Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Slaughter butted his cigarette. “All right, lay it on me.”

So Brightman did. Red Eye had been busted. The feds took him down on charges of treason, sedition, arms trafficking, and six counts of terrorism for plotting the military overthrow of Chicago with a fanatic known as The Puritan, who headed an ultra-right wing Christian fundamentalist militia known as the Legion of Terror. They were like the Seventh Day Adventists. With guns.

“Shit,” Slaughter sighed.

“Yes, shit indeed. He’s being held in a federal correctional institution.”

“And if I don’t play ball he stays there?”

“No, he gets the death penalty.”

Well, there you had it. Slaughter knew there had to be an agenda behind all the resources and manpower spent bringing him in and here it was. Not only an agenda, but one with serious incentives to back it up. There was no choice. Not really.

“He goes free if I do this?”

“He’ll do five years, maybe. But no more.”

“I suppose that’s something.”

Brightman leaned back in his chair. “From where you’re sitting, Slaughter, it’s everything. Your life. Your brother’s. You get Isley back and everything’s clean. If you don’t…scratch one brother.”

“What if this woman’s already dead?”

“Then bring us her corpse.”

“Shit.” Again, no choice. “So I have to go in there alone? One fucking man?”

“I wouldn’t even expect that of a murdering, raping animal like you, Slaughter,” Brightman explained. “I’ve put together a team for you. We’ve cleaned them out of prisons across the land just so you’ll have company.”

“A team?” Oh, this was going to be good.

Brightman thumbed a button on his intercom. Within seconds two soldiers with automatic weapons strolled in and behind them, chained together were some of the most vicious, degenerate criminal types that Slaughter had ever seen, and he knew each and every one of them. Brightman had secured the release of the remaining six members of the Devil’s Disciples. And here they were. All of them flying their colors, all of them grinning, and all of them looking for a good fight.

Slaughter figured they weren’t going to be disappointed.

He started laughing. “The shit is on, my brothers.”

* * *

The gang was all there: Irish, Moondog, Shanks, Apache Dan, Fish, and Jumbo. They’d been released from hardtime federal pens like Atlanta and Lewisburg, state hellholes like Rahway in New Jersey and SCI Greene in Pennsylvania. For the longest time—after he got Brightman out of his hair, that was—Slaughter just stood there staring at his brothers, blown away by it all, nearly beyond words. Seeing them, he was reminded of all the Disciples that had died during the Outbreak and in blood wars with other clubs.

Brightman let them have the conference room all to themselves and all the beer they wanted with the stipulation that they kept it and themselves in there and did not cause trouble elsewhere. So for the first hour or so as they put down the brew and exchanged war stories and tales of lock-up, they got caught up on things. In a lot of ways it was like Church, the monthly club meeting. They talked about Brothers like Cherry from the Pittsburgh chapter who’d thrown his bike on the I outside Altoona two months before the Outbreak. His funeral had turned into a drunken brawl. Slaughter learned that Charley Sweet from the Baltimore chapter had died in a shoot-out with the state police and two others—Creep and Toot—had died in a car crash while being pursued by ATF agents. Pegleg, who had first brought Slaughter into the club twenty odd years before, had died in Rahway from spiking some China White that had been more strychnine than heroin. The list went on and on.

There were so many gone that it became depressing.

If it hadn’t have been for incarceration, Slaughter knew, the six Disciples with him would probably be dead, too.

Yeah, give three cheers for life in-stir, he thought.

What there was in that room was all that was left of the Devil’s Disciples Nation: seven hard-living, hard-riding animals. This was his crew. At one time there’d been thirty guys in the Pittsburgh chapter alone and that, of course, didn’t take in the Baltimore, Harrisburg, Youngstown, and Bayonne chapters, or the newer chapters in the UK and Denmark.

Seven fucking guys including me.

That’s it. No more. Probably never will be any more, he thought then. And I have to lead them to their deaths so I can grab that Isley, the bio, so they don’t cook my fucked-up, whacked-out brother.