Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“From what I could see of it when Moondog and me scoped it from the other side, it looks big enough to drive three or four tanks into at the same time. Hard to say what was in there or what’s in there now. Might have been a bunker or a bomb shelter. Who knows?”

“But that’s probably where our bio will be if she’s anywhere.”

“That’s what we think.”

Sitting there, Slaughter saw the ratbikes of the Cannibals parked in the lot, in the drive, on the grass. They were everywhere. He counted fifty-seven of them so that meant they had at least fifty-seven members of the Nation to deal with. Not good odds for six men, even if they were hard-charging bullet-eating members of the Devil’s Disciples Nation.

He thought over the plan Moondog had come up with. As warlord and sergeant-at-arms and a combat veteran, his plan was good. It was workable. But it was full of holes and that wasn’t poor planning or strategy, but the fact that with six men there was only so much that could be foreseen and mapped out. A good part of it was going to be the element of surprise combined with luck.

Slaughter had been over it from start to finish a dozen times at least and he honestly couldn’t come up with anything better.

Parked in the lot amongst the ratbikes were the vehicles of the Red Hand—APCs, Hummers, and pickup trucks. If all went successful, they’d be charging out of there in a pair of APCs. Once they started rolling, with their weapons systems and heavy armaments, nothing could stop them.

If they could get to that part of things, and it wouldn’t be easy.

Slaughter stood up. He saw maybe a dozen Cannibals moving around down there, shambling about as their kind did. Inside the fortress, he thought, was where Reptile and Coffin would be if they were still in fact walking.

“I guess that about does it,” he said.

“I guess so, man. Now we wait for dark.”

Slaughter nodded, feeling his blood running hot. “Then we get it on.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Slaughter waited for it to begin because it was only minutes away now and he knew it. He could feel the excitement—and dread—coming right up from the balls of his feet as he waited in the darkness on Moondog’s Boss Hoss 375 Horse. It was like energy was funneling up from deep inside the earth and his feet on the ground were plugged right into it.

Moondog was in the bus and it was starting to roll.

Slaughter and the others waited on their bikes. They carried the arsenal Brightman had supplied them with: 12-gauge pistol-gripped Mossberg pump shotguns, white phosphorus grenades, and Hardballer .45s. Full auto weapons like the M-16 wouldn’t do much good against wormboys, you needed real punch for clean headshots.

Slaughter lit a cigarette, watching the bus picking up speed as it made for the gates. There were about twenty Cannibals out in front of the fortress gathered with their ratbikes and there would be twenty less of them once Moondog made contact. He had rigged a pressure switch to the cow-catcher on the front of the War Wagon that was wired to two-hundred pounds of C-4. When he got within fifty-feet of the fortress he would dive out the door.

Things were about to get loud.

The other Devil’s Disciples were waiting out at the end of the drive that led into the compound.

The War Wagon passed through the gates.

Moondog turned the headlights on.

The Disciples fired up their scoots and made ready.

It was only a matter of seconds now before the fireworks began. Every man was tense and exhilarated, pumped-up and ready to roll. And then they heard it—WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP-WHUMP! The War Wagon went up like a dying sun, shooting out a barrage of fire and clouds of rolling black smoke. The first two explosions were the C-4 loads going, the second two were the twin fuel tanks. And now the front of the fortress was a blazing firestorm. The Cannibal Corpse wormboys in front were either blasted into fragments or lit up like napalm. Even from their distance—two city blocks away—the Disciples felt the shock wave and the heat that followed it.

There was the diversion, time to ride into hell.

“THE SHIT IS ON!” Slaughter cried out and the Disciples rode in hell-for-leather, whooping and hollering, shouting their rebel yells.

As Slaughter opened the throttle and led the pack in, he could see wormboys staggering around on fire. Many more were on the ground in burning pieces.

Slaughter came firing through the gates and a dazed wormboy came out to meet him, his face like an open infected wound, his hair smoking. Slaughter roared right at him and gave him a round from the Mossberg that took his head right off. Apache Dan fired into a group of three or four, scattering them.

With the blazing remains of the War Wagon and the burning ratbikes of the Cannibals, it was like daylight in the front of the fortress. The blast had blown open the doors and taken a huge bite out of the concrete wall. Inside, the flames were spreading as more wormboys stumbled out, patting themselves wildly to put out the fires that licked at them.

What worried Slaughter at that moment was that he did not see Moondog anywhere. He should have been in the grass, coming out to meet them. But he was nowhere and that gave Slaughter a very bad feeling.

But there was no time.

He led the pack around the side of the fortress and as they roared out of its moonlit shadow they saw the rising rock wall and the mouth of the immense cave hewn into it. There was no missing it. A paved road led from the fortress to the cave and it was lit on either side by smoldering torches that threw a shifting, dirty orange illumination.

But the stink.

That godawful stink.

Slaughter knew by then what he was going to see even before he saw it: corpses. Just like in Victoria, dozens of people had been impaled on sharpened stakes driven into the ground and lit on fire. They burned with a constant guttering like corpsefat candles and he figured they had been soaked in oil or something similar so they would burn on and on.

It was a ghoulish ride down that road with the human torches blazing and blackened and stinking to either side. When they reached the mouth of the cave, they ditched their bikes and went in.

It was immense inside and lit by more human torches.

In the silence they could hear them sputtering and sizzling, dripping globs of hot fat. The floor of the cave was dirt and it was littered with gnawed bones, bits of flesh and tissue, maggoty heads, and great splotches of blood. It was a dining hall for the Cannibals and what made it even worse was that to either wall, prisoners were shackled together like slaves. There were dozens of them and they were all terrified or completely out of their minds. Some called out to the Disciples but many more just stared off into space. They were citizens, Slaughter saw, many innocents and many more members of the Red Hand.

And they were made to watch as the wormboys had their nightly feast, knowing that each day more of them would be slaughtered for food.

All the Disciples wanted to go to them but they had other concerns right then: a group of Cannibals were feeding on the remains of a woman. Such was their gluttony and the need to fill those empty spaces below that they paid no attention whatsoever that their hated rivals had appeared.

Jumbo made to open up on them but Slaughter held up his hand.

Not yet.

This was too easy.

The wormboys were wearing their colors, which by that point were saturated with corpse goo and cemetery slime, stained by dozens of ghoulish feasts, feathered with rot and mildew. One of the Cannibals, gore dripping from his cankerous mouth, looked over at the Disciples, watching them with fish-white eyes as he chewed ravenously.