The riders came at them and there was no doubt by then that these were Cannibal Corpse riders—those that had faces as such were leathery masks pitted with holes and others were eaten right down to the bone. They rode muddy hogs painted flat black or primer red, most on ratbikes that had been thrown together out of spare parts.
When they were in range, the Disciples opened up with a devastating barrage. Seven or eight of the Cannibals were blown off their mounts and it took some serious trick-riding to avoid the spinning bikes and tumbling riders.
They all made it through the first pass save for Irish, who rolled over a Cannibal Corpse rider, lost control, and slammed into one of their bikes, stacking his own mount on the pavement, low-ending it in a violent tabletop slide.
There was no time to go to his aid.
They pulled off the road, circled around just as Jumbo plowed through the zombie ranks, knocking a half dozen more to the road and catching another on the cow-catcher and dragging him and his bike thirty feet in a smear of blood and oil and motorcycle parts.
Slaughter came back around without hesitation.
The Cannibals came to meet him and it was one of those ice-pure, hot/cold Zen moments that he had experienced only once or twice in his life and usually at a time like this—right in the heat of battle. It was like everything momentarily ground to a halt, total slo-mo, video jumping slowly frame by frame by frame. He saw the wormboy bikers, six or seven of them bearing down on him, and was amazed at the sheer wrath and sheer fucking ugliness of them. Their faces were beyond simple comic book rot, but a wild and perpetually maggoty delirium of slack-jawed screams, scarification and random impalements, insect-eaten, flyblown, runny/pus-juicing/vomited-clotted expulsions of pulpous ooze.
They came at him and he inched forward to meet them.
The world was soundless, a dead vacuum in some distorted cul-de-sac of space and time. He watched them come to kill him, to slobber on his brains or heave blood-slicked resurrection worms down his throat, and he saw his death and did not fear it, but accepted it, saw the smooth transition and the calming crystal purity of abandoning the flesh, for once it was gone and you were divorced of it…no more pain or suffering or torment or worry or fear. A butterfly taking wing from a pupa, breaking free and gliding in the warm summer night of eternity—
That Zen moment, so fleeting and existential, was gone and the physical world pushed back in. He saw those dead riders as they saw him and he was just John Slaughter, outlaw biker and criminal hardcase, barbarian on an iron horse, his belly filled with acid and his soul smoldering with rage and hate and kill-happy enthusiasm.
When the Cannibals were twenty feet from him, he squeezed the trigger on the M16 and, lookee there, these deadheads were capable of learning because as soon as the rounds started to fly two of them broke free, cutting away from the wolfpack. But the others were strafed by slugs that made them hop and jerk, made one of them fall right out of the saddle and strike his head on the pavement with such velocity that it exploded on impact, spraying a gore-soup of rot and filth—and one surprised worm—over the blacktop.
But one or more of those rounds chewed into a gas tank and there was a resounding
Burning, four Cannibals lost control of their rides and skidded out, but one came right at Slaughter with a toothy mortuary grin and that was because he held a hatchet in one claw-hand and, despite the fact that one of his eyes was a yellow gummy soup and the other was swinging free by the stalk, he was bringing it forward in a perfect arc that would have taken Slaughter’s head right off.
But he ducked.
The hatchet slashed empty air.
The forward momentum and the wild swing threw the Cannibal off balance and he lost control, the bike going one way and he going the other. Slaughter never saw that, for as he cut hard to the left to avoid another Cannibal bearing down on him, he found the gravel at the edge of the road and lost control himself. His scoot skidded out and he was tossed mercifully into the long grass and then down into the ditch amongst some desiccated cattails that broke apart in a storm of soft fuzz.