Cannibal Corpse, M/C

But his hand was practiced and sure. The Combat Mag barked and they all went down with perfect headshots. He spun and drilled another, but his aim was off and the slug went into another’s throat. And that was six rounds and he knew it.

No time to reload.

He holstered the .357 and slid the Kukri out.

They screamed and converged and he went straight into their numbers with the Gurkha knife slashing back and forth in lethal arcs, severing limbs and opening guts and splitting open faces. He kept hacking and cutting as they fell and others surged over the top of their comrades and he stumbled through their masses, tripping on entrails and fluids, splashed with their drainage and foul gouts of blood.

Stumbling, tripping, Slaughter hopped forward, fell again, rolled free and came up running.

Breaking free momentarily he ran out of the park and saw there was no way in hell he could make it to the hog. He dashed towards a row of storefronts, gasping as he tried doorknob after doorknob and the dead poured in at him from every direction.

An open one.

A hardware store. He locked the door, ran behind a counter thick with grime and went down on one knee, pulling out the Combat Mag and a speedloader. He dumped the spent cartridges, quickly inserted the speedloader drum, twisted the knob, and the Mag was loaded.

By then they were thick outside.

They battered into the door and threw themselves against the dusty plate glass windows until cracks began to appear. He took aim and fired at a wormboy leading the charge and the slug took out the window and his target. The others surged forward in a sea of rot, spearing themselves on shards of glass that didn’t even slow them down.

At the same time the window went, the door crashed open and seven, then eight, of them pushed through. He dropped two more, kept firing, emptying the gun as the zombies were felled like dead trees and their fellows began to feed on them.

Slaughter quickly made it into the back of the store, slamming the door shut and throwing the lock. He was in a short corridor with two doors. Think fast, man: door number one or door number two. Fuck it. He tried them both. The first led into a cramped storeroom and the other led into the alley…he hoped.

He threw it open and an immense woman was waiting for him.

She was flabby and quite naked, her face huge like an ashen moon, eyes sunken into pockets of flab and fungus. Her breasts were lolling sacks of flour, the nipples like corded hazelnuts leaking gray milk. Black autopsy stitching ran from her crotch to her throat and it was feathered with a blue-green mold.

There was no time for anything but shock.

Slaughter hesitated with the empty .357 in his hand for just one second and she came at him. Before he could ward it off, one gas-plump hand stiff-armed him in the chest and knocked him flat. Not just flat, but sliding him across the floor.

Definitely no time for reloading.

She stood in the doorway, filling it, blocking out the sunlight behind her. She gnashed yellowed teeth together, gagged out a dust of dead flies, and licked her lips with a tongue like a fat black leech. It left a trail of slime on her puckered mouth.

It was then, as his hand gripped the Kukri, that he noticed she carried something in one of her arms. What he had taken to be another meaty roll of flab was a child…a little wormkid infant with a face like a caul, its body a rolling, distended mass like a prenatal sack full of sloshing embryonic juice.

The woman took two lumbering steps into the room as the dead pounded on the door in the corridor, wanting in, wanting not just to feed, Slaughter thought, but to view the festivities.

The woman cocked her head to the side as he stood.

Was this defiance? She just wasn’t sure.

The baby in her arms made a gurgling sound like its mouth was full of gruel. It dug spiny fingers into its mother’s bulk, something like a face moving behind the caul, grinning, chewing, feeding on itself.

Slaughter was beginning to think he might be able to get a speedloader in, but when he reached for the gun, the woman shivered and clots of black wormy earth dropped from the mossy purple-black crevice between her legs which were stout marble pillars.

“Glhhhh,” she said as if trying to form word. “Glhhhh?”

A question. One without an answer.

Her hair was a dull, weed-dry gold that must have been beautiful and luxurious at one time. Now it was patchy, crawling with insects. Coffin beetles, mottled black-and-red like bloodstones, were chewing at her scalp, pushing themselves under the skin.

Slaughter held the Kukri in one blood-spattered, white-knuckled fist.

The woman stepped forward.

Lips peeled open, yellow teeth were unsheathed.

She reached for him and he slashed out with the Gurkha knife and cleaved one of her breasts open. It split like a casket pillow, scattering filth and drainage and she roared, maybe not so much out of pain but out of damage.