Cannibal Corpse, M/C

And a voice in his head, that of Black Hat said, Good work, biker boy. Well-played and well-met. Long have I been earthbound in this ragged hide and now you’ve set me free. Blessed be the name of John Slaughter who birthed death unto the world of men. Blessed be my favorite son and beloved puppet. Now, now comes the time of re-birth. Now comes the moment of regeneration—

And what followed was something Slaughter never expected.

There was a sudden rising of heat like a blast from a seething coke oven and the surviving members of the Red Hand cried out as a searing spontaneous combustion rose up and Slaughter went to his knees thinking the nuke had just been triggered. But it wasn’t that, it was something else. All the zombies began to burn…no, melt. Like plastic army men some kid had decided to torch, they superheated and ran like hot fat, liquefying into a violent, slopping sea of putrescence that rolled across the rooftop, scattering Ratbags into the soup. It was like the spilled cauldron of a witch: a rising flesh and blood and offal stew bobbing with bones.

And then a wind blew clean the gaseous stink of fetid decay and rotten meat and bile and blood and shit. Slaughter slipped in the greasy sea of zombie sludge and got to one knee and saw something like wriggling ectoplasmic threads rise up from the organic sluicing profusion and form an immense and jellied clot of coiling, bubbling motion that bobbed over the rooftop like a hot air balloon. But it was no balloon; it was an obscene fleshy entity that was fetal and gelatinous. An embryonic rushing storm of plasmic life seeding itself, filling and rupturing and fattening and throwing out unformed limbs and feelers and licking black tongues before giving birth to an immense and fragmenting ghost-face which was the face of the hag, the death-hag of Slaughter’s dreams: that fissured graveyard countenance of white corpse-pulp whose hair was fluttering red corpse worms and whose eyes were glistening ruby crystals. Her mouth peeled open and a hot cremating wind blew forth with a freight train roar.

This was the Queen of the Dead.

The bloated white leech that fed upon death and decay.

The thing that hid in the saprogenic depths of Coffin, the true and discarnate evil that was Nemesis and Leviathan and thousands of other nameless and unnamable haunters of the dark to a thousand disparate cultures. Yes, this was the wind demon Pazuzu, the bringer of hot winds of pestilence; it was Uggae, the ten-headed Babylonian personification of rage and graveyards and murder; it was Hebrew Lilith strangling infants in their cribs and feeding upon their pink souls; it was Choronzon, the black fire of hatred, the udders of the cat of slime, the terror of the darkness that crawls upon the sands of Hell; it was Greek Eurynomis, the corpse-eater, flashing its carrion grin and spreading night-black vulture’s wings, its body swollen blue and black like that of corpse-fly. Yes, Canaanite Baalberith and Leviathan, the gatekeeper, the Hell-mouth.

Slaughter was impotent before her.

All men were.

Her mouth continued to open until it was a black storm mouth, a vortex of howling wind, and that face was no longer a face but a tornadic eruption of resurrection worms that fell over the rooftop in a hail of undulant squirming that overflowed the zombie sea and became not inches deep, but feet.

Slaughter knew it was coming because he had seen something similar in his dream.

So by the time the worm-mouth vomited its larva over the world, he was already crawling through the sea of putrefaction and to the door that led below. He barely made it. Even as the surviving Ratbags cried out as the worms tunneled into them by the hundreds and thousands, he pulled them out of his hair and off his vest and out of his beard, smashing them on the stone steps.

And then he was running.

* * *

The thermonuclear funeral couldn’t have been much more than minutes away, if not seconds. He made his way down the stairs and ran down the long corridor, making for the passage that would lead him to the second floor. As a voice in his head told him he would never make it, he found the stairs and half-ran, half-stumbled down them. He saw no zombies. He saw no anything. Then he made the ground floor. It was filled with rolling black smoke and hot with the spreading fire. He had to go to the floor in a crab-crawl to get some breathable air.