Cannibal Reign (36 page)

Book Three

Fifty-Eight

E
ighteen
months after the impact, Ester Thorn and Harold Shipman were visiting a former
shopping mall in Honolulu. It was now a facility for growing hydroponic rice.
The horticulturalist giving the tour was a brunette in her late twenties named
Sandra Hayes, and it was plain to both Ester and Shipman that she was very proud
of the facility she had helped to create.

“And the best part,” Sandra was saying with great
alacrity, “is that we’ll be able to harvest three crops a year.”

“Three?” Ester said, stopping to lean against her
cane. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Sandra said, smiling brightly. “And
there’s no reason we can’t duplicate this facility all through the Islands. You
don’t need a giant building like this either. Any building can be converted in
this same way, and not just for growing rice. The volcanic soils in these
islands are excellent.”

“What about the lighting?” Ester asked. “Most of
these bulbs were made specifically for growing food indoors, were they not?”

“Lighting continues to be the one problem,” Sandra
said, turning glum for the first time. “We only have a limited number of them on
the island, and though regular fluorescent bulbs can be used, there are still
only so many of them available. So unless we can find a way to manufacture
lighting domestically . . . we will eventually have to return to the
mainland and see if there are any department stores still standing.”

Ester turned to Shipman. “We’re still up against
it, Harold.”

“One step at a time, Ester,” Shipman said calmly.
“We’ve made an awful lot of progress in a year and a half and these indoor
facilities have already begun to contribute.”

He turned to Sandra, asking, “Have you worked with
the mushroom farmers at all, Miss Hayes?”

“No,” she said. “I know Bobbi Pouha from the
university in Manoa, but we haven’t really been in contact since the big push
for indoor farming last year. I know that she’s very good. She knows her
shrooms, that’s for sure.”

Shipman chuckled. “I understand they’ve had a
couple of setbacks. I was wondering if you knew anything about that.”

“I believe those were mostly climate-related,”
Sandra said. “And I think they’ve got things straightened out. Fungus can be
tricky.”

“I don’t know how anyone can eat it myself,” Ester
said. “But I’m glad it’s going to be available. We’re only a month ahead of our
food demand.”

“I honestly think we’re going to be okay,” Sandra
said. “At least for the next couple of years . . . and who knows? We
may have sunlight by then. The sky has begun to clear some, even though most of
us still need a light meter to tell.”

“Thank you very much for the tour,” Ester said.
“I’m going on the closed circuit television in a couple of days, so I need to
collect all the good news I can.”

“You’re very welcome,” Sandra said. “Please come
back.”

D
uring
the drive back to the motel where Ester lived on the top floor, she sat staring
out the window at the dead palms along the road, the brown landscape. Hawaii had
been pretty lucky in terms of snow. Not a great deal of it had fallen, and what
little had accumulated melted once the temperature rose into the forties during
the second summer. They were heading into their second winter now and the
average temperature was closer to thirty-five.

“The Navy has been after me about an expedition to
the mainland,” she said with a sigh.

“You’re still opposed to the idea?” Shipman
asked.

“They’re asking to disconnect one of the carriers
from the power grid, the idea being that they can fit more men aboard and bring
back more supplies. Which I’m not entirely opposed to, but it would mean asking
Honolulu to cut back even further on its power consumption, and people have
become somewhat spoiled these past six months. Not to mention that the crew
would need to take a large portion of the dry goods we have in reserve.”

“But the general public isn’t aware of that
reserve. The Navy’s kept it under lock and key belowdecks. What does Hadrian
think about the idea?”

“He’s not opposed to it,” she said. “But he’s
suggested sending a destroyer first to reconnoiter the shoreline, dispatching
shore parties all up and down the California coast.”

“What about
Boxer
?”
Shipman asked.

“Who?”

“Not who,” Shipman chuckled, “it’s a
what
—the USS
Boxer
. It’s a
small aircraft carrier meant for helicopters and amphibious landing craft. And
it’s not nuclear powered.”

“Which must be why the Navy hasn’t suggested it,”
Ester said, perturbed. “That Longbottom is trying to hoard his fuel for the big
war he thinks he’s going to have someday with God knows who. Well, that’s what
we’ll do, then. We’ll send the
Boxer
and one
destroyer escort . . . Oh, and the volcanologists are already after me
to send an expedition to find the impact crater. Have you heard this
insanity?”

Shipman smiled. “Yes.”

“Like we have the time and the resources to mount
such a frivolous expedition.”

Shipman chuckled. “Is this the same Ester Thorn who
got so angry with the government thirty years ago for refusing to allocate more
money to keep an eye on the Great Beyond?”

“Oh, shut up, Harold. It’s not even remotely the
same.”

“How can you say that? You’re a scientist.”

“The U.S. government had more than enough money to
fund such a project, and it would have directly benefited mankind—which was
exactly what I told them!”

“Well, I can’t argue that point,” he said, glancing
at the dead countryside.

“Allowing them to mount an expedition like that now
wouldn’t be any different than sending them to the gallows.”

“Well, you know geologists, Ester.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “And I understand their
desires, but they’re just going to have to wait until we’ve gotten these islands
more than a couple of weeks ahead of our food consumption. I wonder what old
Longbottom’s going to say when I tell him to send the
Boxer
out. You know, Harold, I need a liaison to the Navy who I can
trust, someone to tell me about things like the
Boxer
so I know what types of resources we truly have.”

“That person may be tough to find,” Shipman said.
“Longbottom has a pretty tight rein on most everyone who knows anything about
their internal affairs.”

Fifty-Nine

W
ith the
siege a distant memory, the silo population was preparing to celebrate their
second Christmas belowground. Forrest and Kane had both recovered from their
injuries with minimal hearing loss, and Emory’s baby was quickening nicely,
still nursing regularly at her breast. Erin was unquestionably the baby’s
mother, however; Emory behaved as little more than nursemaid to the child, and
was already being referred to as Aunt Shannon.

The installation remained secure. The antenna array
was raised every morning so the men could watch the countryside with the robotic
camera, and lowered each night after dark. Thus far there had been no further
signs of life aboveground. It did not snow a great deal over the summer, but no
more than half the snow had melted, and flurries began to fly again with the
coming of autumn.

The rat population now stood at thirty-five mating
pairs and, amazingly enough, was still a secret kept among the men, Melissa and
Emory the sole exceptions. The food stores were holding out better than Forrest
had any right to expect, but he knew that by late March they would have to begin
incorporating rat meat into their diets if they were to stretch the rest of the
food through the summer—which meant it was time to start letting the rats breed
at will, and they still hadn’t figured out what to use for cages. So far they
had partitioned off four empty fifty-gallon fuel drums cut down the middle, but
the little critters were escape artists, so Danzig and Kane had an almost
full-time job just keeping them wrangled. Fortunately, the loss of the bay’s
first blast door provided an excuse for keeping a man on duty within the cargo
bay at all times without raising suspicion.

Ulrich tossed his pen down and sat back from the
console with a brief glance at the monitors. “No matter how I crunch these
numbers, Jack, we’re down to rat meat and the occasional tomato by the first of
September. And we still don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do for breeding
cages. The little sons of bitches can chew through damn near anything.”

“Okay. So maybe we need to forget the rats
altogether,” Forrest said, thinking they might need to make a break for it
before the food ran completely out. “Those figures of yours don’t include the
MREs, do they?”

“You ordered me not to, so no, but each truckload
only buys us an extra month at one MRE per day per person, which isn’t exactly a
feast.”

“So, come the first of September we load into the
trucks and roll south with the MREs.”

“South to where?”

“Maybe Altus Air Force Base.” Forrest grinned.
“Marty seems to think it’s teeming with geologists.”

“That’s a pretty huge maybe, Jack, and we’ll only
have a month to find a safe haven.”

The door opened and Erin came in carrying Emory
Marie Ulrich, named after her birth mother Shannon Marie Emory, though everyone
called her Emmy. Laddie got up from where he lay on the floor near Forrest’s
chair and sat watching as she offered the infant to her husband.

“Would you hold Emmy for a little bit, honey? I
need to eat.”

Ulrich sat up straight in the chair and put out his
arms. “You mean with all those women out there you can’t find anybody else to
hold her?”

“Everyone else is eating lunch,” she said. “It’s
not going to hurt you. You are her father, right?”

Ulrich accepted the baby with a nod, and Erin
smiled, kissed him on the lips and left the room. “That’s a buncha bullshit,” he
grumbled. “Those broads fight over this baby.”

“She wants the kid to know you’re her father,”
Forrest said, scratching the dog behind his ears. “What’s wrong with that?
You’re supposed to be doing this for your wife. Remember?”

“Oh, shut up,” Ulrich said, holding the baby
delicately, almost as if he were afraid of hurting her. “Pretty thing, though,
ain’t she? I can’t believe Shannon still doesn’t want her.”

“She’s got reason enough,” Forrest said. “Marty
told me she went through some pretty heinous shit. Maybe not as bad as Liddy and
Natalie, but bad enough.”

The two women they had freed from Moriarty—Liddy
and Natalie—were neighbors before the asteroid, and their families had been
captured together in a basement by Moriarty’s men. Both women saw their husbands
and children killed and eaten over a period of weeks, and if not for their
mutual support of one another, Forrest was certain they would have killed
themselves by now. Even after eight months of safety belowground, they rarely
left one another’s side, as if still afraid of being violated. Michael doubted
they would ever completely assimilate, both women still suffering from severe
post-traumatic shock and horrible nightmares.

The baby began to fuss, so Ulrich stood from the
chair and took her for a walk in the halls, talking softly to her and hoping
that one of the other women would offer to take her off of his hands, but none
of them did, and he began to suspect a conspiracy. There was no sense in trying
to find out for sure, however. The women had grown thick as thieves over the
last eighteen months.

He found Melissa in one of the blast tunnels, one
of her favorite haunts, where she sat reading a book. He had not seen her
working on the code for a few months now and was glad she had finally given it
up.

“Good book?”

“It’s okay,” she said with a shrug, leaning against
the steel bulkhead, knees drawn up. “Nothing great. I’m reading the ones that
look boring first.”

“Good plan. Hey, wanna hold the baby for a
while?”

She grinned and shook her head, confirming his
suspicions.

“See if I do you any more favors.”

“She needs to know you’re her dad, Wayne.”

The remark struck him differently coming from
Melissa, knowing that she had lost her father. “I suppose you’re probably
right.”

“Can I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Are we going to have to eat the rats pretty
soon?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I won’t have to help butcher them, will I?”

“No. The men will take care of that.”

“Thank God,” she said, going back to her book.

After he was gone, she read for a while longer then
checked her watch and saw it was time for the second half of the school day to
begin. She closed the book and went to the classroom to help Andie with the
day’s reading lesson, like she did every other day.

Today Andie was focusing on phonics. Most of the
children were already reading at a third-grade level, but she wanted to enhance
their understanding of the sound values for individual letters because some of
the students were having a difficult time sounding out multisyllabic words.

“So what are the vowels again?” she asked them,
preparing to write them out with a blue marker on her dry-eraser board.

“A . . . E . . . I
. . . O . . . and U,” the children said together as Andie
wrote them out.

“And sometimes Y,” one of them added.

“That’s, right,” Andie said, “and sometimes Y.”

Melissa looked up from the lesson she was preparing
to help with, her mind’s eye suddenly seeing a stream of numeric code. “Vowels,”
she muttered. “What’s the most common vowel?”

She excused herself, slipped out of the room and
into the adjacent common room, taking her laptop from the box beneath her
bedroll and disappearing all the way to the very top level of silo number two,
where she often went to be alone. She sat down in her private nook between two
stacks of cardboard boxes and opened the file containing the cipher work she had
done on the code months before.

The first thing she did was bring up the same
stream of code she had been working on since the beginning:

924913024024812824012924811636025913013011404925036712036824824

Next, she brought up one of the very first ciphers
she had created on her own, the same cipher now flashing in her brain for
reasons she did not yet understand:

Then she sat staring at the code and instinctively
broke it up into units of three for perhaps the two hundredth time:

924-913-024-024-812-824-012-924-811-636-025-913-013-011-404-925-036-712-036-824-824

She scanned the string of numbers just as she had
so often before, allowing her brain to process them with something specific to
focus on this time, her subconscious thought no longer hindered by Ulrich’s
discouraging remarks about the infinite number of possible algorithms.

“The most common vowel is E,” she muttered, pulling
on her lower lip. “So is it zero-two-four? It does appear twice.”

But what about 824? she wondered. That appeared
twice as well, and both sets appeared in tandem, so they might just as easily be
consonants. L’s perhaps.

She set the computer aside, ran back down the
stairs to the tunnel, then down the tunnel to the main corridor and into the
first common room, to retrieve a sheaf of worn papers from inside the computer
box.

“What are you up to?” Taylor asked her with a
smile.

Taylor had been talking with Jenny and Michelle
when Melissa had left in a hurry before with the computer, and she could sense
that Melissa was still in a hurry even though she was trying not to look it now.
Her query drew the attention of some of the other adults in the room, and
Melissa was suddenly acutely aware of how crowded the complex was; she normally
kept everyone largely blocked from her conscious thoughts by daydreaming of
things like string theory and dark matter. Even her uncle Michael was looking at
her funny.

“Nothing,” she said curtly, and walked out of the
room.

When she got back up to her nook she sat down and
began scanning the myriad pages of code, mentally dividing the numbers into
groups of three, seeking out the digit sequence of 024 and spotting it over and
over again, whereas she saw the occurrence of 824 only very rarely.

“So 024 has to be the letter E. How did I not see
it before?”

The question was easy enough to answer—she had been
thinking too far outside the box—and only partially on account of Ulrich’s
gainsaying. Sometimes straightforward solutions to complicated issues simply
avoided her, something her father had enjoyed teasing her about.

Now she needed to come up with a cipher in which E
was equal to 024. She decided to add a numerical value directly to each subgroup
of the early cipher merely as a jumping off point.

Then she assigned E a value of 022 as a place to
start: Group 0, second row down, second letter in the subgroup. She could just
as easily have assigned it a value of 021: Group 0, second row down, first
letter in the row, but she needed to start somewhere and one place was as good
as another.

After deciding she was in the right neighborhood,
it occurred to her for the first time to invert the subgroups within the
cipher.

And suddenly there it was: E = 024. Group 0, second
row down, fourth letter in the subgroup.

“Okay,” she muttered, her stomach filling with an
eager anxiety, “but how do I find values for all these stupid
nines, eights,
and
sevens
?”

Her mind began to clutter again, so she closed the
laptop and drew a breath to clear it before opening the lid for another look.
And just like that she saw the numerical values in her mind’s eye.