Cannibal Corpse, M/C

She gave him a wicked glare, still uppity and proud, a prayer book in one hand and a basket in the other. She raised the prayer book above her head, filled with righteous condemnation. “The Lord has prepared a burning place for thee!” she said, flies exiting her mouth. “And down onto the grass of thy host shall ye go! Amen, amen!”

Rice ignored her as one of the zombies came stumbling over in his direction, the one whose face wasn’t much more than black jelly. He tried to say something but all that came out was more of that black drainage. Slaughter shot him first in the belly and he opened up, viscera spilling down to his knees in unsightly tangles like his abdomen had just burst a seam. Slaughter shot him next in the head, killshot, vaporizing everything from the eyes on up in a fine meaty spray. He took two or three comical steps forward, then rolled into the ditch where he did not move again.

The other zombie came at them. He still had his gore-encrusted knife and he planned on using it. “Gonna cut off yer balls, son,” he said to Slaughter. “Then I’m gonna roast ‘em on a stick like marshmellers.”

“Like hell,” the biker told him.

He sighted and jerked the trigger on the .357 Combat Mag. It went off like a cannon, echoing through the fields and shaking birds out of trees. The effect of a 158 grain .357 slug at such close range was devastating: it cored the zombie right between the eyes and with such force and velocity that it split his head in two like a ripe muskmelon. He hit the road flopping.

“Hmmmph,” said Iris McClew, indignant as always, it would appear. She crouched down next to the murdered man. Taking a fine carving knife from her basket, she slit him open and began stuffing his entrails in her basket. While Slaughter and Rice watched, she slit out a nice flank of liver and shoved it in her mouth, gore dropping from her lips.

After she swallowed, she shook a bloody finger at Slaughter. “You have not the gumption to raise that firearm at me, sir! For your place is known and in it ye shall lay! A gentlemen would not brandish a weapon at a lady!”

“I ain’t no gentleman.”

She laughed with a bubbling, liquid sort of sound. “I know you! We all know you! You bear the mark! You have been named!”

“Hell, you going on about, Iris?” Rice asked her.

But she only laughed as if she knew something they did not and maybe she did at that.

Slaughter shot her dead and that was that.

“Too bad,” Rice said. “She was a real stick in life and she still had it going on in death. Too bad.”

Slaughter didn’t comment on that.

When they rose back up he stopped thinking about who or what they had been. Walking death was walking death. It was a pestilence and you eradicated it and that’s all there really was to it.

Regardless, what she had said haunted him. I know you! We all know you! You bear the mark! You have been named! What mark and named by whom? He didn’t like it. He tried to tell himself that Iris McClew’s brain had gone to rice pudding, but he could not make himself believe it. First the mysterious face on the video back at the compound (Black Hat, as Slaughter now referred to him) and now that shit Iris said. Why did he have the most terrible feeling that it was connected? That taken separately, each incident was a horror, but together they were prophetic?

The farm was just up the road. A barn thirsty for a coat of paint, an old silo, a broken down farmhouse. Typical of the countryside. This was the face the Midwest showed the world these days.

Slaughter got the old man inside and like he’d figured, Rice wanted him to stay for supper and spend the night, which was okay. Why not kick it for a night, work out the kinks? Besides, Rice seemed cool for a citizen and maybe he’d have some good war stories. The farmhouse was a real mess with tools spread around, green metal boxes of U.S. Army ordinance, racks of rifles, survival gear, you name it. It definitely lacked a woman’s touch. The windows were all boarded-up and gunports were cut into them.

Rice found his cane and hobbled around okay with it. “Why don’t you take care of your ride and I’ll get us something to eat,” he said.

So Slaughter did just that.

* * *

He parked his hardtail out in the barn, loving the sweet smell of all that dry hay in there. It reminded him of raw-dogging Dirty Mary out in the barn after some violent foreplay. But he didn’t want to think too much about any of that so he did some maintenance on the scoot and then went back inside.