Cannibal Reign (23 page)

“Christ!” he said whipping around. “Look sharp,
Shannon! We got bodies!”

Emory dropped into a crouch, never taking her eyes
from the SUV. “I got movement, John! Around the truck! Moving to flank us on the
left!”

Sullivan moved forward, unable to detect any
movement on the uneven, rocky terrain. “I got nothin’.”

They advanced together on the truck, drawing close
enough to read the words
UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL
SURVEY
stenciled in dirty white lettering on the door. “You gotta be
shitting me,” he said.

“The government
did not
send them out here!” Emory said. “Did it?”

“Fuck if I know.” Sullivan crept carefully around
the front of the SUV, finding a cleft in the earth on the other side. The
fissure was as wide and as deep as a man, a trench running from the edge of the
crater and winding off across the uneven landscape for what could have been
miles.

Emory came around the back of the truck and looked
down into the trench. “That’s what I saw. Somebody jumping in.”

Sullivan slid down into the ditch and poked around
until he found a boot print then climbed back out. “Better get Marty in
here.”

She turned and beckoned Marty into the camp. He
drove up to the orange tent, killed the engine and got out. He walked over and
lifted the lid from the coffeepot. “It’s boiled dry,” he said, turning off the
flow of propane.

He and Emory had a closer look at the bodies inside
the tent, finding their clothes in a pile in the corner.

“Must’ve taken their arms and legs for food,” she
said.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Marty said. “There’s
backpacking food over there by the stove in a box. Why eat the people?”

Sullivan threw back the flap and stepped inside.
“Because you eat the perishable food first. The dehydrated shit will keep.”

Marty looked at him.

“People are perishable,” Sullivan said, pushing a
digital video camera into his hands. “Found that in the other tent. How’s it
work?”

They stepped out of the tent, and Marty sat on a
rock fiddling with the camera while the other two rooted through the surveyors’
equipment, searching the truck and the immediate area near the encampment.

“Where are you going?” Emory called.

“To find their latrine,” Sullivan answered. “It’ll
tell us how long they’ve been here.” Shortly, he found a small slit trench about
four feet long dug behind a small boulder nearly forty yards away. Near the
trench were three rolls of toilet paper in Ziploc bags and a small spade stuck
in the ground. He used the spade to uncover the buried excrement, then went back
to the encampment where Emory was sorting through the backpacking food.

“Find it?” she asked.

“Either those two were here for at least a week, or
there’s some people missing . . . probably two or three.”

“There’s only two sleeping bags.”

“Well, there’s a lot of shit over there. Maybe
somebody swiped the other sleeping bags.”

“Three!” Marty called, getting up from the rock and
coming over to them. “There’s three missing and they’re down there.” He pointed
into the crater. “They apparently died in an avalanche. Check this out.”

He played a video clip of two men and a woman
preparing to descend the escarpment in full rock-climbing gear. They were happy
and excited, all in their early thirties, one white male, one black, and a small
Asian woman. The blond woman from the tent was in the video too, but she was not
dressed for climbing, and the man with red hair was probably the person holding
the camera.

The next clip showed them descending out of sight a
hundred yards or so down the face.

After that, the clip showed an avalanche much worse
than the one Marty and company had witnessed upon their arrival. The blonde was
screaming in the background, and the man holding the camera kept saying, “Oh, my
God! Oh, my God!” over and over again for nearly a minute until the avalanche
ended. From the look of the video, it did not appear that anyone below could
possibly have survived.

“Unbelievable,” Sullivan said. “Who in their right
mind goes down there?”

Marty shrugged and tucked the camera into his
pocket. “Maybe they figured there was nothing else left to do with their lives.
They were rock hounds . . . and this
is
the ultimate experience for a rock hound.”

“And now it’s their grave,” Sullivan said. “So,
okay, we camp here tonight. In the morning we’ll load this food back into their
truck and head south. That hybrid will get better mileage than the Jeep. Anybody
got a better idea?”

“Don’t forget our cannibalistic underground
dweller,” Emory said.

“We sleep in shifts anyway,” Sullivan said.
“Nothing’s changed.”

Thirty-Seven

I
t was pitch-black by eight o’clock that night, and Emory sat against a rock with one of the sleeping bags wrapped around her shoulders, unable to even see her hand in front of her face. They had pulled the SUV away from the fissure so they could see the trench unobstructed, and every ten minutes or so she would scan 360 degrees around the encampment through the NVD looking for movement or heat signatures.

A woman’s scream split the night, and Sullivan came instantly awake, grabbing the carbine resting across his belly. “Shannon!”

“Here!” she said to the darkness. “It wasn’t me.” She turned on her night vision device and got to her feet, scanning the trench line.

Sullivan pulled on his helmet and scanned through his own NVD. “How far? Could you tell?”

“Hundred yards maybe.”

“What’s going on?” Marty said in the inky blackness.

“Ruck up!” Emory told him. “A woman screamed out there.”

“Probably a trap,” Sullivan said, shrugging into his harness. He could see Marty fumbling around in the dark looking for his equipment, pulling a flashlight from his pocket. “If you turn that fucking thing on, I’ll stick it so far up your ass you’ll have light comin’ out your ears.”

“Well, how the hell else am I supposed to find my shit?”

“Try remembering where you put it!” Sullivan said, walking over and picking up Marty’s gear from behind him and shoving it into his arms. Then he grabbed Marty’s helmet from a rock and jammed it down on his head. “Try not to forget your dick.”

Emory smiled to herself. “He remembered his weapon, John. That’s the important thing.”

“Hark, his guardian angel speaks.”

She laughed. “We’ll walk the trench line above ground. Me and Marty on the right, you on the left.”

“I say Marty walks down in the trench.”

“Sully, fuck off . . . anybody seen my goddamn gloves?”

T
hey covered roughly a hundred yards before Sullivan spotted anything telling down in the trench. His fist went up and the other two stopped in their tracks, crouching low to the ground. He peered carefully over the edge of the fissure for a better look, to see what appeared to be a human being lying on the bottom, zipped up in a mummy sleeping bag. Switching to infrared, he saw that it was indeed a trap.

The person in the mummy bag gave off a strong heat signature, so was alive, and there were additional heat signatures as well . . . two sets of footprints glowing eerily in his viewfinder even as they cooled away to nothing, leading away from the bag into a split in the wall of the trench.

“You two in the cave,” he called out, not knowing what else to call the little hidey-hole. “Come out with your hands up.”

No one answered and no one came out.

“What is it?” Emory asked.

“A goddamn ambush,” Sullivan answered. “I think it’s the girl from the video down there in the bag . . . Come out, for the last time!” he shouted.

He heard what sounded like someone beginning to dig in, so he aimed his M-203 and a fired a 40mm grenade into the opening, blowing it apart and showering the person in the mummy bag with dirt.

When the dust cleared, two blasted bodies lay mangled in the trench, their heat signatures already fading, and Emory slid over the edge, pulling Marty in with her. She knelt beside the mummy bag and Sullivan kept watch above.

“Get your light out, Marty.”

Marty shined his light on an Asian woman’s face as Emory unzipped the bag to reveal her badly battered and naked body. Emory began an examination.

“Multiple broken bones,” she called up. “Distended abdomen . . . internal bleeding.”

“She must have survived the avalanche somehow,” Marty muttered in amazement.

“Poor thing,” Emory said, zipping the dying woman back up to keep her warm. “John, there’s nothing I can do for her!”

Sullivan’s face appeared over the edge. “How long does she have?”

“An hour . . . maybe.”

The woman found her hand. “My friends . . .” she whispered. “Tammy . . . Ted?”

“I’m sorry, they’re gone.”

“Find the camera,” the woman whispered, trying to squeeze Emory’s hand. “There’s video of the crater . . . for future . . . future study.”

“We have it,” Marty said.

“Take it to our friends in Oklahoma . . . an Air Force bunker there. Tell them Yon gave it to you. They’re geo . . . geologists . . .”

“There are a lot of Air Force bases in Oklahoma.” Emory said. “Which one?”

“Altus,” said Yon. “They’re at Altus.” She lingered another ten minutes then died.

I
n the morning, they returned to the site and examined the remains of the man and woman Sullivan had blown up with the grenade. Each of them had a pistol and a knife. Another hundred yards down the trench they found a truly surprising sight: a reinforced concrete tunnel in the side of the crater wall.

“Where the hell does it go?” Marty wondered aloud.

“I’m guessing it leads to an old bunker,” Sullivan said, stepping carefully around the edge to enter the tunnel without sliding away down the steep wall of the crater. Emory and Marty followed, all of them switching on the flashlights attached to their carbines.

“What kind of bunker?” Marty asked.

“SACOM . . . Strategic Air Command. If this tunnel doesn’t lead to a missile silo, it should lead to a command bunker.”

They walked along a steel grating until they came to an open blast door, which in fact had been blasted right out of its casement by the asteroid impact. The door itself was now embedded in the concrete on the far side of a twenty-by-thirty-foot living space. The room was scattered with the charred remains of unidentifiable items and a few partial skeletons that lay among the ash.

“Blast wave,” Marty said. “This place imploded and they were incinerated instantly.”

They found another blast door, also blasted from its casement, and stepped into a perfectly round room filled with scorched and flattened electrical appliances. The remains of a concrete island were in the center of the room, with exposed plumbing sticking up through it.

“That was a sink,” Emory said. “This was a kitchen.” She pried open a smashed metal cabinet to find little more than ash and some melted glass jelly jars.

They checked the entire level and every room was the same. All of the doors were blasted from their casements, and the rooms were scattered with incinerated remnants of what had probably once been furniture and human beings. In all, they found between fifteen and twenty partial skeletons.

Sullivan kicked a scorched skull across the room. “Our two cannibals must have been living here when the rock hit.”

“But how did they survive?” Emory wondered. “All these people were cooked.”

Sullivan shined his light on Marty’s face. “What do you think, Mr. Shock Cocoon?”

Marty thought for a moment. “Where’s the missile silo?”

Sullivan pointed back the way they had come. “The silo was at the other end of that tunnel we came in through . . . vaporized on impact.”

“Well, so much for that idea,” Marty said. “Okay, so the blast wave was moving laterally through these tunnels, following the path of least resistance . . . which means if our two psychos from last night were in here at the time of impact . . . they must’ve been beneath this level. So we’re looking for a hatch in the floor, probably one that opens
up
.”

After another quick search of the facility, they located a round hatch in the center of the floor near the island in the kitchen. They hadn’t noticed it the first time because it was hidden beneath a piece of scorched sheet metal. Sullivan turned the round wheel and pulled the hatch upward to open it.

“And voilà,” Marty said, shining his light down a red steel ladder.

“Think you’re pretty smart, don’t ya?” Emory said, hitting him in the arm.

“Simple physics,” he replied. “Who’s first?”

“I volunteer you,” Sullivan said.

Marty shrugged and stepped forward, but Sullivan grabbed him and pushed him aside. “If you got killed, Princess would never let me hear the end of it.”

Emory smiled as he climbed down the ladder. “Careful, John.”

“Yeah yeah.” After twenty feet he stepped onto the floor at the bottom and shined his light down a short tunnel into intact living quarters. “Bingo!” he called up. “Cocoon Boy was right. It smells like ass down here, but it didn’t catch on fire.”

He found a battery-powered lamp on a table and switched it on, filling the room with light as the other two descended the ladder.

The twenty-by-twenty-foot living space was a proper mess and smelled of body odor and excrement. A quick look in the lavatory explained the sewer smell, and Sullivan shut the door. “There’s no water to flush with . . . they’ve been shitting in a bucket.”

Emory kicked around in the trash on the floor, many empty food cans and wrappers, scattered books and magazines. Sour smelling blankets and clothing.

“Only took ’em five months to turn into animals,” Sullivan muttered.

Emory picked something up from the floor. “Check this out.”

The men came to stand on either side of her as she flipped through a pamphlet advertising a company called Survival Estates. It showed the renovation process of a decommissioned minute man missile silo and advertised the sale of individual condos within the newly renovated complexes, all of them sharing a common kitchen area and living room.

Sullivan grabbed the pamphlet away from Emory. “Lemme see that fuckin’ thing.” He stood paging through it. “You gotta be kidding me. Listen to this: ‘Feel secure in the knowledge that no matter what happens to the world above, you and your family will be safe and sound in your own personal Survival Estate.’ Survival Estate!” He smirked and gave the pamphlet back. “Those sorry fuckers upstairs deserve a goddamn refund.”

Emory paged through the pamphlet, shaking her head. “Fucking twenty-twelvers. My God, how stupid. Get this . . . this little room right here . . . it cost them a hundred grand!”

Sullivan looked at Marty. “And I thought
you
were stupid.”

“Oh, it gets better,” she went on, turning the page. “ ‘We offer round-the-clock security, state of the art telecommunications, and guaranteed technical support in the event . . . in the event of any malfunction.’ ” She laughed and tossed the pamphlet aside.

Sullivan chuckled. “I wonder where the repair crew is.”

“I’m wondering something else,” Marty said.

They looked at him.

“Where are the missing arms and legs?”

“That’s right!” Emory looked at Sullivan. “The bodies in the tent.”

“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Sullivan said, heading for the ladder. “We must have missed another hatch someplace.”

Emory was following him closely up the ladder when she heard a pistol shot from above. Sullivan’s full weight crashed onto her and she nearly fell from the ladder with him as he dropped to the concrete below. The hatch slammed above them, and Marty jumped off the bottom rung, shining his light to see a stream of blood running down Sullivan’s face from beneath his helmet.

“He’s hit, Shannon!”

She scurried down the ladder. “Watch the hatch!” she told him, dragging Sullivan clear. “If it opens, shoot!”

She grabbed the lamp from the table, set it down beside Sullivan’s head and pulled off his helmet to get a look at the wound.

“Is he dead?”

“Not yet.” Her fingers trembled as she probed his matted hair. “John, can you hear me? John!”

She found the bullet wound, and to her utter surprise, the bullet had not penetrated his skull, but was lodged in the bone just above his hairline. “He’s gonna be out of action for a while . . . but he’ll live.”

“Thank God!”

“Thank Kevlar, Marty. His helmet slowed the bullet down.” She decided to leave the bullet where it was for the moment, knowing it would help stanch the flow of blood, and got to her feet. “Any ideas?”

Marty took off his own helmet and stood scratching his itching scalp. “We’re rats in a barrel . . . and the idea man is out cold.”

“Can they lock us down here?”

He shook his head. “It’s not that kind of hatch. It’s geared in a two-to-one ratio on this side. That means we only have to turn it half as hard as they do to unlock it. The trouble’s going to be fighting our way up out of here . . . and that’s your department.”

“We need a goddamn grenade,” she said.

“What about the launcher?”

“There’s no way to open the hatch wide enough to fire it without getting shot, and we don’t— Hold on a second!” She took a knee beside Sullivan and pulled a yellow-tipped high-explosive grenade from his harness, remembering something she had learned in basic training. “Something about a centrifugal fuse.”

“That’s what arms it?”

“Yeah, I think.”

“Is the launcher barrel rifled?”

“Yeah, the grenade has to spin in flight to be accurate.”

He knelt beside her and took the grenade, spinning it nose down on the concrete like a top. He did this many times, spinning it as fast as he could without bumping it against the floor. “That should do it.”

“Don’t drop it or you’ll blow us to shit.”

He put the grenade in his pocket and went to the ladder. “I’ll need you to open the hatch so I can throw this thing into the room.”

He climbed quietly up to the top, and Emory climbed up tight behind him, hooking into his harness with a carabiner so she would have both of her hands free to push the hatch up. Marty hooked an arm over the top rung to keep them both from falling and took the grenade from his pocket. “Okay,” he whispered.

She twisted the wheel to unlock the hatch, and though she could feel someone fighting her on the other side, Marty had been right about the gear ratio, so she was easily defeating the other person. She felt the gear come to the end of its turn and whispered into his ear, “I’m pushing up in three . . . two . . .
one
!”

She had to shove with all her strength to lift whoever was sitting on the hatch, and she felt a muscle pop in her shoulder as she strained against the weight, but the hatch lifted nearly six inches before there was another pistol shot. Marty felt a harmless tug at his body armor as he tossed the grenade through the gap before Emory dropped the hatch.