Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Some of that was the mummies and some of it was the spider-clusters bouncing along the roof, but much of it was individual members dropping onto the War Wagon like it was something to be fed upon, something to be webbed and sipped dry. They could hear them up there scuttling about, perhaps dozens of them, their legs making a skin-crawling ticka-ticka-ticka sound as they raced back and forth over the metal shell.

These are the babies, Slaughter found himself thinking, as afraid as he’d ever been in his life. These are the babies, but somewhere here, somewhere there’s a mother…

There were so many clusters of spiders by then that the Disciples began backing away into the rear of the Wagon. Slaughter and Apache Dan stayed up front with Moondog and, seeing no more wrecked vehicles, he eased the speed up to twenty and then thirty miles an hour and it became louder and louder with the clusters banging off the Wagon and the thumping of the hanging mummies. And then one of those clusters must have broken free of its anchor line and came swinging down at the windshield like a pendulum and the result was instantaneous: two or three of the spiders burst open upon impact with a gush of that brown-black slime and the worst part of it, the very worst part, was that everyone in the Wagon could hear the tinny, shrill, agonized screams of the things.

The windshield was a clotted, oozing mass of spider tissue and spider legs—some of which were still moving—that the wipers knocked from side to side until the spray cleaned the emulsion free.

And it was about this time that something came out of the mist and the webs at them. It was immense…something the size of a pick-up but swollen and shiny with spreading legs like telephone poles and a huge sucking black mouth fanning out with immense fangs. It dropped right on the Wagon and the entire thing shook and groaned, rocking on its springs.

Several of the Disciples cried out.

Slaughter was one of them.

He could see a pair of night-black legs, immense but tapering to surgical points tapping away on the hood…and above, that huge and fleshy thing was tearing at the roof with its fangs and the sound of that was like the blades of shovels scraping iron. The force of those teeth was unbelievable, pushing in dents, and then it did something else, it suckered its mouth to the roof and tried to drain the Wagon. The roof popped out, then in, out, then in, like the shell of an aluminum can in a fist.

“Pour it on, man!” Slaughter cried at Moondog, who stomped the accelerator, and the War Wagon rocketed forward, still sluggish with its rider. And then the spider clusters were thinning and the web was no longer a funnel but threads and wires and ropes, and it was then that the Wagon rocked again with a resounding thump and the thing was gone, jumping back into the mists and webs as the Wagon climbed a hill and broke free from the valley below.

The Disciples let forth a collective sight.

And Fish said, “I think…I think I just pissed my pants.”

Chapter Fourteen

About three hours later, they stopped for the night in a nice wide open field where there was not a lick of fog. The spiders were discussed and dispensed with. Nobody much wanted to dwell on any of that and the entire memory of those webbed bodies and clusters of spiders smashing against the windshield filled Slaughter’s mouth with revulsion so he just shook it out of his head.

He lay on his bunk, smoking, trying to put the day and night in some kind of perspective that would make it all easier to live with. It was something he’d done countless other times after coming down from too much action, too much insanity, too much wild and randy bullshit.

What’re you getting your back up about, Slaughter? he asked himself in a voice that was half-dream and half-awake. You knew there’d be mutations out here. The spiders were just that. Disgusting, made your spine crawl and your belly flop over, but not truly unexpected. There’ll be other things. Some of them not so bad and others a lot fucking worse.

Sure, that was realistic, he knew, lying there in the dark of the Wagon, so close to his hog that he could smell the engine oil coming off her like a seductive sweet perfume.

But he knew that wasn’t what was bothering him.

It was Black Hat.

The idea of that man…or thing…disturbed him in ways he could not fathom. That somehow, some way, Black Hat was the axis upon which everything was spinning now. He told himself he couldn’t possibly know that, yet he was certain of it.