Cannibal Reign (17 page)

Thirty

T
he basement was cold, but Marty and Susan spent most of their time cuddled together beneath lots of blankets, so it wasn’t unpleasant. The only time the cold was a genuine bother was when they had to come out from the under the covers to go to the bathroom or to wash up. They usually kept a supply of food by the bed along with the camp stove, so they could keep warm while preparing their meals.

Their time together since the asteroid strike had been good, and they had made love many, many times over the past few months, more times than Marty had in all the rest of his life. By the sixth week Susan was pretty sure she had conceived, but she chose not tell Marty about it. The end was drawing near, and knowing that she was pregnant with his child would only make his job more difficult when the time came.

The food had begun to run low after the first couple of months, and she went to sleep each night hoping never to awaken again, but each morning she awoke to find him there in bed wrapped tightly around her. She did love him, though not in a passionate kind of way, and their lovemaking had been a wonderful way to pass the days and nights. Each Friday night they had even been able to watch a DVD on Marty’s laptop until the battery finally went completely dead.

Then one disappointing morning Susan awoke to find that Marty had left the house during the night, to scavenge around the neighborhood by flashlight in search of food and supplies, and in doing so managed to scare up enough food to get them through another week. It had been difficult for her to do, but she feigned happiness. She felt terrible because she knew how badly he wanted there to be a future for them, and she knew he was perfectly willing to live with her there in that basement for the rest of their lives if that was what it took.

“You do understand,” she had gently said the week before, “that there has to be an end to this, right?”

“I do,” he answered heavily. “But will you let me fight for us?”

“Of course,” she said, touching his pained face in the candlelight. “So long as you’ll keep your promise to me.”

“I will,” he said, actually meaning it, for by then he had seen things on his numerous forays into the neighborhood, sights that chilled him to his core. Partially butchered corpses, heads stuck on fence posts, and entire families gathered together in bedrooms, dead of murder-suicides. Soon he would be forced to venture too far from the house at night to risk leaving her alone and undefended.

The light had faded outside the glass block windows, and Marty got up to cover them so they could light a candle without the risk of the light showing outside. The nights were pitch-black now, and the slightest hint of light seemed visible for miles and miles, though distance was extremely hard to judge in that kind of darkness. He slipped in beneath the blankets and wrapped himself around her, placing his hand flat on her belly where he knew that his child lived.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“I haven’t told you about the time I went to Yosemite with my scout troop yet. Would you like to hear about it?”

“Absolutely,” she said, lacing her fingers through his on top of her belly and rolling to her side to face away from him, now realizing that he knew she was with child.

As she listened to him telling her of his trip to Yosemite, tears began to pour from her eyes, for she had sensed a change in him, a change in his tone of voice as he told the story, almost as if he were telling it to a little girl whom he loved very much, and she knew that he had chosen tonight.

Halfway through the story, he stopped and said, “Susan, will you marry me?”

She rolled over, wrapped herself around him and whispered, “Of course I’ll marry you!”

He squeezed her and she squeezed him back.

“I love you!” she said suddenly, feeling the emotion more intensely at that moment than she had imagined possible.

“You are my entire life,” he told her. “All that I ever was or could ever have been was meant for you.”

That was more than she could take, and she began to weep openly, kissing him and wriggling her pajama bottoms down for one last time. They made love by candlelight, their tears mixing together as they kissed and said their vows to one another. They agreed to name the child Purity.

Susan fell into a deep sleep a short time later, and he lay beside her running his fingers through her hair and watching her sleep peacefully in the soft yellow light of the candle. He did not know who had been watching the house all that day, but he knew with absolute certainty that they would never, ever harm his wife or desecrate her body.

“I love you, Susan,” he whispered, his throat tight as the tears ran down his face. “And I love Purity. I love you both more than any man has ever loved his family.”

He blew out the candle, and Joe’s pistol went off a second later.

He then got quickly out of the bed and opened the cans of Coleman fuel, pouring them all over the mattress and the counterpane, knowing his way in the darkness by now as well as any blind man knew his own bedroom. He ran up the stairs and opened the last of Joe’s gasoline, pouring it down the stairs. He flung more gasoline around the lower level of the house, then took a road flare from the kitchen counter, popping it alight and tossing it into the basement as he ran for the back door.

The basement erupted in a blast of white flame that shot up the stairs and quickly engulfed the entire lower level of the house. Marty dove from his back porch into the dirt and scrabbled to his feet, grabbing up the carbine and slinging it over his shoulder. He was quick to get out of the light of the flames engulfing the house, running through his neighbor’s backyard by the light of the fire. He ducked quickly into the second house over and made his way upstairs, where he took up a firing position in one of the windows, watching for those who had come to eat his family.

When he saw three men in biker colors crossing the street with shotguns over their shoulders, he became so furious with himself for not hiding the Jeep that he nearly jammed Joe’s .45 up under his own chin. Instead, he quickly unshouldered the carbine and took aim at the closest Mongol. He squeezed the trigger and the biker jerked as though he had been stung by a wasp, grabbing at his neck and falling to the ground. The other two men turned and ran back across the street, but Marty was pretty good with the carbine now. He shot them down before they were able to make it to cover.

Then something hit him between his shoulder blades, and as he fell over on the floor in agony, he saw a large figure standing over him with crowbar.

Brutus picked him up from the floor with one arm and held him against the wall by his throat. “Now I got you, motherfucker, and you’re gonna pay for killin’ my brother!” He slugged Marty in the stomach and threw him to the floor.

“I didn’t!” Marty gasped. “It was him . . . him!”

Brutus paused before dropping his boot against the back of Marty’s neck. “Him who, asshole?”

“Jeep guy,” he groaned. “Dead under my deck!”

Brutus remembered that Gig had mentioned a body under Marty’s deck, so he jerked him to his feet and threw him into a chair.

“What Jeep guy?”

“Him,” Marty choked, his gut feeling as though he’d been run over by a car. “He tried to take my house . . . my wife.”

“You’re tellin’ me you killed the fucker who owns that green Jeep?”

“Jeep sure ain’t mine, mister.” Marty was still gasping for air, holding his belly. “It’s got California plates. He was a Secret Service agent . . . followed my wife back from JPL . . . check his wallet if you don’t believe me. He was a total psycho!”

Brutus stood thinking it over. If Marty’s story was true, he didn’t exactly owe him any favors now that he had killed his three men in the street, but he might be willing to let him live . . . for a while.

“Okay, motherfucker,” he said, grabbing Marty’s coat and hauling him to his feet. “We’re gonna check your story out. If that cat ain’t Secret Service, you’re gonna wish I’d broke your goddamn neck!”

F
ive minutes later Marty was on his knees in the street in front of his burning house, his hands tied behind his back as Brutus and another biker stood examining Paulis’s Secret Service ID.

“Don’t make no sense,” Gig said. “I saw a broad with red hair at the rest stop getting out of the Jeep. She was telling the Army to shoot us.”

“That had to be my wife!” Marty blurted, conjuring his lie off the cuff. “He drove her back from Caltech. Look, I’m an astronomer. I’m the guy who took the story public. My wife worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Secret Service gave her a ride home the day before the asteroid hit. A few days later he came back and tried to take her for himself. She’s actually the one who shot him, not me.”

Brutus and the other biker stood looking at each other.

“This ID sorta proves he’s telling the truth,” Gig said. “It explains how that bastard was able to kill so many of our bros.”

“So where’s your old lady now?” Brutus demanded.

Marty started to cry, having blocked it from his conscious thought until that moment. “She’s down in the basement,” he sobbed. “Our baby . . . I shot her . . . just kill me already.
Get it over with!
”

“Put him in the truck,” Brutus said, strangely conflicted. “I’ll decide about him later.”

Thirty-One

L
ife belowground for Forrest and his flock had settled into a pleasant, if a little boring, routine within a few weeks of the impact. The children attended school with Andie for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon every day, and the mothers experimented with the food they were allotted to cook for each meal.

Mealtime, especially dinner, was everyone’s favorite because it was story time. They took turns telling stories about themselves or someone they knew. Sometimes the stories were funny and sometimes they were very sad, but it helped them get to know one another and to remember that they were human beings with histories and memories. And most importantly, it helped to pass the time.

At other times they read, watched movies, worked puzzles or played games, and everyone took turns riding the bicycle generators. The women also helped watch the monitors when the soldier assigned to Launch Control wanted to put his head down for a nap, or to step out and stretch his legs. In Forrest’s case it was usually to smoke a cigarette in the cargo bay.

A few of the women were even learning to knit from Maria Vasquez, a skill she had thought would be important for the children to eventually learn as well, having seen to it that a lot of yarn had made its way down into the silo. She had also begun teaching some of the other children to speak Spanish in the evenings.

Late night was the favorite time for the adults. After the children had been put to bed, they almost always played cards, and each of them was allowed either a small bar of chocolate or a shot of whiskey. Almost every mother had someone she shared with, so they could all have a little of each. It wasn’t much, but it was something to look forward to. Euchre and strip poker were favorite card games, but it was agreed that no one would strip past their underwear, the married women especially adamant.

There were a few other rare treats held in store, like extra bottles of wine, but Forrest held these items secret in the cargo bay—where none of the civilians were permitted for security reasons—and told them they would have to wait for Thanksgiving and Christmas to find out what they were.

One morning three months after impact, Danzig stepped into the cafeteria where Forrest and Veronica were working on a large jigsaw puzzle with some of the children. “You’d better come have a listen to this, Jack.”

“What’s up?” Forrest said, getting up from the table. Veronica followed them out of the room and down the hall toward Launch Control.

“Picked up an odd radio signal,” Danzig said. “In Morse code, all numbers.”

“An encrypted code, probably military.”

“Maybe, but Wayne says it’s a conversation.”

“That is odd.”

They stepped into Launch Control, where Michael and the rest of the men were standing around listening to the steady stream of electronic dots and dashes. Ulrich was sitting at the console scribbling down the numbers as fast as they were being transmitted.

“Hey, dude,” Forrest whispered into Danzig’s ear. “You’re getting a little ripe.”

Danzig smelled his pits. “It’s that crappy deodorant we bought. I’ll switch to antiperspirant.”

“What do we got, Stumpy?” Forrest said, putting a hand on Ulrich’s shoulder.

Ulrich waved at him to shut up, trying to keep up with the telegraphers. “It’s a conversation,” he said during a brief pause. “Two different hands, both experts.”

“Different hands?” Michael asked.

“All telegraphers have a different pace,” Kane explained. “Their own rhythm.”

“You mean he can tell the difference between who’s tapping?” Michael said. “It all sounds exactly the same.”

Ulrich shushed him as the transmission began again, and a couple of minutes later the conversation stopped completely. “Looks like that’s it for now,” he said, sitting back and looking at the stream of numbers on the pad. “They were deciphering during all those short pauses, so they’re probably using an agreed-upon text, but we don’t have the software to crack a code like that.”

“Can I see what you wrote down?” Melissa asked from where she stood in the doorway with Laddie.

“Sure, honey.” Ulrich reached between the men to hand her the pad.

“How did you find the signal?” Forrest asked.

“They’re using such a high frequency, I almost didn’t. It was an accident, really.”

“Could they hear us if we tried talking to them?” Michael asked.

“Not sure,” Ulrich said. “I’ve got no way of knowing how far away they are. But it doesn’t matter. We’re not breaking radio silence.”

“We’ll continue to monitor that frequency,” Forrest said. “You never know.”

L
ater that night Forrest was down in the electrical room preparing for his ride on one of the bicycle chargers when Veronica came in and shut the door, standing with her back against it.

“Come to take a spin?” he said.

She shook her head. “Missed you at cards tonight.”

“I felt like hanging out alone in the LC.”

“One of those nights?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

She pushed away from the door and walked over to him, putting her hands on his chest. “I’ve decided what I want.”

“Oh? And what’s Michael have to say about it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters!”

“Why? You said I needed to figure what I wanted . . . Now I have and you’re flipping the script on me.”

“Flipping the script?”

“Don’t dodge the question.”

“Much as I wish I felt otherwise, Veronica, I’ve got a lot of respect for the man. He’s a huge part of why we’ve been so successful to this point. His counseling sessions have probably averted two or three nervous breakdowns already, and I can’t believe how popular those stupid jigsaw puzzles are.”

She stood looking at him. “Jigsaw puzzles? I’m trying to give myself to you, and you’re talking about jigsaw puzzles?”

“I’m talking about respect, honor, integ— No, check that. One man’s integrity is another man’s bullshit excuse. Loyalty. The man’s earned my loyalty.”

“So
loyalty’s
what’s changed since three months ago when you jammed your tongue down my throat?”

He frowned. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“You know, you’re a real piece of work,” she said, stepping back. “You promised me, Jack. Remember? Remember all that bullshit about not repeating or breaking promises?”

“Unfortunately I do,” he said, lowering his gaze. “And I’m sorry.”

“So I don’t rate the same respect that Michael does. Or is it a guy thing? Bros before hos?”

He looked at her. “It sure as
hell
isn’t that.”

“You’re the only reason I’m even down here, Jack. And now I find out it’s been one big mind fuck.”

“Okay, stop! That’s taking it too far. I’ve never been anything but kind to you.”

“Until now. Until you made me feel like a complete fucking idiot.” She turned around, walked out of the room and shut the door behind her.

Forrest stood looking at the door. “An absolutely impossible situation,” he said in frustration, reaching for his shirt to fish out his pack of Camels.

Veronica came back in just as he was about to light up. She turned to close the door and stood with her back to him, as though she were unsure if she should speak.

He waited, suspecting that she was really going to let him have it this time.

“Do you know what?” she asked quietly.

“What?”

She turned around looking very serious. “You just got punked so fucking bad.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said, the cigarette dangling from his lip.

“Michael and I split up, you dope! You haven’t heard? He wants to be with Karen.”

“I’m the last one to hear about everything down here, and it’s giving me a case of the red ass.”

“Oh, stop whining. You wanted to be in charge.” She came flouncing toward him and fell into his arms. “I’m yours at last,” she said dramatically. “Yours at last, Jack.”

He stood holding her with a stupid grin on his face, and took the cigarette from his lips. “You laid me lower than whale shit a second ago. That was cruel.”

“I couldn’t resist,” she said, smiling, gazing into his eyes. “I had to see how you’d react. And I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t turned me away, by the way. I’d have kept you but I’d have been disappointed.”

“Kept me?”

“You’ve been mine since the day you set eyes on me, Jack Forrest, and don’t even
try
to deny it.”

“I seem to remember turning you away a minute ago,” he said, his lips only inches from hers now as he stared back into her soft brown eyes.

“And it killed you. I could see it on your face.”

“You’re the most beautiful goddamn woman I’ve ever seen,” he said, kissing her.

“I want you right now,” she said, suddenly wanton. “Right here!”

“But I need to go get—”

“I’ve come prepared,” she said with a grin, pulling a condom from her pocket.

They dropped their pants and Veronica turned around, taking hold of the handlebars on the bike.

“Take me now,” she whispered. “Hurry, before I fucking scream.”

He entered her from behind and she reached back with both hands, pulling him against her. “Oh, my God!” she whispered.

She began pushing back and forth. After a couple of minutes they were both breathing heavily, their rhythm growing clumsier with each stroke until Veronica gasped in climax, sinking toward the floor barely able to grip the handlebars. Forrest held her up the best he could, finishing only a few seconds behind her, groaning deeply, both of them dropping to the floor where they lay in one another’s arms on the cold concrete, their pants bunched up around their ankles.

“Holy shit,” she panted. “I almost passed out.”

He was holding handfuls of her hair, still breathing hard into her chest. “I never came so hard in my fucking life,” he chuckled. “It actually hurt. Fuck, that was a long time coming.”

“Again,” she said, laughing as she tried clumsily to get up. “We have to do it again.”

“Not here,” he said. “In the missile silo. I don’t want to be interrupted.”

“That seems to be the popular place,” she said, working her pants back up over her thighs. “Just don’t take me to your usual spot.”

“What usual spot?” he said, standing and pulling up his pants. “I haven’t been with anybody but my wife in twelve years.”

“Really?” She grabbed his face and kissed him. “I thought that you and Andie . . .”

“She’s never asked and I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to.”

“So how long has it been for you?”

“More than two years. Almost two and a half.”

“Oh, you poor baby,” she said, hurting for him. “Well, let’s get you caught up.”

They stopped at the door and had a long, tender kiss. “I’m so fucking glad you found me,” she said softly.

“It’s not fair,” he said. “The world’s dead and we’re down here feeling like this.”

“Isn’t it what you planned?”

“This? Hell, no. I didn’t think we’d survive the fucking impact!”