The Cutthroat Cannibals (20 page)

Stone felt himself churned around in the crushing floor of the falls like something being whipped into butter. There was no
way he could even begin to control his direction. He was ripped every which way, bobbing around like a bottle. Stone had no
idea which way was up, or for that matter quite who or where
he
was, as the shock of the fall had knocked half his brain cells into silly putty. He dimly knew that he should be getting
some air about now or it was all over. Some air, some air. He really did need the stuff, you know. But when he opened his
eyes all there was was water. As if the whole fucking world was made of it. And then, though he knew he really shouldn’t,
Stone opened his mouth and sucked in hard, just hoping that somewhere in all that water there might be a bubble or two of
oxygen for him. And even as the water rushed into his lungs to fill the vacuum created, Stone knew that after all the murderous
bastards he had faced and taken out, he was about to be done in by a few quarts of water.

When Stone awoke he was looking into the face of a hideously fat and ugly angel. He knew it was an angel because he had to
be dead after his descent to the bottom of the falls, and because the face was completely white and pure, dressed in white,
with white hair and white skin, white lips. But he had always believed angels to be beautiful, and this one was something
that would make the creature from the black lagoon have stomach problems. The skin was all bloated, dripping with oozing sores
and boils everywhere. The eyes were red pinpricks that seemed suited more to a rodent than a man or an angel. And the teeth,
the rotted black stumps that filled the blubbery lips, looked as if they had all been pulled out, ground up, and glued back
in again at any old angle, because they sure didn’t fit right.

Even as Stone, in his dim-witted state of consciousness, tried to figure out just how God could make something so mismatched,
so repulsive, he swore he was seeing double. For suddenly appearing right next to the first was a second virtually identical
face. And its lips were moving.

“Time to wake up. Time to wake up.” Stone knew he was in heaven now because that was exactly how his mother had always awakened
him in the bunker. Was this what his mother had turned into in heaven? Then he wasn’t in heaven, he was in hell. And as his
head cleared slightly and Stone managed to push himself up to a sitting position he realized that he was in a much worse place
than hell. He was on earth.

And he was looking at two of the most repugnant specimens of humanity that had ever popped out of a womb. As his vision cleared
Stone saw that there
were
two of them, two obese monsters, with not radiant satin-white skin but rotting, pockmocked albino flesh. They were total
albinos, white like chalk, like long-rotted meat, like the larval mucous shells of maggots. And they were fat. Jesus Christ,
had these two packed it in. They looked like hardly more than heads atop great round snowballs covered in the filthy, bloodstained
clothes that draped over them. The men must have weighed something approaching a half ton between them. And Stone swore, as
his eyes seemed to come back into total focus, that they were identical twins. They both had the same ratlike features, the
red junkie eyes like blood on the tip of a needle, flaccid cheeks hanging down around their faces like the jowls of a diseased
rooster. No necks at all, just those shapeless lumps atop much larger shapeless masses.

They smelled too: bad. For the mouths laughed—or something that was supposed to be laughter—and the smell that emerged from
both pairs of lips reminded Stone of something horrible. But even as he reached for the memory in his mind, one of the foul
mouths spoke up.

“You don’t look like an Indian.” The lips hardly moved, as if the white blob of a face had a hard time exerting the energy
to work them.

“I’m not a fucking Indian,” Stone cursed, the question making him angry for some reason. Suddenly one of the albinos reached
out with a fat arm, fingers as white as a servant’s gloves, and, grabbing a piece of flesh around Stone’s upper arm, pinched
hard. Stone pulled back, slapping the hand away.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “Keep your fucking hands off me. I may be down, but I can still cause
plenty of damage.”

“Just testing for your fat content,” the albino mouth answered in reply. “Not too good—your fat-to-muscle ratio is very low,
just like the damned Indians.”

“Listen, I don’t know what the hell you fellows are talking about,” Stone said, trying to sound a little more friendly, “but
whatever it is—and I thank you for saving me, if you did—really I’ve got to be on my way.” He tried to rise again, wanting
to get the hell out of there as fast as he could and find the damn dog, if the creature had survived the fall. But everything
just didn’t seem to be working the way he wanted it to. It was as if his nerves were short-circuiting from the near drowning,
and his legs suddenly collapsed under him when he was only halfway up. Stone fell back onto the ground thrashing in futile
anger.

“He’s got a lot of life and that’s good,” one of the albinos said. Stone had trouble telling them apart except for the fact
that one’s voice was about an octave higher than the other’s. “Makes the meat sharper tasting, perhaps will add the spice
that the lack of fat will mean.”

“No, no, I don’t think so at all,” the other answered, sounding quite depressed, as if he’d been disappointed yet again. “He’ll
just be like leather. I know it. Nothing to sink your teeth into, just a lot of chewing, and spitting out half of him.”

Stone didn’t like what he was hearing, to say the least. He hardly allowed himself to believe what the words implied. Surely
they were playing with him. This was all some kind of sadistic game. He found himself a little less dizzy after collapsing
on his side and raised his head up again, this time keeping his body flat on the ground, like a baby taking its first crawl.
And he didn’t like what he saw. For there were a lot more of them than he thought. There must have been a good dozen of them
standing around in a rough semicircle. They were equally foul-looking and clothed in tatters, almost subhuman appearing with
dumb, scarred faces. Drool dribbled from their open mouths as the hairy faces just stared like cows. The obese twins who had
been addressing him were, Stone saw, sitting in large metal wheelbarrows side by side, which were being held and balanced
in back by two men holding onto each handle, the handles reinforced and extended with metal L-braces to support the elephants
inside the barrows. The cavemen types who had been pushing the albino brothers were still wiping the sweat from their foreheads
though they had put the two down many minutes before.

“What the hell is going on?” Stone asked angrily. He didn’t like being toyed with, like a mouse by a cat. “Who are you two
bastards?”

“The second question first,” the one on the right replied, his thick legs draped over the front of the wheelbarrow like huge
loads of thick white dough about to be baked. “We are the Hungry and these are our people.” He waved his hand around to include
the whole motley crew, all of them so pimple ridden that Stone wished he could have had the Clearasil franchise for the area.
“We are so named because, as you can see”—he patted his huge stomach—“we are always hungry.”

“I am Top,” the other one spoke up, “because I like the meats from the top, you know—brains, the heart, the lungs, and of
course, the eyeballs.”

“And I am Bottom,” the other rotted egg spoke up with his higher-pitched voice from the other wheelbarrow, arms resting on
the sides like overstuffed pillows. “Because I prefer those meats from the lower portion of the animal.”

“And as to what is going on,” Top said with a laugh, so Stone’s eyes shot to the closer of the albino brothers, the edge of
his wheelbarrow only inches from Stone’s face, “it’s really quite simple. We’re going to eat you as we do all those who fall
into the river, Indians mostly. And as my brother says, they’re not very tasty. But you, we’ll see. With a few spices, some
oregano, some bat feces to bring out your natural flavorings, I think I can do wonders.” He smiled at Stone as if the future
roast should be equally happy about his gastronomical fate.

“Listen, you fucking slime,” Stone screamed out, filled with an uncontrollable rage at hearing all this talk of cooking and
flavoring. He tried to rise again, ready to strike out any way he could at the bastards. But even as he grabbed hold of the
edge of the closest wheelbarrow and, pulling himself up, began trying to pound the face of one of the albino cannibals, the
army of subhumans closed in from all sides. Baseball bats, shovels, lead pipes all swung out of the mist-splattered haze,
the roar of the falls like a thunderous drum behind them. It wasn’t exactly the most aesthetic of attacks. But then when it
comes to bashing in someone’s head it doesn’t take a lot of finesse.

The last words Stone heard before he felt something smack into the side of his head and his brain going back and forth like
one of the bells at Notre Dame was, “Watch out, you assholes, don’t bruise his flesh.” Then he was a bloody Peter Pan flying
mad circles in Never-Never Land.

W
HEN Stone came to, he was bouncing up and down, his hands and feet tied tightly, inside a wheelbarrow. How nice of the cannibals,
Stone thought absurdly as he came out of his throbbing black pit of a brain, to give him a ride. He was in the center of the
marching band of squat and muscular maneaters, all walking along like the fucking seven dwarfs. Only they had already eaten
Snow White and they were hungry for more. Ahead of them he could see the two brothers in their own souped-up wheelbarrows
being pushed along by grunting teams of underlings. They were arguing, though he couldn’t quite make out the words, about
just who was going to get what and just how he should be cooked, neither of which was very soothing to Stone’s ears. Maybe
the damned dog had been better going out the fast way in the falls than having to go through what Stone was about to endure:
being eaten. The animal had been too proud in life to have been able to stand that. Its heart would have broken, and hurt
even more than the pierced flesh. And suddenly Stone found a small and dark happiness in the fact that the animal would not
have to endure this.

When they reached the edge of the albino brothers’ camp Stone wished that
he
had perished in the falls too. For the sight was as sickening as the most nauseating photographs he had seen of the Nazi
Holocaust. Bodies were everywhere in all stages of rot and decay. Bones littered the ground from the moment they came into
the square the size of a city block that the slime bastards had cleared and called home. The place looked like the garbage
dump for a slaughterhouse. Only
these
bones were all human, the skulls those of
homo sapiens
, with twisted grins of terror set forever on their ivory faces. Half-eaten slabs of dessicated meat lay stacked in piles
as if for later snacking, while arms with hands still on them were hanging in a line from a pole, drying out in the little
bit of sun that peeked down through the charcoal gray clouds. The albinos had discovered that they didn’t even need to tie
the arms up, just to curl the fingers around and the rigor mortis held the things in place as if they were holding on to the
straps on a subway train.

As the caravan of albinos, caveman dwarfs, and Martin Stone passed deeper into the camp, Stone saw the rest of the “tribe”
walk out from their hovels to inspect the newest catch of the day. They walked stooped over, with animallike expressions on
their faces. Spittle hung from many mouths as they jumped up and down hungrily. The inhabitants of this quaint little cannibal
town looked as if they belonged back in Cro-Magnon days rather than in twentieth-century America. They hardly looked human.

As some got too close and reached out toward the wheelbarrow Stone was riding in, the brothers Albino let loose with snaps
from long horsewhips that they pulled from within their foul flesh-coated robes. The half-humans snarled and pulled back,
loping along, their hands almost touching the ground. What a fucking place, Stone thought, shaking his head back and forth
in disbelief. The depths to which the human race could sink never ceased to amaze him.

Then he saw that it was even worse than that. For as the half-humans ran from the whips of their masters, Stone squinted through
his swollen eyes and saw that the round structures he had at first taken to be some kind of tents were in fact just that,
except their coverings, which consisted of twenty-foot strips attached over branch frames, were made of human flesh. It was
obvious because the builders of the wretched structures had left the hands, fingers, knees, and feet all pressed into the
dark, taut material. Everything was still there like a rich man’s bear rug in front of the fireplace with head, tail, paws
all intact. Just the flesh within, all the muscles, bones, and slime, had been removed, then the quarter inch or so of actual
flesh was dried out in the sun until it achieved a leathery but somewhat flexible hardness that was perfect for all-purpose
weather protection. When stretched tightly around their frames the human skin structures kept out rain, wind, snow, sun. Stone
saw as they passed close by one that the dwellings weren’t exactly sewn together by master craftsmen but more thrown together
any which way with thread made from the dead humans’ own intestines. They were like immense purple-tinted canvases of the
dead, creations of a macabre colony of artists with a bent for the darkest visions of the human soul.

The wheelbarrows moved right through the center of the camp, and Stone saw that with the exception of the albinos everyone
else in the place was of neanderthal appearance. The brothers ruled through sheer terror, force of will, and superior intelligence.
For the dumber but stronger half-men could easily have killed and dismembered the two—what a meal that would make. Yet they
shrank in fear in all directions as the food procession moved along, like long beaten dogs skulking off from their hard masters.
Stone’s nose sniffed deeply a few times almost on its own as if it were a separate beast. Then he gagged. He could smell the
cooking human flesh in the air. He had smelled such a scent before. He’d had run-ins with flesh-eating scum before. Only then
his Harley 1200 had been functioning as had all its weapons systems: .50 cal. machine gun, 89-mm missile launcher, and various
other tricks and treats. But now he had nothing, not even the fucking dog.