Cannibal Reign

by Thomas Koloniar

  “That’s like six hundred pounds of dog shit somebody’s gonna have to scoop up, and it sure as hell won’t be me,” Ulrich said.

  “Nobody’s asking you to,” Forrest replied testily.

  Ulrich glanced over his shoulder as the dog trotted through the house sniffing everything in sight. “How did you talk Monica into giving him up?”

  “I didn’t talk her into anything. She asked me if I wanted to save my son’s dog and I said yes. Now, are you gonna pick up the food or do I have to go get it myself?”

  Linus Danzig stepped into the doorway and stood looking at the wolflike dog trotting around the kitchen. He was a big country boy in his late twenties, wearing nothing but a pair of purple underwear.

  “Fuck are you made up for?” Forrest asked irritably.

  Danzig shook his head and disappeared back down the hall, realizing Forrest was in one of his moods.

  Ulrich drank deeply from the beer and had a seat. “Wanna tell me about it?” He put his feet up on the table.

  “Nothin’ to tell,” Forrest said, ripping the cellophane from a brand new pack of Camels. “She don’t wanna live underground and she ain’t gonna, but then I already knew that.” He smacked a cigarette from the pack, lit it with the Zippo from his pocket and stood leaning against the sink staring at the floor.

  “I can help you kidnap her,” Ulrich said quietly.

  Forrest looked at him, his eyes welling with tears. “I’d never do that to her. She’d kill herself belowground the first chance she got. Hell, if it wasn’t for her horses, she’d have done it by now.”

  Ulrich sighed and rocked back, the wooden chair creaking beneath the strain. “There’s a lot that’s unsaid, Jack, but you know I think the world of that woman.”

  Forrest nodded, drawing pensively from the cigarette. “She’s just so . . . full of anger, Wayne. She never shows it but it’s there, right below the surface . . . Christ, that woman’s angry.”

  “And she has every right. You guys lost your son. And who knows? Maybe if I hadn’t talked you into that last mission—”

  Forrest held up a finger, banishing the thought. “You never talked me into anything I didn’t wanna do. Monica knows that. She’s no more angry with you than she is me. Who she’s really pissed at is him.” He pointed up at the ceiling.

  Ulrich looked at his boots. “Wanna cash it in?” he said suddenly. “We can give the silo to the trio and go to Montana. Erin will agree to it, Taylor too probably. Hell, those women were all thick as thieves at one time . . . and they miss Monica.”

  Forrest smiled wanly at his friend, knowing the offer was genuine. “Even if Monica wanted the company—which she doesn’t—there’s no way I’m letting any of your wives die if I don’t have to. One’s enough.” He crushed out the cigarette in the sink. “I’m gonna go bring the rest of that shit in. I picked up some new office chairs too, by the way, since that request seems to have gone in one ear and out the other.”

  “Yeah, I don’t have enough shit to buy without having to worry about your creature comforts.”

  “And there’s a lot of assembly required,” Forrest added with a chuckle, “so get the Dynamic Duo to put ’em together in the morning.” He took Laddie outside with him, and the moment he was gone, Danzig reappeared in the kitchen doorway with Oscar Vasquez. Marcus Kane was asleep in the silo below.

  “Is he okay?” Danzig asked.

  Ulrich tipped his beer and looked at them. “You know who’s gonna have to police up all that dog shit, don’t you? He sure as hell isn’t gonna do it.”

  Vasquez grinned. “And that dog’s shit is gonna be biiig, vato.”

  Danzig laughed, both of them cracking up at the look appearing on Ulrich’s face.

  “Since you two dickheads are up,” he said, dropping his feet to the floor, “we just got some new office chairs that need—”

  Both Danzig and Vasquez vanished instantly.

  “That’s what I thought!” he called after them, taking another swig and muttering to himself. “Just what we need, the lingering odor of dog shit in those tunnels.”

  Seven

  Harold Shipman came down the hall outside of his office at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to find Ester Thorn seated in a chair against the wall, her hand propped on her cane, overnight bag on the floor beside her. “Ester?” he said. “My God, what a surprise! How have you been?”

  Ester took his hand and used her cane to push herself to her feet. “I’ve been well enough,” she said grimly, tired from her long flight over the Pacific. “But I’m afraid I come as a harbinger of bad things to come, Harold. May we talk privately?”

  “Yes, of course,” Shipman said, puzzled but amused to see that Ester had barely changed since the last time he’d seen her nearly ten years before, when she was his senior at the observatory. “You should’ve called, Ester. I could have made arrangements.”

  “There’s time enough for arrangements,” she muttered, watching him put his key into the door.

  Shipman took up her bag and allowed her to precede him into the cluttered office that had once been hers, inviting her to sit across from him in one of the two chairs before his desk.

  “So what in the world brings you all this way?” he asked.

  “Thor’s Hammer,” she said, her old gray eyes unblinking as she allowed the silence to gather.

  Shipman did not immediately respond, although he knew exactly what Ester meant, remembering well her vehement assertions that the industrialized governments of the world ignored the dangers of near Earth objects at the peril of all humankind. “Yes,” he said. “Well, it’s still out there somewhere, we all know that, but I’m afraid with all of the cutbacks and—”

  “Would you like to see it, Harold?”

  He went slack in the jaw. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s coming out of Ursa Minor,” she said, referring to the northernmost constellation, often referred to as the Little Dipper.

  Shipman turned in his chair, grabbing a chart of the heavens from a nearby table piled high with charts and texts. “Who’s spotted it?”

  “A young astronomer from Mesa Station. Martin Chittenden. Ever heard of him?”

  “I recognize the name,” he said, flipping through the chart. “I think I may have read something of his a while back in Astronomy Today. Something on deep space asteroids. Lots of conjecture. If I remember correctly, he thinks we’re not paying enough attention to empty space.”

  “Turns out we haven’t been,” she said, her expression tightening along with the grip on her cane.

  “Ester, what’s going on? Are you telling me we’re actually going to be hit?”

  “We’ve got about eighty days to impact.”

  “Eighty days? How big is it?”

  “Three point two kilometers.”

  “My God!”

  “And it’s coming at us so fast it’ll make your eyeballs roll.”

  “But that just can’t be,” he said, scanning the same chart he’d seen thousands of times. “There’s nothing out there, Ester. You know that.”

  “It’s coming from the Great Beyond, and it’s maybe as old as the Earth.”

  He turned the chart on the desk for her to see. “Show me where.”

  She used the tip of her cane to indicate the northernmost star in the sky. “The brightness of Polaris has probably helped to keep it hidden all these years. Like the Red Baron coming out of the sun.”

  “Thor’s Hammer,” he muttered. “I take it you’ve seen this creature for yourself?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, then how do you know it’s even—”

  “The night he came to ask for my help in taking it public, he was abducted from my front lawn by two federal agents. They shot the boy in the back with a Taser gun, Harold.”

  “They’re trying to keep it
a secret, for Christ’s sake? It’ll never work!”

  “That’s not stopping the cowardly bastards from trying.”

  “Well, we sure as hell won’t stand for that,” Shipman said. “Not if this fellow knows what the devil he’s talking about. I’ll turn the dome tonight and we’ll just have a look for ourselves. Though it could take weeks to come up with an orbital model that will prove our case.”

  “All we need are preliminary estimates,” Ester said. “And those we can come up with in a few days, enough to get everyone on Earth with a telescope looking toward Polaris. Getting word out isn’t going to be the problem. The problem will be in prepping these islands.”

  “Prepping the Hawaiians? For tsunamis? Where does Chittenden think it will hit?”

  “North America. He’s seems fairly certain of that. So it’s not so much a tsunami of water I’m worried about. Once word gets out that the mainland is under the gun . . .”

  “People will flock here by the thousands. We’ll be overrun,” Shipman concluded.

  “That’s right. So I think we need to get the governor’s ear as quickly as possible. Do you know anyone in the local government?”

  “I play golf with the mayor of Honolulu.”

  “Perfect. I think it’s important that the Islands prepare to quarantine themselves. That might take some convincing at first, but once the insanity begins . . .” She shrugged. “Desperate times seem to precipitate their own desperate measures.”

  “This explains a few things,” he muttered, sitting back in his chair and taking his pipe from a side drawer. “NASA’s been cutting funding across the board and suggesting all sorts of odd things for everyone to look at out there. Even the GLAST telescope has been kept aimed in almost the opposite direction over the past five months or so.”

  “During my flight I was wondering about that new satellite program that was fast-tracked out of nowhere. The timing is too close. It has to be related. I’m even doubting they’re satellites.”

  “You think they’re trying for a shoot-down?”

  Ester sucked her teeth. “It’s all we’ve got, isn’t it?”

  Shipman shook his head, saying, “At two miles across, it won’t work unless this thing’s made of butter. What class is it? Did Chittenden say?”

  “M-class.”

  “Well let’s hope he’s wrong, by God. Ester, you sure know how to wreck an old man’s day.”

  “Oh, you’re not even sixty yet,” she said. “And look at it this way . . . neither of us has to worry about ending up in diapers now.”

  He tossed the chart back onto the table. “I’d also like to bring Sam Ash in on this. He knows a lot of people in cable news. That might expedite things once we’ve got some orbital models to offer.”

  “We have to keep this an absolute secret until we announce. And here’s something else . . . when we do announce, we have to be ready to counter the skeptics and naysayers—all those same idiots who are still denying global warming.”

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll do our research, and then we’ll get in touch with Sam. He’s here on the island.”

  “The situation will deteriorate rapidly after impact,” Ester went on. “First, it will be every state for itself. Then every city, every neighborhood, every block, and finally every man, woman, and child. This country’s headed back to the Stone Age, Harold, and nothing can stop it.”

  “I’m afraid our immediate problems here will be of a somewhat different nature.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, Pearl Harbor is home to the United States Pacific Fleet. That’s a lot of permanently displaced sailors and marines. Who controls them after Washington goes out of business? What will the Admiralty decide to do about these islands? We could all too easily become a military state here.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “Obviously, the Navy possesses the facility to be either our saviors or the bane of our existence.” She sat thinking for a short while. “Does President Hadrian still live here on the island?”

  “He does.”

  President Barry Hadrian was a former president of the United States who had retired with his wife to his home state of Hawaii after two successful terms of office. He was in his fifties now and still very well respected.

  “Perhaps your friend the mayor can talk to him,” Ester suggested. “I doubt either of them would like to see us ruled by the military. Who’s the governor these days?”

  “Paola Reyes. A flimsy politician, to say the least. I don’t see her standing up to the Navy once disaster has struck.”

  “Is she particularly popular among Hawaiians?”

  Shipman shrugged. “Fifty-fifty. She goes where the smiles go, caters heavily to the tourists and local business.”

  “Then she’ll not likely be missed,” Ester decided. “But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. The first thing we have to do is establish that Chittenden’s NEO actually exists. After that we go on the offensive.”

  Eight

  Dr. Michael Porter was lying on the sofa watching CNN when a BREAKING NEWS bulletin suddenly interrupted the Nasdaq report. Aging anchor Wolf Blitzer appeared and tersely announced that a trio of astronomers from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii was standing by to make a collective statement, concerning a large asteroid due to collide with the earth within the next few months.

  “Fuck,” Michael muttered, sitting up on the couch. “Hey, Ronny? You’d better come listen to this.”

  Veronica came quickly from the kitchen. “Is this it?”

  He gestured at the television where Ester Thorn stood behind a podium between two much taller male astronomers. She spoke into a cluster of microphones. The caption in the upper right-hand corner of the screen read: LIVE.

  “ . . . and if these preliminary calculations are accurate,” Ester Thorn said, reading from a prepared statement, “this object will collide with the Earth in sixty days. We are at this time still calculating the exact point of impact . . .”

  “Holy shit!” Veronica whispered. “He was telling the truth.” She felt a sudden surge of fear and sat down on the couch. Michael put his arm around her as they sat watching.

  “ . . . but we have determined with veritable certainty that we will be struck somewhere in or very close to North America. The asteroid is coming toward us out of the northern sky at a velocity in excess of one hundred thousand miles an hour from the constellation Ursa Minor nearest the star we call Polaris. This means it is not coming from the asteroid belt within our solar system, and that it has very likely been traveling millions of years to get here.

  “An asteroid of this size is on par with the object we believe ended the reign of the dinosaurs more than sixty-five million years ago. So, with that in mind, we believe it is essential for all nations to begin preparations at once. The time for denial has long since passed. We are a species with the means of preserving itself, but we must work together and we must begin today, this very hour. Thank you.”

  The reporters in front of the podium went nuts, shouting their questions, but neither Ester nor the men made an effort to answer as they walked back into the observatory.

  “The government’s been keeping it from us,” Michael said. “Did you hear that bit about ‘the time for denial has passed’? She was saying ‘shame on you’ to somebody.”

  “I wonder if they’ll arrest her. If you think about it, this wasn’t a very responsible way to tell us. People could well go nuts.”

  “That won’t likely happen before the final week or so,” he said. “At least not on a grand scale. Shock and denial have to run their course first. The biggest problem will be getting people to go to work, which is likely the reason we haven’t been told. Anyhow, I doubt they’ll arrest her. She’s an old woman and that would only prove her point. If the government wants credibility, they’ll have to offer us some kind of hope or solu
tion.”

  As if on cue, Wolf Blitzer announced the President of the United States live from the White House.

  “My fellow Americans,” began the President, an elderly man with white hair, standing before a podium flanked by a pair of officials, “the time has come for me to share with you a discovery of great significance . . .”

  When the President was finished, Veronica opened her phone and selected Forrest’s number, pressing the call button.

  “Hello, Veronica,” Forrest answered in a quiet voice a few moments later.

  “Jack, the story broke ten minutes ago on CNN.”

  “Who broke it?”

  “A group of astronomers in Hawaii. The President spoke right afterward.”

  “Did he speak live in front of reporters?”

  “It was live from inside the White House. No reporters. He only spoke for about five minutes.”

  “Were there two other men in the shot with him?”

  “You saw it?”

  “No. It wasn’t live. That announcement was taped weeks ago. Listen, pay close attention to whatever he says when he’s live and in front of the media. Soon, he’ll have to respond directly to whatever assertions are being made by these astronomers. The White House already has a battery of experts lined up to manage the public fear factor, but it’s going to take a few hours to get them all to D.C. for a joint appearance. They’re going to play it way down, make like it’s just a matter of shooting it out of the sky, but every astronomer in the world will be weighing in over the next few weeks, and the facts will eventually override all their bullshit.”

  “How do you know all of this stuff?”

  “I’d rather not get into that over the phone. But if you guys would like to meet, that’s fine. We’ve got fifty-nine days.”

  “I think I’d like to meet sooner than later.”

  “Okay. Make it the day after tomorrow at the truck stop.”

  “Well, should we pack now? Do you need us to bring anything?”