Tim Curran: Cannibal Corpse, M/C

And he was not feeling that way again for no reason.

There was an open door at the end of the corridor and he knew very well what would be in that room. God, how he knew it. Go ahead, Johnny. Go take a look at death and know the pain it inspires and the bleak finality it lays upon the soul like an iron door clanging shut that will never, ever be opened again.

Enough. He would not be ruled by fear and regret and channeled guilt.

He looked in the room.

Apache Dan’s corpse was flopped in a pool of ever-spreading blood that was so darkly red it was nearly black. He sucked in a sharp breath. It was as he had expected, except for the fact that his brother’s head was missing and that was the final indignity of his mortification and degradation.

A frozen terror spread out inside him, chilling all it touched, and he felt like an ice sculpture waiting to melt. His life had not been a good one when you put it under the microscope and dissected it layer by layer. There was suffering and pain. There had been hunger and squalor as a child and petty crime as a teenager followed by violence and murder, drug dealing and misery as an adult, years of incarceration in brutal hardtime joints. And all he’d ever really had through the sad roll of those latter years was his brothers, his patched brothers, the Devil’s Disciples. They were his equilibrium, his support system, his sanity. The cool water in his throat and the hot food in his belly. The hands to clasp and the shoulders to bear his weight.

Gone now.

All gone.

Because he knew, God how he knew, that Moondog was gone, too. It had been that crazy death-happy bastard’s plan from the beginning to ride the War Wagon into his own personal blood-drenched biker heaven of Valhalla. He was gone. Apache Dan was gone. Shanks, Irish, Fish, and probably Jumbo, too.

“I’m sorry, my brother,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

He turned back into the heavy silence of the corridor and breathed deep its air, which was stale and dusty, almost gritty in his throat. Okay. Okay. Time to go, But then—

Thud, thud, thump-thump-thump.

What the fuck?

He stepped around the final bend of the corridor, playing his light around. He saw a set of steps and then something came thudding down them: Apache’s head. Sure, over-the-top, high melodrama and Grand Guignol, but wasn’t it almost to be expected? The head hit the landing and rolled to a stop and other than seeing its whipping blue-black locks, Slaughter did not look at it; there was no point.

He stepped closer to the landing.

He sucked in great whooping gasps of stale air which carried a sickly-sweet after-odor of putrefaction to it. It was getting so the smell of death was the rule rather than the exception.

A peal of chilling laughter drifted down from the landing high above.

The sound of it was telling, for it was the sort of laughter that would echo through subterranean depths and from the dripping hollows of midnight tombs. He went rigid, absolutely rigid, as he brought the beam of the flashlight up to reveal the crooked form that waited at the top of those crooked stairs.

The laughter again.

And in Slaughter, the mourning and grief and self-recrimination of this entire haphazard, perfectly fucked-up affair was shelved, and he felt hatred to his marrow and the need for payback to his core. He didn’t know who or what was up there but he was going after them, he was going to gut them, he was going to stuff them, he was going to mount their gamey ass on a fucking wall, so help him God. So as he charged up those stairs and that crooked shape retreated, he felt like he was put together out of heat and electricity; voltage looking for something to fry. In essence, about 110% pure undiluted death.

At the top, he saw the crooked figure, its back to him. He had the light on it and he saw the three-piece patch very clearly: the fanged skull in its pool of red, that single bloodshot eye staring out at him. The upper rocker: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And the lower: KANSAS CITY.

His blood ran hot.

The figure turned.

Death and resurrection hadn’t been exactly kind to Reptile. He had been a big, strapping fellow bulging with muscle and attitude, death kept at a low simmer in his black eyes…but now he was shrunken, leathery like brown hide, his face looking a little too much like the logo on the back of his denim vest: a skull covered in papery flesh like poorly dried papier mache, a living deathshead aswarm with red beetles that chewed and tunneled and devoured the thin scraps of face-meat that were left. His eyes were dun pockets of pestilence lidded by gray flaps, his bare chest crudely stitched like a stuffed Sunday chicken.

The beetles had been busy, as had the worms, for in the end the worm conquered all…even this walking heap of grave matter. White bones extruded from his chest, black bloodgrease bubbling from open wounds. His mouth was a blackened corpse-grin that extended ear to ear in a ghoulish smirk. Dead insects dropped from his tongue as he spoke: “Well, lookee here, it’s Johnny Slaughter, prez of the mother chapter of the Devil’s Disciples. Another one for my collection.” He laughed, coughing out a dustball sputum of carapaces. “I think it’s just you and me, Johnny. Now that old Apache Daniel went to meet his maker. But don’t let that eat your guts, prez, because I did it quietly, just like I did the other Disciples. Apache never knew he was dead until his head bounced over the floor.”

Slaughter, feeling a mixture of repulsion, pity, and razor-edged hatred, flipped the Kukri in his fist, sheathing it expertly like a gunslinger slipping his Navy Colt into its scabbard. He racked the pump on the Mossberg.

“Man you came to meet is up above, but you’ll never get there, Johnny,” Reptile said, seething with a blackness that was death fermented in its own vile juices and maybe even something beyond death. “I think you’re gonna scream, Disciple. I think you’re gonna scream real loud when I eat your soul.”

Slaughter brought the shotgun up. “Then quit jawing, Reptile, and slither on over here.”

Reptile made a sound that he probably thought was laughter but sounded more like a scream echoing up an elevator shaft. And then he moved. He was in rough condition and Slaughter did not expect much and that’s why he was shocked: because Reptile did not shamble towards him with a slow and drunken zombie crawl, he exploded, he filled the air like chain lightning and blooming black smoke, flesh and motion and Jack-in-the-Box surprise, a raging carrion gelatin smear in the air that got within about six inches of the shotgun barrel before Slaughter squeezed the trigger and his head was atomized into a spray of pink-black mucilage that sprayed against the wall with the tinkling of pellets.

The head was gone.

The forward momentum of the body struck Slaughter and flattened him, knocked the wind from him, but he gathered himself quickly enough and kicked himself free of the carrion.

He wondered how much time was left before the nuke pissed death to the four winds.

He decided he didn’t really care.

Because up above, that’s where Coffin was waiting and he had a pretty good idea by then that he would wear a black hat.

Now it comes to a close.

Now the beginning seeks its end.

Now the circle closes and in closing, nooses itself tight.

It didn’t take Slaughter long to find the stairs that could only lead to the roof and he took them slowly, calmly, the threat of thermonuclear annihilation like some fairy tale he’d heard long ago and never really believed. In his mind were feelings and sensations that went far beyond the mere five and into another realm, an undiscovered country that was part terror, part revelation, and pure fission.