Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

He wanted to mourn her.

More so, he wanted to track the mutants to their lair with a hundred well-armed 1%ers and sort them out, but that was wish fulfillment and fantasy retribution. He had to be practical. He needed a vehicle. He needed to link up with the Disciples and, if that was impossible, to get to that fortress and get that bio out of there.

And don’t forget Black Hat or Nemesis or Leviathan or whatever the fuck he calls himself. Because that puke has something special in store for you at the end of the trail and you know it.

He looked for a vehicle, but every one he found was wrecked. The Red Hand must have deserted during the night, those few survivors driving off in anything that ran. Slaughter was hoping for a Hummer or an APC, but he couldn’t find so much as a skateboard. He was on foot. His scoot was back in Exodus and he really doubted it had survived the all-out attack by the Red Hand.

Damn.

On foot.

That was a hell of a thing for an old scooter tramp. He kept walking, keeping his eyes open for trouble and wondering how he was going to get out of this one and how far it might be to the nearest town where he could possibly hook up with a ride. He came closer to the main gate and he began to see a few stragglers roaming around. They ignored him. Even when he called out to them, they ignored him. They weren’t interested in him or what he was selling. He wondered how many of them had been watching him dance with Maggot.

There was a row of clapboard buildings and that’s where Slaughter had his first piece of luck of the day. The corpse of a man was impaled to the wall of one of the buildings. One of the mutants must have done it and it was a testament to the strength of those things. A knife had been driven through the belly of the corpse and into the wall, pegging it there.

The corpse belonged to Valdez.

And the knife belonged to Slaughter.

It was his Gurkha knife, his Kukri. He kind of doubted there was another one around so it had to be his. He took hold of the hilt with both hands and, bracing himself with one boot against the wall, worked the knife loose. The corpse hit the ground and he stared at the gored blade. The knife was no worse for wear. When he turned around, three or four stragglers were watching him.

When he put his eyes on them, they scattered.

All except one: a Ratbag with a .38 on his belt.

“You know where I can get a ride?” Slaughter asked him. “A car, a truck, anything?”

“No. But when you find one, you let me know.”

He was about to turn away when there came a rumbling in the distance. Slaughter recognized what it was: there was no mistaking the roar of hogs, the sound of a pack coming in on their iron horses. The only thing akin to it was the sound of heavy armor riding in formation. It was thunder and blitzkrieg and sweet music, the banging of Thor’s hammer and the echo of sheer wrath.

Problem was: who were the riders?

Slaughter couldn’t see yet because of the bend in the road out there. If it was Cannibal Corpse, the stragglers were going to wish that the headhunters had got them the night before. But if it was the Corpse, then Slaughter had already decided he was going to liberate one of those carrion-eaters of his ride.

The stragglers scattered.

They saw death coming and they weren’t hanging around. They crawled back into their holes and coverts and made for the next round which would be no less bloody and savage than the first, they figured. Slaughter slipped around the side of the building, wondering how he was going to work this. He had the Kukri and the flare gun, but that was about it. Not exactly the sort of artillery needed to handle a crew of the Corpse Nation.

But he made ready.

He was going to make it work because he had to make it work. He saw the riders coming in: four of them and behind them another vehicle.

Couldn’t be.

Couldn’t possibly be.

But it was: the Devil’s Disciples had arrived.

Chapter Twenty-Six

On the road again.

In the bright sunshine of a bright day, the War Wagon rolled on, moving steadily north-northwest up to Devil’s Lake where the real action would begin. Slaughter slept away the morning and a good piece of the afternoon in the back of the Wagon after the exhilaration of forming up with his brother Disciples again had worn off. Up front, Apache Dan was driving, the others out riding their iron horses with Moondog leading the pack. Slaughter lay on his cot in the back looking at all the military surplus stacked up, smelling engine oil and gasoline, and thinking there wasn’t a finer and more relaxing scent on earth. With what he’d gone through last night, he was starting to wind down and he was glad the Disciples had shown because it had really energized him to the task at hand and that was something he needed badly.

It had only been a few days since they were together last, but out here in the Deadlands a few days could be an awfully long time. In a few days you could meet a crazy old Indian barbecue king who could tell you wild tales about a Skeleton Man and you could trip your brains out on peyote and have visions and hold court with Black Hat and face down a town full of zombies only to be taken prisoner by the Red Hand and be forced to fight a giant wormboy only to barely escape a worm rain and hook up with a neurotic young woman who you began to feel protective of only to see her dragged off by mutants. And then there was always the bit about the woman squeezing out worms and becoming some kind of fucking seer. Yeah, a few days in the Deadlands could be like a lifetime of revelation and pain and horror.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Maria and hoping she had died quickly, because he had felt responsible for her in her helplessness and felt that he had let her down.

You did the best you could do. Since you seem to be believing in karma these days, then you can believe that yours is intact and unsullied as far as Maria goes because you couldn’t have done more.

According to Apache Dan, after Slaughter rode off that day, drawing the Red Hand away from the pack, they had gone to ground for hours, waiting it out in the shelter of some trees. After a time, Apache Dan had led Moondog and Shanks out on their bikes searching for him. They looked for hours but could find no sign of him and then, since Apache Dan was in charge, he did the only reasonable thing and resumed the drive up to Devil’s Lake. None of them wanted to leave Slaughter behind but they figured if they would link up with him anywhere it would be up at their destination. When he wasn’t there, they got down to business anyway and did some reconnaissance of the old NORAD fortress.

“It was worse than we thought,” Apache Dan told him. “We were expecting to see it swarming with the Red Hand, but that’s not what we saw at all.”

“What did you see?” Slaughter asked him.

“Cannibal Corpse.”

According to Apache at some point—fairly recently, he was guessing—the Corpse Nation had overrun the fortress compound and taken over.

It wasn’t good news.

In fact, it was unbelievably bad news.

Apache Dan and Moondog had scouted out the perimeter of the place for some time and from their estimates there were at least forty or fifty members of the Corpse hanging around with more inside. And it looked like they were running themselves a flesh farm out back of the fortress. Somewhere in there, Slaughter knew, would be the bio. The Red Hand had been smart enough to keep her alive for a bargaining chip, but he doubted the same could be said of Cannibal Corpse. There was every likelihood she had either gone on the spit or become one of the walking dead by that point.

It would be no easy bit getting in there.