Cannibal Reign (25 page)

“Ambush central, Constantine. I’m afraid it’s up and over or not at all . . . over.”

A simple glance over her shoulder told Melissa that Forrest was no more shaken by this transmission than by the first. “Have you heard these guys already too?”

“We’ll try again after dark, Jawbreaker . . . over and out.”

Forrest glanced up from the book just long enough to reply, “We’ve heard Jawbreaker before, not the other guy.”

“So who’s Jawbreaker?”

“No one who can help us. Scan on, my child. Get it out of your system.”

So she turned the dial some more, picking up another, weaker transmission . . .

“ . . . but my batteries won’t last long after my fuel runs out, eh. Plus I won’t be able to run my chain saw, and this cabin’s gonna get pretty damn cold.”

“Yeah, well, join the club, eh. We’ve only got enough firewood left out here for maybe a few weeks. The whole damn forest is burnt down . . .”

Melissa continued to turn the dial, eventually coming upon another conversation in progress . . .

“ . . . so what I need to know is how to convert this old diesel motor over to vegetable oil. I’ve got a few thousand gallons of old fryer oil out back.”

“Well, first you have to install an auxiliary fuel tank with a heat exchanger in it. And it don’t sound much like you’ve got the necessary—”

Melissa didn’t care even a little bit about veggie oil cars so she moved on . . .

“ . . . which is bullshit! You tell your friends over there I don’t care how much food you’ve got left. I’ve got twenty-five scarecrows on this bus and I’m coming across that goddamn bridge whether they like it not!”

“They’ll shoot you, Don! I’m not kidding, goddamnit!”

“Well, I’m comin’!”

Melissa waited almost five minutes to hear what happened next.

“You can forget them,” Forrest muttered. “They’re gone.”

She reluctantly turned the dial, realizing she had just heard someone’s last words, but another signal caught her attention before she had the chance to dwell . . .

“We have repelled repeated attacks. Our perimeter is holding. That’s not the problem. Our problem is food. We can’t survive much longer without you, and you can’t survive long-term without our power. We’re wasting time even debating this.”

The voice was female.

“Jack!”

“I’m listening,” he said, appearing interested for the first time.

“It’s not that simple,”
a male voice replied.
“You’re talking about us traveling three hundred miles through extremely dangerous territory. We need to wait. Let the lunatics starve off.”

Forrest set the book aside and moved toward the receiver for a closer look at the radio frequency.

“If I didn’t know better, Patrick, I’d say you were waiting for us to starve so you could take over the facility when you get here.”

“Valerie, shut up. We could do that anyway.”

“How long until your heating oil runs out?”

“Nine weeks. Maybe less.”

“Well, we won’t last nine weeks without your assistance. We’ve barely got a month before we start looking at our dogs in a whole new way.”

Patrick did not immediately respond.

“They’re gonna eat their dogs?” Melissa mumbled.

Forrest nodded as he marked the frequency on a pad. “It happens.”

“Val . . . I’m not the sole decider over here . . . I’ll talk to the council and see what they say. That’s all I can promise.”

“A friggin council,” Forrest muttered, tossing the pad onto the shelf.

“Well, you be sure to tell your stupid council this . . . you tell them that before the last of us shoots herself . . . we’ll disable every one of these goddamn mills! You hear me? There won’t be enough juice left out here to run a goddamn lightbulb!”

“Val, you could hardly disable all those mills. Just try to be patient. Please.”

“We can sure as hell destroy this facility . . . and don’t think we won’t! If you’re waiting for us to die off, there won’t be shit left when you get here!”

“Jesus Christ, Val! Will you please try to understand our situation? Nobody’s waiting for you to die off! We’ve got old people and children to consider here.”

“And we don’t?”

“You’re not the only ones who have been attacked, Val. How can we move two hundred people all that way and protect them?”

“I’m not suggesting you make the trip in a goddamn wagon train, Patrick. Groups of ten or twelve at time would do the job. Two trucks, moving fast, and you could—”

“I gotta go, Val. I’ll call you tomorrow at noon.”

“Don’t leave us hanging, Patrick. Please.”

“I’ll do what I can. I promise. Over and out.”

“Maybe
we
can join them!” Melissa said excitedly.

“Settle down there, young communicator,” Forrest said, shoving his chair back toward the console. “Grab me the en reel index from the top shelf over there.”

“What index?” she said, getting up and walking around the console to the far side of the round room.

“N.R.E.L.,” he said, pronouncing each letter separately. “National Renewable Energy Laboratories. It’s a map index.”

She found the index beneath some manuals and brought it over. It was about the size of a common road atlas, full of colorful maps denoting wind corridors along with the locations of transmission lines that carried power from the nation’s many wind farms to population centers.

“You guys thought of everything,” she said, setting the index down.

“Hardly,” he chuckled. “But we were thinking we might hook into a wind turbine someday. This index is as far as the plan ever got.”

“But if these people already know how to make them work and want our help . . . I wonder where they are.”

“They could be damn near anywhere,” he muttered, flipping through the index. “But it’s good to know somebody else is thinking long-term. They took a serious risk staying aboveground, though.”

“Maybe we should offer to go and help them,” she suggested again. “We could tell her to forget that Patrick guy.”

“Their main problem seems to be food,” he said. “We can’t solve that.”

“Shouldn’t we at least talk to her?”

“Way too soon,” he said, tracing his finger along a power route through Colorado.

“But they need help and if—”

“She sounds desperate, honey, and desperate people are potentially very dangerous—in any circumstance. Though you’re right, we haven’t heard anything like this before, so it’s worth keeping an ear on them.”

“There seem to be a lot more survivors out there than you guys have told us about.”

“And fewer every day,” he said, turning the page. “I wonder if they’re out in the San Gorgonio Pass.”

“That place is huge!” she said. “My dad drove us through there once. There’s like four thousand windmills out there.”

“And the land is barren for hundreds of miles,” he added thoughtfully. “Which would make an extended siege difficult at best. You’d have to hit them fast and hard.”

“Shouldn’t we tell the others about this? It’s a pretty big deal.”

“This is a case of what they don’t know won’t hurt them. So don’t go blabbing.”

“But—”

“I’m serious, Melissa. False hopes are bad news, and it’s way too soon to get excited about these people. We have to be careful with morale.”

Just then the floors and walls began to vibrate as if a train were rumbling beneath them. There was no real movement because of the shock dampeners that protected the installation, but the rumbling in the earth was unmistakable.

“Whoa,” Melissa said, instinctively placing her hand on the console, though there was no need to steady herself. “That isn’t just a tremor, is it?”

“Doesn’t feel like one.”

There had been a number of tremors since the asteroid impact, but none of them had caused so much vibration within the facility.

“Are we still safe?”

“We’re fine,” he said. “We’re nowhere near any of the known fault lines, and it would take a major shift to crack us open.”

A couple of minutes later Ulrich wandered sleepily into Launch Control in his bare feet. “That one woke damn near everybody up,” he said. “What have you two been doing?”

“It sounds like somebody’s forded up on a wind farm,” Forrest said, tapping the index. “I’m guessing San Gorgonio. My assistant here picked up some new traffic. We’ll need to make sure we’re listening tomorrow.”

Ulrich cocked an eyebrow at Melissa. “And who said you could use my radio?”

“I didn’t touch your crappy radio,” she said, crossing her arms. “Everybody knows analog’s better than digital.”

He looked at Forrest. “I guess I don’t have to ask where she got that.”

“Don’t look at me,” Forrest said. “I’m not the only one who thinks digital sucks.”

“Yeah, well I wasn’t talking about the bullshit opinion,” Ulrich said, turning for the door. “I was talking about the smartmouth.”

When he was gone, Melissa looked at Forrest. “I think I made him mad.”

He shrugged and went back to the index. “You may have.”

“But . . . but what if he doesn’t want to copy down the code for me anymore?”

He looked at her and smiled. “You should have thought of that before you got salty with him.”

“But I was . . .”

“But you were what?” he said with a chuckle.

“Well he was the one who . . . He’s always such a grouch. Can you fix it for me?”

He laughed and closed the index, picking up his book again. “Your mouth wrote the check, kiddo, not mine.”

“But he . . . he was the one who . . .”

He chuckled again as he refound his place in the novel. “You say that like it matters.”

Forty

E
arly the next day Maria Vasquez and a number of the other mothers were busying themselves with the work of turning silo one into a spook house. They were on the far side of the silo hanging a number of sheets and black trash bags to serve as curtains, cordoning off little hiding places for the witches and ghosts who would soon lie in wait for the unsuspecting children. Ulrich emerged from the tunnel and stood on the main deck watching them with his hands on his hips. He had already been recruited to dress up as a mummy, and though he felt a little stupid about it, he knew the party would be a great distraction for the children.

Melissa was in the silo as well, but she wasn’t helping with the Halloween project. She was busy up above with her deciphering project, which had so far yielded nothing in the way of cracking the code. She listened to Ulrich talking with the other women and eventually decided she had better walk down to the main deck and find out if she was on his shit list. The trip downstairs made her feel like when she was a little girl and got in trouble with her parents. Only it wasn’t her loving father waiting three decks below but a perpetually dour soldier who didn’t seem to have much in the way of a paternal instinct.

Ulrich glanced briefly in her direction as she came down the stairs, then went back to talking with Karen and Maria about where they might displace some of the food bundles until after the haunted silo project was finished. She walked over and stood listening, realizing now that Ulrich was definitely annoyed with her because, while his glance wasn’t disdainful, it hadn’t been exactly pleasant either.

“Very well, then,” he said. “Just so nothing falls over on anyone.”

“Amen,” Karen chuckled.

He turned to walk away without a word to Melissa, and she stood watching him go, debating whether it would even be worth the effort of trying to get back into his good graces. She asked herself whether it would matter if she didn’t need him to write out the Morse code transmissions for her. Deciding it would, she trotted after him. “Wayne?”

He stopped and turned to look at her. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“For smarting off to you last night.”

Only the slightest of perceptible grins came to his lips. “Realized you need me for the code?”

“Even if I didn’t, I still wouldn’t want you mad at me. I didn’t think before I spoke.”

He smiled, understanding she had only been trying to buddy up with Forrest, wishing that he had a better excuse to be pissed with her, disliking his own vulnerability. “I thought you might get Jack to smooth it over for you.”

“He said my mouth wrote the check.”

Ulrich laughed. “He did, huh?”

“He said I shouldn’t have gotten salty with you.”

He laughed some more. “Well, you know you’re wasting your time with that goddamn code, don’t you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do, though. I never knew I could get so bored. I don’t know what it is . . . nobody else seems to be.”

Ulrich reflected that the more intelligent the creature, the more negative the effects of confinement. He recalled briefly his first and only visit to the zoo as a child, the gorillas in their cages with the saddest, most tragic expressions he had ever seen.

“Well, I appreciate the apology,” he said quietly. “But the truth is that you’ve got more than enough of the code now. You’re not going to find anything new by continuing to copy it down. Especially if they’re altering it.”

“Altering it?”

“They may change it from night to night. Just enough to throw off a code breaker.”

“Do you think they are?”

“There’s no way to tell if the changes are minor. Either way, you’re better off sticking with what you’ve got. Honestly.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

He shook his head. “If I was mad at you, I’d tell you. Ask Jack.”

“Were you before?”

“I was trying to be.”

She bit her lip, hesitating a moment, then, “How come you don’t let people get close to you?”

He stood looking at her, surprised she had asked. “Because people die.”

F
orrest walked into Launch Control and sat on the edge of the console. “Excuse us, Linus.”

Danzig gave Vasquez a quick look and got up from his chair. “I guess I can use a break.” He pulled the door closed after him, and Forrest sat looking down on Vasquez.

“Look, Jack, before you read me the—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Forrest snapped.

Vasquez sat back in his chair, unprepared for Forrest’s anger.

“This isn’t a goddamn frat house! Who the fuck do you think you are, deserting your goddamn post?”

“Oh!” Vasquez said. “I . . . I’m sorry. You’re right. It won’t happen again. I mean I—”

“And who are you diddling besides Maria two?” Forrest quickly demanded, sensing that Vasquez had been expecting to get his ass chewed for an entirely different encounter.

Vasquez hesitated. “Um . . . Renee . . . and Joann.”

“Jesus Christ! And none of ’em minds about the others?”

Vasquez shrugged. “I don’t think they know.”

“You bet your sweet ass they don’t know!” Forrest flared. “Because the second one of ’em finds about the other two, they’re gonna tell your wife so goddamn fast you won’t know whether to shit or wind your watch!”

“I don’t think so,” Vasquez said innocently. “They ain’t like that. I mean . . . they know I ain’t gonna be around long . . . you know? And I think they like the thrill of doing something bad . . . seize the day and all that.”

“I’m gonna seize something,” Forrest told him, standing up from the console and shaking loose a cigarette, “and it won’t be your goddamn day. So who’s Linus screwing—and don’t tell me nobody! He skulked outta here looking guilty as shit.”

“Nobody, I swear. He just covers for me sometimes . . . like the other night with Maria two. I didn’t abandon my post, Captain. I’d never do that.”

Forrest at least took some comfort in that. “It stops now. Understood? If I find it’s still going on, I’ll tell Maria myself. Got it?”

Vasquez nodded. “But suppose they don’t agree?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Vasquez shrugged again. “I’m just saying they look forward to it . . . you know?”

“End it, Oscar!”

“Yes, sir.”

H
alf an hour later Forrest’s voice announced calmly over the intercom:
“Wayne and Melissa to the LC. Wayne and Melissa to the LC.”

When they arrived in Launch Control, Forrest and Vasquez were sitting in front of the receiver listening intently to a very panicked radio transmission.

“Kiddo, it sounds like your wind farm friends are getting zapped,” Forrest said, offering her a chair. “Along with Patrick and his gang.”

“Both? But how—”

“ . . . and you’re sure you didn’t tell anyone where we are?”
Patrick was demanding.

“Yes!”
Valerie replied in a shout, with gunfire obvious in the background.
“They’re hitting us too, goddamnit! I told you! None of our people ever even leave here. One of your people must have said something, one of your scavenging parties maybe. Patrick, you’ve been double-crossed!”

“No, he hasn’t,” Vasquez muttered, shaking his head. “Stupid
pendejos
!”

Melissa stood staring at the radio, almost as if she were watching the drama play out on television.

“No way!”
Patrick insisted.
“The leak has to be at your end! Can you escape on your own somehow?”

“Escape? We’re completely surrounded! They’ve got rocket launchers, Patrick. You’ve got to come help us!”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Melissa said. “What did we miss?”

“I called you the second I turned it on,” Forrest said.

“I’m sorry, Val. We’ll be lucky to save ourselves. I’m hoping they’ll let us go once they see we’ve left the food behind. We’re pulling out right now. Gotta go. Good luck to you!”

“Patrick, no! . . . Patrick, are you there? . . . Patriiiick! . . . Patriiiiiiick!”

“Turn it off,” Ulrich said. “Turn it off, Oscar.”

“Patrii—”

“But . . . but what the hell happened?” Melissa demanded, clearly crestfallen, her eyes darting between the three men.

“They’ve obviously been talking back and forth in the blind for some time,” Forrest said sadly. “Broadcasting for anyone and everyone to listen in. They were naive.”

“But . . . what does that mean?”

“It means that someone’s been triangulating their individual signals,” Ulrich explained. “Someone with the resources, the muscle, and the patience to arrange a simultaneous assault.”

“And that’s why we don’t talk to anybody without a damn good reason,” Forrest said. “There are just enough people left alive out there to finish killing each other off.”

“That’s sick!” she said in disgust. “They weren’t hurting anybody! They were just . . . they were just trying to survive.”

“This is also why we don’t relate every contact to the other women,” Ulrich added, having already discussed the matter of Melissa monitoring the radio in great detail with Forrest earlier that morning, right down to the part about her smarting off, the two of them agreeing to wait and see whether she would apologize. “Too many of these disappointments would irreparably damage morale. So understand that you’ve been trusted with something very important here today.”

With effort, Melissa broke eye contact with him long enough for a glance at Forrest, who confirmed what Ulrich had said with a nod. “You guys knew this would happen,” she said quietly, looking at the floor.

“No,” Forrest said. “But now you see the trouble we could have been in had we joined in on their conversation last night. It’s possible we could have brought this same kind of hell down on ourselves—even though it’s likely the triangulation had already been done.”

“But not necessarily,” Vasquez warned.

“Those women are gonna be . . . they’ll be raped, won’t they?”

“Let us hope not,” Ulrich said quietly. “There are alternatives.”

She stood looking at the three men. “So I should keep this a secret?”

“What do you think?” Forrest asked.

“I think we’re just buying time down here,” she replied, suddenly feeling a new kind of heaviness.

“Do you want the others to start believing that? To start dwelling on it?”

She shook her head. “I won’t say anything. I don’t feel good. I think I’m gonna go take a nap.”

“Okay,” Forrest said. “I’m sorry, kiddo.”

“Yeah . . . me too.”

When she was gone Ulrich dropped down into a chair with a sigh, squeezing his temples between his forefinger and thumb. “So is the military hitting civilians now? Is that what we just heard?”

Forrest switched the set back on just long enough to make sure there was nothing more to hear and switched it off again. “I think we’d damn well better assume as much,” he said gravely. “And what’s that tell us . . . the military has finally degraded to the point of committing murder?”

“Men are men,” Vasquez said. “And men with guns aren’t going hungry if they don’t have to.”

“So you’d kill an innocent for his food—
her
food?”

“If she left me no choice,” Vasquez answered without batting an eye. “I’ve got a family to feed.”

“That’s too easy,” Forrest said. “Say it’s just you?”

“Maybe I’d split it with her, offer her a pact like we’ve made down here. Look, I’m not a murderer and I sure as hell ain’t no rapist . . . but a starving person doesn’t have any choice about food. Instinct will make him do what he has to do to get it.”

“That’s bullshit,” Forrest said. “Starvation isn’t rabies. Gandhi starved himself damned near to death more than once just to make a fucking point.”

“Well, I ain’t Gandhi either,” Vasquez said, and chuckled.

“What I’m saying is that giving up your dignity is a conscious choice,” Forrest said. “It’s a choice you make ahead of time. You decide that you’re either going to throw in the towel after a certain point or you’re going to be the last one standing no matter the cost.”

“I won’t argue that. But if the military hit that wind farm, the common grunt didn’t have that luxury.”

“Horseshit. No one hit that farm who didn’t want to. A man can step back and take stock of himself at any time.”

Vasquez sat forward in the chair. “That might be true for you, Captain. You’re a leader . . . not all of us are. Some of us are happy to follow, and not all followers are lucky about who they get as leaders. Personally . . . without you two dudes . . . I don’t know how I’d handle any of this.”

Forrest stood up and tousled the younger man’s hair on his way to the coffeepot. “Well, not all leaders are lucky about who they get to follow them either.”

Ulrich smiled at Vasquez, hiding his concern about what Forrest referred to as the “insulin habit.” He and Forrest had asked Vasquez and Danzig both to come in on the project precisely because they
were
followers. They were not blind devotees, but were highly skilled operatives who could be depended upon to follow orders in a paramilitary setting without a great deal of debate. Kane of course was his own story. He was their noncommissioned officer, the perfect blend of capable and aloof; that he agreed to join them had been as much a compliment as their having asked.

“You’re sure you didn’t talk to those people last night?” Ulrich said, shifting his attention to Forrest. “We don’t need a proper military outfit showing up outside our door.”

“Wayne . . . come on ”

“I just don’t want any surprises, Jack.”

“I was only on the air for a few seconds . . .” Forrest kept his face serious.

“What . . . ?”

“Long enough to broadcast our address five or six times.” Then Forrest smiled.

Ulrich shook his head, Vasquez grinning.

“Ask a stupid question,” Forrest said, sipping his coffee, “and ye shall receive a stupid answer.”