Cannibal Corpse, M/C

She was very uncomfortable with it all and he could see that. He didn’t know what to think about it all. He had never in his life believed in the Christian Devil. He had always pretty much associated it as being symbolical for the animal side of men and their primal past. With all he had seen, was he now ready to believe in something as intrinsically offensive to a reasoning mind as a demon or the Devil himself? He wasn’t sure. He really wasn’t sure. Maybe not the Devil, but perhaps the sort of thing that had inspired such belief. Because it really fit. All of it did. Frank Feathers had told him of the brutal murders in Crabeater Creek in association with the Skeleton Man. The murder part fit. The chaos thing did, too, because the worm rains had certainly created chaos. And the west being the Land of the Dead…well, that was certainly true enough.

If what that worm-witch had said was true, then Black Hat was expecting him, knowing that, inadvertently, Slaughter was following him. They were going to meet. Slaughter knew that. And it was going to be an ugly affair when they did. Who was he to fight something like Leviathan? He did not know. Yet, he almost felt that it was fated.

But one thing was for sure: he wasn’t about to ascend the throne of death. It wasn’t his calling. If he had one, it was to purge Leviathan from the world.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The shadows were growing very long and they knew they weren’t about to spend the night in the hut with the corpse of the worm-witch, so they struck out for something better. And about that time, they heard screams coming from across the encampments. The sound of gunfire. Down in the mud bowl below people were running. Shouting. It was coming from every direction.

Maria was nervous.

So was Slaughter.

He led her up to the next tier and they came across a man lying in the dirt. His throat was torn out and recently, they knew, from the blood pooling around him that was still fresh, still very wet. Another man was tangled in the barbwire. Like the first, he was dressed in fatigues. Ratbags. There was an arrow in his back. Not a modern streamlined thing but a crude shaft that looked like it had been carved from a stick of wood, but deadly just the same.

His head was missing.

What the hell is this now?

“We have to find a place to hide!” Maria said. “We have to hurry!”

“What’s going on?”

She looked around frantically, her eyes beady and filled with fear. “Mutants,” she said. “Headhunters.”

Slaughter was going to ask her what she was talking about and then, from below, near to the hut, a man ran screaming and four hobbling shapes took him down. He saw that they were both men and women, judging from the pendulous breasts on a couple.

And then Maria cried out.

A woman came running from a bunker in their direction, a look of absolute desperation and absolute horror on her face. And it didn’t take long to see why: the mutants were hunting her.

A trio of them hemmed her in and took her down.

Slaughter got a good look at them.

None of them were more than five feet in height. They were thick-bodied and bow-legged, apelike, with long dangling muscular arms. They were all naked, bodies greased with clotted gray mud that was so thick in places it was cracking open like parched earth. Where the mud had worn away he could see that their skeletons were exaggerated, jutting, their seamed yellow skins barely covering the architecture of bones beneath. Their hair was long and tangled like ditchweed, knotted up ritualistically with sticks and bonepipes, pulled into crude roped dreadlocks with snakeskin thongs and feather clusters.

He fired on semi-auto, busting two 5.56 mm slugs into the back of one of them. The creature—a male—jerked from the impact, but did not go down. He turned and snarled, bearing a mocking grin of crooked, protruding teeth and loops of saliva. The incisors and canines were sharp and doglike.

As the other two mutants literally tore the poor woman apart, this one charged with a hatchet in its gnarled hand.

Slaughter did not hesitate: he fired on full auto, spraying the mutant in the chest. This time the creature went down, making a low grunting sound that could have been pain or pleasure or both. He rose back up, spilling blood from his wounds, and Slaughter put three more in his head and he pitched into the mud, convulsing.

The other two had succeeded in eviscerating the woman now and were fighting over her entrails. A couple more, excited by the smell of blood, loped over there and two more began sniffing around the corpse of the one Slaughter shot. One of them chopped off the woman’s head with an axe and held it high like a trophy.

“C’mon!” Slaughter said, dragging Maria to her feet. “Don’t fold up on me for chissake!”