Cannibal Corpse, M/C

There was no more shooting.

The guy with the .30-30 jumped in one of the trucks and drove like hell, spitting gravel and making his escape. Too bad. He was the one that had popped Dirty Mary. Slaughter wanted him.

Stepping out into the sunshine, he grabbed the dead kid’s ruck and made his way back to his hog. The shadows were growing long and he decided to grab a crib for the night down the road.

Then tomorrow…tomorrow he was heading west into the Valley of the Dead because that voice was getting real strong now.

Chapter Five

He found a rusty mobile home sheltered in the trees about six miles away and, after making sure it was secure against whatever might come, he rolled out his sleeping bag and fell asleep listening to mice chewing on the upholstery. It was a quiet night other than the mice and a lone coyote howling out in the woods. He had bad dreams and he was glad when he opened his eyes and it was light out.

He lay there, smoking, watching dust motes twist in the beams of sunlight and smelling the dank stink of the trailer.

Most days started out the same for Slaughter…dismal and desperate.

He’d wake up with a hint of hope that would turn to sheer anxiety by noon, complete despair by suppertime, and out and out misery by sundown. That’s the way it had been for months now. He’d grit his teeth and close his eyes like somebody on a roller coaster and just wait for it to be over, his head filled with the glory of the old days and wild ways. Most of the time he couldn’t feel a thing. Not happiness or sadness or anything in between. He’d just be numb as frostbite, stiff and wooden, going through the motions, like a corpse that had gotten tired of waiting for the funeral and decided to take a walk. One of these days, he supposed, he’d lay back down again for good.

These past weeks it had been getting progressively worse. Cooped up on the farm with Dirty Mary. Not moving. Not riding. Not doing anything but feeling that almost magnetic pull of the west and the Deadlands. Something out there was calling his name and it wanted him real bad.

It had gotten so that every day was a battle not to give in to it.

But he knew he couldn’t leave until Dirty Mary hooked up with somebody else. There was no way in hell he was taking her out there. Now…that had changed.

No strings.

No responsibilities.

When Slaughter met Dirty Mary he knew she was trouble just like she knew he was trouble. But neither of them had cared because at the time there’d been a mutual need. They were both lonely and scarred-up following the Outbreak. They’d lost everything like most survivors had, and their lives had turned turtle. Slaughter knew she was one mean mama, but hell…you give a starving man a bone with a little meat on it and he enjoys every bite and every nibble. He feels like a rich man for awhile. And that’s how he felt. Like something inside him was actually alive. Like there was hope for a happy ending after all. His intuition, of course, told him to run as fast and far away from her as he could, but he didn’t listen. What his soul knew and what his heart said were two different things.

Now she was dead and that was a real shitter.

Slaughter would have buried her proper, but he figured the Red Hand would be coming back in force to sort his ass out and, truth be told, things like funerals and send-offs just didn’t seem to matter much anymore. The dead were the dead and they had it better than the living (the ones that didn’t move, that was) so you left them to it.

He had some Spam and canned beef stew for breakfast and then went out to his scoot and packed his saddlebags properly for a long run.

It was time to head into the Deadlands.

* * *

About ten miles down the road, he found a little town called Freemont and siphoned gas from a pickup to fill his tank. He filled another five gallon can and strapped it to the back of his hog figuring it might be awhile in between fill-ups. Then he toured the town almost casually, looking for signs of wormboys or militias and seeing not a thing except for something weird in the river that cut through the town: some black, shiny, snake-like thing that darted out of the ebon water and took hold of a gull and pulled it under.

He didn’t wait to see what it was because there were nameless things the farther you pushed west.

The rest of the town was just a graveyard. Empty houses, cars rusting at curbs, trees down in the middle of the streets, some bones scattered in yards but not much else. He didn’t see so much as a scavenging dog or a single rat. Either Freemont had been devastated by the Outbreak or its citizens pulled up stakes and retreated to the east. Probably both.

As he approached the outer boundaries of the town he came upon block after block of burnt, razed houses. The streets were torn apart by bomb craters. There were literally dozens of skeletons in the rubble or wound up in yellow grasses in vacant lots.

Apparently there had been some kind of battle fought there.