Those were the days.
Rumbling with the Pagans in Maryland and the Outlaws in Chicago, blood wars with the Angels and Mongols in California, nothing but pussy and booze and blood.
Lots of turf battles. Ugly affairs to be sure, but at least they were men fighting against men. Ever since the worm rains, it wasn’t the same for the 1%ers. Pickings were thin, the old boys were all dead, and there were things walking that should have moldered in graves long ago.
Kicking the wormboy’s body a few times, Slaughter scavenged the corpse, taking the SS dagger from the torso. It was deadly sharp. He used it to slit the wormboy’s colors from the back of the filthy leather vest. He held them up into the sun. A white jawless skull, fanged, set in a field of red, one socket empty the other with a staring bloodshot eye. The upper rocker read: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And beneath the skull, the lower said: KANSAS CITY.
He stuffed them in his road bag.
He had taken the colors off a dozen of them in the past three days.The farther west you got, the wilder things were. Back in the day, Slaughter remembered, the Devil’s Disciples had gone to gun against the Cannibal Corpse Nation. It had been violent, bloody warfare right from the first, a drug war, a turf war, riders and soldiers on both sides gunned down, beaten, stabbed, strangled, burned. Clubhouses blown up, chapter presidents and officers assassinated. The Outbreak had brought a cessation of hostilities, though. And that was the funny part, when you came down to it. Cannibal Corpse. They all died when Kansas City and St. Louis got dusted by tactical neutron weapons, but the worms brought them back so that in death they were what they claimed to be in life.
Slaughter went over to his bike.
He figured he’d better get back to the farm. Dirty Mary, his old lady of the moment, was probably waiting for him. He’d gone out on a run to do some scavenging and found an untouched case of Dinty Moore beef stew. Mary was going to like that.
The problem was that Slaughter was already feeling restless.
Dirty Mary was all right, but the road was calling to him and he wanted to ride, keep going west, right into the black heart of the Deadlands. The longer he sat still the more he could feel the walls of his cage narrowing even further. It had been like that ever since he was a teenager. He had to keep moving, keep doing something or he got bored and crazy after awhile. The longer he sat still in one place, the more he envisioned a gallows being built in his mind, boards being nailed into place and a noose strung from a scaffold. And he knew it was his noose and when he started seeing it, when it got into his dreams and laid a chill along his spine, he knew it was time to move.
He jumped on the hog and opened her up down the road.
Something to the west was calling to him, but he couldn’t hear the voice yet.
But soon…
Chapter Two
Slaughter’s scoot was a stripped-down, night-black Harley FLHTC with a hardtail frame, straight drag pipes, and a high compression ironhead stroker. She was loud as hell and could be heard rumbling a mile away, but she was fast and maneuverable, and when you were in her saddle, she had plenty of meat.
He shot down the I just outside Black River Falls, rode the clutch, and cut onto the county trunk which was more gravel than pavement, potholed and rough. It cut through the green hills of western Wisconsin and sometimes, when you were high enough, you could see Minnesota out there to the west, hilly and mist-choked like some fairy tale never-never land. In Slaughter’s mind, it was beginning to take on that kind of mythic quality: it was west, west into the Deadlands and that’s where he wanted to go and where it would happen… whatever it was.
Back roads like this… open fields, clustered thickets, deep-cut ravines… it reminded him of the old days when he was chapter president of the Pittsburgh Devil’s Disciples and he took the pack out on a road run.
He was thinking about Dirty Mary.
If he went west, she’d want to tag along because that’s the kind of girl she was. She was a veteran biker bitch for sure, a long-time club lady, fast with her mouth, good with a knife, slick and mean. But under all that she was weak. She was terrified of being alone. Slaughter figured that if he was going, he’d have to ditch her in the middle of the night. He knew Dirty Mary didn’t love him any more than he loved her. They were in it together for bonding, for protection, for sex. That’s how it worked. You stripped that away and they were barely friends. The first time he hooked up with her outside Milwaukee, she’d tried to put a knife into him.
It was that kind of relationship.
The sex was good—rough, raw, violent—but that’s all there was. Slaughter scavenged for food and Dirty Mary cooked it up, he protected her and she took care of him. They got it on, but they could barely stand to be in the same room together. She liked to tell him he wasn’t as smart as Jibb, her last old man, a sergeant-at-arms for the Warlocks out of Florida, and he liked to tell her she couldn’t cook or give head like Joseline could, his ex who had died back in Scranton.
Fun, fun, fun.
There was a diabolic chemistry between them and he could feel it bubbling in him like acid whenever they were together and not slapping skin. Like belladonna and mandrake root mixed, real poison, venom seething and hissing and looking for lives to take. And it was going to happen. Sooner or later, that evil temper of Mary’s was going to piss him off and he was going to hurt her or she was going to slit his throat while he slept.
Blood was most definitely in the offing.
He rumbled up a tree-lined hill, waiting for a break in the foliage because when it opened he could see the farm down there in the hollow and he would breathe easier. He always breathed easier when he saw it. Like home sweet home, dig it, made him feel relaxed. That was, until he got in the door and Mary and he started going at it, dosing each other on hate and circling one another like mad dogs.
Jesus.
Slaughter shook his head. What kind of fucking life is that? What kind of shit is that to be—
What the hell?
He was grannying the hog in low gear, moving slow and easy, when the trees parted and the bushes squatted down and he could see little home sweet home down there. Barn, silo, farmhouse, all knitted up in yellow late-summer fields like a shawl.
He brought the hog to a stop, then rolled it beneath the overhanging branches of a big oak. He hopped off and peered down into the hollow. There were two pick-up trucks parked down there, and when he’d left three hours before to eat some road there had been no trucks of any sort. So either Dirty Mary had made some new friends—Slaughter found that hard to believe—or she was in a spot.
He figured the latter.
He went back to his bike and loaded the Combat Mag, slid it in the Army web belt holster, and strapped it on. He scanned the farmyard below, figuring how he was going to do this. He should have been scared and he knew it. But with the life he’d led and how goddamned pent-up and bored he’d been for weeks now, this was escape. This was a kick. This was getting into the shit and getting in deep.
He moved down the hillside smoothly, going down into a crouch and crab-crawling his way through the yellow grass of the orchard until he got amongst the old crabapple trees and got himself some camo. He waited a few moments to see if anyone was on the watch for him.
Nothing.
“All right,” he said under his breath. “Let’s light this shit up.”
Crouching again, he moved from cover to the silo, stepping easy to the barn and waiting, his heart thumping in his throat. But it wasn’t fear. It was exhilaration. It was excitement. Man, it was like the old days creeping up on a Cannibal Corpse clubhouse to throw some lead around and bust some heads.