Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Slaughter led Maria away, only firing when they were threatened.

They climbed quickly to the uppermost tier which seemed to be mutant-free. The bunkers up there were arranged so that they had a perfect, unobstructed killzone before them. The only way the enemy could get at these was to climb the hillside or drop down from above. The first bunker they checked was collapsed, the second was filled with sand and had no weapons. But the third was exactly what they were looking for. It was reinforced concrete, sandbagged, with a .50 caliber machine gun emplacement and a barbwire perimeter. Military surplus was stacked along the low walls. Apparently the Red Hand was using it for storage.

It had been years since he had fired a fifty cal, but it came back to him quick enough. He pulled back the bolt and fed in the belt from the ammo box.

“Please…please don’t let them get me,” Maria said. “You don’t know what they do.”

“I can imagine,” Slaughter told her.

In the setting sunlight, he saw a group of mutants climbing the muddy hillside up at them. They clawed their way up, using their powerful arms and swinging themselves in rapid ascension like monkeys climbing trees. There were a series of barbwire perimeters confronting them, but they crawled up and over the first, torn and bloody, but undaunted in their hunt for meat.

“Okay,” Slaughter said. “This is going to get loud.”

Maria was hunched over behind him and now she curled up in a ball and, if he hadn’t known it before, he knew now that she was going to be absolutely no use in a fight. It made him think of Dirty Mary. She would have relished something like this. Oh, she’d have been scared, too, but once her claws were out, he knew, you’d never have suspected it. He was beginning to really miss her…or maybe he was only now allowing himself to admit it.

In the dying light, Slaughter got a bead on the mutants. They were smeared with blood and one of them brandished a severed arm like a club. He opened up and the fifty did its work just fine. The mutants literally exploded when the .50 cal slugs ripped into them. They were cut in half, throwing up mists of blood and bone fragments. A few more tried to climb either to feed on their downed brothers or to get up at the bunker and Slaughter cut them down. He scattered a few more packs, driving them into the shadows and out of sight.

As darkness came on, he could still hear the screams of the dying from the encampments. That and the grunting and growling of the mutants as they fed.

“Maria?” Slaughter said.

She was still curled up behind him, just shaking.

“Listen,” he said. “I need your help here, man. I can’t do it all myself. You gotta pitch in.”

She sat up. “What do I have to do?”

“Start going through those crates and see what we have.”

Hesitantly, she did. She found a few more ammo boxes for the .50 cal, some medical supplies, bottled water, military MREs, some flares, but no grenades. That was the one thing that he had been hoping for. She passed out food and water, arranged some flares for the long night and then just sat there, staring, practically comatose again.

By the time it was fully dark, the screams out there had all but subsided. They could still hear the mutants from time to time but even that was lessening. The hot wind carried a raw, evil stink of death and suffering.

“You need to tell me about these things out there,” Slaughter said, knowing he had to somehow slap her out of her current state.

In a low, weak voice she said, “They’re flesh-eaters.”

“I figured that.”

“Headhunters. That’s what people call them because they always take heads.”

Slaughter sighed. “Yeah. I got that much.”

“They come in packs and murder everyone. Some of the women they carry off to—”

“Figured that, too.”

“They usually attack towards dark like this and the Red Hand knows it. They haven’t been after us in a month or more,” Maria explained. “I think…I think people let their guard down. I think the headhunters knew that and waited for it.”

Out in the darkness below he could hear the unmistakable sounds of the mutants feeding—snapping bones, chewing, now and then shrieking, and howling.

It was going to be a long night.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Out in the compound, it was quiet.

A deathly brooding silence had fallen and Slaughter wasn’t caring for it much. All they needed was for a few of those things to slip up in the dark and make it into the bunker and that would be it. He still had the M-16, but it was nearly out of shot. What he would have given to have his Combat Mag again and a few speedloaders for the close-in stuff. Back in his days as a Marine, they would have set out landmines and Claymores, tripflares and boobytraps to secure the perimeter. Now he just had his five senses. But he had to remain vigilant, which wasn’t easy because he was so damn tired. His eyes kept shutting. Some coffee or a couple of bennies would have been nice.

Maria was awake.

He could feel her behind him. She was breathing softly but now and again she would move. He didn’t know what the hell he was going to do with her. In the old days, he would have probably tossed her to the headhunters if she didn’t earn her keep, but now he was thinking he had to get her somewhere. Somewhere safe. But where exactly was that? He wondered if the other Disciples were still alive, still riding hard and giving hell.

She’s going to be trouble and you know it. She’s like a child and you don’t have the time to be babysitting anyone.

But what the hell could he do?

Things were different now. He just couldn’t leave. And that meant in the morning—if they even saw the morning—she’d have to come with when he made his break out of this place. He had a pretty good idea that by dawn there wouldn’t be any Ratbags left to stop him and was that a good thing or a bad thing?

Now and again he heard a night bird crying out or the distant and terrible roar of some nocturnal predator. It was hard to say what that might have been, but he didn’t think he was being overly-imaginative when he thought it sounded prehistoric.

The eerie silence and blanketing darkness were almost unbearable.

Slaughter dug around next to him.

“What are you doing?” Maria asked him, her voice almost neurotic in its intensity.

“Putting a flare out,” he said.

What he didn’t tell her was that the stillness out there was making his skin crawl and his experience told him that this was more than nerves but a warning signal.

He aimed the flare pistol and fired it. There was a muted pop and the flare went up over the compound, throwing out a flickering red-yellow illumination that swept over the ragged landscape, creating a surreal world of strobing shapes and jumping shadows.

But his instincts had not been wrong.

A dozen headhunters were clawing their way up the hill. When the flare ignited, they froze, staring up at it like it was the eye of their god that had just opened. They watched it with primitive fascination and Slaughter sighted them in and sprayed them down with the fifty. It was a turkey shoot. The slugs ripped them apart and sent their remains tumbling down the hill. He fired on suspicious pockets of darkness and anything that didn’t move fast enough or things that looked like they might be alive. Most of them weren’t, but the hammering of the heavy machine gun and the burning flare disoriented the other mutants, forcing them up out of ditches into the killzone and scattering the rest in fear. He took out sixteen or seventeen of them by his figuring.

When he was done, the barrel was smoking.

He sighed then, lit a cigarette, knowing there was no point in stealth by then. He kept his senses alert and his instincts sharp. “How did you come to be with the Red Hand?” he asked Maria.