Cannibal Reign (16 page)
Authors: Thomas Koloniar
“Where’s that?”
“Hold on . . . the caption says St. Louis . . . Oh, shit! People are running past the camera in flames!”
“Keep that channel, Marcus. Sounds like it might be a party line.”
“On fire? In St. Louie?”
“It’s what it says . . .”
“Should I lock the door?” Ulrich wondered.
“Dunno,” Forrest said. “What do you think? I hate keeping information from the others. Feels a little like communism.”
“ . . . Oh, now they’re showing somewhere in Southern California . . . It’s all on fire—nope, they just lost the feed.”
“This shit here might freak the women out,” Kane said.
“I’ll lock the door,” Ulrich decided. “We’ll tell them about it if they ask. People on fire won’t play well.”
“My wife just came in from outside . . . she says she can see a darkness to the west. Christ, it’s moving fast. We’ll be going to the basement soon . . .”
“Hey, I’m down here in Jacksonville . . . It’s raining like hell here. Loudest goddamn thunderclap I’ve ever heard in my life . . . and the wind! Jesus, the wind!”
“That’s from the asteroid, you’d better bet!”
“Hey, what about the government? Has anybody heard a damn thing?”
“Ha! The government? Remember 9/11? Katrina? They’re running for the bunkers . . . or out fishing! We’re on our own, pal.”
“Nobody’s fishing today, ass-wipe . . .”
“But he’s right. We’re on our own . . .”
“White Horse calling . . . anyone hear me? This is White Horse calling . . .”
“Go ahead there, White Horse.”
Kane looked over at Forrest. “White Horse?”
“Capital of the Yukon.”
“Earth’s quakin’ like hell up here, folks. A giant crack ripped right through the center of town. Power’s out too and it’s getting dark. Gonna be a long winter, you betcha . . .”
The three men listened for the next hour, and the news was all the same, more or less. The continent was dying and, for the most part, people were saying their goodbyes in surprisingly calm and dignified ways. By the end of the hour, Forrest decided to meet with the rest of the population, and he shared with them much, though not all, of what they had heard. To his relief, most of the women were satisfied to hear it from him and made no requests to hear it for themselves, many of them suspecting things were worse than he was letting on and choosing to remain willfully underinformed.
Later that night, as everyone was milling about getting ready for bed, Andie cornered Forrest at the end of the hall near the blast tunnel door as he was reentering the corridor.
“What are you keeping from us?” she asked quietly. “I’d like to know.”
“Ever read Revelation?” he said with a rueful grin.
T
hree months had passed since the asteroid strike, and the skies had long since grown dim. The average temperature in the Hawaiian Islands now hovered at thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and the ocean life had at last begun to die off. However, there were still fish in the sea to be caught, and the Navy had their hands full protecting the fishing vessels from pirate attack. Admiral Preston Longbottom drew a careful breath before making his response, reminding himself that the people of Hawaii had elected a government, and that a military must exist to serve that government.
“Madam President,” he said patiently, “I am not disagreeing with you, but you must understand that we need to patrol the Islands. There are still pirates in these waters.”
Ester Thorn, now the president of the United Hawaiian Islands, had reluctantly accepted the office six weeks earlier, and so far she was not terribly pleased with the progress they were making toward securing the future of the Islands. The population of 1.2 million was doing well in terms of cooperation with their newly elected government, but there was growing unease over the dwindling food supply, and the announcement that rations were to be cut again had not been well accepted.
“I don’t mean to be obstinate, Admiral,” Ester said, “but I’ve told you before that your men and their expertise are needed elsewhere. If the pirates attack the fishing boats, by all means blow them out of the water, but don’t waste time looking for them. You’ll never hunt them out of existence. We’re bringing half the vessels back into port and that’s my final decision.”
Longbottom sat back looking pissed. The idea of taking orders from an astronomer did not ride well with him at all, but the crotchety old bitch had been elected in a landslide. At least her vice president was Barry Hadrian, former twice-elected President of the United States and hugely popular in the Islands.
At first Hadrian had not approved of the idea of canning the old state government in favor of an entirely new
federal
government, but saw that it was inevitable—the vast majority of people in the Islands were demanding a fresh start. When he began to hear talk that the military element in the Islands was considering militarizing the government, he approached Ester and offered himself as her vice presidential candidate. With his support, the other three candidates, all of them lifelong politicians, didn’t have a prayer of being elected.
“I think what President Thorn is trying to say, Admiral,” Hadrian interjected, realizing that Longbottom was mostly trying to preserve the size of his force and thus maintain his importance, “is that we’re in dire straits as far as feeding the population is concerned, and that your engineers and other servicemen will be better utilized trying to solve those much more immediate problems.”
Dr. Harold Shipman, here in his new capacity as adviser, smiled at Ester. Neither of them had any illusions about who at the table had actually kept the Navy in check to this point.
“Yes, sir,” Longbottom said, still respectful to the former commander-in-chief.
“The wind farms are providing us with enough electricity to run our essential services,” Ester continued, “and the natural gas is keeping us warm. But we’re not moving fast enough on indoor farming. Which is where we must focus our efforts, gentlemen, until we have solved the problem. We’re not going out the way they did at Easter Island centuries ago by devouring one another.”
This had been one of Ester’s campaign promises, and she never passed up the chance to restate it, understanding how real the possibility was of the food running out. By now most shopping malls and grocery stores—most buildings with fluorescent lighting—were on the way to being converted into greenhouses. But Ester was well aware that once their fluorescent bulbs burnt out, there was no immediate way of replacing them. New technology had to be developed as soon as possible, using resources available within the Hawaiian Island chain.
“Admiral?” she said, having a sudden idea. “How difficult would it be to use the nuclear reactors aboard your aircraft carriers and submarines to power a new industrial center?”
Longbottom sat forward, casting a surprised glance at Hadrian. “What sort of industrial center?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s for you and your engineers to work out. I’ve already said many times that I don’t believe for a single moment there aren’t enough resources among these islands for us to sustain ourselves without the sun, but we need men of vision. There are civilian engineers here, but yours are the best and the brightest, and I’m convinced that if we’re to be saved by new technologies, your engineers will be the people who develop them. We still need the Navy, Admiral, but we need them to perform an entirely different mission now.”
Longbottom drew another breath and sat looking at the table. “Madam President,” he said at length, “I’m getting old and I’m afraid I haven’t a great deal of faith in new technology.”
“I was reading about Golda Meir last night,” Ester remarked. “For obvious reasons.”
Everyone chuckled, however dutifully.
“And she once said something that I find applicable to our situation. She said, ‘Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots . . . and diffidence falls short.’ Now, we all know that I don’t make a pimple on Golda’s backside, but I’m smart enough to know that she was right. Your men and women have an abundance of ability, Admiral, and they’ll work to solve our problems . . . but I need you on board.”
Longbottom sat thinking for a long moment, realizing that fighting against the tide would serve no one’s interest.
“Perhaps I’ve grown too fatalistic about the future,” he said slowly. “Perhaps there is a way. I don’t know. But I’ll put together a committee and—”
“No committees!” Ester said. “Committees are the old way of doing business and we don’t have the time. Gather your engineers and your mechanics, your avionics experts and every other expert you’ve got. Gather them in the hangar of one those floating airports you command out there and tell them I want them—what
we
want them to
think
about! And to start thinking right now! To work to save the life of the human race. And forget about bloody goddamn pirates!”
Hadrian sat smiling in his chair, happy to see that Ester had at last found her way with the Navy. “Does that sound like a great enough challenge for you, Admiral?”
The admiral looked at him, a slight grin coming to him. “Yes, sir, Mr. Vice President. But to be honest, I think I’d rather have to fight the cold war all over again.”
“This is a cold war,” Hadrian replied, “as cold as any of us can imagine. It snowed right here in Honolulu last week.”
“I know,” Longbottom said, looking grim. “Dirty, gray snow.”
“It’s a worthy fight,” Ester said. “And we owe it to our progeny to make it.”
“I’ll do my best, Madam President. You have my word.”
“That’s all anyone can ask for,” Ester said. “Thank you for being here today. I know that meeting with me was the last thing you felt like doing.”
“There’s something else that Golda Meir once said, Madam President.”
“Let me have it,” she said glumly.
“She said, ‘Being seventy is not a sin.’ ”
Ester allowed herself to smile at the man for the first time since meeting him. “So then you see, Admiral, why I trust her judgment.”
A
fter the meeting adjourned, Ester sat alone in her office with Hadrian. “You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”
“Not at all,” Hadrian replied. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you knew what I was trying to accomplish in there even before I did . . . and yet you let me twist.”
“You needed to find your own way with him, Ester. You gained some of his respect in there today. Had I done all your talking for you, he’d still be paying us lip service. Whereas now, I think he may actually be with us.”
“In other words, you weren’t entirely on board before this meeting either.”
“This was your sink or swim moment, Ester,” he said with a smile. “Every politician has one. Congratulations. You’ve made it to the edge.”
Ester shook her head. “Me a politician. I swear if I ever see that Chittenden boy again, I’ll crack him over the head with this cane.”
“Who’s Chittenden?”
“The astronomer who got me into this unholy mess,” she said. “If it weren’t for that boy, I’d be rocking in the bosom of my Lord right now instead of having chess matches with admirals.”
Hadrian smiled. “It may well be that the human race will one day owe this Chittenden a great debt of gratitude.”
“That hope lies with the Navy,” she said. “The Navy and a favorable wind.”
T
he last three months had not been kind to Private Shannon Emory, who was now the property of a man the bikers called Brutus. He possessed her in virtually every sense that one human being could possess another. She fought savagely every time he came to take her, which was at least once a day, and he always laughed as he pinned her down and forced himself upon her. She had bitten him once on the neck early in her captivity, and he had beaten her for it, promising to bust out her teeth if she ever did it again. So Emory did not try to bite him after that, though she had vowed to bite off anything he put into her mouth, and he must have believed her because so far he had not yet attempted to do so.
She spent most of her days now locked in a motel room in Mesa, Arizona, where the temperature fluctuated between twenty and thirty degrees. There was no heat in the building, so she spent most of her time sitting on the bed wrapped in blankets. She was allowed to keep her uniform and boots, and had so far been fed decent food, but the selection grew poorer over the weeks, and for the past few days now she had been given nothing to eat but cans of creamed corn and lima beans.
She knew the Mongols had recruited more biker types to their cause and that their numbers were now close to a hundred. They were also taking prisoners for food, literally feeding upon the weak. In the early days, from her balcony on the tenth floor, she had watched the flammable parts of the city burned and the populace fleeing south. Few police remained behind, and those who did were quickly killed off by lawless mobs of men looking to rape and plunder away their final days on earth.
Civilized people had banded together and done rather well for the first month or so after the impact, until their food supplies gave out and they grew too weak to fight, either taking their own lives or being overrun by those willing to eat human flesh in order to survive. The males had been killed and eaten straight away, the females abducted and raped and finally eaten as well. Twice, even the biker motel had been attacked. But the Mongols were violent, Vikinglike warriors. They fought with everything from pistols and machine guns to axes and machetes, teaching even the local sociopaths to stay away.
A few small convoys of military vehicles had passed through town headed south, and the Mongols ambushed a couple of them, taking the ammunition and food. By the end of the second month, Mesa City had grown bitter cold and become more or less a ghost town, people only emerging at night to scavenge for food. Many of these people fell victim to Mongol traps and became food themselves. The Mongols too had begun to forage, sending groups of well-armed men into the suburbs each day to scavenge anything of use. They went systematically through each neighborhood, moving from house to house, discovering many families who had found ways to survive.
The door to the motel room opened and Emory prepared herself to fight yet again as Brutus stepped in and stood looking at her. He wore his long blond hair in a golden braid and kept his beard trimmed closer to his face than the rest of the gang, but he was every bit as grubby and smelly. He was tall and muscular, with blue, mean-looking eyes, like the archetypal Viking.
“Bad news,” he said.
She sat looking at him, hating him intensely. Often, she had considered throwing herself off the balcony, but had so far been unable to bring herself to take that final fall.
“There’s nothing left but dog food,” he said. “After that, you’ll have to eat man meat with the rest of us.”
“I’ll starve, thanks.”
“You’ll fucking eat or I’ll blowtorch your tits.”
He tossed a can of Alpo onto the bed, and she sat looking at it, thinking that the time had finally come to consider the balcony in a very serious way. It would be much easier to do if she were drunk, however.
“Is there any booze left?” she asked. “I’ll need something to take the fucking taste out of my mouth.”
He grunted and left the room.
She opened the can with her can opener and scooped half of the nasty smelling dog food into the toilet, using the bucket of water to flush it down and getting back into the bed, sticking her spoon into the can and setting it beside her on the blanket. She had fought as hard and as long as she could and hated to give up, but there was nothing ahead now but more and ever greater misery.
Brutus came back into the room with a pair of leg shackles in his hand, and she sprang from the bed like a frog from a hot pan, beating him easily to the sliding door, but he was on her before she could get it open, knocking her to the floor with his great, hairy forearm. She scrabbled to her feet and tried for the hallway, but he caught her collar and swung her around, slamming her hard against the wall, knocking her senseless.
He took hold of her ankle and dragged her across the room, where he used his booted foot to smash apart the heating unit, exposing the radiator pipe. Emory came to as he was shackling her to the pipe and kicked him in the face, knocking him over backward, but it was too late. She was caught fast to the radiator.
Brutus stood back up and wiped the blood from the corner of his eye, looking at it on his fingers. “This is the second time you’ve made me bleed.”
“Wait till next time!” she said acidly.
He stood on her free leg and began to unlace her boot.
Emory hammered away at him with her fists, but he ignored her as he finished stealing her boots and stepped away, tossing them into the hall.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” she swore. “You fucking piece of shit! You fucking biker trash motherfucker! Nothing but a bunch of fucking white trash biker fucks! Eating fucking people! You fucking animals!”
He took the blankets from the bed and tossed them over her. “Didn’t have to be like this. All you had to do was go along.”
“Fuck you!” she said from under the blanket. “I’m a fucking soldier! You’re nothing but a goddamn animal!”
Another Mongol came into the room, a winter parka worn over his colors. His name was Gig.
“Something you might find interesting,” Gig said, noticing Emory’s shape beneath the blanket. “We found the green Jeep . . . on the east side of town.”
“What’s the plate number?” Brutus demanded.
“OA 5599,” Gig said. “It’s him. I’ve got some men watching the house now. All the curtains are shut, but there’s tracks in the dust outside the back door. A dead body under the deck.”
Brutus had never gotten a good look at the man who killed his brother, but he would soon be pissing on his dead body. He looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. “Be dark soon. We’ll hit him after it gets late.”
“You’re all animals!” Emory said, still hidden beneath the blankets.
Brutus booted her in the head, not real hard but hard enough to hurt. “Get a house mouse in here to keep an eye on this bitch. I don’t want her offing herself.”
