Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Slaughter crouched there, smoking, thinking of eighth grade American Lit. They all had to memorize a poem and old fat ass Mrs. Buntz gave him Poe’s The Conqueror Worm. Crazy shit, but he could still remember it, still hear those words running through his head:

But see, amid the mimic rout

A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out

The scenic solitude!

It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs

The mimes become its food,

And seraphs sob at vermin fangs

In human gore imbued.

“Yeah,” he said, blowing smoke out through his nostrils. “Dig it.”

It was still fresh in his mind and never had those words made sense like they did now. The point of the poem was about human mortality, he knew, about people carrying on like death was not a solid, grim inevitability when in fact its shadow was cast over every living thing from the point of birth. For in the end the worm conquers all.

“The play is a tragedy and it’s called ‘Man’,” he paraphrased. “And its hero is the conqueror worm.” He stood up. “But you won’t conquer shit today, my friend.” He stomped the worm to paste, looking down that lonely stretch of highway snaking away through the green Wisconsin hills towards Minnesota. Somewhere out there was the great Mississippi and on the other side, the Deadlands. Like the name implied, the Deadlands was a great wild wasteland of roving gangs, scavengers, nomads and mutants, and the walking dead that stretched clear to the Pacific Ocean. The cities out there were cemeteries and the towns were tombs. Some of that was from the Outbreak itself and some of it was from the ten megaton nukes used to contain it. Deadly clouds of fallout and radioactive dust storms were still blowing around out there, people said. Back east, things were secure. After the Outbreak—the worm infestation that brought the dead up out of their graves—and the wars that followed, the military had reorganized and launched one cleanup op after another until nearly all the zombies were exterminated. You got west of Pennsylvania, then it was the Wild West all over again. The frontier. The politicians kept saying that the army would continue the cleanup, pushing ever westward, but as things stood, the army had enough problems securing the east.

Which was just fine with Slaughter.

He was out in Wisconsin now because it was lawless. Out here, the dead walked, psychos and paramilitary whackos would kill you for your guns, your women, or a can of fucking pork-n-beans. But that was okay. As a blood member of the Devil’s Disciples and a veteran of countless biker wars, he understood killing and attrition and the politics of survival just fine. Out here, Darwinism was law and he fit right in.

Besides, he was wanted on three counts of capital murder back east and was currently the only member of the Devil’s Disciples living fancy free. The others were either dead or in prison.

He finished his cigarette and flicked it in the ditch, longing for the good old days when you patched with a good club, pushed some blow and crank, took to the road on your steel horse with your brothers, and your enemy stayed down dead when you shot him.

Those were the days.

Rumbling with the Pagans in Maryland and the Outlaws in Chicago, blood wars with the Angels and Mongols in California, nothing but pussy and booze and blood.

Lots of turf battles. Ugly affairs to be sure, but at least they were men fighting against men. Ever since the worm rains, it wasn’t the same for the 1%ers. Pickings were thin, the old boys were all dead, and there were things walking that should have moldered in graves long ago.

Kicking the wormboy’s body a few times, Slaughter scavenged the corpse, taking the SS dagger from the torso. It was deadly sharp. He used it to slit the wormboy’s colors from the back of the filthy leather vest. He held them up into the sun. A white jawless skull, fanged, set in a field of red, one socket empty the other with a staring bloodshot eye. The upper rocker read: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And beneath the skull, the lower said: KANSAS CITY.

He stuffed them in his road bag.