Brightman just sighed and shook his head. “I’m trying real hard here, Slaughter, to see you as a stand-up guy with some twisted, convoluted sense of underworld honor and not some dirty bloodthirsty animal.”
Slaughter just laughed. “You don’t know shit.”
“Don’t I?”
“No, you don’t. Just as you have your laws, citizen, we’ve got ours. You’re good to us, we’re better to you. You shit on us, we bury you alive. Simple as that.”
“Is it?”
“That’s right,” Slaughter said. “I’m your best friend or your worst enemy, but there’s nothing in-between.”
Brightman finally sat down. He did not look amused by any of it. “I talked with some gang experts back east, and they told me some things. They told me who you are and what you are. I know you, Slaughter. And I know you because I can read those tattoos you have. They tell me who you are, where you came from, what you did, and who you did. For example, I know that black diamond on your vest means that you’ve killed for the club. And I also know that the black Waffen SS deathshead on the back of your left hand indicates that you are a member of 158 Crew.”
Slaughter smiled. Brightman had done his homework. The 158 Crew were an elite group of enforcers and contract killers within the Devil’s Disciples. “158” was shorthand for “1958”, the penal code of the federal statute given to “murder for hire.”
“Okay, citizen. You got me. So show me the cheese and see if I nibble.”
Brightman acted like he had no idea what the biker was talking about. He had a thick file on Slaughter, and it was pretty well-thumbed by the looks of it. “You’ve been a bad boy, Slaughter. Your sheet is longer than my left arm. Twelve county lockups on minor offenses ranging from disturbing the piece to street brawls to possession of a deadly weapon. Two years in SCI Frackville for aggravated assault. You split a guy’s head open with… let’s see here…” he paged through the file “…a monkey wrench? I like that. Three more in Yardville for battery of a police officer. This one’s better. There’s a little notation here. Apparently the cop was a narc and he caught you flushing packets of meth down the toilet. When he tried to stop you, you beat him so badly he spent six weeks in the hospital. Nice, real nice. Only reason you didn’t get twenty years on that is because that idiot came in without a search warrant and you, being the good upstanding citizen you are, were only defending your life and property. Let’s see… ten years at FCI Leavenworth for armed robbery… sentence commuted after two years. You got lucky on that one. Witnesses couldn’t be sure it was you so your lawyer managed to have it overturned. Nice. I’m guessing your shithead club brothers had something to do with the hazy memories of those witnesses. What’d they do? Threaten to kill their kids? Rape their wives?” Brightman laughed. “At Yardville you were brought up on charges twice for stabbing other inmates with homemade knives… both times, charges thrown out for lack of witness corroboration. I like that. I’m guessing those other cons were scared to open their mouths. And look at this, another six convictions overturned or thrown out of court—gun running, narcotics distribution, murder conspiracy, assault with a deadly weapon, possession of explosives, grand theft.” Brightman had himself a little laugh. “Slaughter you’re nothing but a goddamned scab on society’s ass.”
“You got it, citizen.”
“A parasite.”
“Sure.”
“A fucking predator.”
“One-hundred percent. So throw me in a cell and get it done with so I don’t have to listen to any more of your high-handed shit.”
Brightman threw the file on his desk. “We’re willing to pretend this file doesn’t exist. We’re willing to ignore the three bodies you left behind you in New Castle. In fact, we’re willing to give you a clean slate if you’re willing to play ball.”
“Whose ball?”
“Mine,” Brightman said, “and those I represent.”
“Uh-huh. Go on.”
Brightman finally got down to it. It was simple, really. Since it was already quite apparent by his path west that Slaughter was going into the Deadlands, they were going to clean his slate if he went in there not just to raise hell, but to achieve a very specific objective: to free a high-level biologist being held by the Red Hand of Freedom in a fortress outside Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. Grab her, bring her back. According to Brightman she was a former employee of the CDC that had been kidnapped out of Denver by the Red Hand. Her name was Katherine Isley, she held doctorates in virology and biogenetics, and she was the only one still living who knew the mathematical model for a synthetic biological agent that could zap the worms out of existence.
“What sort of agent?”
Brightman explained that Isley had been part of a team that produced an artificial virus loaded with a particular DNA sequence that would latch on to the reproductive cells of the worms and literally make them sterile. That would mean, in time, no more worms. The worms—origin unknown, Brightman claimed—followed a very peculiar life cycle. One out of every fifty reanimates (he disliked the word zombie) became something of a breeding ground for the worms themselves. What genetic or biochemical factors determined this were also unknown, only that they were always female. In a very strange biological ritual which was yet to be explained, the walking dead would choose a single female and disgorge their worms into her and die… given their rate of decay, most zombies only lasted so long. Several hundred worms usually parasitized a breeder (which, Slaughter figured, explained that girl on the video back at the compound: she was a breeder). The infestation went on until the worms completed their reproductive cycle. Like ordinary worms, they reproduced asexually by parthenogenesis—from unfertilized eggs. These pregnant worms would escape the host, swollen with eggs, and literally burst, each worm releasing thousands of eggs that were lighter than air because of hydrogen pockets within the cell membranes. The eggs then floated upwards, usually in great clusters of hundreds of thousands, and possibly even millions where they would gather in the lower troposphere, about fifteen kilometers up, and slowly mature. Rain was born in the troposphere and when a good cloudburst occurred, down came the worm larva, most less than an inch in length. The larva would seek hosts and reanimate them as cannibalistic corpses.
The cycle began anew.
Slaughter listened to this and he supposed that Brightman thought it was all beyond him, over the head of an outlaw biker, but the reverse was true. Slaughter’s IQ had been tested by the prison psychologist at Leavenworth and had been rated at 150, which was below genius level but well within the superior intelligence classification. In all his years in hardtime joints he’d read one book after the other so none of what the colonel was saying was incomprehensible to him. His brain worked just fine.
“So I hit the fortress, grab this woman and bring her back?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“That’s all there is to it?”
“Sure. If you survive the walking dead, assorted mutants, and the drifting clouds of fallout. Other than that, Slaughter, it’s a cake walk.”
“You’re a funny guy.”
Brightman told him that the fortress was a former NORAD complex that dated from the Cold War: three stories of steel-reinforced concrete, with another two levels below ground. It was, more or less, a bunker that had been appropriated by the Red Hand.
Slaughter chuckled. Lit another cigarette. “And you want me, some dirtbag biker, to play Delta Force and go on some kind of James Bond fucking commando raid? You’re more fucked up than I am.” He blew smoke out of his nostrils. “Why don’t you send in special ops or something?”