Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“Wait…I think I have a solution,” Valdez said. He motioned to a couple of his bully boys and they came over, flashing knives. They sliced Slaughter’s bonds and he fell to the ground. It took him a good five minutes to get the feeling back in his arms. But Valdez was a patient man. He had nothing but time. Now that Slaughter was free, the other Ratbags had their weapons on him. They didn’t trust him and Slaughter had to respect that. Because he had been beginning to think how easy it would have been to take a knife from one of these stooges. Just a few seconds would be all he would need. Grab the nearest one, stomp his kneecap and smash his Adam’s apple, take his knife and put it against Valdez’s throat. By the time the other limp dicks got their weapons up, he’d already have their boss hostage.

But they weren’t that dumb.

Once he got his blood going again, Valdez dropped him a canteen and he drank down the whole thing. Better. It swept that fuzzy disorientation out of his skull.

“Better?” Valdez asked.

“Sure.”

“Anything else?”

“I could handle a steak.”

“So could I, my friend. Here. We found these on you. Enjoy.” He tossed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter into the dirt. Slaughter shrugged, picked them up and had a few easy drags. “Okay,” he said. “So what do you got in mind?”

“I’ve come up with perfect solution to our problem. One that will take care of my dilemma, entertain my men, and allow you the dignity of dying like a man.”

One of his bully boys chuckled.

Slaughter waited for it while he finished his smoke. All this high drama for nothing. Valdez had it all planned from the moment they strung him up. Why all the theatrics? Just get to it already.

“You see,” Valdez said, “we are a free-ranging group. Our job is to collect up anything and any one we can find. Food, medicine, weapons, supplies of any sort. But it’s hard work. The farther east we range the more dangerous it is. The Army has a kill-on-sight order as far as we’re concerned. We’ve had some nasty engagements. My men grow tired. Bored. Restless. They need entertainment.”

“And I’m it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Slaughter turned his back on them and had a good long piss. After that, he felt pretty human again save for the stink of zombie gore spattered all over him. But he supposed a shower was out of the question.

“Now that you’re freshened up,” Valdez said, “you’ll take a walk with these gentlemen.”

“Where to?”

Valdez ignored him. “Put him in the cage,” he said. “And tell Benny to bring up Maggot.”

They led Slaughter through the compound at gunpoint. It was a large, sprawling place that looked like part of an old Army base. As it stood, from what he could see of it, it looked pretty indefensible. There were several small encampments enclosed by sandbags and spooled barbwire, but there were great openings in the ramparts that you could have driven a tank through. The wire was old and rusting, the sandbags leaking. A good force could have overrun the entire thing in minutes. He saw scrub forest beyond the perimeter in one direction and fields of high yellow grasses in the other. Perfect cover to mount an attack. As they led him on, he saw that the ground was pitted with bomb craters.

They’re putting you in the cage…what do you think of that?

But he didn’t think much at all about it.

He let himself go cool and easy as he always did before a good action or gang fight. It was the only way to do it. Breathe slowly, rest your muscles, stretch your joints. Don’t tense up until you have to. Conserve energy.

The troubling thing, he figured, was that the farther they led him through the compound the more riders they picked up. People began to follow them, not just soldiers but women, too, until there was a crowd of at least thirty people with more pressing in all the time. They led him to a “cage” that was about thirty square feet enclosed by walls of high chainlink fence. It looked like it might have been a dog pen at one time.

They shoved him through the doorway.

The crowd ringed the cage.

When they started to part like the Red Sea, Slaughter figured there was probably a very good reason for it and he wasn’t wrong on that: a giant of a man came lumbering along. He was closer to seven feet than six, a huge black zombie with a face of mush. Quilts of decay were threaded into his purple-mottled flesh. He was absolutely gigantic, his body perforated with wounds that oozed a clear slime, and Slaughter figured he weighed well over three-hundred pounds. He was led by five soldiers.

His wrists were tied behind his back and they had a dog collar on him, each pulling him along with lengths of chain attached to it. And they were struggling. The giant was making growling, slobbering noises and that’s about as close to speech as it got with him. There were flies all over him and a violent stink not unlike potatoes rotted to soft white pulp emanated from him.

They led him into the cage and forced him to his knees. They unhooked his collar chains and untied his wrists and then beat hell out the door, chaining it shut and slapping a Masterlock on it.

So this was Maggot.

At first, he paid absolutely no attention to Slaughter. He went right at the chainlink walls, screeching and growling and snapping his teeth. He shook the fence and made the gawkers out there take more than one step backwards. He raged at the walls that held him in, trying to bull his way through and when that didn’t work, he raised his fungi-webbed fingers into the sky and let out an animal roar.

“We told Maggot he could eat you when he was done with you,” Valdez said through the storm fence. “Incentive, you know.”

Maggot turned on Slaughter, just staring at him.

From chin to eye socket, his face was a festering ulcerated cavern eaten through the flesh and right down to the bone in places. He had one good eye, a yellow, rheumy thing swimming in a soup of gummy putrescence; the other was just a ragged pocket of serous drainage. When he opened his mouth, it was filled with maggots.

Slaughter kept his distance as the giant shambled in his direction.

He knew he could only play this game so long.

One thing he was keeping in mind was that Maggot was blind on his left side and his working eye didn’t look like much to begin with. That was something. So Slaughter felt him out, keeping to Maggot’s left, now and again getting into his field of vision to see if the zombie could sight him in. He did, but only when he was close.

Work that, Slaughter told himself. That’s your edge.

He kept moving away to the left, keeping Maggot turning in circles while the crowd jeered and made with their catcalls. He knew he wasn’t putting on the show they wanted and he planned on keeping it that way.

But he got distracted by something—a bottle probably—shattering against the fence. That’s when Maggot charged in for the kill. As he reached out, Slaughter did the only thing he could think of—he jabbed him in the face with clenched fists, four or five good shots that would have put any living man to his knees. But Maggot did not go to his knees. He stumbled back from the ferocity and quickness of the attack, his face breaking open like a sore and spilling a foul-smelling ooze but that was about it.

He grinned with a mouth of broken teeth.

“GET HIM, MAGGOT!” one of the Ratbags called. “TEAR HIS FUCKING THROAT OUT! EAT HIS FUCKING LIVER!”

Slaughter kept to the giant’s left side again.

Maggot kept trying to compensate, probably trying to figure out in his rotting brain why this food would not keep still so he could take a good bite out of it. Still, despite his frustration, Maggot managed to maintain his sunny disposition. He grinned at Slaughter, fixing him with that one flat and lifeless eye like a cow considering the cud it was about to chew.