Cannibal Corpse, M/C

It was the voice of Black Hat and Slaughter knew it instinctively. There could be no other voice like that…dry and scraping, like a skeleton key scratched over a rusting iron tomb door. It was him. The death-goddess was part of him, they were joined together in something. And that was obvious when she lifted the veil that covered her pubis and belly. Her bone-white legs were stained with something like dark menstrual blood or afterbirth and across her gleaming white autopsy-stitched belly something was burned black into the flesh:

That word, that symbol, whatever in the Christ it was. It was everywhere and it was the core of this thing. If he could translate it and know what it meant it would reveal many things. But there was no time to contemplate it because the zombies were massing. They would tear him to bits.

Then the cavalry rolled in.

Once again, the Red Hand arrived.

They came in armored vehicles with shock troops pressing in behind. Light machine guns opened up, cutting down the dead and shooting gouts of fire at them from mounted flame throwers. Then the troops moved in and cut the others down. Slaughter hit the ground and knew there was no escape.

They had him, if that’s what they wanted.

But one thing they didn’t get was the death-goddess for she was nowhere to be seen.

Once the zombies were nothing but blackened, smoldering refuse in the streets, the troops moved in on Slaughter. He still had the Kukri and Combat Mag in his hands.

“The wise thing to do,” one of them said with a submachine gun pointed at him, “would be to drop that hardware.”

So Slaughter did just that.

And they charged in at him.

Chapter Twenty-Two

When he came to the next morning, he was hanging from a crude framework by his wrists. The Ratbags had taken him from Exodus and none too gently. They gave him a quick beating to take the fight out of him and after what he’d been through, there wasn’t much fight left. They roped him, gagged him, and threw him in the back of a truck. Whether it was the beating or the rest of it, he couldn’t say, but he went out cold and woke up like this. He was still dressed, still wearing his colors, and still sprayed down with gore from the zombies.

Every fucking day, he thought as he peered around the Red Hand encampment, things just get worse. You get farther away from your brother Disciples and farther away from that compound and the bio there. And farther away from Red Eye.

Now what?

What in the hell did these assholes want with him?

About an hour after he came out of it, the guy who’d taken him prisoner, the dude with the submachine gun, came over with five men trailing behind him. He was dressed in dirty camo fatigues like the others. He was white-haired, craggy-faced, and seemed to have some sort of bearing that the others lacked.

“You’re awake, eh?”

“Sure.”

“Suppose you want to be set free?”

“I was thinking that.”

The old guy nodded. “I’m Valdez,” he said. “I’m in command here. You’re my prisoner.”

“Okay. What do you want with me?”

Valdez just stood there, staring at him. “You’re Slaughter?”

“Yeah. I been called that.”

“You’re the one that mixed it up with some of us in Wisconsin. Killed a few of us.”

“So now you’ve got me.”

“Now I’ve got you.” He whispered something to one of the other men. “Question is: what do we do with you?”

“What use am I to you?”

“None that I can see. Of course, we could use a guy like you. You could join up with us.”

“The Hand? No, I’m already patched-in with a different club. I don’t flip patches for no one.”

“I suppose I could kill you.”

“Figured you’d get to that.”

“Uh-huh.” Valdez stroked his chin. “We could torture you…but why expend the energy on a booger-eater like you? You’re strong. You’d make a good slave. A good camp boy to do all the shit nobody else likes. But then we’d have to feed you. And, sooner or later, a guy like you would start killing us to get free.”

It was quite a quandary, all right. Slaughter was amazed at how quickly the Red Hand grapevine worked. They must have been watching for him. Now they had him. Valdez was playing games. Slaughter had killed some Ratbags, they wanted payback. They were going to punish him and he knew it, but Valdez was playing his mindgames, acting like he didn’t know what he was going to do when he’d probably made up his mind long ago.

“See, Slaughter, the thing is that I’ve been pretty much ordered to execute you. That comes from higher up, as a favor to other Red Hand units that you put the hurt on. It’s a brotherhood thing…and you understand brotherhood, do you not?”