Cannibal Corpse, M/C

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.”

Baiting him. That’s all this was. It could be nothing more. The death of Moondog came as no real surprise, of course. The only thing he didn’t know and would never know is if Moondog couldn’t get out of the War Wagon in time or if he just decided to ride it straight into hell. He favored the latter because that was exactly how Moondog would have wanted it to end.

“The thing I love about you, Johnny, is that you’re so fucking predictable,” Coffin said, uttering that horrible laugh, his long pale fingers lightly brushing the bulging pockets and sacs of his face, all of which seemed to be moving. His eyes were pink, juicy meat. “I wanted you here on the roof so I had Reptile do Apache, knowing that you’d have to come. You’d have to come to right the wrong against your club. Ha, ha. I love that about you, Johnny. That misplaced, convoluted sense of honor. I knew you’d come here to this place and you did. I knew you’d bring meaty sacrifices of your own Disciples and goddamned if you didn’t.”

Slaughter kept breathing evenly and deeply.

He could not let Coffin scent what he was feeling, because there was terror, great shivering amounts of terror. He knew at that moment in the greater scheme of things that everything that had led up to this moment had been neither accidental nor coincidental; it was planned. All planned out. Probably from the moment he killed those two cops in New Castle. He had been baited every step of the way and he had taken the bait offered. Taken it? No, he had jumped for it, sinking his teeth into it, enjoying every bite. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Coffin had wanted not only him but offerings of the very things that meant the most to him: his brother Disciples.

That was the definition of true sacrifice: the offering of that which you loved best and by your own hand.

Slaughter thought of the dream.

That hag-face rising up and then that voice, that terrible, terrible voice speaking prophecy on the dead wind: We’re waiting for you, Disciple, for you have been named. We’re all waiting for you, she had said. Out here. Out in the west. Out in the Deadlands and cemeteries and the tombs of men, in narrow boxes and seeping charnel depths, we wait for you. Come unto us, Disciple. Bring us our burnt offerings and our racks of meat prepared by thine own hand—

Yes, it was there and it always had been.

The answers he sought were most simple: he was a puppet carefully manipulated and his brother Disciples were nothing but fucking offerings to this obscenity, to Coffin/Nemesis/Black Hat/Leviathan.

“I got a little present for you, Johnny.”

A group of Cannibal Corpse zombies dragged a man out. He was handcuffed, gagged, ankles tied together. They dumped him at Coffin’s feet. It was Jumbo. He was gagged, his eyes wild and pissed-off.

Slaughter tried to break free but he was held firmly.

“I want you to watch how Disciples die, Johnny,” Coffin said. “I want you to see your last boy flip patches.”

The zombies dragged Jumbo to his feet and he looked through the crowd at Slaughter and there was no hatred or recrimination in his eyes. There was only a look that signified friendship. We ride hard and we die hard, John. That’s why they call us the Devil’s Disciples. Slaughter felt something breaking open inside him. A blackness filled his guts and clouded his skull and it was the blinding blackness of sheer hate.