Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“How does any woman come to be with them?”

“You didn’t volunteer, I’m guessing.”

Maria made a sound that was almost laughter. “No. Would any woman in her right mind volunteer to be a camp woman?”

“I suppose not.”

“There are women who join them, though,” Maria admitted. “Some of them just want protection. But others join because they want to be part of the Hand. They want to fight.”

“But you weren’t one of them.”

“No, I wasn’t one of them.” She went silent for a moment, then: “They grabbed me and three other girls in Bismarck. We were making our way east like everyone else.”

“You were going to college when the Outbreak happened?”

“Yeah. I was studying comparative religion.”

“Heavy stuff.”

“Sure.”

She kept talking but he was no longer listening. He was getting that chill up his spine again. He knew someone, or more probably, some thing was sneaking up on the bunker. He listened. Intuited. Put out feelers hoping to snare something mentally, but whatever it was, it was being very quiet, very patient, something well-practiced in stealth and stalking. He thought about putting out another flare but he knew there was no time for that. He was getting a raw smell of rotting meat and old blood; nothing could disguise it.

It was getting thicker.

Hot, nauseating.

Maria had sensed it now, too. She had stopped talking.

Slaughter swallowed. Something was on top of the bunker working its way forward, inch by inch. The moonlight was very pale but there was enough of it to see by.

He waited.

A face and a trailing mop of hair appeared over the lip of the roof, then hands. They were perfectly silhouetted. Slaughter fired twice with the M-16, catching their intruder in the head. The headhunter made a gurgling sort of sound and dropped to the ground, dead.

But he was only the spearhead of a much larger force.

They saw no more reason for stealth.

Slaughter heard them grunting out there, gnashing their teeth and breathing hard. He put out a flare. Jesus, the hillside was swarming with them. They were crawling upwards on their bellies in shaggy ranks, their eyes glistening in the sudden intrusion of light.

He loaded the flare gun and put out another.

Loaded it again and stuck it inside his jean vest.

He opened up with the .50 cal. machine gun and killed twenty within the first five seconds of firing. But they were coming from every quarter. He laid down suppressive fire to the left and right, straight ahead and down below in the mud bowl. In the flickering light of the flare, it was a sea of gore down there, twitching limbs and blood and looped entrails and blasted heads. But they still kept coming, crawling right through the shattered remains of the others, painting themselves up with the blood of the fallen. Filthy, carrion-stinking, subhuman nightstalkers.

He kept shooting until the barrel was again hot and smoking.

But there were too many of them.

“We’re going to have to make a run for it!” he told Maria between shots, but she was hysterical and crying.

Two of them came out of the darkness, diving into the bunker. Slaughter was hit by something that knocked him on his ass. Maria screamed. His head filled with stars, he saw two hunched-over forms taking her out of the bunker. She fought and screamed in the orange glow of the flare, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Their silhouettes were everywhere. They were hissing and growling and squealing like boars. The air was foul with the vile, musky scents of their pelts. He could smell their acrid urine, the pungent stench of their glandular secretions, the hot-blood smell of the meat they’d been chewing on. It was a concentration of death and graveyards that sickened him and made him want to vomit. This is what Hemingway had meant by death: the carrion breath of blood-drinking hags from a slaughterhouse.

He felt them grab his ankles, dragging him up and out of the bunker. He reached blindly for the M-16 and his hands closed around a flare magazine with five rounds in it. He stuffed it inside his vest as they pulled him out of the bunker and through the dirt. In the distance, he thought he heard Maria screaming.

Making himself go limp, he let them drag him down the path and out of the main body of headhunters. In the moonlight he could see the forms of the two that had his ankles. They were taking him somewhere private to feed upon him and take his head, no doubt.

Slaughter let that happen.

He didn’t want too many mutants around when he made his move. When they got him down to the next tier and within hailing distance of the hut, he reached a hand inside his vest and pulled out the flare gun. When he got a clear silhouette and saw that the snarling simian bastards were shoulder to shoulder, he kicked out with his legs to get their attention. They dropped his ankles and turned to feed (he was thinking). He covered his eyes and put a flare right into the face of the one on the left who cried out in agony as it exploded in a shower of red sparks, lighting his hair on fire. The flare bounced off him and drilled into the other—a woman—burning across her breasts, bouncing off her legs and hitting the man again, this time in the groin.

Slaughter rolled away, scrambling off on his hands and knees.

They were screeching and growling, the man blinded, the woman seared, both of them burning now.

He made his getaway.

He ran off towards the hut but there were shapes moving all around him, so he cut down the hillside, avoided three or four more that shrieked at him, and ducked past still more. A throng of them came hobbling in his direction and more came from behind. He put a flare right into the throng and they vaulted away, screeching and burning, and he cut through them, trying to navigate in the flickering light. Then he tripped over something—a tree root, a half-buried bone, it was hard to tell—and went rolling down the hillside and found himself in the mud bowl.

There were dozens of them.

He ran and ran, found a ditch not far from the cage where he’d fought Maggot, and jumped in.

He listened to them for hours, killing and maiming, raping the women and dismembering the men, feeding on the wounded and chopping off heads. They didn’t find him. They had plenty of prey and he bided his time, shivering in the muddy ditch, just praying for dawn, his ears ringing with the screams of their victims.

As inconceivable as it seemed, he must have fallen asleep at some point because when he opened his eyes it was silent. The sun was rising over the hills in the east in a red, shimmering ball, burning away a damp early morning mist.

For some time he laid there, afraid to move.

The encampments were silent.

Nothing moved.

Nothing stirred.

He carefully raised his head from the ditch. He saw nothing. The mutants were gone. A few vehicles were burning, casting plumes of smoke into the air, but that was about it. The headhunters had left with the rising sun.

Slaughter pulled himself out of the ditch, slicked with drying mud, face painted with grime. He saw a few headless Ratbag corpses that were badly mauled or eaten, but no dead mutants. They’d dragged off their dead along with the corpses of their prey. In fact, the area was very sterile in appearance. Not so much as a stray bone or a shank of meat. He saw bloodstains; they were everywhere. But there were no corpses save a few Ratbags sunken in the mud that had been overlooked. The headhunters were very efficient scavengers, apparently.

He pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of his vest and lit it.

He wondered about Maria. Poor kid was a mess, a real basket case, a collection of neuroses, but she’d been through a lot and that was understandable. He hoped they’d killed her. He honestly hoped for that because he didn’t think any woman could remain sane after the attentions of those things.