Cannibal Corpse, M/C

All the Disciples wanted to go to them but they had other concerns right then: a group of Cannibals were feeding on the remains of a woman. Such was their gluttony and the need to fill those empty spaces below that they paid no attention whatsoever that their hated rivals had appeared.

Jumbo made to open up on them but Slaughter held up his hand.

Not yet.

This was too easy.

The wormboys were wearing their colors, which by that point were saturated with corpse goo and cemetery slime, stained by dozens of ghoulish feasts, feathered with rot and mildew. One of the Cannibals, gore dripping from his cankerous mouth, looked over at the Disciples, watching them with fish-white eyes as he chewed ravenously.

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.