Cannibal Corpse, M/C

And, yes, of course, then he knew. He saw himself in New Castle after those shit-eating cops had gunned down Neb and he himself had returned the favor with the MAC-10. Word had reached him that Neb’s old lady, Indiana, had dimed them, turned evidence on them to the police to avoid another drug-related conviction. For days Slaughter had hunted her, the only thing keeping him going was the all-pervading, all-filling, all-nourishing hatred and need for revenge. He tracked her like a stalking cat. He followed her to a bar. Sometime after midnight she came out with some drunken scooter tramp and Slaughter slipped out of the shadows.

The tramp said, “Wha—”

Slaughter punched him in the face and kneed him in the groin. When he went down in the gravel lot, Slaughter kicked him in the ribs and booted him in the head until his eyes rolled back white.

Then it was just him and Indiana.

Why she hadn’t run he didn’t know.

She waited there. In fact, she went down on her knees and begged him for mercy, that it wasn’t her or if it was then the cops had forced her to do it.

Slaughter took her by the hair and yanked her to her feet. His face inches from her own, he said, quite calmly, “You fucking skank. You fucking whore. You fucking grubbing dirty little cunt. Neb. They killed fucking Neb and you’re the rotten fucking cunt who put them onto him.”

She was crying and shaking, but all her little girl tears were wasted on Slaughter’s stony demeanor.

“Oh please, oh God…John, please, John, don’t kill me,” she whimpered. “Oh please, John, please please please…”

“Here’s your please,” he told her, the knife in his hand. “Here it is for you, you fucking cunt.”

He sank the blade to the hilt into her belly and she gasped at the violation of cold steel. Then, still holding her head by the hair so that her face was but inches from his own, he pulled the knife right up to her sternum, gutting the hog and dropping her, leaving her to die in her own pooling blood and bowels.

That’s what he had done to her, that fucking rat.

Indiana.

Indiana…

So now he knew. Indiana. Goddamn Indiana.

“You,” he said.

Her mask was stripped away and dispensed with now and he looked at her fissured corpse-face that was like the root of a dead tree. The boys before her stood—lambs to slaughter, offerings of meat—and she flayed them with her black thorny nails. Like scalpels, they sheared the skins of the boys free and then gutted them in turn, eviscerating them as Slaughter had once done to her. Before they dropped at her feet, those nimble white fingers pulled an offering from each of them: their still beating hearts. Then, each in turn, her lacquered black fangs bit into them, mouth spilling candy-red sauce, biting and ripping at them, engorging the pink-muscled masses nearly whole.

Sacrifice had been taken.