Cannibal Corpse, M/C

The path was rocky in the woods and the scoot bumped along, but he knew the Red Hand couldn’t follow him up here unless they came in on foot and if they did, then it would be his kind of fighting: close-in and personal. He cut across a stream then up a hill, down another, through another dry ravine and up a hillock and across a little footbridge. He kept his speed low. The hog wasn’t made for this off-road shit and with the hardtail frame, he felt every little bump hard right up into his hips. He kept going until the trees thinned and there was a two-rut dirt road below him. He cut down onto it and followed it maybe a mile and then cut into more open prairie, then into a cedar stand. By then, the Red Hand were nowhere to be seen or heard. He moved through the switchgrass until he found a gravel road that he guessed might swing back around and bring him within sight of the highway, but several miles back before he ran into the ambush. He kept going but saw no highway.

Finally, he rolled the hardtail into a stand of withered juniper and killed the engine. It was quiet. Real quiet. He tried to raise Apache Dan on the walkie-talkie but all he got was dead air. He hoped they were hid good and tight.

That’s all he cared about.

Because for right now, he himself was hopelessly lost.

* * *

Maybe an hour later, Slaughter came out of cover onto some pavement and overhead, there were dozens of buzzards circling. There was death nearby and the birds knew it. And to draw them in such numbers it must have been real thick, real good, and real meaty, none of which remotely concerned Slaughter because what was death in the big bad new world as envisioned by the Outbreak? Death was just death. It held little significance in the greater scheme of things. The living envied the dead, as it was said.

He followed the pavement as it moved through the countryside, knowing it was a secondary road and not the I, but hoping the two would meet up. He cracked open the throttle, kept an eye on the buzzards overhead, and eased his hog on down the road. Death was on his mind like it had been for so long now.

He thought about Black Hat.

He thought about the Hag.

And the more he thought about the both of them the more he thought he was probably fucking crazy.

But as he rode on, thinking death and such, that poem by Poe he’d memorized in the eighth grade kept bouncing around in his skull like a catchy tune you just can’t rid yourself of:

Mutter and mumble low,

And hither and thither fly-Mere puppets they, who come and go

At bidding of vast formless things

That shift the scenery to and fro,

Flapping from out their Condor wings

Invisible Woe!

Yeah, that was it. That was the meat of the thing and he knew it: puppets. Puppets that come and go to the bidding of vast and formless things. It made all the sense in the world to him because it seemed that day by day it was all some crazy stage he was playing on and something above was manipulating his strings. And whoever or whatever that might have been must have been one real sadistic motherfucker with an absolutely cruel sense of humor.

He drove on.

The road wound down into a little grassy glen and then came up through a sparse thicket and under a train bridge, right outside a little town called Victoria. Set out at the crossroads was another of those freaky little altars.

This time he was in no hurry, so he stopped.

He parked his scoot and hopped off, looking around carefully and strapping on the Combat Mag in case the shit started flying. The town was just before him and he could tell it was a dead place. The buzzards were circling directly overhead and he knew that there was death, recent death, in its streets. The wind was slight, warm, and dry. It smelled like hay and corn husks. When it shifted direction, it brought the stink of the town out to him: a hot, maggoty odor of decomposition.

But the altar…