Cannibal Corpse, M/C

She said she went to the door and was about to call out to whoever was out there when she felt something go right up her spine. The knob was turning. She’d forgotten to lock it. It wasn’t the first time, but when your old man was sergeant-at-arms of a 1%er club, you didn’t worry much about locked doors. But Jibb was dead and somebody was coming in and she had a pretty good idea of who it might be.

The door opened and Jibb was standing there. “Daddy’s home,” he said.

“I backed away. I screamed. All I remember is the clump-clump-clump of his motorcycle boots. We buried him in his rags, his colors, and they just hung on him…Jibb was a big guy and by then he was only a big corpse, like a skeleton wearing skin. His face was white and blotchy, and there were maggots in his hair and beard. His eyes were all red like they were filled with blood or maybe something worse. I got this real perverse idea, man, that he hadn’t come home just to put his teeth in me but to get me in bed, to do things like we used to do.” She broke off for a moment, breathing really hard. “He said he was going to eat me. He said he was going to start with my pussy and work his way up. There was green slime coming out of his mouth and cockroaches—I think they were cockroaches—coming out of holes in his face. He smelled like death, man. Like roadkill. Dirt fell from him as he walked, and he was grinning like a sewer grate. I did the only thing I could do, and took up his .44 Magnum from the kitchen drawer and I shot him. I shot him right in the chest and that fucking .44 almost broke my wrist with the recoil. Jibb made a growling sound and came at me so I shot him in the head the way Stumpy had told me to. Jibb shook and squirmed, the top of his head gone…then he dropped to his knees and vomited out this black bile that looked like crude oil. Then he fell over and he was dead again. He was still grinning, man.”

Slaughter held her tight and she trembled. She had opened her soul to him and that night he really loved her. It didn’t last, of course, but that night he really loved her because she was open and vulnerable and no woman had ever needed him so much. He held her as she shook, listening to the wind howling out in the deserted lot, the rain speckling the windows. After a time she calmed and she wanted him again or maybe she needed him, needed something physical and exhausting that would wipe the slate of her mind clean the way only good sex or good drugs could.

Later, she said, “Tell me now if you’re like that.”

“Like what, baby?”

“Like Jibb. Crazy.”

“I’m crazy, all right. I don’t have a lick of sense, but I know I’m not God’s chosen. I’m a Devil’s Disciple, man. Does that mean God hates me and the Devil loves me? No, it just means that neither have any use for biker trash like me. But one thing you can be sure of: I don’t stand out in worm rains. I’m scared shitless of them and that’s the truth.”

“I think you’ll do then.”

“Any port in a storm?”

“Something like that,” she said, putting her head on his chest.

* * *

They took it easy for a few days after that. No hurry. Just pushing along slow down the pavement. In Sauk City, which was mostly empty except for some Army units patrolling the streets that paid them no mind, and the locals who were armed behind their fenced-in yards, Dirty Mary decided she wanted some candles of all things. She had a real love of candles, and didn’t like getting it on unless candles were burning. That’s the way she was. So Slaughter pulled his hog over before a big gift shop and in they went.

He stood around paging through dusty magazines while Dirty Mary looted the candle section and that’s when a form came shambling out of the back, a big man in a dirty khaki uniform and a badge. “I’m the law around here and I caught you,” he said. “I caught you and you’re mine. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”

The cop had been dead a couple weeks at least, but was still a big boy that was boiling hot with rot. His stiff white crew cut was patchy, as was the scalp below, like birds had been picking at it. His face was gray, mottled, and scabrous, skinless from his nose on down, loops of black slime foaming from his mouth, staining the front of his uniform shirt.

It was nothing Slaughter hadn’t expected. What bothered him, though, was that the cop still had his service pistol on his hip.

“We can come to agreement,” said the cop, his voice scratchy like something from a wind-up phonograph. “Suck my cock and we call it an even trade.”

For one second Slaughter thought John Law was talking to him but that’s when he realized that the cop did not even seem aware of his presence. He was addressing Dirty Mary. He had eyes for nothing or no one else. Maybe in life he’d once been sucked-off by some runaway or desperate woman and that was just replaying in the rotting spools of his brain.

“You suck it, woman,” he said, a long white worm coming out of his ear and dropping to the floor. “How’s about it? Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”