Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Slaughter looked around, not sure of anything now but knowing from experience that nothing was real and everything was real and you couldn’t fight it: you just went with it.

Hey, asshole.

He looked and Dirty Mary was squatting in the grass before him. She looked good. He felt a burning need in his groin. He wanted to get up and climb on top of her but he could not move.

Oh, aren’t you just something? Fucking asshole motherfucking biker piece of shit. Who do you think you are? Spent your life robbing and fighting and murdering and dealing drugs. Nothing but a criminal. A lowlife criminal and now…ha, ha…now you think you’re righteous, you’re walking the straight and narrow, on a holy mission. Don’t make me laugh. Did you think Black Hat won’t punch your ticket in the end?

You know Black Hat?

I serve at his side.

But you’re dead.

She laughed and unbuttoned her blouse and showed him her breasts. They were full and round, the nipples pink and jutting. He saw the tattoos on them—the roses on the left one and the dragon on the right climbing up to her sternum.

You can’t have them. He won’t let you.

Who?

You know. Call his name. To call the names of the dead is to summon them and to give voice to the darkness is to make it real. You get it, asshole? Do you GET IT?

She squeezed and worked her breasts in her long fingers, teasing the nipples until they stood as hard as push pins. When she took her hands away there was another tattoo and it covered both breasts:

Slaughter began to shake and shiver as the hot sweat of fevers broke open on his face. That word. That symbol. That word-symbol. It meant something and he knew it. It meant the most awful things and Dirty Mary was trying to tell him but he couldn’t hear and she kept shaking her head as she rubbed her breasts.

I died. Then I went down the rabbit hole and into the darkness and I saw him there. He asked about you, John. Oh, the evil that men do. You’re one of his favorites because you have absolutely no respect for human life. You like to kill.

No, I don’t.

But you do.

Only when I have to.

She began speaking in what seemed dozens of voices at the same time, all of them berating him and shouting at him and telling him things he needed to know, but were incomprehensible.

Really, John. You have to concentrate. I went down the rabbit hole and I met the Mad Hatter and he said tweedle-dee, tweedle-dee, why is a raven like a writing desk and right now he’s with that Little Injun and he’s telling him riddles.

Shut up.

I won’t. Not until you remember.

Then Slaughter did. In his memory that was so real it shut out everything else he saw a couple of the boys from the 158 Crew: Sean Cady and Butch Vituro. They were both long dead now but that didn’t seem to matter and why should it?

Allentown. Yes, Allentown, PA. The 158ers were going after a witness in a drug trial involving Ringo Searles, then-president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Disciples. The rat’s name was Boyle, a drug dealer who had fingered Ringo’s complicity in a tri-state heroin trafficking operation.