“Is that what you plan on doing in the Deadlands?”
“Part of it. The ones you saw were outriders out scoping things. They’ll keep coming in packs like that. Back in the day, the Corpse were in Missouri and Kansas, thick as shit-flies in St. Louis and Jefferson City, Springfield and Kansas City. We fought them out there and we fought them as far east as Ohio and Pennsylvania. But they just kept coming. This time, there’s no law to stand in my way and I’m going to send ‘em back to the grave where they belong.”
“Sounds like you got a score to settle, son.”
Slaughter managed something like a smile. “I do. The Kansas City chapter president was a maggot they called Coffin. He ordered the murders of three Disciples. The shiteater who carried it out was a psychopath name of Reptile. I want both of them in the worst way.”
“Maybe you’ll get a medal for that.”
“Probably a good beating and a prison cell if I get dragged back east.”
Rice fell into silence for a time. “I thought about it, you know.”
“Thought about what?”
“Going back east.”
“But…?”
He sighed. “I decided it wasn’t worth it. My whole command got wiped out. I’d be in for the shit. I’d rate a desk job if I was lucky. Better off to spend my remaining time out here in the wild west.”
“But it wasn’t your fault what happened,” Slaughter told him and meant it. “None of it.”
“Thanks, son. But they wouldn’t see it that way, those brass hats and stiff dicks out in Washington. They’d hang me out to dry. None of them have ever seen eight or nine-hundred zombies coming at them in waves. They couldn’t understand. They’d say I should have known better than to get bottled-up in a place like Freemont.”
Slaughter lit a cigarette. “I was there.”
“Freemont?”
“Yeah, lots of skeletons.”
“Sure enough. Those were my boys.” Rice’s eyes misted a moment. “I scavenged what I could from there for weeks, but I haven’t been there in a couple years now.”
“Nothing there but skeletons.”
“No hardware?”
“None.”
Rice said he couldn’t understand it, that there’d been APCs and Stryker vehicles.
“Somebody took ‘em then,” he said. “Maybe the Red Hand.”
Slaughter figured that’s probably who it was. The idea of the Ratbags with fifty cal. machine guns and rocket launchers, armor-piercing shells and anti-tank missiles was a scary thing.
“Saw a helicopter last week, Blackhawk by the looks of it,” Rice said. “It was heading due west. Probably reconnaissance, spotting Red Hand and zombie hotspots.”
Slaughter didn’t care for that much. A chopper? Way out here? The word back east was that the Army was going to push west but nobody really believed it. Maybe it was so. He highly doubted the military would come after him. Still, it worried him. Maybe it was just egotism whispering in his ear, telling him they had to be coming after him because he was John fucking Slaughter, cop killer and notorious outlaw biker and all around bad boy. A wanted man. But he didn’t believe that.
The old man locked down the doors and went off to bed and Slaughter stayed up. He went out on the back porch and watched a light rain fall, thinking about that interstate out there calling to him.
Chapter Eight
Like the bloodthirsty redskins in an old movie, the zombies came at dawn. Rice saw them marching down the road, forty or fifty of them, and there was no doubt where they were headed. They came up the drive carrying axes and pipes and broomsticks sharpened like spears.
“Looks like we’re in for a siege,” Rice said.
He broke out the rifles—nice lever action .30-30s—boxes of ammunition and single-shot Snakecharmer shotguns for back up.
“Headshots, son,” Rice said. “We conserve ammo that way. Just drop ‘em and move onto the next kill.”
They came on thick with stink and flies, bits of them dropping off in their wild flight at the farmhouse. Rice opened up first, then Slaughter started popping off rounds, shooting, levering, shooting again, dropping the dead in their tracks. Zombie heads came apart in meaty, gushing sprays of putrescence and soon the puddles outside were dark with blood and fluids and bits of tissue… and worms, of course, because as soon as the bodies went down, the worms crawled out, searching for something else to infest and finding only broken husks.
Though the dead were not exactly smart by any shakes, most of them anyway, they were smart enough to soon realize that their numbers were being dropped by rounds fired from the gunports, so they attacked these with fury.
The wormboys came on, charging the gunports, hitting them with their pipes and chewing up the boards with their axes and, when that failed, pressing in and digging their hands through the slots.
Slaughter kept darting from gunport to gunport, popping off rounds until the dead congested again and moving on to the next slot. When they thickened he drew the .410 Snakecharmer and blasted away at them again and again.
But then some crafty little kid zombie crept up under the gunport, reached up and got his or her hand around the barrel and would not let go. Slaughter yanked and yanked, banging the kid off the outside of the farmhouse with moist, mushy sounds and spraying a lot of decay and goo around, but by then two or three adults had the Snakecharmer and pulled it right through the port, tossing it away into the muddy drive.
Slaughter knew that wasn’t a mistake he could afford to make again.
He dropped a little boy that brandished a bone.
He dropped a man with a hatchet.
He dropped twin girls with kitchen knives.
Still they came on, rushing the ports in crazy human—or inhuman—wave attacks.
He put down three more and was amazed that they did not follow their usual behavioral patterns and stop to feed on their own dead. They always had before, scavenging for scraps.
But this time they were interested only in getting at Slaughter and Rice.
A woman with a sloughing skin speckled with purple blotches took three rounds from Slaughter’s .30-30, shots to the torso to drive her back so he could get a clear headshot. But she just kept coming on. Her breasts burst open like balloons filled with rancid milk and her belly split open releasing a tide of foul gray slime, but all that did was piss her off.
He finally got a bead on her and took her down with a headshot that made her scream and gurgle, vomiting out gouts of something like white glistening cheese curds. But it didn’t go the way he wanted. Not in the least. Even with her face shot off and the side of her head hanging by a few threads of gristle, she propelled herself at the gunport with incredible velocity and struck it like a swollen bladder filled with rot, smashing into it, wedging her flabby arm in there, corpse jelly flooding through the port and slopping down the wall.
“Never seen ‘em come like this!” Rice called out. “Not since Freemont!”
He kept shooting and Slaughter did the same until his ammunition was sorely depleted. And by then there were maggoty arms reaching through the ports and several enterprising wormboys or wormgirls were shoving a bloated, blackened infant through one of them. Something with a mouth like a lamprey filled with tiny sharp teeth.
Slaughter blew it back out with five or six shots and then, from the kitchen, they heard a constant thumping and pounding that could only be axes cutting into the door.
They heard it split open.
“I got this!” Rice called, hobbling off into the kitchen and Slaughter kept shooting until he had less than a half a box of shells and the .30-30 was smoking hot in his hands, the air thick with the stink of burnt gunpowder.