Tim Curran: Cannibal Corpse, M/C

He could feel Coffin waiting for him.

More so, he could feel what hid behind Coffin: an entity in a black hat who described his kingdom in bones and ashes and wrote his name in a blood mist upon the marrow of the sky again and again like a silly, bored, and sadistic child obsessed by its own identity:

The name rang out in his head and he feared its echo, its discord, its resonance. But as he feared it he knew that ultimately in some small and possibly insignificant way that it feared him, too. Had it not once called him a favored son? Maybe that was in the whirlpool apparitional phantasmagoria of a peyote dream, but he still felt that it had weight. Black Hat had shown him a future that was an atomic Armageddon wasteland of skeletons and blowing dust and cities that were graveyards. He claimed that was the end of the game, that Slaughter himself would have a hand in it and there was a certain truth in that as death ticked away downstairs, only it would not play out exactly as Leviathan had hoped, just as nothing from the beginning of this sordid little mess had played out the way Slaughter had expected it.

That was life and destiny and fate intertwined:

Mere puppets they, who come and go

At bidding of vast formless things

Yes, that was it, for even spoilers bleed and gods die and demons themselves are caught in the web of forever, the lathe of cosmic eternity and resolution and chaos.

As he moved up those steps, he felt Coffin and Black Hat and Nemesis and Leviathan, that destroyer of worlds. But he felt something more than that. It was thrumming through him. Nemesis. Leviathan. A discarnate death entity that had built its house bone by bone and corpse by corpse and skull by skull, a castle then, a cathedral of the dead and the damned where this abomination might walk in tomblike malignant grandeur, his monolithic eyes sweeping over the vast charnel empire he had built with the help of stupid men with brilliant minds who had handed him the trump card that he had longed for in the form of a weaponized biological death: the resurrection worms. He had called to them in their vanity and animal aggression from his den of bone-picked darkness and they had heeded the summons. The worms rained from heaven’s split flesh and the dead rose in tomb legions, cavorting and feasting and spreading the pall of death and giving unto him their burnt offerings which were the souls of the innocent which he craved and the worshipful adoration of graveyard faces which he ached for. His realm was no longer some interdimensional sucking black hole of mausoleum delight but an entire world, a world given unto him like a sacrificed firstborn, a world remade into death, an ossuary without border.

This is what Slaughter felt and knew and understood.

Leviathan was vain.

He had been for so long reviled. Hated.

Now he was worshipped by the risen.

Humanity was desecrated by its oldest enemy and somebody, somehow, somewhere, needed to put an end to Leviathan’s little evil playground.

So his favored son moved up the steps with killing and cessation in mind and nothing could stop him.

When Slaughter stepped out onto the rooftop and smelled the night air and felt the billowing heat of human corpse-candles burning high above him and dripping their clotted wax, he saw that he was in a nest of zombies. The rooftops of the NORAD fortress were roughly the size of a mall parking lot and the dead were crowded there, waiting for him. How to take in the living dead in ranks of rot and ruin, crumbling things and slime-oozing things and upright skeletons and yellow-eyed cadavers? He looked at the rows of his enemies, the members of Cannibal Corpse in their colors, in various states of dissolution. But amongst them, oh yes, Ratbags of the Red Hand—alive and uninfected, it seemed—that hadn’t gone on the spit. They all held rifles and every last one was trained on Slaughter as the mannequin dead ringed him in, trying to suffocate him with their boneyard stenches. He offered no resistance as those bloated white hands like clown gloves held him in place.

The crowds parted and here was Coffin and he did indeed wear a Black Hat that he removed and tipped towards his guest with sardonic courtly manner.

“Well, Johnny K. Slaughter,” he said and his voice was like a throat burnt by lye and scratched red by ground glass. “A long road it has been and a deserved end it is, my friend. Did you have a dance with Reptile and did you enjoy it?”

Slaughter didn’t struggle; he was held and that was acceptable for now. “I killed him. I blew his fucking head off and I stamped the worm that crawled out.”

“Well, that’s fine, Johnny. Just fine and peachy.”

“Just like I’m going to do to you, maggot.”

Slaughter stared at Coffin. The others did not exist. They were only part of him. This was Coffin. This was the piece of shit that had ordered the death of his brothers. This was Death. This was the slimy, crawling casket-worm that crept through the hair of corpses and adorned itself with tubes of gut and swam through rivers of poisoned blood and tunneling through shattered anatomies and dancing in the flayed skins of children, gnawing on organs and fondling the severed breasts of mothers and sisters and daughters uncounted.

Death laid bare.

Coffin was dressed in typical 1%er chic: black jeans and motorcycle boots. He wore a black leather vest with no shirt beneath. He was a bloated walking torso, a sun-swollen fish that was gutted then stitched back together…poorly. It looked like his arms and legs had been pulled off and then shoved back in their sockets. Everything was out-of-sync. He was bulging with corpse-gas and pockets of larva like there were innumerable hungry ghosts just beneath the skin trying to push their way out. His eyes were dead suns sinking into pockets of blood, his face was pocked and pitted and riven with tiny holes as if nails had been pounded into it, the flesh cold dead white, crosshatched by intensive suturing to hold it together. The lower lip was gone, the upper swollen thick as an engorged leech, the teeth stained pink. He was so pale he was luminously white, yet it looked like he had been peeled, his flesh regenerating itself not as a smooth cutaneous membrane but in ropy corded strands of gut.

He laughed at Slaughter, slow and deadly, brushing strands of coal-black hair from his distorted face. “Ha, ha. Don’t worry about that worm, Johnny. Always more where that came from, always more.” And as if offering proof, three or four of them slid from the holes in his face and dropped writhing to his boots. “Right now you’re thinking, if I can just shed these deadheads long enough to get at my shotgun or that .45 on my belt, I’ll blow this fucker’s head clean off. End of story. Only, see, Johnny, it won’t be the end of the story but the beginning of a new chapter and you ain’t gonna like the story it tells.”

Slaughter just stared and waited. It was coming. What he was waiting for, oh yes, it was most surely coming.

“Too bad about your Disciples, Johnny. You had some good boys. Apache Dan. He would have made a good Cannibal. Too bad he wasted his life with shiteaters and rat-suckers like the Disciples. I hear my boys took out Irish. Glad to know it. Fish is gone, Shanks is dead, and you know damn well that Moondog went out with a bang. Like I said, too bad.”