Cannibal Corpse, M/C

When Slaughter came out of that he was still in the park, crawling madly in ever-widening circles as his brain told him to just go with it, just ride it out because in its unreality was its very reality. Dirty Mary was his oracle that had become mixed up with the 158 Crew and a book from his childhood. He knew better than to reason it out. He knew that something was coming, whether revelation or stark insanity or perhaps both, he could not know.

You make everything so difficult, John.

Dirty Mary again, fondling herself.

You make no sense, he told her.

I make all the sense in the world. Pay attention now: why is a raven like a writing-desk? C’mon, John, answer the riddle. If you don’t I’ll toss you down the rabbit hole.

Slaughter’s mind was very clear and sharpened, it turned back upon itself, seeking and probing, opening doors that had long been closed. It looked in the dusty back corridors of his brain, found something. A place. Like some wellspring of childhood terrors opening before him and he knew it was where Black Hat had come from.

A city.

It was a city.

Yes, a city of the dead and the damned, those unliving and those undead and those that were never really born. A blasted urban gutter of nightmare.

The city was a shrouded, evil place of cyclopean buildings and crumbling streets that were mazes leading everywhere and nowhere. There were rivers and stagnant pools of refuse and broken bodies. The shadows had textures, physical presence; colors had odors; the ground heaved tears and flame; the sky rained blood and filth. There were great empty spaces, blackened and blasted, dismembered bodies spread in every direction as if some terrible battle had taken place there. The lanes were flanked with crucified children and adults impaled on stakes and set aflame. The flickering illumination intended to guide strangers to valleys of punishment they were better off not seeing. And everywhere, the hot, nauseating stench of cremated flesh and the cries of the damned.

It was Hell.

Maybe not literally, but something very much like Hell.

And this is where his tripping brain had dumped him, marooned him: the city with no name.

There was no time here or no sense of the same. Slaughter ran through black mists, from one street to the next, feeling something behind him. Something or someone. Always following. Footsteps coming through the darkness, slow and methodical and stalking. They were patient and relentless. No matter how far he ran, they only edged in closer and closer. Now and again, he’d see a face peering from the shadows. The face of Black Hat. Always watching, always waiting.

Slaughter kept running, passing through the rotting thoroughfares of the deserted city, looking for somewhere to hide or someone with warm blood in their veins to help him. But there was nothing and nobody. Just the breath of ghosts and the whisper of shadows.