After she swallowed, she shook a bloody finger at Slaughter. “You have not the gumption to raise that firearm at me, sir! For your place is known and in it ye shall lay! A gentlemen would not brandish a weapon at a lady!”
“I ain’t no gentleman.”
She laughed with a bubbling, liquid sort of sound. “I know you! We all know you! You bear the mark! You have been named!”
“Hell, you going on about, Iris?” Rice asked her.
But she only laughed as if she knew something they did not and maybe she did at that.
Slaughter shot her dead and that was that.
“Too bad,” Rice said. “She was a real stick in life and she still had it going on in death. Too bad.”
Slaughter didn’t comment on that.
When they rose back up he stopped thinking about who or what they had been. Walking death was walking death. It was a pestilence and you eradicated it and that’s all there really was to it.
Regardless, what she had said haunted him. I know you! We all know you! You bear the mark! You have been named! What mark and named by whom? He didn’t like it. He tried to tell himself that Iris McClew’s brain had gone to rice pudding, but he could not make himself believe it. First the mysterious face on the video back at the compound (Black Hat, as Slaughter now referred to him) and now that shit Iris said. Why did he have the most terrible feeling that it was connected? That taken separately, each incident was a horror, but together they were prophetic?
The farm was just up the road. A barn thirsty for a coat of paint, an old silo, a broken down farmhouse. Typical of the countryside. This was the face the Midwest showed the world these days.
Slaughter got the old man inside and like he’d figured, Rice wanted him to stay for supper and spend the night, which was okay. Why not kick it for a night, work out the kinks? Besides, Rice seemed cool for a citizen and maybe he’d have some good war stories. The farmhouse was a real mess with tools spread around, green metal boxes of U.S. Army ordinance, racks of rifles, survival gear, you name it. It definitely lacked a woman’s touch. The windows were all boarded-up and gunports were cut into them.
Rice found his cane and hobbled around okay with it. “Why don’t you take care of your ride and I’ll get us something to eat,” he said.
So Slaughter did just that.
He parked his hardtail out in the barn, loving the sweet smell of all that dry hay in there. It reminded him of raw-dogging Dirty Mary out in the barn after some violent foreplay. But he didn’t want to think too much about any of that so he did some maintenance on the scoot and then went back inside.
The old man had boiled water on the stove and drawn him a bath in an old tub which at first got Slaughter to thinking: I smell that bad? But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cleaned up so he got in there, scrubbing and soaping and sudsing the dirt and grease from his hair and beard. He spent a good hour in there, just resting in the warm water and drifting off again and again. When he woke, Rice had washed his clothes—jeans and socks, shorts and oily denim vest—in an old wringer washer and dried them over the stove. Slaughter was grateful… except for his rags, his colors, he hadn’t washed them in a long time thinking that it was only the dirt and patches that held them together.
By the time he got dressed and had a leisurely cigarette out on the back porch, noticing with interest that Rice had dug a trench around the farm as sort of a defensive perimeter, there was a meal spread out on the table. Potatoes, smoked ham, even some bread and fresh beans. It was good stuff and Slaughter knocked away about three plates until it felt like he was about nine months along.
“You’re heading out in the morning, I assume?” the old man asked him.
“Yeah, I got places to go.”
“You could stay, you know.”
“Sure, I know. But you’d get sick of me before long. I’m not much good when I’m pent up in one place for too long. I get some real badass PMS after awhile.”
Rice raised an eyebrow. “PMS?”
“Parked Motorcycle Syndrome.”
They had a laugh over that and it felt pretty good to laugh, Slaughter figured. It had been so long now he couldn’t seem to remember how at first… but then it came, a smile, a widening grin, then it just rolled out and he realized that he hadn’t much laughed with Dirty Mary, things were always too tense, way too much poison in the air, but with Rice it was easy. Just like it had been easy back in Pittsburgh at the clubhouse with the rest of the boys when they got together for some drinking and card playing or went to Church, which was what they called their monthly meeting.
Rice told a few jokes after that and kept things going, then soon enough he brought out a jug of corn mash and they took one pull after the other until they were nicely lit up and laughing about just about everything and it was nice. Slaughter figured if he could take away anything from this day it should be the memory of drinking with the old man because it was something good, something real, a connection made between them. Something golden he could hold onto when things weren’t so bright in the gray winding days ahead.
Soon enough, though, Rice started asking about things. “None of my business and that’s for sure, but I gotta ask you, son, I just have to: what do you hope to accomplish out in the Deadlands? What do you hope to achieve besides your own death?”
“I already told you that. I’m going to kill zombies.”
“And that’s all?”
“What more could there be?”
But Rice wasn’t having that and he sure as hell wasn’t believing it. “I guess I’m wondering what you left back east that makes you so desperate to push west.”
“Let’s just say I got my reasons,” Slaughter told him, wondering then how much he should be saying about any of it. “There’s people that would like to put me in a cage, but I don’t think they’ll come after me in the Deadlands. And while I go to ground, as they say, I can be a serious thorn in the side of the walking dead.”
“I suppose you can at that,” Rice shrugged. “But if it’s the Deadlands you want, you got your heart set on that cold lick of hell, you might as well wait right here. They’re saying the Deadlands start on the other side of the Mississip, but don’t you believe it. They’re pushing farther east every day, inch by inch.”
“I bet they are.” Slaughter thought about that a moment. “Let me ask you a crazy question. You ever seen or heard of a guy in a black hat? Real ugly, face dead-white and scarred-up. Pink eyes.”
“No, think I’d remember somebody like that. Why?”
Slaughter just shrugged. “Got me a funny feeling our paths are going to cross.”
“I know something else that might interest you, though.”
“What’s that?”
Rice licked his weathered lips. “A bike gang. What you would call a club. I seen some of them riding through. Dead ones. But they wear colors like you—leather vests, denim vests… says Kansas City on ‘em, I think. Couldn’t make out the rest on account I was keeping my head low and out of harm’s way.”
“Cannibal Corpse,” Slaughter said.
“Good name for what they are. You know ‘em?”
Slaughter snorted a cold laugh. “You could say that. Like ten miles of bad road or ten years of hard time, I know ‘em. They’ve been trying to push east for years. My club and a few others like the Outlaws stopped them from doing so. Now they’re all zombies and the old boys are all dead or like them. Nothing to stop them. Nothing but me.”