plate glass windows until cracks began to appear. He took aim and fired at a wormboy leading the charge and the slug took out the window and his target. The others surged forward in a sea of rot, spearing themselves on shards of glass that didn’t even slow them down.

At the same time the window went, the door crashed open and seven, then eight, of them pushed through. He dropped two more, kept firing, emptying the gun as the zombies were felled like dead trees and their fellows began to feed on them.

Slaughter quickly made it into the back of the store, slamming the door shut and throwing the lock. He was in a short corridor with two doors. Think fast, man: door number one or door number two. Fuck it. He tried them both. The first led into a cramped storeroom and the other led into the alley…he hoped.

He threw it open and an immense woman was waiting for him.

She was flabby and quite naked, her face huge like an ashen moon, eyes sunken into pockets of flab and fungus. Her breasts were lolling sacks of flour, the nipples like corded hazelnuts leaking gray milk. Black autopsy stitching ran from her crotch to her throat and it was feathered with a blue-green mold.

There was no time for anything but shock.

Slaughter hesitated with the empty .357 in his hand for just one second and she came at him. Before he could ward it off, one gas-plump hand stiff-armed him in the chest and knocked him flat. Not just flat, but sliding him across the floor.

Definitely no time for reloading.

She stood in the doorway, filling it, blocking out the sunlight behind her. She gnashed yellowed teeth together, gagged out a dust of dead flies, and licked her lips with a tongue like a fat black leech. It left a trail of slime on her puckered mouth.

It was then, as his hand gripped the Kukri , that he noticed she carried something in one of her arms. What he had taken to be another meaty roll of flab was a child…a little wormkid infant with a face like a caul, its body a rolling, distended mass like a prenatal sack full of sloshing embryonic juice.

The woman took two lumbering steps into the room as the dead pounded on the door in the corridor, wanting in, wanting not just to feed, Slaughter thought, but to view the festivities.

The woman cocked her head to the side as he stood.

Was this defiance? She just wasn’t sure.

The baby in her arms made a gurgling sound like its mouth was full of gruel. It dug spiny fingers into its mother’s bulk, something like a face moving behind the caul, grinning, chewing, feeding on itself.

Slaughter was beginning to think he might be able to get a speedloader in, but when he reached for the gun, the woman shivered and clots of black wormy earth dropped from the mossy purple-black crevice between her legs which were stout marble pillars.

“Glhhhh,” she said as if trying to form word. “Glhhhh?”

A question. One without an answer.

Her hair was a dull, weed-dry gold that must have been beautiful and luxurious at one time. Now it was patchy, crawling with insects. Coffin beetles, mottled black-and-red like bloodstones, were chewing at her scalp, pushing themselves under the skin.

Slaughter held the Kukri in one blood-spattered, white-knuckled fist.

The woman stepped forward.

Lips peeled open, yellow teeth were unsheathed.

She reached for him and he slashed out with the Gurkha knife and cleaved one of her breasts open. It split like a casket pillow, scattering filth and drainage and she roared, maybe not so much out of pain but out of damage.

She reached her free arm out at him, scabrous black nails coming within inches of his face and then he jumped back. The zombies were still beating at the other door and he knew it wouldn’t hold. His choice was to go through them or go through this woman.

There was no choice.

He’d have to hack straight through her.

One of her eyes pushed out of its seam of fat and winked open, a glossy ova serrated by red veins. She puckered her lips like she wanted to kiss him, expectorated in her throat, and spat a globby/stringy ball of bile at him. He ducked and it splattered against the wall.

She made a chortling sound as if amused.

She dug her fingers between her legs, tearing out a slimy blob of something that dripped a thin watery red sap.

And threw it.

He ducked away from that one, too, and she chortled again. And, worse, her child made a moist giggling noise that sounded like somebody vomiting.

She took two steps forward and Slaughter took two backward.

She was grinning.

He was shaking.

She made a retching sound and gagged up a ball of mucus and slime and spit it at him. As quickly as he ducked it, another came and then another and then another, spattering against the walls like red, juicing inkblots. She repeated the process two, then three times, wiping maggots from her lips and then tossed her child at him.

Slaughter stepped aside and it hit the floor with rubbery, slick sound like a water balloon. It rolled towards him, mewling. He gave it a kick and it squealed, its hide ruptured and black juice spilling out.

The woman cried out and launched herself forward.

Slaughter came at her, meeting her, bringing the Kukri down with full force and slicing her bulbous head open lengthwise. She let out a scream that was almost too human and sank to her knees, pudgy pulp fingers exploring her cleaved-open head. Brains ran down what remained of her face in a gray, inching slop like something yanked from a corpse with a funerary hook by an Egyptian embalmer. Blood and pus and clotty drainage poured out, then nests of roaches and pockets of silverfish.

She pitched over, trembling.

The wormkid oozed over the floor and Slaughter gave it a kick that caved in its caul and it slithered about like a rent jellyfish.

He hopped over it and out into the day.

There were more out there and he saw them. He shook the shells from the Combat Mag and inserted his last speedloader with a twist of the drum knob.

Six more rounds.

That’s all you got. You better make it count.

By the time he got to his feet and made ready for the killing there were dozens and dozens of them. Like worms sliding free of carrion, they came out of houses and stores, sheds and garages, attics and crawlspaces and weedy drainage ditches. There was a solid mob of them that encircled him now and he knew there was no way, just no way, he could fight through them.

He looked around as they tightened their noose.

Nowhere but up.

If he could shimmy up a raingutter, somehow get up above them onto the roofs, he might stand a chance.

God, the entire rotting population of the town was out there now and then…they parted. They made way for another that stepped into view. A wormgirl. But a special one and even he could see that. She wore a hooded poncho of human skin and a corpse mask which had been stripped from some old hag and carved to look almost totemic.

Slaughter just stared as a voice in his head said, remember this one. She’s important. She’s different than the others. She’s like a death-goddess to them and you can see the authority she commands.