And outside, Jesus, the dead piled in heaps and ramparts as more and more rushed in. The thirty or forty Rice had spied coming down the road had not only doubled but tripled, then quadrupled.
There was no way in hell they could hold off an army like this.
That’s when Rice screamed.
Slaughter ran in there just in time to see what remained of the door bursting off its hinges as seven or eight axe-wielding zombies pushed in on a hot putrid wave. He dropped three of them but the others just poured right over the top and Rice was buried in their numbers, shrieking and kicking as they bit into him.
Slaughter ran.
He looked back once and Rice, poor goddamned Rice, they had him in their filthy hands and a young girl opened her mouth inches from Rice’s own and a twisting red worm came out in a slushy bile and slithered right up his left nostril.
The zombies came after Slaughter.
He killed three more, then he was out of shot.
He made ready to die a horrible death.
And then… just as they closed in for the kill… there was a rumbling sound of heavy engines from outside followed by the clatter of heavy machine guns, the thump of grenades and mortar rounds. The farmhouse shook. It shook again. Slaughter was thrown off his feet and the zombies were cast like dice as an artillery round punched into the kitchen and blasted it into wreckage.
Cavalry… the fucking cavalry is here.
But as to whether that was the U.S. Army or the Red Hand with purloined APCs and ordinance from the 25th Infantry, he did not know. Either way, he figured it would be trouble for him.
Boom, boom, boom.
More shells landed. A great section of ceiling collapsed, burying the zombies that had managed to pull themselves up. Even then, they struggled in the debris. Slaughter dusted himself off and pulled himself up to a gunport and saw the action out there. There were four or five wheeled armored vehicles that had encircled the farmhouse. With mounted fifty caliber machine guns, they were chopping up the zombies into gore and gristle. They launched mortar rounds. Built-in flamethrowers on their front ends gushed out twenty and thirty-foot flames that lit up the walking dead like match heads, incinerating them into stumbling blackened husks.
And the rounds came whistling through the air.
Incoming.
Slaughter dove to the floor as anti-tank shells hit the farmhouse and the wall across the room disintegrated into a rain of burning shards and plaster dust and flaming refuse.
The next volley would bring the whole goddamn farmhouse down and he knew it.
He crawled across the floor, kicked through some lathing and loose singed planks, and dove out into the yard, crab-crawling until he saw dead zombies and worms crawling in the grass. He found his feet, running for cover behind a tree as more anti-tank rounds hit the farmhouse and there was a great hot whooshing of air and the farmhouse collapsed like a house of cards, sending up plumes of fire and rolling clouds of black smoke that blew through the farm yard.
Still clutching the spent .30-30, he used the smoke as cover as the armored vehicles moved in, pounding away with their big fifties, lighting up the remains of the farmhouse with their flamethrowers and cremating anything that still had the will to walk.
A zombie came at him out of the smoke and Slaughter smashed the stock of the .30-30 into its face. He broke open the head of a little boy, jumped through a ring of naked women with burning hairdos and drop-kicked a man chewing on his own entrails.
The barn.
He threw the door open and was glad his saddlebags were packed. He had to move. Those guns would be trained on the barn and silo next and he had to be out of there. He fired up the hog and with all the noise from outside, her roaring straight pipes sounded like the purr of a kitten. A zombie that was on fire stepped through the doorway, but by then Slaughter had popped his scoot into gear and throttled up. The hog jumped forward, knocking the zombie aside.
Already Slaughter could taste the freedom of the road.
Outside, not only the razed structure of the farmhouse was burning, but so were the trees and outbuildings, and even the meadows and fields, smoke tangling in the air that was acrid with the stink of smoldering human flesh. It was a crazy ride, zigzagging through the flames and debris and heaped bodies, trying to avoid the notice of the gunners on the armored vehicles. He worked the clutch and throttle all the way, using every trick he knew, carving his path hard and fast, taking sharp corners with the bike nearly horizontal to the ground and then he was flying down the drive and out onto the rutted road.
Not that he escaped unnoticed, for a few mortar rounds exploded in his path far behind him, nearly throwing him off the bike, but then he was on the road and there were no citizens ahead and he figured he had it and he owned it.
Go west, my brother.
Chapter Nine
Fifteen minutes later he sighted the big slab, that beautiful winding snake of pavement known as the I and he squealed onto it, taking the humps and bumps standing straight up with his boots on the footpegs. The exhilaration was such that he felt like opening the old hog up and doing a little trick riding like squatting no hands on the seat or steering with his feet… but no, that was crazy old bullshit from the crazy old days of bullshit that no longer existed.
And he had to get his ass far and away.
The bike roared under him as he took the I mile by mile, the wind blowing his hair back and parting his shaggy beard, making his face sting and his eyes water. Shit, yes. A few bugs slapped his cheeks and forehead and that was all part of it.
He had not felt so free in years.
He thought about Rice for a moment. He was a good guy for a citizen. He could have been a good biker. Too bad. At least he’d been burned up back there and wouldn’t have to wander around with a worm sliding around in his brain making him go cannibal. It wasn’t much, but it was something. At least the old man had been spared that.
Slaughter thought no more about it.
He was feeling really good, really charged, still buzzing from the action. He had that feel-good sort of soul rapture, that pure euphoria he only got after a good conflict. It was like coming down from tripping your brains out on the good stuff. It reminded him of that field event back in the good old days in Harrisburg. The Disciples were there, along with members of the Outlaws and Pagans, the Warlocks and the Dirty Dozen, countless other clubs big and small. Slaughter and Jumbo, Neb and Apache Dan were barrel riding on their bikes, getting low down and crazy, their minds blown clean on tabs of Red Dragon.
That’s exactly how he felt now: free without a care. The way a patched-in outlaw biker was supposed to feeclass="underline" high and proud and randy in the saddle. That was the tribal lifestyle—who rode the best, who fucked more women, who kicked more ass. Absolutely primal, the barbarian life.
The only thing that brought him down was that he could not share it with any of his brothers of the Disciples Nation.
On the good side, the I was clean; there were very few wrecks and absolutely no citizens. That was one good thing that had come out of the Outbreak, it kept the citizens off the road with their cages, cleared away the rice rockets and weekenders.
The sun was getting warm, burning off the morning mist, and he could feel it warming up his arms and all that intricate inking—the snakes and skulls, dragons and tombstones, the bright red swastikas on each bicep overlaying the serpents and gargoyles beneath, the black SS deathshead on the back of his left hand.
He was feeling good about things, starting to think that—