Cannibal Corpse, M/C

And as Slaughter looked at them—faces like seamed leather masks missing eyes and noses, lips shriveled back to reveal jutting teeth—he had to wonder, and not for the first time, if they went dormant like this because they needed to or if it was the worms that needed some down time. No matter. A few were face-down and they wore the colors of Cannibal Corpse.

“Shiteaters, alright,” Jumbo said.

“Do ‘em,” Slaughter said.

Under Moondog’s direction it was carried out calmly, efficiently, and slowly. They each chose a wormboy and put the barrels of their shotguns to the heads of the zombies. It was unbelievably simple and that’s why Slaughter knew it was going to go to shit, and right about the time the Disciples pulled their respective triggers and sent the deadheads back to hell, it hit the fan.

The door behind the bar flew open and at least ten wormboys came charging out. And what a sight they were. Their faces were raging liquiform epidemics of leprous rot…mucid, dripping, fluids oozing from ulcerous sores. Eyes like rotten eggs spilling tears of slime, mouths filled with undulant worm follicles. They came shambling and stumbling, creeping forth to engulf the intruders.

Slaughter was expecting it.

When they came out, he brought up his 12-gauge pump and took out the first Cannibal Corpse with close-range scattershot that blew the zombie’s head apart into a kaleidoscopic eruption of pink, red, black, and gray ribbons that splashed against the others and sprayed the walls in a dripping meat Rorschach blot.

The other Cannibals went right over the top of the flopping husk and Slaughter didn’t have to tell his boys to wade in.

Moondog reacted first.

As one of the wormboys reached for him, he smashed the barrel of his shotgun into its head and kicked it swiftly in the sternum, knocking it aside and giving him the time to blow the face off another pitted skull and get a glancing shot into the advancing horde before three of them crested over him like a rogue wave and he went down fighting with them.

Slaughter ran at them firing and working the pump on his gun.

Apache Dan and Shanks both got off a couple rounds but a really big Cannibal—a real wagonload of crawling carrion—got hold of Irish and lifted him up like he was stuffed with pillow down and threw him at the wall ten feet away. And maybe threw is not nearly descriptive enough, because Irish was fucking launched like cannonshot, going right over the top of the bar and crashing into a Budweiser mirror and coming down in an explosion of glass as his descent upset about a dozen dusty bottles of hootch.

Jumbo, who was about the size of an Abrams tank, grabbed a downed and quite overanxious Cannibal Corpse with a face like a ball of suet by the ankles and proceeded to use him as a bat, swinging him from side to side and sweeping wormboys out of his path so he could get to Irish before the zombies could. When he cleared the way, he swung around again and again like a man throwing a discus and let fly his wormboy right through the window, taking out the neon Leinenkugel’s sign in the process.

Not wanting to fire buckshot with the Disciples so close at hand, Slaughter used the pistol grip of his weapon like a club, battering it into the face of a Cannibal until he went down, then ducking just in time as another deadhead swung a femur at his head. Slaughter moved in and hammered the zombie in the ribs with his left fist until he felt something give in there. Then he darted back, pulled the Kukri from its sheath and started slashing and hacking like a man felling sugarcane. He took off arms, a head, opened two bellies, then brought the blade down overhead, bisecting a Cannibal’s head from cranium to chin like a fork of white-hot lightning splitting a dead oak.

By then Moondog was on his feet and he and another Cannibal Corpse were facing each other, both sprayed with gore and decay, swinging, hitting and getting hit, and it was an old-style bare-fisted punch-up as they kept hammering each other. After they both took six or seven good shots each, Moondog jumped up and brought the cleats of his boot down on the wormboy’s knee and there was a wet snap clear as a pistol shot. The wormboy screamed out in rage and Moondog took him by his greasy hair and slid the blade of his black anodized K-Bar fighting knife under his ear and into his brainpan. The wormboy went over dead as a stump. It was an old Marine Raider quick-kill technique from World War II and it still did the job just fine.

While Moondog was so engaged and Jumbo fought viciously to keep the zombies from lunching on the downed Irish, and Shanks tangled with a pair of Cannibals, both Slaughter and Apache grabbed up shotguns from the floor and walked around, dropping the dead men until their guns were empty.

Then there was silence.

The air was thick with burnt cordite, gunsmoke, and the mist of rot that rose from the dead at the feet of the Disciples.