Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

He made a grunting noise, but that was about it.

The others were even less interested than he.

The hunger of the worms that inhabited them was such that simple survival mechanisms of defense and attack were overridden in the need to shove meat into their mouths. They were fixated on the corpse of the woman who not too long ago, Slaughter guessed, had been shackled to the walls with the others. They tore at her, snapped at each other, pulling limbs free and yanking at what they found inside her open belly.

The Devil’s Disciples waited no more.

They opened up and dropped all four Cannibals into the gore of their meal.

“Watch out!” someone yelled.

And that’s when Slaughter saw the others coming at them. Not three or four, but fifteen or twenty Cannibals carrying chains and hatchets and skinning knives.

The wormboys burst out of the darkness at the rear of the cave, and if their dead compatriots had no longer felt the hate for the rival club, they certainly did, and they planned on doing something about it.

Slaughter watched them come on, letting them get within killing range of the shotguns, his brother Disciples at his side, spaced evenly as they did when taking on a rival gang.

Slaughter, at that moment, felt more alive than he had in days, if not weeks. Because when you were a 1%er this is what it was about. Nothing like a good turf battle or blood war to remind you what it was to be alive again…even if your adversaries weren’t strictly human or strictly even living things as such.

“Grenade?” Apache Dan said.

But Slaughter shook his head. “Not with all these people in here. Can’t risk it.”

The dead came on.

The Devil’s Disciples faced them.

When they got in range, Slaughter and his boys opened up with their shotguns and within five seconds, eight of the Cannibals were down with heads blown to confetti. And then it got close in and personal, the way the Disciples liked it. They were outnumbered by the deathless horrors but that had never stopped them before and it did not stop them now. Ten wormboys converged on the five of them and they went at it, shooting when they could, using their guns as clubs, hitting and kicking, avoiding chains and hatchets, pulling knives and using them.

Slaughter had no time to watch out for his brothers because his own skin was in danger and he was fighting tooth and claw with his Gurkha knife, the shotgun tossed aside now. He ducked under a chain and took out the throat of a Cannibal Corpse with one swing and decapitated another with a second. A chain snapped against his back, throwing him forward into a pair of wormboys who tried to get a hold of him so they could use their teeth. But Slaughter was a greased eel, twisting and sliding, nearly boneless as he fought against them. The Cannibal Corpse with the chain swung it again and he dipped under it, the chain shattering the face of one of his tormentors.

Then the one with the chain took hold of him in a bear hug from behind, lifting him up in a squeezing killing embrace.

Slaughter allowed it.

He let the wormboy lift him into the air and when he did, Slaughter kicked the second zombie in the chest, flattening him, and brought the Kukri down in a savage arc, sinking it into the knee of the one that held him.

Then he was free, the wormboy hobbled, and he took his head off with one vicious and powerful swing of the blade.

He saw Shanks go down fighting in a crowd of five Cannibals and he ran in their direction, swinging the Kukri like a farmer scything wheat. The zombies fell like trees. He hacked, stabbed, pivoted, ducked, hacked and hacked again. Then something hit him in the face. Not hard enough to draw blood but with enough force to make him lose his footing and trip over the crawling remains he had just made.

Slaughter rolled through them.

He saw Shanks get up.

He saw him smile crookedly, blood spattered over his face and then a wormboy—one that was fast and surprisingly lithe—jumped through the fighting bodies and brought his hatchet down clean into the crown of Shanks’ head.

Shanks went down, still wearing the same goofy smile.

“MOTHERFUCKER!” Slaughter shouted and then a strength that was pure hate and pure adrenalin rippled through him like high voltage and he fought through the remains, finding his knees, then his feet, kicking and hacking, and going after the zombie that had put Shanks down.

Not a gang fight anymore.

Not just bloodsport.

Now it was personal.

He knocked a wormboy aside and the one with the hatchet whose face was mottled blue and black came to meet him. He swung the hatchet forehand and backhand, the strokes powerful and devastating. Slaughter barely got out of the way. But as he did, he swung the Gurkha knife and sliced nearly a pound of meat from the wormboy’s left forearm.

Being a zombie, the wound didn’t bother the Cannibal Corpse much. It was more of a surprise and a minor inconvenience than anything else.

He looked at his arm.

Then he looked at Slaughter.

He grinned and black bile poured from his mouth in a bubbly foam. He swung the hatchet. Slaughter swung the Kukri. The blades met in midair, clanging and throwing sparks. The impact stopped both man and zombie, made them stagger back a bit and reassess the prowess of their adversaries.

But if the wormboy Cannibal Corpse was hesitant to engage again, Slaughter was not. For in his mind he saw this walking carrion taking down Shanks, a brother Disciple, and that’s all it took. Letting out a war cry, he went right at the wormboy, slashing and cutting with a ferocity that made the zombie stumble back, but not before Slaughter took his hand off at the wrist and his other arm at the elbow. Then the wormboy stumbled about almost comically and Slaughter went at him again, a voice in his head saying, it’s only a flesh wound, and then he split the zombie’s face open and was splattered with his gore.

The zombie went down, his attendant worm sliding out of his bisected skull.

Three more Cannibals came at Slaughter with chains.

He dove away from them and brought up his Mossberg, blowing the head off one and wiping the face off another. The third swung his chain and it connected with Slaughter’s left arm in a blazing white-hot explosion of pain that dropped him and he lost the shotgun.

Maybe it would have been over then but Apache Dan, smeared with gore and crying out in the voices of his Shawnee ancestors, came bounding in and sank one of the Cannibal’s own bloodied hatchets into the head of the zombie, dropping him. Apache didn’t stop until that head was so much hamburger spread over the floor.

And that’s when the others scattered.

Slaughter pulled himself up, grabbing his Mossberg and his Gurkha knife.

Only three of the ten were left but they were moving off deeper into the cave as if summoned.

Shanks was dead, Jumbo and Apache Dan and Fish were badly battered but alive.

In the rear of the cave, more torches were lit, more human candles, and Slaughter knew without a doubt they hadn’t been lit by accident. It was an invitation. They wanted him and the other Disciples to follow them and this is exactly what they did even though the prisoners against the walls cried out for them not to go any further.

Drawn to the flickering torches, smelling the greasy vile stench of roasting human flesh, Slaughter led the Disciples deeper into the cave and what waited there.

Maybe he should have known it was a mistake.

Maybe he should have known it was some kind of trap.

And maybe he should have practiced some restraint and common sense. But he was too amped up by that point, mainlining death and hate, his belly a boiling mass of need for retribution. He wanted to kill every last Cannibal Corpse he could find until the trail of mutilated cadavers led him to the ones he wanted most of all: Reptile and Coffin.