Cannibal Reign (37 page)

“Yes!” she said, jumping up to do a quick dance
before sitting back down to decipher the initial string of code.

“Holy shit!” she said, her face splitting into a
grin. “That’s it!”

She grabbed the papers and began to decipher them
as rapidly as she could. Oblivious as the hours passed, she didn’t stop to come
up for air.

“Melissa!” Forrest shouted from three stories
below.

She looked at her watch and was surprised to see
how much time had passed. “Up here!”

“It’s time to eat!”

“Not hungry!”

“Too bad. Get down here!”

“No!”

She heard his boots trotting up the four flights of
steel stairs and sat grinning until his face emerged over the deck. Laddie came
trotting over and licked her face.

“I
know
I misunderstood
you,” he said, a wry grin on his face. “Because from way down there it sounded
like you told me no.”

“I can’t stop right now,” she said.

“You’re back at that goddamn code, aren’t you?”

“Can I please skip dinner just this once?
Please?
”

“Melissa . . . that code is going to
drive you insane.”

“Dad, will you please trust me this one time?”

He saw a new kind of determination in her eyes now,
something that said to him she finally had a legitimate reason for wanting to
skip dinner. “Okay. I’ll put a plate in the oven for you. I want you to eat when
you come down. Understood?”

She gave him a little salute, making him laugh as
he turned and went back down the stairs.

“Laddie, you comin’?”

The dog sat beside Melissa and watched him, cocking
his head to one side.

“Communist,” he said with a chuckle, and trotted
down the stairs.

“Hey, know what?” she called when he stepped onto
the deck below her, looking down at him through the grating.

“What?” he said, looking up.

“I’m gonna be seventeen pretty soon.”

“I know that,” he said with a smile.

“What are you getting me?”

“What do you want?”

“A car.”

He laughed and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

When Forrest got back to the cafeteria he sat down
beside Veronica, across from Karen and Michael. “She says she’s busy,” he said,
lifting his fork from the steel tray.

The other three exchanged looks.

“You’ve never let her get away with that excuse
before,” Karen said, grinning. “What’s different about today?”

Melissa was famous for trying to skip dinner a few
times a week, and Forrest would never allow it.

“I’ve got a feeling she’s close to cracking that
goddamn code,” he said quietly. “But don’t say anything to Wayne. She’ll want to
tell him herself.”

“For real?” Michael asked, surprised.

Forrest shrugged, saying, “She didn’t actually say
it, but I could tell by the light in her eyes.”

“Well, good for her,” Veronica said. “She’s sure
lost enough sleep over that damn thing.”

After the children were put to bed that night,
Forrest asked the women to join him, Ulrich, and Dr. West in the cafeteria for a
meeting. Emory and the rest of the men stayed behind to watch over the sleeping
children in the common rooms.

Melissa was still in the silo.

Formal meetings were rare events, so there was a
lot of whispering as the women speculated over what it was about. The general
consensus was that Forrest was going to announce a cut in the daily food
allowance, a step that had not yet been taken and that most of them realized was
probably long overdue.

“So,” Forrest said with a dubious kind of smile. “I
suppose you’re all wondering why the three of us have gathered you here
tonight.”

There were some chuckles.

“Okay, as I’m sure you’re all aware, we’ve consumed
well over half of our original food stores. And I’m afraid that in order for us
to stretch what we’ve got left through to the end of the summer, we’re going to
have to take certain . . . certain measures.”

He glanced at the other two men sitting beside him
to see if either of them wanted to jump in, but Ulrich only smiled at the women,
and West maintained his usual passive demeanor.

“We know you’re going to reduce our rations,” Erin
said, burping the baby over her shoulder, having only moments before gotten her
back from Emory. “Just tell us by how much.”

“I’m afraid the measures are going to be a bit more
radical than that, actually,” he replied. “At our present rate of consumption,
we’ll be out of food around mid-May—which makes nearly two years. So we’ve done
an excellent job of conserving while at the same time keeping everyone well
nourished. But in order for us to stretch the food through the summer, we’re
going to have to cut back to
below
what would be
considered healthy by even minimal standards, which would put us all in jeopardy
if we didn’t find a way to supplement our diet.”

“You’ve got plenty of vitamins stashed away,” Andie
piped up from the back row.

“That’s right,” he said with a chuckle. “And you
can believe we’ll finally be breaking them out, but I’m afraid vitamins alone
aren’t going to do the trick.”

The women began to murmur, their mutual concern
steadily rising.

“And as we all know,” Forrest continued, “the skies
have not cleared enough to—Okay, everyone, cut the chatter and give me a second
to finish. We do have a plan. But it’s going to sound somewhat repugnant to you
when you first hear it, so I want you to brace yourselves.”

He was trying to make the plan sound a tad worse
than what he hoped it actually was, in order to keep the truth from coming as
too great a shock.

“We’ve been raising a certain kind of animal in the
cargo bay. And we’re pretty sure we can breed them fast enough to provide us
with a viable source of nutrition through the winter. So long as we start a
full-fledged breeding program right now.”

Not one of the women made a sound. None of them
wanted to even speak the word
rat
, but there was no
other animal Forrest could possibly have been talking about in this
postasteroidal world.

Erin got up from her seat and took the baby with
her into the common area without even meeting her husband’s eyes, furious with
him for keeping such a disgusting secret from her.

“Look, these animals aren’t the demons they have
been stigmatized to be,” Forrest said quietly. “In fact, they’re actually rather
affectionate if they’re handled from birth, and they’re as clean as their
environment will allow.”

No one was speaking up yet, so he continued.

“The babies are called pups, and a female is
capable of producing twelve litters a year with an average of ten or so to a
litter. A female is able to begin breeding after just three months, and at the
moment we have thirty-five breeding pairs and two extra females.”

“My God, that’s fifty-two of those . . .
things
!” Lynette said, standing up, half
expecting to find one of them running under foot. “You can’t honestly expect us
to eat them!”

“I’m afraid that starvation is our only other
option at this point,” Forrest said, making brief eye contact with Price, who
stood just inside the common room doorway.

The doctor looked embarrassed, and Forrest felt
sorry for him, of course. But when a man marries a woman based largely upon her
looks, he takes a calculated risk, and Forrest had warned him before he’d taken
that final plunge.

“No!” Lynette said. “I’ll fucking starve! I’m
sorry.”

“That will of course be your decision,” Forrest
replied. “But I have seen starvation up close—in time of war—and you will be
very surprised at what you can eat by the time your belly begins to swell from
hunger. And I would like to remind everyone that these animals were eaten as
part of the regular diet in many Asian cultures and treated with great respect,
particularly in India, where they were actually worshipped, rather than
eaten.”

“Next you’re going to tell us they taste like
chicken!” Lynette lashed out, her flesh continuing to crawl.

Forrest could see her hysteria beginning to spread
to some of the other women, so he signaled for Price to come into the
cafeteria.

“Oh!” Lynette said, growing angrier. “So now I’m
going to be treated like a fucking head case, is that it?”

“Honey, please try to calm down,” Price said. “This
isn’t going to help anything, and no one is going to make you eat anything you
don’t want to eat.”

“I want out!” she said, continuing her harangue.
“Give me my share of the food and let me the fuck out! I’m sick of living on top
of each other down here anyway! At least out there I’ll be able to fucking
breathe!”

Forrest remained calm, seeing Emory and the other
men gathering outside the doorway, Emory clearly ready to physically subdue
Lynette if Forrest so much as crooked a finger.

“Lynette, are you sure that’s what you want?” he
asked her with a stern military bearing. “Because I will load you up right now
with all the food you can carry. You’ll actually be doing the rest of us a
favor. Because you won’t be able to carry even a fraction of what you’ll eat
should you choose to stay. I’m even willing to supply you with a weapon. But
remember one thing: I will
not
let you back in when
that food runs out.”

Lynette’s irate bluff had been called, her punk
card drawn, stamped, and given back to her just that fast, and she was suddenly
afraid that she might now be expected to make good on her threat. She could
already see Ulrich’s cold blue eyes cutting into her, the faintest hint of a
sinister smile on his face.

So she did the only thing a woman of her breeding
knew how to do in such a situation; she sat back down and began to bawl, and
Price went to her, pulled her to her feet and walked her down the hall.

The rest of the women sat staring at Forrest,
unsure what to say or even think; the prospect of having to subsist on rat meat
was a lot to digest.

“In response to Lynette’s supposition,” Forrest
said with a smile, “I did have the pleasure of eating a few of these delectable
animals during my time in the military, and yes, they do taste a little bit like
chicken, particularly with a dash of Tabasco.”

Andie laughed, and that seemed to break the
tension.

“Don’t we have to worry about them making us sick?”
Karen asked.

“Like Jack said,” Dr. West joined in at last,
“these animals will keep themselves as clean as their environment will permit.
But they’ve got bad bladders, so they tend to pee a lot, which will make keeping
their environment laboratory-clean something of a challenge. And while a
ra—
the animal
—is capable of carrying diseases
that are communicable to people, we’re hoping our animals are at minimal risk.
This is because they’re all the progeny of the same original breeding pair—which
were local animals living in the fields around the silo, rather than some New
York City sewer drain.”

L
ater
that night, Forrest was sitting in Launch Control with his feet up, smoking a
cigarette. He and Ulrich were reminiscing about their younger days of whiskey
drinking and womanizing and other forms of youthful wickedry. It was taking all
of his self-discipline not to check on Melissa, who had yet to emerge from the
silo, or envisioning her falling from the top deck to the bottom of the silo in
a freak accident. If Laddie hadn’t been with her, he’d have long ago checked on
her.

He was about to finally give in to his fears when
she at last stepped into Launch Control. Laddie came trotting around the console
and jumped up to put both of his feet into Forrest’s lap, whining and licking
his face.

“Oh, so she’s not all she’s cracked up to be, huh?”
Forrest said with a smile, rubbing and squeezing the dog’s face.

Melissa was smiling more brightly than he had ever
seen her smile as he watched her put a single sheet of paper on the console in
front of Ulrich.