Cannibal Moon

by James Axler

  “If the cannies get off that ship before we blow it up, this game is over,” Cheetah Luis snarled. “And we lose. Fire, damn you!”

  “Not yet, not yet,” J.B. said.

  Cheetah Luis shoved the muzzle of his M-16 hard against the Armorer’s cheek. “If you don’t shoot, little man, I will.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Her arm locked behind her back, Dr. Mildred Wyeth was hustled from La Golondrina’s presence. The pair of Angels forced her down a narrow corridor, to the rear of the wheelhouse where a cramped, low-ceilinged, windowless room had been converted into a kitchen.

  A big, cast-iron pot simmered on a predark all-electric stove, which had been crudely customized so it could burn wood. With the stove stoked up, the room’s air temperature was well over 100 degrees.

  Hanging on the wall beside the cooktop was a selection of cast-iron fry pans, from huge to tiny. On the shelves above the unfinished plywood-on-sawhorse counter were condiments looted from conquered villes and ransacked farms: coiled necklaces of red chile peppers; bundled thyme and rosemary sprigs; Mason jars full of black peppercorns and bay leaves; beakers of salt; blue antifreeze jugs of joy juice for marinades. Everything on the spice shelves was employed in the preparation of savory meats.

  Despite her fear Mildred guessed that all of the queen’s meals were cooked here by her Angels.

  That included the slicing and dicing.

  Next to the blazing woodstove was a two-foot-wide chopping block. Its upper surface was deeply dished out and splintered, from too energetic swings of the cleaver. It wasn’t the kind of block found in a four-star restaurant. It was the kind of block found in a prison courtyard on execution day.

  In the five-gallon pot on the front of the stove, a soup stock was bubbling and steaming. She could see a pile of gray rib bones sticking up from the foaming surface, bones cooking to mush and releasing their rich marrow.

  One of the Angels picked up a wooden ladle and carefully skimmed off the thick skin of greenish froth, which he flung unceremoniously in a plastic slops bucket. Then he used the ladle to dip some of the vile bouillon into another, smaller cooking pot.

  A head-size pot.

  “Don’t put in so much of that fucking broth this time,” said the Angel who was holding Mildred in the armlock. “She likes it mixed with plenty of fresh blood.”

  And a sprig of bruised thyme, Mildred thought. The cannie Martha Stewart.

  The Angel wrestled her over to the chopping block. When he tried to make her bend over it, she resisted with all her strength, stomping on his toes, firing elbow shots into his ribs with her free arm. The huge man hitched her arm up higher on her back, and when the spearing pain froze her, he kicked her behind the knees. Her legs gave way and she hit the floor.

  “Nice and easy now,” the Angel told her, leaning his full weight into her shoulders.

  She pushed back as hard as she could, but she couldn’t stop him from forcing her head toward the chipped and gouged hollow.

  “Don’t you struggle and make me miss my first swing,” he said as he made her bend over even further, pressing down until her neck lay across the splintered block. “You don’t want me to have to take a second cut, believe me. If I don’t chill you on the first swing, it’s gonna hurt like hell.”

  Mildred had no intention of giving him a first swing, no intention of going out nice and easy.

  The Angel at the stove took hold of the heavy stock pot’s wire handle, preparing to hoist it onto another burner.

  At the peak of his lift, Mildred lashed out with her right foot as hard as she could. She caught him square on his weight-bearing leg just above the ankle. The kick didn’t knock him down, but it knocked him off balance. He fell forward, onto the red-hot stove and the stock pot in his hands tipped over, sending blanched ribs and boiling water sheeting down this bare chest. With a piercing shriek he joined her on the floor on his knees, his mouth and outstretched fingers trembling in agony.

  Startled by the turn of events, the Angel behind her relaxed for a second, letting the pressure off her back and arm. In this case, a second was long enough. Mildred wrenched loose of his grip and, once free, scrambled around the chopping block. As she lurched past the scalded cannie, she snatched his sword from its scabbard.

  Instinctively, the wounded flesheater raised his hand to protect the side of his neck.

  Mildred pivoted from the hips, putting everything she had into the sword slash. The blade passed cleanly through his forearm at the wrist, severing his hand without slowing. It hissed on, slicing at a downward angle through his throat from the hinge of his jaw to his Adam’s apple. The edge stopped only when it came up hard against his spinal column.

  As it turned out, there were worse things than a third-degree burn.

  Mildred booted him in the shoulder as she jerked the blade free of his neck. The edges of the slash gaped wide. The clipped ends of the vessels looked like pink soda straws.

  Eyes bulging, the Angel tried desperately to staunch the tremendous flow of blood. His efforts were in vain. He had only one hand to work with, and he had sustained two mortal wounds.

  Blood squirted in all directions, from the stump of his arm and from his cut jugular.

  In a second, his face went from furious-red to dead-white. Then his chin slumped to his chest. His brain was out of blood, but his heart was still beating. Blood continued to pulse from his severed wrist.

  “You’re in for it now,” the other Angel told her. “I’m going to chop you up in little bitty pieces.” With that, he took a practice cut with his sword, making the blade hiss through the air.

  “You’re more than welcome to try,” she said as she backed away.

  Mildred’s adversary was much bigger and much stronger than she was. Not as agile, though. And because he was so tall and his arms were so long, he was handicapped by the confined space of the kitchen. The low ceiling and narrow walls would make it difficult for him to aim and deliver full-power blows.

  The Angel came at her like a whirlwind, sword whistling as it slashed back and forth through the air. His blade tip knocked the iron pans off the walls and crashed through the collection of dishes and crockery.

  Mildred was unable to return a single thrust. Under the horrific attack, all she could do was retreat while keeping up her guard.

  They circled the cluttered little room again and again, the cannie’s sword point scoring the ceiling and walls as he tried, forehand and back, to angle a chilling strike through her defenses.

  The Angel’s repeated blows on her cutlass hilt sent shock waves and pain rippling up her hand, arm and shoulder. She realized it wouldn’t be long before all three went numb, making it impossible to lift the cutlass or maybe causing her to lose her grip on it altogether. It was a matter of physiology, not willpower or determination.

  As she ducked away from him, he nicked the back of her left hand with the edge of his blade. There was a sharp tug, then a stinging sensation.

  Mildred looked down to see the skin gone over the knuckle of her middle finger. For a second, she saw the exposed white bone, then the wound filled with blood.

  The Angel laughed. “Little bitty pieces,” he said.

  Even though he’d cut her, she knew she’d lucked out. She had come within an inch or two of losing all the fingers on that hand. She couldn’t stay lucky for long.

  As she barely twisted out from under an overhead strike, she realized she was praying for a single chance, an opportunity to stick this pig while she still had the strength to run him through.

  In other words, it was desperation time.

  Dragging the sword point on the floor to rest her arm, she darted around the room’s small worktable.

  “Can’t hold it up anymore?” the Angel said, grabbing the tabletop in his left hand and tossing the thing aside.

  Mildred took her best shot. The cannie’s arms were wide apart and he was momentarily rocked back on his heels. She whipped the blade point up and lunged.


  It was a trick. A sucker’s game.

  The Angel neatly turned to make her miss, and as he did, he slashed down with his sword.

  Again Mildred felt the rasping tug of steel on flesh and a burst of sharp pain. This time it was her sword arm that was struck. A long oval patch of skin was sliced from her tricep, the pink flesh beneath oozed red. Hot blood poured down her arm and wrist. Inside the cutlass’s basket, her fingers were suddenly slippery on the grip.

  “This is gonna be the death of a thousand cuts,” the Angel said. “You’re no match for me.”

  Mildred had to agree with that. Her legs were fine, but it was getting hard to swing the sword. She was moving the blade slower and slower, and she could feel her arm getting weaker. She didn’t stand a chance with this particular weapon, under these circumstances.

  When he charged her again, she managed to fend him off with the cutlass, but dodging was far preferable to parrying his powerful blows. As she skirted the perimeter of the room, she let the weapon drag again. She needed to recover the feeling in her sword hand before she tried Plan B.

  Mildred made a point of not glancing directly at the two revolvers stuffed into the front of the Angel’s pants, but she had already noted the way their butts and trigger guards hung tantalizingly over the waistband. Two very familiar weapons, both fully loaded when she last hefted them. She didn’t want the cannie to guess what she had in mind until it was too late for him to do anything about it.

  “I’d rather not die by inches,” she said as she darted away from a sideways slash. It was the truth, oddly enough. A clean death had a whole lot of upside. “If you promise to chill me quick,” Mildred said, “I’ll throw down the sword and give up.”

  The Angel spread his arms in a transparently bogus gesture of magnanimity. “Sure, why not,” he said. “Go ahead and drop it.”

  Mildred did so at once, letting the heavy sword clatter to the floor behind her.

  “There,” she said, holding out her empty hands. “I lived up to my part of the bargain. It’s your turn.”

  Though it made her scalp crawl, when the Angel started to step up she forced herself to slip to her knees in front of him and assumed the classic, doomed prisoner pose. “Make it quick, now,” she said, looking up, meeting his eyes and holding his gaze.

  The cannie’s expression twisted into an evil leer as he cocked back the cutlass, fully intending to finish her off with a single, terrible swipe. “Die, bitch…” he snarled.

  Well inside his guard and the cutting arc of his long blade, Mildred lunged up from the floor. The Angel reacted just as she had expected. He jumped backward so he could bring his cutlass to bear. But he didn’t move far enough, and certainly not fast enough. Reverse was his slowest speed.

  Mildred kept coming at him full-tilt, driving with her legs, her arms outstretched toward his midsection. Before he could retreat farther or twist away from her hands, she grabbed the butts of both pistols at once.

  In the next instant, the Angel realized just how fatally he had underestimated her skills.

  Mildred didn’t yank the blasters free. That would have taken too long, and perhaps given the giant cannie time to smash in the top of her head with his sword’s pommel.

  She simply turned the weapons’ barrels and cylinders, twisting them around inside his pants. Grinding the sights and muzzles deep into his groin, she fired the weapons point-blank. The simultaneous reports were muffled by his shuddering flesh.

  The Angel squealed as the crisscrossing through-and-throughs blew out the cheeks of his ass. He doubled over, clutching at his belly and his perforated bowels. He staggered backward a half step, then his knees buckled. No longer able to stand, he sat hard, his legs extended out straight from his hips, his heels drumming on the floor.

  “That pretty much evens the odds, doesn’t it?” Mildred said as she stowed the pistols in her belt and picked up the cutlass she had dropped.

  The gut shot Angel gave her a look. Squinty. Hateful. It was supposed to be defiant to the last, like a wounded tiger. It came across more like a wounded jackal.

  She wiped her bloody hand on the back of her trousers, then delivered a backhand slash across the front of the cannie’s undefended throat that nearly took off his head.

  Cutlass in one hand, Python in the other, she returned to ship’s control room on the run. She fully expected to meet more Angels head-on, either in the narrow corridor or in La Golondrina’s suite, but there was none in sight. She was kind of disappointed.

  The smell of sandalwood incense still hung heavy and cloying in the queen’s chamber. Behind the drooping folds of brown muslin, backlit by the oil lamps’ weak glow, a slender figure suddenly moved for the wheelhouse door.

  “Hold it right there,” Mildred warned. Then she hacked down the intervening gauze curtains.

  La Golondrina found herself caught in midstep. She lowered her pale, scrawny arms to her sides.

  “There’s been a slight change of menu,” Mildred informed the cannie queen. “Soup’s off.”

  “I don’t know how you managed to get away, but you have accomplished nothing,” La Golondrina assured her. “You have earned yourself a few more meaningless moments of life, that’s all.”

  “Maybe I can think of something to make them meaningful.”

  “No matter what you do,” the queen said, “you will still end up on my plate. Beneath a sauce made from your own marrow, I think.”

  “But will you be around to enjoy it?”

  La Golondrina scowled at her.

  “I think you know what’s going to happen next,” Mildred said.

  She did.

  The freezie hag filled her withered lungs and lifted her head to cry for help.

  In a blur, Mildred thrust the cutlass forward, stopping its keen point against the front of La Golondrina’s throat. The blade neatly pricked the wrinkled, parchment skin. Instead of screaming, the queen let out an agonized yip and jumped back, clutching at her neck with a skeletal hand.

  “Shouting won’t do you a bit of good,” Mildred informed her. “It sounds like your lackeys have problems of their own.”

  They both could hear male voices heatedly arguing on the bridge outside the wheelhouse.

  “No help is coming,” Mildred said. “At least, not in time.”

  La Golondrina bent with a speed that took Mildred by surprise. Out from under a tasseled pillow, the queen pulled a long, silver dagger. The first two inches of its needle point gleamed iridescently in the lamplight, making Mildred think it had been dipped in poison.

  Jabbing weakly with the slender knife, the cannie queen began to circle her fellow freezie. In that baggy black dress, she looked like a doll made of sticks, one leg long, one leg short.

  “Spicy,” Mildred said, turning the insult back on its author. Then she swung down with the flat of her sword, knocking the dagger out of La Golondrina’s hand.

  The blow made the hag screech in pain.

  “You broke my wrist! Oh, you broke my wrist,” the queen cried, cradling one bony hand with the other.

  “If you’re looking for pity, you’ve got to know you’re looking in the wrong place,” Mildred said. Then she dropped the sword on the floor and shifted the .357 Magnum revolver to her strong hand. A gesture with unmistakable meaning under the circumstances.

  “You can’t chill me,” La Golondrina snapped. “Not if you’re really infected with oozies. I’m the only thing that can keep you alive. You need me in one piece with my immune system pumping up a storm.”

  “Because your blood is the only cure?”

  “That’s right. I have enough antibodies in me to save a hundred thousand cannies from the Gray Death.”

  “I’m not a cannie, yet.”

  “But you will be, soon enough. Nobody escapes the virus.”

  “You’re wrong about that. I think there is a way.”

  “You’re kidding yourself, my dear.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s worth a shot.”


  Mildred scooped up one of the plush pillows. With her left hand, she jammed it against the stunned woman’s face.

  Not as a courtesy to the queen, rather to avoid coating Jak’s favorite blaster with cranial back splatter.

  Mildred rammed the Colt’s muzzle into the middle of the pillow and fired. Big hunks of cheddar-colored foam stuffing blew out the other side. La Golondrina’s head jerked backward, her long, dyed hair on fire, her skull flying apart like a dropped teapot.

  In the same instant blasterfire erupted from the bridge wing behind her. A barrage escaped five or six longblasters, and strings of bullets pounded on the side of the wheelhouse. Stray slugs crashed through the windows, plucking at the sweltering room’s brown muslin veils, then slamming into the opposite wall.

  Mildred leaned down, out of the line of fire, over the frail, twitching body. As she did so, she took a detailed inventory of her every sensation. Her right hand and wrist tingled from the Magnum revolver’s powerful recoil. She smelled burned cordite and coppery blood mixed with sandalwood. She could feel a river of sweat sliding down the hollow of her back, between her buttocks. Her heart was beating like mad, but the unholy desire that Junior Tibideau had tortured her with wasn’t there.

  Perhaps she didn’t need to do anything more, she thought. Perhaps the infection hadn’t taken hold, after all.

  Perhaps she was safe.

  The scientist in her answered with cold, irrefutable logic. There was no way of knowing, one way or another, until the full array of behavioral and physiological symptoms showed up. In other words, until it was too late.

  The real question was whether she could live out the rest of her life with something so horrible hanging over her head.

  There was only one way to make sure she had nothing to fear.

  The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Mildred. But she knew exactly what she had to do, and she steeled herself for it.

  Mildred made her mind go blank before she started. She didn’t let herself think. She didn’t let herself breathe through her nose or mouth. She closed her eyes. She didn’t let herself feel anything. She knew if she hesitated for a second, she could never go through with it.