The barrel came in an inch, sweeping back and forth.
Christ, this guy was stupid.
The barrel came in two inches, then three.
Slaughter waited. He rose up, back flat against the wall, the head in his right hand. He started swinging it back and forth by the hair, getting a feel for the heft of it the way an athlete likes to get the feel for the ball he has to throw.
As the barrel pulled back, Slaughter moved.
He swung the head out with everything he had, bringing it around in a fast arc and tossing it right at the guy out there. The other Ratbags saw him move but with their brother in the line of fire, they couldn’t open up. The head hit old Hothead, smacking into his shoulder, knocking him to his ass, and he responded in kind by firing off ten rounds into the sky.
That did it.
That crazy fucker in there was throwing heads and that just wasn’t right.
The Ratbags out there lost it. Even the Hispanic guy who was something of a cool head. He ran around the side of the house, no doubt making for the back door, while Hothead jogged up the porch steps and prepared to bust in the front way. The other guy—the one with the .30-30—was giving them covering fire, just randomly putting rounds through windows hoping to keep Slaughter down covering his head.
Not so.
He slipped out of the living room and into the dining room. There was a door leading from it out into the kitchen. The Hispanic guy would have to go through it to get to him. Slaughter hedged his bets by sliding a chair in front of the door so it would not be easy for him. He’d have to fight his way through.
Hothead was jiggling the front door handle.
The other guy was still peppering the house indiscriminately.
Slaughter crawled into the living room. They were going to sandwich him, try the classic pincer movement, which meant he had to get creative. He dragged the corpse of the one-armed Ratbag into the dining room, then hoisted him up to a standing position. Sonofabitch stank pretty good. Not just the blood and meat but the shit in his pants as well.
Slaughter held him up.
Hothead blew the lock off the front door and stormed in. Slaughter could hear his boots clomping about as he moved around in the living room, scanning for unfriendlies. Then he saw the blood smear drag mark leading into the dining room. He followed it, thinking the biker was bleeding to death.
Slaughter was waiting for him just around the side of the door.
He’d have precious few seconds when Hothead slipped into the room. He waited. And in came Hothead with his rifle raised to fire. As he turned, Slaughter heaved the corpse at him. The fear and confusion were instantaneous. A corpse plowing into anyone would raise fear and disgust and more than a little horror, but these days with the walking dead breeding like flies in a dead cat’s skull, a corpse coming at you was the last thing you wanted to see. The corpse slammed into Hothead and they both went down in a heap. Hothead dropped his rifle, squirming and fighting to get the corpse off him. And by the time he did, Slaughter brought the Kukri down on his skull, nearly cleaving his head in half.
He died flopping in a pool of blood and brain matter.
And by then, the Hispanic guy was fighting his way through the door, firing a few rounds as he did so.
Slaughter was on him.
He brought the blade of the Gurkha knife down on his hand that gripped the barrel of the sixteen, freeing three fingers in the process. The Hispanic guy screamed and dropped the rifle and Slaughter slashed his eyes to running pink pulp and then sliced open his belly with another quick slash. The dying man hit the floor, kicking and shrieking, his bowels bulging from his belly.
A few more rounds were fired from outside.
Really enjoying the carnage by that point, Slaughter dragged Hothead’s corpse into the living room and threw it out the window.
There was no more shooting.
The guy with the .30-30 jumped in one of the trucks and drove like hell, spitting gravel and making his escape. Too bad. He was the one that had popped Dirty Mary. Slaughter wanted him.
Stepping out into the sunshine, he grabbed the dead kid’s ruck and made his way back to his hog. The shadows were growing long and he decided to grab a crib for the night down the road.
Then tomorrow… tomorrow he was heading west into the Valley of the Dead because that voice was getting real strong now.
Chapter Five
He found a rusty mobile home sheltered in the trees about six miles away and, after making sure it was secure against whatever might come, he rolled out his sleeping bag and fell asleep listening to mice chewing on the upholstery. It was a quiet night other than the mice and a lone coyote howling out in the woods. He had bad dreams and he was glad when he opened his eyes and it was light out.
He lay there, smoking, watching dust motes twist in the beams of sunlight and smelling the dank stink of the trailer.
Most days started out the same for Slaughter… dismal and desperate.
He’d wake up with a hint of hope that would turn to sheer anxiety by noon, complete despair by suppertime, and out and out misery by sundown. That’s the way it had been for months now. He’d grit his teeth and close his eyes like somebody on a roller coaster and just wait for it to be over, his head filled with the glory of the old days and wild ways. Most of the time he couldn’t feel a thing. Not happiness or sadness or anything in between. He’d just be numb as frostbite, stiff and wooden, going through the motions, like a corpse that had gotten tired of waiting for the funeral and decided to take a walk. One of these days, he supposed, he’d lay back down again for good.
These past weeks it had been getting progressively worse. Cooped up on the farm with Dirty Mary. Not moving. Not riding. Not doing anything but feeling that almost magnetic pull of the west and the Deadlands. Something out there was calling his name and it wanted him real bad.
It had gotten so that every day was a battle not to give in to it.
But he knew he couldn’t leave until Dirty Mary hooked up with somebody else. There was no way in hell he was taking her out there. Now… that had changed.
No strings.
No responsibilities.
When Slaughter met Dirty Mary he knew she was trouble just like she knew he was trouble. But neither of them had cared because at the time there’d been a mutual need. They were both lonely and scarred-up following the Outbreak. They’d lost everything like most survivors had, and their lives had turned turtle. Slaughter knew she was one mean mama, but hell… you give a starving man a bone with a little meat on it and he enjoys every bite and every nibble. He feels like a rich man for awhile. And that’s how he felt. Like something inside him was actually alive. Like there was hope for a happy ending after all. His intuition, of course, told him to run as fast and far away from her as he could, but he didn’t listen. What his soul knew and what his heart said were two different things.
Now she was dead and that was a real shitter.
Slaughter would have buried her proper, but he figured the Red Hand would be coming back in force to sort his ass out and, truth be told, things like funerals and send-offs just didn’t seem to matter much anymore. The dead were the dead and they had it better than the living (the ones that didn’t move, that was) so you left them to it.
He had some Spam and canned beef stew for breakfast and then went out to his scoot and packed his saddlebags properly for a long run.
It was time to head into the Deadlands.
About ten miles down the road, he found a little town called Freemont and siphoned gas from a pickup to fill his tank. He filled another five gallon can and strapped it to the back of his hog figuring it might be awhile in between fill-ups. Then he toured the town almost casually, looking for signs of wormboys or militias and seeing not a thing except for something weird in the river that cut through the town: some black, shiny, snake-like thing that darted out of the ebon water and took hold of a gull and pulled it under.