Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“MOTHERFUCKER!” Slaughter shouted and then a strength that was pure hate and pure adrenalin rippled through him like high voltage and he fought through the remains, finding his knees, then his feet, kicking and hacking, and going after the zombie that had put Shanks down.

Not a gang fight anymore.

Not just bloodsport.

Now it was personal.

He knocked a wormboy aside and the one with the hatchet whose face was mottled blue and black came to meet him. He swung the hatchet forehand and backhand, the strokes powerful and devastating. Slaughter barely got out of the way. But as he did, he swung the Gurkha knife and sliced nearly a pound of meat from the wormboy’s left forearm.

Being a zombie, the wound didn’t bother the Cannibal Corpse much. It was more of a surprise and a minor inconvenience than anything else.

He looked at his arm.

Then he looked at Slaughter.

He grinned and black bile poured from his mouth in a bubbly foam. He swung the hatchet. Slaughter swung the Kukri. The blades met in midair, clanging and throwing sparks. The impact stopped both man and zombie, made them stagger back a bit and reassess the prowess of their adversaries.

But if the wormboy Cannibal Corpse was hesitant to engage again, Slaughter was not. For in his mind he saw this walking carrion taking down Shanks, a brother Disciple, and that’s all it took. Letting out a war cry, he went right at the wormboy, slashing and cutting with a ferocity that made the zombie stumble back, but not before Slaughter took his hand off at the wrist and his other arm at the elbow. Then the wormboy stumbled about almost comically and Slaughter went at him again, a voice in his head saying, it’s only a flesh wound, and then he split the zombie’s face open and was splattered with his gore.

The zombie went down, his attendant worm sliding out of his bisected skull.

Three more Cannibals came at Slaughter with chains.

He dove away from them and brought up his Mossberg, blowing the head off one and wiping the face off another. The third swung his chain and it connected with Slaughter’s left arm in a blazing white-hot explosion of pain that dropped him and he lost the shotgun.

Maybe it would have been over then but Apache Dan, smeared with gore and crying out in the voices of his Shawnee ancestors, came bounding in and sank one of the Cannibal’s own bloodied hatchets into the head of the zombie, dropping him. Apache didn’t stop until that head was so much hamburger spread over the floor.

And that’s when the others scattered.

Slaughter pulled himself up, grabbing his Mossberg and his Gurkha knife.

Only three of the ten were left but they were moving off deeper into the cave as if summoned.

Shanks was dead, Jumbo and Apache Dan and Fish were badly battered but alive.

In the rear of the cave, more torches were lit, more human candles, and Slaughter knew without a doubt they hadn’t been lit by accident. It was an invitation. They wanted him and the other Disciples to follow them and this is exactly what they did even though the prisoners against the walls cried out for them not to go any further.

Drawn to the flickering torches, smelling the greasy vile stench of roasting human flesh, Slaughter led the Disciples deeper into the cave and what waited there.

* * *

Maybe he should have known it was a mistake.

Maybe he should have known it was some kind of trap.

And maybe he should have practiced some restraint and common sense. But he was too amped up by that point, mainlining death and hate, his belly a boiling mass of need for retribution. He wanted to kill every last Cannibal Corpse he could find until the trail of mutilated cadavers led him to the ones he wanted most of all: Reptile and Coffin.

I’ll go to my grave, I’ll crawl through the foulest fucking tracts of hell to get them, he thought. To sort them out proper and see their heads hanging in the wind where I’ll anoint them with my piss.

The flickering human torches were not in the same chamber. An archway—artificial like everything else in there—led into a sister chamber that was much smaller than the first and if they thought it smelled bad where they were, the stink in here was absolutely toxic. It was like greening meat shoved up their noses and corpse-worms slicked freshly with the drainage of dead men twisting on their tongues. It was so raw and savage and unbelievably violent it nearly put them to their knees.

Apache Dan and Fish stood there, trembling.

It was only Slaughter that stepped forward. This chamber was the real flesh farm, the other was more of a stockyard. This was where the stunning and cutting and rendering came down, this was the abattoir where human meat was processed. This was the corpse factory.