Cannibal Corpse, M/C

But, as usual, it slowed the flow and stilled the frame and let him see reality not as people wanted it to be but as it truly was. Amazing. All these years he thought citizens were limp-wristed, weak, and wan…but the truth was that they hid their true natures behind that thin yellowing membrane they called civilization and this is what they really were: animals. By God, all the 1%ers had raged against them all these years never realizing that, under the skin, all human beings were inherently 1%ers.

But by then, of course, the revelations ceased because Maggot took hold of him. Picking him up off the ground as if he weighed about as much as a feather pillow, lifting him up over his head—that drove the crowd absolutely wild and orgasmic—and throwing him through the air against the fence. The impact was painful and so was the fall that followed. But when Slaughter hit the dirt, he came up grinning, wiping blood from his face, knowing that if he accomplished nothing in this life he must, above all things, totally fuck-up things for the animals out there.

He must piss on their parade and shit in their party punch.

And he saw just how to do it.

Maggot had him again. He lifted him up, pressing him against the fence and Slaughter got his elbow against the zombie’s throat so those teeth couldn’t get at him. Maggot’s tomb-breath was hot and feverish in his face.

“KILLLLLL HIIIIIMMMMMM!” the crowd called out.

“GET HIM, MAGGOT!”

“PULL HIS STOMACH OUT! EAT HIS FUCKING SPLEEN!”

Maggot was worked up into a wild delirium by then. He needed to get his teeth into the food so that he could fill himself with it but the food was strong, the food was cunning, the food fought back with amazing agility. But he would win because he always won in the end…but then the food reached one hand out and dug its clawing fingers into the side of Maggot’s neck where there was a bloated purple-blue pouch of rot and worms. It was soft as the flesh of a rotten peach and those fingers dug in there, tearing at the pouch and ripping it open in a gushing of graveworms and fetid meat. Those claws took hold of something more substantial and yanked, pull, tore, ripped.

Maggot screamed as a great chunk of muscle and meat was torn out of his throat. The action made his head slump to the side, made his neck feel like rubber.

He dropped Slaughter.

The crowd booed and hissed; they did not like this.

“C’MON, MAGGOT!”

Maggot, his head bobbling, went down to one knee, fingers trying to halt the flow of ichor and liquefied tissue from his throat. Slaughter came at him and kicked him in the face. That head snapped back on the damaged neck, spraying corpse goo, the left cheekbone shattered to running pulp. And the muscles that held his one good eye in place went flaccid and it popped out of the socket, dangling back and forth.

Maggot made a whining, almost pathetic sound.

He was trying to stand. He finally did…almost. But as he made it up, wobbling from side to side, Slaughter gave his left, and weaker, kneecap a jumping stomp that shattered it and dropped him back down, crippled and moaning.

It was easy then.

Slaughter grabbed one of the rocks and smashed one of the bottles that had been thrown until he had a good shank of jagged glass. He slashed Maggot’s dangling eye with it, blinding him. Then he slashed his throat, two, three, four times as the zombie’s hands sought him out. Slaughter darted in again and slashed it across the opening in the side of the throat he’d made with his fingers. Maggot’s head slumped to his shoulder.

He was almost done now.

The crowd had grown noticeably quiet.

Maggot could barely hold himself up on his knees.

Slaughter slashed at his throat again and again, cutting deeper and deeper. With a barking noise, Maggot rolled over into the dirt. Slaughter jumped on him and cut free the last few ligaments that held his head in place. Using his knee as a brace, his snapped the vertebrae and twisted Maggot’s head free…then he swung it around and around and threw it like discus out into the crowd that screamed and scattered.

They probably would have shot him down at that point.

But the sky had scabbed over purple-and-blue like a contusion and yellow forks of lightning split it open.

The rain began to fall.

And people ran.

Chapter Twenty-Three

By the time the rain started coming down in sheets and turning the ground to rolling mud, Slaughter had climbed up and over the fence of the cage and dropped into the muck on the other side. The rain was cool and cleansing and it felt good as he stood in it, trying to see through it, trying to figure out where some shelter might be. It kept coming down, drenching him, cleaning the stink and remains of zombie gore off of him.

But he knew that, at any moment, the worms might start coming down, too.

He had to find shelter.