Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Sacrifice had been taken.

Slaughter vaguely heard Apache Dan and Fish call to him, but he was transfixed by the atrocity he witnessed, and maybe equally by Indiana’s bile-yellow eyes that swam with maggots, the scarab beetles that poured from the skullish cavern of her nose, and the bulimic gush of vomited human meat she spat at his feet.

Hissing like a serpent, she said, “I am become death, the devourer of worlds.”

The words of Lord Shiva, the Hindu death god, in the Bagavad Gita, Slaughter knew, but never had it been so appropriate, so fitting, and so very prophetic.

As she descended from her throne of human bone, Slaughter did not back away from her. No, he waited for her and maybe in some psychic realm of his mind he went to her as fast. His brain was rioting with conflicting emotions—rage, terror, disgust, and maybe even pity. For maybe it was another sparkling and impossibly lucid Zen moment, but he saw very clearly himself killing Indiana and knowing it was ugly and brutal and very wrong in the human sense of things, but resurrecting her like this as wormgirl incarnate, the Queen of the Dead, Dark Maiden of Destruction, Extermination, and Necrotic Dissolution, Mistress of Dank Tombs and Graveyard Rats…it was an atrocity and one, he knew, he had played a hand in.

As he raised the Mossberg, he wanted to shout, to cry out something melodramatically Hollywood like, Die you evil cunt or Back to hell where you belong but there were no words extant that could encompass what was in his brain so he simply opened up on her, blasting her into writhing fragments until the shotgun was empty. But as he reloaded and fired again, he saw something that he would never have believed. If the identity of the death goddess as Indiana was the first revelation then here was the second: although she was blown apart in fleshly corruption, she did not stay apart. As he killed her, she was reborn; as he unmade her, she was remade; as he atomized her remains she reparticulated.

She was deathless, eternal, immortal.

He killed her again and again. Each time she exploded into a storm of tissue, blood mist, and winging white deathshead moths only to be reanimated and remade in a fleshstorm of corpse ropes, blood trains, scab and suture, creeping beetle and squirming maggot, all coming together and pressing out another copy of her like hot plastic formed in a mold. And then she would be standing there with glaring yellow eyes of leprosy and a toothy grin of charnel delight, things dropping from her, things squirming in and out of her, fetal cemetery rats pushing from her flesh and sprouting greasy hair and rabid teeth and glaring red rodent eyes. Like her, they reformed and fleshed out.

Again, Slaughter destroyed her and again she became a steaming, smoking fleshshow of liquid polymer that sought and found the same form again and again.

But by then—and it had probably only been seconds since he’d killed her the first time—Fish and Apache Dan were with him and all three of them stood there like the Magnificent Seven minus four, blasting away at the death goddess until she fell apart and came back together in a whirling storm of graveyard waste. They put her down and she stood back up. They kept shooting until their weapons were hot and smoking in their fists and that’s when Fish totally lost control. Because it had been too much for him for a long time now. The spider-things in the mist had unhinged him as had the sporing mutants and now, his shotgun empty, he went into a blind, hating rage and charged the death goddess with his Mossberg held like a club.

He went at her, swinging.

Slaughter heard his own voice cry out in desperation.

But too late.

The death goddess had already accepted Fish as an offering.

In a whirlwind hallucinogenic eruption of writhing white limbs, she embraced him, pulling him into her and crushing him until his bones popped like bubble wrap and red mush spurted from his mouth and she chortled with obscene laughter, blowing out a hot sulfuric steam that was acrid and burning.

Apache Dan shouted and Slaughter hooked him by the arm and pulled him away, taking out a white phosphorus grenade from his ammo sack, pulling the pin, counting the seconds, and then tossing it at her. And as he did so, he threw himself and Apache into the dirt and there was a resounding explosion, an outpouring of heat and acrid smoke…and as they looked backward, the death goddess was caught in a hot-white blazing firestorm that spread out, lighting up the hanging bodies and seeking dry tinder at every quarter.

She screamed.

She laughed.

She sobbed.

She cried out at Slaughter the way she had the first time she died.

But in the end, she collapsed into herself, burning and popping, throwing out gouts of flame and greasy curls of black smoke as she was incinerated and cremated into drifting black ash.

They lobbed two more WP grenades into that slaughterhouse so all would burn, all would be cleansed by fire, and all would go to ash.

Then, coughing and gagging, they stumbled off into the other chamber.

Jumbo was waiting for them. He was carrying the corpse of Shanks who looked like some bloody, slit, and broken ragdoll. “Fish?” he said.

“He’s gone,” Apache Dan told him and said no more.

They brought Shanks outside and laid him in the grass. There was no service, nothing but thoughts and remembrance. There was time for little else. Then, heeding the cries of the prisoners, they moved methodically from one to the other cutting the leather thongs that bound their wrists. Most were on their feet immediately if somewhat unsteadily. Others never lost the glazed look in their eyes. They had to be pushed along by the healthier, saner ones towards the opening.

Slaughter kept asking them the same question again and again: “Which one of you is Katherine Isley?”

He got no responses and that only deepened his dread.

The three Disciples got the prisoners out of the cave and into the relatively fresh air of the night.

“Get out of here,” Slaughter told them. “Go back where you came from or grab a vehicle out front. But go! Just go!”

They need no further urging. They moved off into the night, all except for one young boy who said, “You’re looking for Kathy Isley?”

“Yes.”

He pointed towards the fortress looming in the night. “Colonel Krigg was keeping her in there.” Then the kid ran off.

Krigg was the leader of the Red Hand. Slaughter figured he was probably dead by now and maybe the bio, too, but he had to go look. Much as he hated to, he had to go into that fucking mausoleum.

“Jumbo,” he said as they climbed on their hogs. “Get out front. See if you can find Moondog. Get us an APC. Whatever you can find. When we come out, we’re going to be in a hurry.”

Jumbo fired up his Panhead and roared off into the night.

“You sure you wanna go in there with me?” Slaughter asked Apache Dan as they reloaded their pump shotguns.

He just laughed. “Quit with the stupid fucking questions, John.”

Together, side by side, they rode off towards the fortress.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

There was only one way in and they took it: right through the front doors which had now been nicely widened by the explosion of the War Wagon which was still burning…what was left of it. They rode their bikes right through curtains of flame and funneling smoke until they got clear of it in a corridor.

“Goddamn place is going up, John.”

“We better be quick then.”

Other than the flames, the fortress was shadowy. They pulled out tactical flashlights from their ammo bags (noticing with some unease that they had no shells left, only a couple of grenades) and bracketed them to the barrels of their shotguns. They clicked them on and started hunting. The place was immense and they went room to room to room and, other than a few Cannibal Corpse zombies they killed, they found nothing. Just offices and storerooms and emptiness. From what they could see, the first floor was untouched.