Cannibal Reign

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Cannibal Reign Page 18

by Thomas Koloniar


  Twenty-Nine

  The last three months had not been kind to Private Shannon Emory, who was now the property of a man the bikers called Brutus. He possessed her in virtually every sense that one human being could possess another. She fought savagely every time he came to take her, which was at least once a day, and he always laughed as he pinned her down and forced himself upon her. She had bitten him once on the neck early in her captivity, and he had beaten her for it, promising to bust out her teeth if she ever did it again. So Emory did not try to bite him after that, though she had vowed to bite off anything he put into her mouth, and he must have believed her because so far he had not yet attempted to do so.

  She spent most of her days now locked in a motel room in Mesa, Arizona, where the temperature fluctuated between twenty and thirty degrees. There was no heat in the building, so she spent most of her time sitting on the bed wrapped in blankets. She was allowed to keep her uniform and boots, and had so far been fed decent food, but the selection grew poorer over the weeks, and for the past few days now she had been given nothing to eat but cans of creamed corn and lima beans.

  She knew the Mongols had recruited more biker types to their cause and that their numbers were now close to a hundred. They were also taking prisoners for food, literally feeding upon the weak. In the early days, from her balcony on the tenth floor, she had watched the flammable parts of the city burned and the populace fleeing south. Few police remained behind, and those who did were quickly killed off by lawless mobs of men looking to rape and plunder away their final days on earth.

  Civilized people had banded together and done rather well for the first month or so after the impact, until their food supplies gave out and they grew too weak to fight, either taking their own lives or being overrun by those willing to eat human flesh in order to survive. The males had been killed and eaten straight away, the females abducted and raped and finally eaten as well. Twice, even the biker motel had been attacked. But the Mongols were violent, Vikinglike warriors. They fought with everything from pistols and machine guns to axes and machetes, teaching even the local sociopaths to stay away.

  A few small convoys of military vehicles had passed through town headed south, and the Mongols ambushed a couple of them, taking the ammunition and food. By the end of the second month, Mesa City had grown bitter cold and become more or less a ghost town, people only emerging at night to scavenge for food. Many of these people fell victim to Mongol traps and became food themselves. The Mongols too had begun to forage, sending groups of well-armed men into the suburbs each day to scavenge anything of use. They went systematically through each neighborhood, moving from house to house, discovering many families who had found ways to survive.

  The door to the motel room opened and Emory prepared herself to fight yet again as Brutus stepped in and stood looking at her. He wore his long blond hair in a golden braid and kept his beard trimmed closer to his face than the rest of the gang, but he was every bit as grubby and smelly. He was tall and muscular, with blue, mean-looking eyes, like the archetypal Viking.

  “Bad news,” he said.

  She sat looking at him, hating him intensely. Often, she had considered throwing herself off the balcony, but had so far been unable to bring herself to take that final fall.

  “There’s nothing left but dog food,” he said. “After that, you’ll have to eat man meat with the rest of us.”

  “I’ll starve, thanks.”

  “You’ll fucking eat or I’ll blowtorch your tits.”

  He tossed a can of Alpo onto the bed, and she sat looking at it, thinking that the time had finally come to consider the balcony in a very serious way. It would be much easier to do if she were drunk, however.

  “Is there any booze left?” she asked. “I’ll need something to take the fucking taste out of my mouth.”

  He grunted and left the room.

  She opened the can with her can opener and scooped half of the nasty smelling dog food into the toilet, using the bucket of water to flush it down and getting back into the bed, sticking her spoon into the can and setting it beside her on the blanket. She had fought as hard and as long as she could and hated to give up, but there was nothing ahead now but more and ever greater misery.

  Brutus came back into the room with a pair of leg shackles in his hand, and she sprang from the bed like a frog from a hot pan, beating him easily to the sliding door, but he was on her before she could get it open, knocking her to the floor with his great, hairy forearm. She scrabbled to her feet and tried for the hallway, but he caught her collar and swung her around, slamming her hard against the wall, knocking her senseless.

  He took hold of her ankle and dragged her across the room, where he used his booted foot to smash apart the heating unit, exposing the radiator pipe. Emory came to as he was shackling her to the pipe and kicked him in the face, knocking him over backward, but it was too late. She was caught fast to the radiator.

  Brutus stood back up and wiped the blood from the corner of his eye, looking at it on his fingers. “This is the second time you’ve made me bleed.”

  “Wait till next time!” she said acidly.

  He stood on her free leg and began to unlace her boot.

  Emory hammered away at him with her fists, but he ignored her as he finished stealing her boots and stepped away, tossing them into the hall.

  “I’ll fucking kill you!” she swore. “You fucking piece of shit! You fucking biker trash motherfucker! Nothing but a bunch of fucking white trash biker fucks! Eating fucking people! You fucking animals!”

  He took the blankets from the bed and tossed them over her. “Didn’t have to be like this. All you had to do was go along.”

  “Fuck you!” she said from under the blanket. “I’m a fucking soldier! You’re nothing but a goddamn animal!”

  Another Mongol came into the room, a winter parka worn over his colors. His name was Gig.

  “Something you might find interesting,” Gig said, noticing Emory’s shape beneath the blanket. “We found the green Jeep . . . on the east side of town.”

  “What’s the plate number?” Brutus demanded.

  “OA 5599,” Gig said. “It’s him. I’ve got some men watching the house now. All the curtains are shut, but there’s tracks in the dust outside the back door. A dead body under the deck.”

  Brutus had never gotten a good look at the man who killed his brother, but he would soon be pissing on his dead body. He looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. “Be dark soon. We’ll hit him after it gets late.”

  “You’re all animals!” Emory said, still hidden beneath the blankets.

  Brutus booted her in the head, not real hard but hard enough to hurt. “Get a house mouse in here to keep an eye on this bitch. I don’t want her offing herself.”

  Thirty

  The basement was cold, but Marty and Susan spent most of their time cuddled together beneath lots of blankets, so it wasn’t unpleasant. The only time the cold was a genuine bother was when they had to come out from the under the covers to go to the bathroom or to wash up. They usually kept a supply of food by the bed along with the camp stove, so they could keep warm while preparing their meals.

  Their time together since the asteroid strike had been good, and they had made love many, many times over the past few months, more times than Marty had in all the rest of his life. By the sixth week Susan was pretty sure she had conceived, but she chose not tell Marty about it. The end was drawing near, and knowing that she was pregnant with his child would only make his job more difficult when the time came.

  The food had begun to run low after the first couple of months, and she went to sleep each night hoping never to awaken again, but each morning she awoke to find him there in bed wrapped tightly around her. She did love him, though not in a passionate kind of way, and their lovemaking had been a wonderful way to pass the days and nights. Each Friday night t
hey had even been able to watch a DVD on Marty’s laptop until the battery finally went completely dead.

  Then one disappointing morning Susan awoke to find that Marty had left the house during the night, to scavenge around the neighborhood by flashlight in search of food and supplies, and in doing so managed to scare up enough food to get them through another week. It had been difficult for her to do, but she feigned happiness. She felt terrible because she knew how badly he wanted there to be a future for them, and she knew he was perfectly willing to live with her there in that basement for the rest of their lives if that was what it took.

  “You do understand,” she had gently said the week before, “that there has to be an end to this, right?”

  “I do,” he answered heavily. “But will you let me fight for us?”

  “Of course,” she said, touching his pained face in the candlelight. “So long as you’ll keep your promise to me.”

  “I will,” he said, actually meaning it, for by then he had seen things on his numerous forays into the neighborhood, sights that chilled him to his core. Partially butchered corpses, heads stuck on fence posts, and entire families gathered together in bedrooms, dead of murder-suicides. Soon he would be forced to venture too far from the house at night to risk leaving her alone and undefended.

  The light had faded outside the glass block windows, and Marty got up to cover them so they could light a candle without the risk of the light showing outside. The nights were pitch-black now, and the slightest hint of light seemed visible for miles and miles, though distance was extremely hard to judge in that kind of darkness. He slipped in beneath the blankets and wrapped himself around her, placing his hand flat on her belly where he knew that his child lived.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I haven’t told you about the time I went to Yosemite with my scout troop yet. Would you like to hear about it?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, lacing her fingers through his on top of her belly and rolling to her side to face away from him, now realizing that he knew she was with child.

  As she listened to him telling her of his trip to Yosemite, tears began to pour from her eyes, for she had sensed a change in him, a change in his tone of voice as he told the story, almost as if he were telling it to a little girl whom he loved very much, and she knew that he had chosen tonight.

  Halfway through the story, he stopped and said, “Susan, will you marry me?”

  She rolled over, wrapped herself around him and whispered, “Of course I’ll marry you!”

  He squeezed her and she squeezed him back.

  “I love you!” she said suddenly, feeling the emotion more intensely at that moment than she had imagined possible.

  “You are my entire life,” he told her. “All that I ever was or could ever have been was meant for you.”

  That was more than she could take, and she began to weep openly, kissing him and wriggling her pajama bottoms down for one last time. They made love by candlelight, their tears mixing together as they kissed and said their vows to one another. They agreed to name the child Purity.

  Susan fell into a deep sleep a short time later, and he lay beside her running his fingers through her hair and watching her sleep peacefully in the soft yellow light of the candle. He did not know who had been watching the house all that day, but he knew with absolute certainty that they would never, ever harm his wife or desecrate her body.

  “I love you, Susan,” he whispered, his throat tight as the tears ran down his face. “And I love Purity. I love you both more than any man has ever loved his family.”

  He blew out the candle, and Joe’s pistol went off a second later.

  He then got quickly out of the bed and opened the cans of Coleman fuel, pouring them all over the mattress and the counterpane, knowing his way in the darkness by now as well as any blind man knew his own bedroom. He ran up the stairs and opened the last of Joe’s gasoline, pouring it down the stairs. He flung more gasoline around the lower level of the house, then took a road flare from the kitchen counter, popping it alight and tossing it into the basement as he ran for the back door.

  The basement erupted in a blast of white flame that shot up the stairs and quickly engulfed the entire lower level of the house. Marty dove from his back porch into the dirt and scrabbled to his feet, grabbing up the carbine and slinging it over his shoulder. He was quick to get out of the light of the flames engulfing the house, running through his neighbor’s backyard by the light of the fire. He ducked quickly into the second house over and made his way upstairs, where he took up a firing position in one of the windows, watching for those who had come to eat his family.

  When he saw three men in biker colors crossing the street with shotguns over their shoulders, he became so furious with himself for not hiding the Jeep that he nearly jammed Joe’s .45 up under his own chin. Instead, he quickly unshouldered the carbine and took aim at the closest Mongol. He squeezed the trigger and the biker jerked as though he had been stung by a wasp, grabbing at his neck and falling to the ground. The other two men turned and ran back across the street, but Marty was pretty good with the carbine now. He shot them down before they were able to make it to cover.

  Then something hit him between his shoulder blades, and as he fell over on the floor in agony, he saw a large figure standing over him with crowbar.

  Brutus picked him up from the floor with one arm and held him against the wall by his throat. “Now I got you, motherfucker, and you’re gonna pay for killin’ my brother!” He slugged Marty in the stomach and threw him to the floor.

  “I didn’t!” Marty gasped. “It was him . . . him!”

  Brutus paused before dropping his boot against the back of Marty’s neck. “Him who, asshole?”

  “Jeep guy,” he groaned. “Dead under my deck!”

  Brutus remembered that Gig had mentioned a body under Marty’s deck, so he jerked him to his feet and threw him into a chair.

  “What Jeep guy?”

  “Him,” Marty choked, his gut feeling as though he’d been run over by a car. “He tried to take my house . . . my wife.”

  “You’re tellin’ me you killed the fucker who owns that green Jeep?”

  “Jeep sure ain’t mine, mister.” Marty was still gasping for air, holding his belly. “It’s got California plates. He was a Secret Service agent . . . followed my wife back from JPL . . . check his wallet if you don’t believe me. He was a total psycho!”

  Brutus stood thinking it over. If Marty’s story was true, he didn’t exactly owe him any favors now that he had killed his three men in the street, but he might be willing to let him live . . . for a while.

  “Okay, motherfucker,” he said, grabbing Marty’s coat and hauling him to his feet. “We’re gonna check your story out. If that cat ain’t Secret Service, you’re gonna wish I’d broke your goddamn neck!”

  Five minutes later Marty was on his knees in the street in front of his burning house, his hands tied behind his back as Brutus and another biker stood examining Paulis’s Secret Service ID.

  “Don’t make no sense,” Gig said. “I saw a broad with red hair at the rest stop getting out of the Jeep. She was telling the Army to shoot us.”

  “That had to be my wife!” Marty blurted, conjuring his lie off the cuff. “He drove her back from Caltech. Look, I’m an astronomer. I’m the guy who took the story public. My wife worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Secret Service gave her a ride home the day before the asteroid hit. A few days later he came back and tried to take her for himself. She’s actually the one who shot him, not me.”

  Brutus and the other biker stood looking at each other.

  “This ID sorta proves he’s telling the truth,” Gig said. “It explains how that bastard was able to kill so many of our bros.”

  “So where’s your old lady now?” Brutus demande
d.

  Marty started to cry, having blocked it from his conscious thought until that moment. “She’s down in the basement,” he sobbed. “Our baby . . . I shot her . . . just kill me already. Get it over with!”

  “Put him in the truck,” Brutus said, strangely conflicted. “I’ll decide about him later.”

  Thirty-One

  Life belowground for Forrest and his flock had settled into a pleasant, if a little boring, routine within a few weeks of the impact. The children attended school with Andie for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon every day, and the mothers experimented with the food they were allotted to cook for each meal.

  Mealtime, especially dinner, was everyone’s favorite because it was story time. They took turns telling stories about themselves or someone they knew. Sometimes the stories were funny and sometimes they were very sad, but it helped them get to know one another and to remember that they were human beings with histories and memories. And most importantly, it helped to pass the time.

  At other times they read, watched movies, worked puzzles or played games, and everyone took turns riding the bicycle generators. The women also helped watch the monitors when the soldier assigned to Launch Control wanted to put his head down for a nap, or to step out and stretch his legs. In Forrest’s case it was usually to smoke a cigarette in the cargo bay.

  A few of the women were even learning to knit from Maria Vasquez, a skill she had thought would be important for the children to eventually learn as well, having seen to it that a lot of yarn had made its way down into the silo. She had also begun teaching some of the other children to speak Spanish in the evenings.

  Late night was the favorite time for the adults. After the children had been put to bed, they almost always played cards, and each of them was allowed either a small bar of chocolate or a shot of whiskey. Almost every mother had someone she shared with, so they could all have a little of each. It wasn’t much, but it was something to look forward to. Euchre and strip poker were favorite card games, but it was agreed that no one would strip past their underwear, the married women especially adamant.

 

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