Tim Curran: Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“And what did cause them? The worms?” he asked. Brightman looked like he was going to open his mouth and Slaughter gave him a hard look that shut him up.

Isley’s eyes rolled in her head a moment, then focused…somewhat. “It was called the Proteus Experiment: a biological weapons program that got out of control. It proved to be self-perpetuating. After the worm larva was set loose experimentally, it was found that it could not be contained.”

“And you?”

“I was brought in to seek a cure of sorts,” she admitted. “What I came up with was a synthetic virus. Then things happened. I think you know the story. I ended up here.”

Slaughter sighed and ground his cigarette out under his boot. “I don’t get it. Why the charade? If they wanted me dead why didn’t they put a bullet in my head?”

Isley told him to remember the two factions: those who did not know and those who did. The first group knew what Isley had been working on with the CDC, they knew about the mathematical model for the virus. They wanted her found and brought back. The reality of the situation was the armed forces—special ops and commandos—that could pull off such an operation were stretched pretty thin as it was. But the first group demanded. The second group could not admit their culpability, but at the same time they had to play along with the first group. To do anything less would have been inhumane and immoral. That’s when Brightman, who was CIA, and his think tank came up with the perfect solution…especially when a report came across his desk about a renegade biker named John Slaughter who had killed a couple of cops and was heading ever west. They’d grab Slaughter, free his boys from lockup, send them on a mission they couldn’t possibly complete (it was thought) and then no one could say a rescue hadn’t been attempted. Of course, the people back east would be told it was a highly-trained mercenary force of expendables, not a bunch of rowdy outlaw bikers. Perception management. Playing one hand against the other.

Brightman was sweating and breathing hard by that point. He just shook his head. “Slaughter…please listen to me,” he said, trying it once again. “This woman is ill. She is delirious. She’s talking fantasy. Please! Use your head.”

Slaughter went over to Isley and cut her loose. “You’re coming with me.”

“I can’t. I’m infected. But…if you help me,” she said, tottering uneasily. “I think I can help you.”

He led her from the room and behind him Brightman was screaming hysterically: “SLAUGHTER! GODDAMMIT, SLAUGHTER! YOU LET ME OUT OF HERE! YOU CUT ME LOOSE! DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU GODDAMN FUCKING NO GOOD SHIT-EATING FUCKING BIKER TRASH! YOU CUT ME LOOSE!”

Slaughter led her down the corridor using his flashlight. He called out for Apache Dan but there was no reply. A sense of dread began to move through him. They came to a door with a digital lock. Isley punched a code and it opened to a plush office with leather chairs and an antique desk, impressionist paintings on the walls, and a wet bar. Very nice. Very cozy.

“This was Colonel Krigg’s office,” she said. “He’s dead. He was one of the first that the reanimates fed upon.”

“Okay. How can you help me?”

She fell into a chair, seemingly barely conscious by that point. She told him there was something behind the paneling. He gripped its edges and it swung out. A safe. A big floor safe.

“Open it,” she said, telling him the combination.

He did as she asked and the only thing in the safe was what looked to be an aluminum box with a keypad and a digital display. He hefted it out, discovering that it weighed easily eighty pounds or more. He slid it across the floor.

“What is it?”

She blinked her eyes. “It is a sub-kiloton weapon.”

“What?”

“A tactical nuclear device.”

Slaughter stepped away from it, keeping his light on it. “A fucking suitcase nuke?”

“Yes. Colonel Krigg planned on activating it if the Army came for him. He wanted to go out in a big way. He stole it in the early days of the Outbreak. Now you will activate it. You’ll have enough time to escape.”

“And you?”

“There’s no point in me escaping, now is there?”

She was right and he knew it. But a nuke. A fucking nuke. Why not, man? Why the hell not? This fucking fortress and what it contains is a blight on the landscape, a fucking cancer. You want to erase it and the wormboys who call it home, then this is the way. Good-bye Cannibal Corpse Nation. Do it for Red Eye. Do it for the shit you’ve been put through. Do it for the lies you’ve been fed and the corrupt puppet masters that have been pulling your strings and have cost the lives of your brothers.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

She told him a code and he punched it in. A digital display beeped and read: ARMED AND READY. She gave him another twenty digit code and he punched it in. A shrill alarm sounded and a plastic catch popped open on the display. There was a green button behind it.

“Arm it,” she said. “You’ll have sixty minutes. That’s it. One hour to move your people out of here.”

Sweat running down his face, Slaughter pressed the button.

The alarm shrilled again.

The display read: 59:58.

“You’d better go, Mr. Slaughter.”

Slaughter grabbed his shotgun and Gurkha knife. His palms were so sweaty he could barely hold onto them. He put the light on Katherine Isley but she was gone…no, not dead, but worse: she was moving, twisting, her mouth peeling open in something almost like a blood snarl. And her face…bulging, contorting, rippling with motion just beneath the skin. As he watched, the worms started coming out of her. From her mouth, her nose, even her eyes. Not maggots because this woman was surely not dead and decomposing. These were the red worms. The resurrection worms and she was alive with them. They started tunneling out of her face, pushing out, scarlet and slicked with fluids.

Just like the girl on that video from the compound in Wisconsin.

But Isley was living and that meant breeders were not always corpses, but living human beings.

Not that this jewel of wisdom mattered one bit, for the digital display on the nuke read: 58:43.

And counting…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Shotgun in one hand and Kukri in the other, Slaughter raced down the corridor shouting out for Apache Dan because time had never, ever in his life been so unbelievably goddamn dear. But the corridor was long and there were so damn many rooms and offices and as he ran along he could see that digital readout in the back of his head counting down to doomsday and hear that alarm shrilling in his ears.

Jesus. There just wasn’t time.

They had to get gone.

“APACHE!” he cried out at the very top of his lungs. “APACHE! MOTHERFUCKER, WE GOT TO MOVE! WE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE!”

But the very quality of his voice as it echoed down that lonesome corridor told him that Apache Dan would never answer. Dread deepened in him. Where before it felt like a surgical cut at the base of his belly, now it was yawning wide and becoming a deep and hurting wound that could have swallowed him alive in a coveting and formless blackness of despair. Apache Dan and he went way back, way, way back and it was these memories that assailed him, weakened him, slowing his running feet to a clumsy thudding of motorcycle boots on dusty hardwood flooring.

He called out the name of his brother again, but without any true force behind it. It was like there was no breath in his lungs: “Apache? Apache?”

He stumbled on down the corridor, unsure then if he’d been moving down it for a minute or an hour or a minute that had been squeezed into an hour. His mouth was dry, his skin sweaty and cool. His hair was damp and his limbs felt rubbery. He remembered at that precise moment that he had not felt like this since he was a kid and had to cross the lavender-curtained parlor of the funeral home to look down at his mother lying in that long polished box.