Cannibal Corpse, M/C

It must have been a tanker truck filled with gasoline or a storage tank of natural gas, he figured, because it ignited like napalm, creating a wild, raging firestorm that swept through the town, scattering red-hot ashes into the dry wind.

Moondog had the War Wagon up to about forty miles-per-hour then as it reached the outskirts of the town. Every time the wipers cleared the worm goo away, they could all see just what sort of inferno they were driving into, the zombies backlit now by the spreading fires in the gray afternoon dimness.

Then they hit the zombies.

The worms were bad enough, but the zombies were worse.

The cow-catcher did the real work and the wormboys and wormgirls out there literally exploded as it breached their lines like a hot knife. The zombies went up like blood-blown bags of meat, gore and guts raining up and over the Wagon, a few stray limbs bouncing across the hood. The bus shook with each jarring impact. THUD, THUD, THUD, THUD-THUD-THUD! Moondog could barely see where he was driving and the Wagon shook and reeled as it smashed zombies aside and split them in two, rolling right over them, knocking aside wrecked cars and trucks and slicing deep into the bowels of Copton which was a furnace by that point, a great smoldering kiln, and the air inside the bus became thin, rarified, dry and hard to breathe.

But the zombies were still coming.

That was the amazing thing, the disturbing thing: they just kept coming and coming in waves, crowding the streets and pressing closer and closer until the bus crashed into them and their anatomies splashed over the pavement and drenched the others.

As Copton continued to burn, great bonfires swept up by the dry winds became a living fire demon, a sentient conflagration of pure elemental, oxidizing wrath and the zombies went up like tinder and blazed like sulfur. They were melting corpse candles and hot smoldering fuses and Guy Fawkes dummies glowing with tongues of flame, chestnuts popping in firepits. They did not run or try to flee. They were engulfed and still they shrieked with scalded voices for the flesh of the invaders as the fire withered them and scattered them like crematory ashes in a whirling, scorching wind.

Sweat beading his face, his throat scratchy and dry, Slaughter held onto the dashboard as Moondog held onto the wheel and pushed them down narrow streets and arteries clogged with debris and blackened stick-forms.

In was a yellow-orange jungle out there and its trees and vines and creepers were made of fire. Copton was overgrown by the combustion, flooded, drowning in searing brimstone growths, black smoke rolling through the streets and sparks sweeping down byways. The houses and buildings were red glowing bricks. And the zombies…fire ghosts, feral red things reaching out with gnarled fingers, breathing embers, and flaking away like coals in the sizzling, crackling purgatory, the steam and smoke boiler of the holocaust.

“Hey! Did you fucking see that?” Moondog asked.

Slaughter looked at him.

Moondog just shook his head. “I’m losing it. I saw…I thought I saw…”

“What?”

“I don’t know…a guy standing there in the flames. Just standing there, only he wasn’t burning. Weird. Like an old-time preacher,” Moondog said. “Long black coat…and a black hat.”

Slaughter sat down because his knees felt weak. Well, then, now somebody besides himself had seen Black Hat. He tried to convince himself that it wasn’t so, but he didn’t believe it for a moment.

Maybe what you need to do is quit trying to rationalize shit. Quit trying to make sense of things. Take ‘em as they come.

Which was fine and dandy, only it didn’t explain a thing and he badly needed some explanations. Black Hat was occupying a zone of darkness in his head that was widening its perimeters by the hour and Slaughter was beginning to worry that he’d fall in and never find his way out again. There was both rhyme and reason to all this, only it was beyond his limited faculties of comprehension to understand. But it was big. It was important. Black Hat was prophecy and fate, doom and destiny, twisted divination and mad-dog Karmic retribution all rolled into one and Slaughter felt that right into his marrow.

That Black Hat was evil was absolute.

That they would meet was inevitable.

And that they would clash was predestined.

This was all Slaughter really knew for sure. Some dark night on some dark lick of pavement, we’re going to come together. And before the pain and the dying and the bloodshed, there just might be a few answers.