By then Moondog was on his feet and he and another Cannibal Corpse were facing each other, both sprayed with gore and decay, swinging, hitting and getting hit, and it was an old-style bare-fisted punch-up as they kept hammering each other. After they both took six or seven good shots each, Moondog jumped up and brought the cleats of his boot down on the wormboy’s knee and there was a wet snap clear as a pistol shot. The wormboy screamed out in rage and Moondog took him by his greasy hair and slid the blade of his black anodized K-Bar fighting knife under his ear and into his brainpan. The wormboy went over dead as a stump. It was an old Marine Raider quick-kill technique from World War II and it still did the job just fine.
While Moondog was so engaged and Jumbo fought viciously to keep the zombies from lunching on the downed Irish, and Shanks tangled with a pair of Cannibals, both Slaughter and Apache grabbed up shotguns from the floor and walked around, dropping the dead men until their guns were empty.
Then there was silence.
The air was thick with burnt cordite, gunsmoke, and the mist of rot that rose from the dead at the feet of the Disciples.
Irish rose up from behind the bar like a ghost, shards of glass falling from him. He had a bottle of Jack Daniels Old No. 7 by the neck. Eyes rolling, face gashed and bleeding, he said, “Rock and roll, my brothers.” And promptly went down again.
Jumbo scooped him up and Moondog led them out into the fresh air.
Slaughter and Apache Dan remained behind, stepping around over a carpet of tissue, blood, maggots, and seeking worms.
“That was the shit,” Slaughter said.
“We’re lucky we pulled that one off,” Apache Dan said, squeezing blood from his long black ponytail. “Had to be twenty of those muthas, John. We better not go diving into a scene like that again or we’re going to come up short.”
“You’re right,” Slaughter told him, “and I knew it going in there. So did Moondog. But these boys needed some seasoning and there’s only one way to get that, brother.”
“I’m just advising caution. This shit is for keeps.”
Slaughter clapped him on the shoulder and led him outside where Shanks had just taken the head off the Cannibal Corpse that Jumbo threw out the window. He tossed the head into the gravel lot where it rolled. “Sheeeeeeit,” he said.
The others were smoking and laughing, enjoying the buzz of the after-action, with the exception of Moondog, who was off securing the perimeter as he always did. They were bloody and dirty, cut and bruised. And as far as Slaughter was concerned, they were ready now.
Fish was telling a story, and as usual it involved sex.
“…so we’re drinking at this bar up north in the boonies, checking out this three-day festival in Eerie, Penn. All the old bands are up there—Molly Hatchet, Foghat, even Mountain.” Fish went on, “Must’ve been… what? Fifteen years ago. Yeah, at least. So I’m up there with Charley Sweet and Creep—God rest their souls, man—and we’re at this bar getting pissed, just juiced and sloppy, right? Creep… oh, old Creep… never had any respect for his dick. He got his eye on this Indian bitch hanging around the bar. Don’t look like much to me—real dark, long hair, kinda chunky. Doesn’t do shit for me, that one.
“But Creep? Hell, he’s in love. You remember Creep, motherfucker always had an eye for the ladies. If they had a hole at the bottom, they were his type. So pretty soon him and this squaw are hitting it off. Charlie and me just shrug, right? Whatever gives him wood, that’s his business. Maybe an hour before last call, Creep and his Squaw, both pissed to the gills, disappear. Next day—it’s not even noon—Creep’s at the bar throwing back hooks of Wild Turkey, just staring off into space. He keeps shivering all the time, you know, like something’s crawling on his skin. ‘You nail that stuff?’ Charlie asks him. Creep just nods. ‘Any good?’ Charlie asks. Creep, he turns to us… and that look on his face! Shit! Like maybe he’d just eaten a turd sandwich. That bad. ‘Yeah,’ Creep says, ‘we were all over each other last night. Did it in the dark. Fucked like hogs, we did. I wake up this morning next to her and that’s when I realize this pig ain’t even an Indian.’ Charlie looks at me. We both look at Creep. ‘Not an Indian? She was dark like one,’ I say. ‘Sure she was,’ Creep says. ‘Except I wake up this morning and I see her in the light. I mean, I really see her in the light. That’s when I see she ain’t no fucking Indian, man, just a filthy white woman, dirty black. In fact, only clean spots on her were her tits, twat, and lips.’ Creep, he excused himself then. Had to go puke again, you see.”
“Bullshit,” Shanks said while the others laughed.
“Happened just the way I said it,” Fish told them, laughing. “Some time, I’ll tell you about that hooker with the three tits.”
Jumbo was holding up Irish, who was coming around pretty good by then. “I’m okay, my brother, I’m okay. I was just getting warmed up in there. Just getting my sea legs,” he said, taking two steps and going down again. Jumbo scooped him up like his bride. Irish stroked his bald head. “You’re beautiful, man.”
“Put him in the Wagon,” Moondog told Jumbo.
They went back to the War Wagon and their bikes and nobody even mentioned cutting the patches off the Cannibal Corpse members. When they got Irish in the Wagon along with his bike, and after Jumbo had attended to their wounds and his own, Apache Dan, as road captain, told Shanks he was chase, which gave Fish a little time to get out in the wind on his scoot.
“Shit,” Shanks said.
“We’re going to each take our turn on chase,” Slaughter said so everyone could hear it.
Once they had the Wagon secured, they kicked their bikes over and formed up. “Let’s do it,” Slaughter said and off they went, into the wind, into the day, cutting deeper into the Deadlands to whatever came next.
Chapter Twelve
Thick as summer locusts, the dead moved up the road in an enraged swarm. Blown by desert-hot winds, they shambled forward en masse in clouds of dust to meet the invaders, pushing ever closer with a yellow, subterranean stink of mortuary spices. It was Slaughter who saw them at a distance with his Minox binoculars. Men, women, and children, erupting in an army from the city limits of Copton, Minnesota like a flurry of hollow-eyed wraiths breaking out of a midnight cemetery. He got the bikes and their riders into the Wagon.
Since there was no way around, they were going right through.
“We’ll slice ourselves a path right through with our cow-catcher,” Moondog said. “Gonna be ugly, but it’s the only way.”
The closer they got, the thicker the swarm was until they could see hundreds of them, chalk-white funeral sculptures bearing the stigmata of the grave, stalking out like bone-pale mantises stuffed with dry grasses and withered weeds, semi-human ghouls on the march.
All of the Disciples were gathered up front as Moondog pushed the Wagon further, gathering up speed, but not too much, knowing he had to have enough velocity to punch through the horde.
Slaughter waited, tensed like the others.
He’d never seen so many undead in one place before and he would have been lying if he did not admit to himself that he was scared, really scared. Even the wormboys that attacked Rice’s farmhouse had been a drop in a bucket compared to this. And what really bothered him was that it seemed almost as if they knew the War Wagon and its outriders were coming. That was crazy but he did not honestly think the idea sounded as crazy as it should have under less trying circumstances.