Cannibal Corpse, M/C

It was thick and fine and consuming like the guts of a blizzard. Also like a blizzard, it was in constant swirling, rolling motion, spinning and seething, a busy storm cloud building and covering. It had a funny, almost metallic sheen to it as if it was saturated with microscopic flakes of aluminum. The headlights bounced right off it, filling the cab of the War Wagon with a moonish glow. Slaughter didn’t know if it was his imagination or not, but he began to see shapes in it, weird, darting forms like figures in motion dancing away just out of sight. And above too, shapes circling in the fog like witches taking to the air.

But he figured it was like staring into static on an old TV…sooner or later, your eyes would begin to see patterns and contours where none really existed. That’s all it was.

Then he saw something.

A man…something like a man…with shining eyes at the side of the road.

“You see that?”

Apache Dan’s voice was dry. “Yeah,” he said.

By that point, Slaughter’s teeth were clenched and his scalp felt tight and crawling, a chill running down his shoulders and over his chest.

Keep it together, man, just keep it together.

Now and again, the fog thinned enough where he could catch an occasional glimpse of the countryside and what he saw was like some netherworld of dark, blasted earth cut by jagged gullies and craters, a few dead trees rising up like withered skeletons. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but he was certain that North Dakota did not look like that. If anything, it looked like France or Belgium in World War I, scarred and gutted and stripped by artillery barrages.

It wasn’t right.

None of it was right.

Some kind of battle or something had been waged here. He hoped it had been with conventional weapons and that they weren’t all being saturated with radiation.

“This is the shit, all right,” Apache Dan said as if reading his mind.

Maybe it was the fear of atomic fallout or that business with the spiders, but his nerves were steadily fraying and his guts were pulled up into his chest now in cold, knotted tangles.

“We gotta ride out of this soon.”

Another five minutes of white-knuckled driving and Slaughter saw a hulking shape in the gloom: the remains of a high stone wall that was crumbling now into debris. There were great holes punched through it like it had been hit by rockets. And then, everywhere, countless buildings and towers and huts rising up into the mist, every one of them derelict and shattered like London after the blitz. Some were nothing but great heaps of rubble, others standing but set with yawning chasms and ragged voids, roofs ripped free and walls gone to wreckage. He glimpsed low doorways and hooded windows, nothing beyond them but a grainy blackness. It looked like some Medieval town after a siege…just gutted and broken and pulverized. What did still stand looked ready to fall. No life there, just cloying shadows and drifting pockets and tendrils of mist.

“Where the hell are we?” he said under his breath.

“Don’t look much like North Dakota, does it?” Apache admitted.

Slowly then, the other Disciples bunching up front with them, Slaughter moved the Wagon through twisting streets, the tires bumping along, maybe over rubbish and bricks and maybe over a road that was no longer pavement, but cobblestones. And as disconcerting as that was, what was worse was that the tombyard of fragmented ruins stretching around them might have been dead and ancient, but they were not unoccupied. He kept seeing vague shapes moving through the rot and devastation, like men or women, hunched and shambling. But every time it seemed like he might glimpse one dragging itself into view through a ruptured doorway, the mist rolled back in, obscuring his view.

Something was telling him that might be a good thing.

“What kind of fucking place is this?” Fish said.

Jumbo and Moondog said nothing; they just watched.

The half-glimpsed figures sliding from the fog stopped when they heard or saw the Wagon coming. They stood there, swaying from side to side, until Slaughter got in close and then they scampered off. Not running or fleeing as men would, but moving with an almost pained loping or hopping motion.

There.

Right before the Wagon now, a figure standing in the middle of the road.

It was not going to move.

“Run that fucker down,” Fish said

The mist blew around it, making it look like steam was coming off it. As the War Wagon got in closer, splashing the figure with headlights, it lifted its arms and waved back and forth like it wanted them to stop. Slaughter did not stop—didn’t dare to—but he slowed. Slowed so that he saw the figure wore little better than rags. Huge, shapeless filthy garments like gunny sacks or motheaten tarps.

“Maybe…maybe we better see what they want,” Jumbo said, a huge and bear-like man, fearsome in battle and loyal as hell…but down deep, oddly compassionate for an outlaw biker. Almost motherly.