Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“No, she was a beauty, this one,” Fish was saying, “tall and blonde. A Swede. Naomi Ericksen was her name. Don’t that just give you a hard on? Naomi Erickson. Her old man had bucks. Shit, I could’ve had the easy life with her. Too good for a fucking road rat like me. But she thought I was exciting. I took her to a couple club events and I’m not sure if she was turned on by it all or sick to her stomach. Maybe both. Then I made a big mistake…”

Slaughter watched the road.

The fog was thick and stayed thick. The headlights of the Wagon bounced right off it, reflecting back at them, and Moondog kept the speed down to less than thirty miles an hour because there was no way in hell to know what was out there with visibility down under twenty feet. The trees were black and thick-boled, their limbs hanging out over the road like the tentacles of giant squid. They passed a long-abandoned service station and the mist turned the pumps into stalking, mechanistic things like the Daleks on Dr. Who.

“Looks like it’s getting thinner,” Apache Dan said.

Slaughter thought so, too.

“We’re coming up a hill,” Moondog said.

It was a low, gradual grade, but it kept moving upward and that was the good thing because Slaughter was all for getting out of that goddamn valley. But then the hill crested and they started down again. Just before the fog began to thicken like pale gelatin, the hi-beams of the Wagon swept over a lonely meadow at the side of the road and what they saw—just for that briefest of moments—was something unbelievable.

“Holy shit,” Apache said.

That summed it up. The meadow was lit by the moonlight and they saw great ramparts and heaps of white, shining things: bones. Not human bones, of course, but the bones of animals lying about in a great crazy ossuary architecture of rib slats and skulls and disarticulated skeletons. They only saw it for a moment before the night swallowed it and the fog came pushing in again, but it was burned into their brains.

“Buffalo, I bet,” Moondog said.

Slaughter nodded. “Could be.”

“Maybe they all starved,” Apache Dan put in, but the idea, of course, was ludicrous with all the heavy grasses growing wild to either side of the road.

“Maybe,” Slaughter said.

But he wasn’t buying it and he knew they weren’t either. It didn’t look like those animals had lain down and died, it looked like their bones had been dumped there in a litter pile.

“…well,” Fish went on in the back, “I made my biggest mistake when I turned Naomi onto crank. I mean, who am I kidding? I cooked the shit. I sold it. I made serious scratch off it. But one thing you don’t do is turn on anyone you care about to that shit. I never used. Well, Naomi found her drug of choice and she became a first class fucking methamphibian. Fucking crazy, wild, eyes glazed over, hair falling out, sores on her face…ah, she ended up in dry out and her old man threatened to kill me. So that’s how I fucked up my sweet thing. Man, before the Outbreak, I could have had the life, but you know what?”

“You’re fucking stupid?” Irish said.

“That’s it, man. That’s it.”

Fish started laughing then and nobody seemed to get it until he jumped and shook his ass in Jumbo’s face and started dancing around, humming the tune to “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz. Jumbo and Irish were laughing by then, too, and Shanks was just shaking his head as he often did with Fish. Since Fish had an audience, he danced around like the scarecrow from the movie, singing:

“I could while away the hours, smokin’ up them flowers,

If I only had a brain.

With Naomi I’d be busy copulatin’,

I could swear off masturbatin’,

If I only had a brain…”

They all burst out laughing at that, even Shanks who generally did not find anything humorous in life. They started really carrying on then but Slaughter wasn’t in the mood for that locker room shit so he told them to cool it.

“Hey, we’re just fucking around, John,” Jumbo said.

And Slaughter was going to tell them that now wasn’t the time and maybe they’d better get their shit together because they were playing for keeps here, but then he started seeing the vehicles. Moondog slowed the Wagon down. There were pick-up trucks, military Hummers, all of them smashed up like they’d been picked up by a giant and dropped. They were scattered over the road, in and out of the ditch. Slaughter thought he saw some skeletons in the cab of a pick-up truck, but he couldn’t be sure. As they passed a Hummer with an open top, moving around it slowly, he saw a camouflage fatigue shirt dark with blood stains draped over the driver’s side door—no body to go with it, just the shirt, and that made it somehow worse: like the owner had been sucked out of his clothes.

“Red Hand?” Apache said.

“Gotta be,” Moondog told him. “I wonder what happened?”