Cannibal Corpse, M/C

More mutants were massing now. There was no way in hell they could hold off those primal monsters with an M-16; there were too many and Slaughter was pretty sure he was down to four or five rounds by that point, but he didn’t dare take the time to check. From all across the encampments he could hear shooting, screaming, people dying. The Red Hand had superior weapons, but against the sheer number of mutants it was hopeless. The mutants were loosely organized into hunting bands, but driven into a psychotic kill-frenzy by hunger. They didn’t fear death. They celebrated it, glorified in bloody carnage. A wolf pack with only a vague resemblance to men.

Slaughter led Maria away, only firing when they were threatened.

They climbed quickly to the uppermost tier which seemed to be mutant-free. The bunkers up there were arranged so that they had a perfect, unobstructed killzone before them. The only way the enemy could get at these was to climb the hillside or drop down from above. The first bunker they checked was collapsed, the second was filled with sand and had no weapons. But the third was exactly what they were looking for. It was reinforced concrete, sandbagged, with a .50 caliber machine gun emplacement and a barbwire perimeter. Military surplus was stacked along the low walls. Apparently the Red Hand was using it for storage.

It had been years since he had fired a fifty cal, but it came back to him quick enough. He pulled back the bolt and fed in the belt from the ammo box.

“Please…please don’t let them get me,” Maria said. “You don’t know what they do.”

“I can imagine,” Slaughter told her.

In the setting sunlight, he saw a group of mutants climbing the muddy hillside up at them. They clawed their way up, using their powerful arms and swinging themselves in rapid ascension like monkeys climbing trees. There were a series of barbwire perimeters confronting them, but they crawled up and over the first, torn and bloody, but undaunted in their hunt for meat.

“Okay,” Slaughter said. “This is going to get loud.”

Maria was hunched over behind him and now she curled up in a ball and, if he hadn’t known it before, he knew now that she was going to be absolutely no use in a fight. It made him think of Dirty Mary. She would have relished something like this. Oh, she’d have been scared, too, but once her claws were out, he knew, you’d never have suspected it. He was beginning to really miss her…or maybe he was only now allowing himself to admit it.

In the dying light, Slaughter got a bead on the mutants. They were smeared with blood and one of them brandished a severed arm like a club. He opened up and the fifty did its work just fine. The mutants literally exploded when the .50 cal slugs ripped into them. They were cut in half, throwing up mists of blood and bone fragments. A few more tried to climb either to feed on their downed brothers or to get up at the bunker and Slaughter cut them down. He scattered a few more packs, driving them into the shadows and out of sight.

As darkness came on, he could still hear the screams of the dying from the encampments. That and the grunting and growling of the mutants as they fed.

“Maria?” Slaughter said.

She was still curled up behind him, just shaking.

“Listen,” he said. “I need your help here, man. I can’t do it all myself. You gotta pitch in.”

She sat up. “What do I have to do?”

“Start going through those crates and see what we have.”

Hesitantly, she did. She found a few more ammo boxes for the .50 cal, some medical supplies, bottled water, military MREs, some flares, but no grenades. That was the one thing that he had been hoping for. She passed out food and water, arranged some flares for the long night and then just sat there, staring, practically comatose again.

By the time it was fully dark, the screams out there had all but subsided. They could still hear the mutants from time to time but even that was lessening. The hot wind carried a raw, evil stink of death and suffering.

“You need to tell me about these things out there,” Slaughter said, knowing he had to somehow slap her out of her current state.

In a low, weak voice she said, “They’re flesh-eaters.”

“I figured that.”

“Headhunters. That’s what people call them because they always take heads.”

Slaughter sighed. “Yeah. I got that much.”

“They come in packs and murder everyone. Some of the women they carry off to—”

“Figured that, too.”

“They usually attack towards dark like this and the Red Hand knows it. They haven’t been after us in a month or more,” Maria explained. “I think…I think people let their guard down. I think the headhunters knew that and waited for it.”

Out in the darkness below he could hear the unmistakable sounds of the mutants feeding—snapping bones, chewing, now and then shrieking, and howling.

It was going to be a long night.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Out in the compound, it was quiet.