Cannibal Corpse, M/C

She was moving with wild greased gyrations by that point. The burning smell was stronger about her and blood ran from her mouth. It filled her eyes and dripped from her ears. Then she slumped over and hit the floor. As she laid there, obviously dead, limbs askew, mouth still wide, eyes still staring, steam began to rise from her like she was melting. It carried an acrid stink of burning flesh.

Something was happening.

Something revelatory.

Maria was openly crying out in her fear, but Slaughter was close to something, he thought, or maybe miles distant. Yet, he knew what was happening was not by accident. He had the most uncanny feeling that it was meant for him and him alone. As the steam continued to rise, filling the hut with a sickening odor, he used the barrel of his rifle and pulled the woman’s shirt up and there it was as he knew it must be. Her belly was rising like bread dough, pushing up to form letters that were going from pink to red like scalded flesh. Then there was a searing, burning stench and he saw it, he saw it once again:

Just like all the others, it was branded right into her. Upraised and branded right into the flesh and just the sight of it made him take a stumbling step towards the door. He stepped out into the air which, although dank and cool, was comparatively fresh compared to what he’d been breathing in the hut. He was dizzy. Woozy. His knees were weak and his legs were shaking. He found an overturned crate and dropped his ass on it, breathing in and out, clearing his mind.

“Are you all right?” Maria said, wiping tears from her face.

He was still trembling. “Yeah…I’m okay.”

“I told you we should leave,” Maria said to him. “I told you that they say things. Things you don’t want to hear.”

He nodded. “Question is: how much of what she said can we believe?”

“I don’t know.”

“She knew things she shouldn’t have known. I can’t explain that with ordinary logic, now can I? And, even if I could, I sure as hell couldn’t explain those words burned into her.” Before he could stop himself he told Maria about that word and where he had seen it before. “I don’t know what it means but Black Hat is behind it.”

“Black Hat?”

Since he had started telling the tale, he went through the whole spiel, telling her about that video at the compound in Wisconsin, his dreams, and specifically about Frank Feathers and the Skeleton Man.

Maria was silent for a moment when he was finished. “I’ve seen it before,” she finally said.

“You’ve seen it, too?”

She shook her head. “Just in a book.”

She explained that in college she was into occultism and New Age stuff, everything from healing crystals to pyramid power and the tarot. It was just a kick and lot of kids were into it. “In 1611, I think, this priest named Father Louis Gaufridi was executed for sending demons to possess the nuns of Aix-en-Provence in France. During his trial they found a pact with the Devil signed in blood. It bore the reverse signatures of six major demons of Hell and was countersigned by a seventh.”

Slaughter was sitting forward now. “Tell me the name.”

“Leviathan,” she said.

Slaughter heard it, felt it echo through his head and knew it was right. He formed the word silently with his lips. Leviathan. To him, it had power and diabolical force but that was mainly because of the circumstances relating to it. He remembered hearing the name in Catholic school as a kid. He thought leviathan had something to do with a whale and told Maria this.

“Sure,” she said, “people call whales leviathans. It sometimes means a fire-breathing sea monster. But in demonology, Leviathan is one of the four crown princes of Hell. He’s the gatekeeper. He tempts men with carnal sin, murder, and avarice. He is a god of chaos. His direction is west. West, traditionally, being where people thought the dead went because the sun sets in the west so they thought it was the land of the dead.”

“So he’s the lord of the dead?”

She shrugged. “It’s open to interpretation, I guess. All that stuff is.”

But it would fit. He had seen those weird little altars in several towns, like offerings made to some pagan god. Maybe that pagan god was Leviathan and maybe his worshippers were the zombies. It made a crude sort of sense. In Exodus, he had seen the wormgirl, the death-goddess, maybe she was like some kind of high priestess. Again, he was reaching but it all seemed to make some kind of sense, for who else would the undead worship but something like Leviathan? Back in Victoria, where he’d found all those impaled corpses on the green, he also found that old man with the words burned into his back, the signature of Leviathan. And what had the old man said? The one who perpetrated that atrocity said his name was Nemesis, which could be construed as adversary or enemy.

Nemesis…I am Nemesis.

“Yes, to all living things you certainly are.”

“What?” Maria asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing.” Then the obvious occurred to him. “Can Leviathan mean the Devil or something like the Devil?”

“Yes.”