Cannibal Corpse, M/C

In the distance were those encampments and he made for the nearest one, hoping he’d make it and not get shot when he jumped the perimeter. He ran through the mud, slipping and falling, getting up again and then tripping over something and going face-first into the slop. He rose up, the rain washing the muck from his face.

There was a woman there.

She was hugging herself and rocking back and forth on her haunches.

That’s what he tripped over.

“You better get to cover!” he shouted at her, but she just shook her head.

He knew at that moment that every second was precious. He should have run. He should have worried about himself but he knew if he did that, he knew if he abandoned the woman and saved his own skin, he was no better than the citizens who’d cheered on his death in the cage. And he knew he was better than them. At least, now he was.

He grabbed the woman by the arm and pulled her up.

She didn’t fight.

She didn’t do anything.

She just stood there with absolute dejection, wet hair plastered to her face. She was nearly limp as he dragged her along, mumbling something or other about wanting to stay out in the rain and wait for the worms.

He pulled her along, slopping forward to the nearest barbwired encampment. As they came through the wire, a man with an M-16 came out of the gathering darkness. He almost walked right into Slaughter. Slaughter chopped the edge of his hand across the guy’s nose and kicked him in the head when he fell. He grabbed the rifle and pulled the woman into the compound with him. In the rain, no one fired because if there were guns out there, no one could be sure in that deluge who was a Ratbag and who was not. There was a little tin shack at the foot of a hillside that might have been a guard house once.

“C’mon!” Slaughter said, dragging her forward.

When he got her to the shack, he pushed her down in the mud, grabbed the latch on the door and threw it open, jumping to the side. A couple of shots rang out. Some swearing. Some shouting.

Slaughter rolled over the ground through the muck and puddles and came to a rest on his belly, firing indiscriminately into the shack. A man cried out and fell from the doorway and a woman screamed, tried to pull him back in. Slaughter sprayed both of them down and yanked their corpses out, throwing them in the puddles. He pulled the woman in there and latched the door, breathing heavily.

“That was tight,” he said.

The falling rain on the tin shack sounded like popcorn popping. There were a few tiny leaks in the ceiling and a few drops of rain still fell, but it was dry and it was warm. There were dry blankets on a shelf and a couple of chairs against the wall, a candle flickering in the corner.

Had yourselves a cozy little love shack here, eh, citizens? he thought with absolutely no sympathy. Well ain’t that too fucking bad?

He wondered how many rocks and bottles the two he had killed had thrown at him. How many jeers and boos they had called out. How badly had they cheered on his death?

“What’s your name?” he asked the woman.

“Does it matter?”

“Sure.”

He wrapped her in a blanket. She was small and shivering, her hair long and straight, dishwater blonde. She had a nice face, blue eyes, girl-next-door pretty but despondent as hell. Something in her had been yanked out and crushed.

“Maria,” she said.

“Slaughter.”

She did not look at him. She looked at the floor. She did not speak, he soon realized, unless she was spoken to. She acted like some of the weaklings he remembered from prison. The bitch-boys and punks that the hardtimers used as girlfriends. She was like them: trained, silent, obedient. Not a shred of defiance in her.

“Were you a camp woman?”

She looked up at him. “I was a whore to be used.”

Jesus. Thoroughly broken.

“I suppose that’s what you want,” she said, lifting her shirt and exposing two pert breasts that were grimy and sullied by purple bruises.

He pulled her shirt back down. “I got other things on my mind right now.”

“You’re not going to rape me?” she said.

“Honey, I never raped anyone in my life,” he told her. “It was always given to me, I never had to take it.”

He felt a foolish, almost boyish and immature need to brag of his sexual conquests to her. The club runs and parties back in the old days. All the women who’d show up. Not just biker babes but hot college girls and attractive housewives looking for a ride on the wild side, looking to escape the dull confines of their ordered lily-white worlds, attracted by bad boys as women of all stripes were always attracted by bad boys. But what was the point in telling her that stuff? It would have been silly. Like a thirteen-year old kid bragging in the locker room about the handjob Betty Sue had given him in her parent’s garage. Puerile.

“You don’t have to take it, I’ll give it to you.”

“I don’t want it.”

She looked dejected. “You don’t think I’m pretty?”

“Got nothing to do with it. Right now it’s about surviving.”