Cannibal Reign

by Thomas Koloniar

  “Better?”

  Marty shrugged back into the jacket. At any other time in his life, the smell of gasoline on his clothing would have made him sick, but under the present circumstance it smelled wholly appropriate. “Thanks, Sully.”

  “Sullivan . . . Sully was my dad.”

  “Hooah,” Marty said.

  They were on the road a short time later, searching for the best way to refuel the Jeep. By pure dumb luck they came across an abandoned eighteen-wheeled Shell tanker and filled up the Jeep, along with Joe’s two remaining fuel cans.

  Sullivan drove and Marty rode shotgun. Emory sat in the backseat with her M-203 grenade launcher. Anyone attempting to chase them down would get the shock of their lives.

  “This guy Joe,” Sullivan said, shifting into drive. “He was a good friend?”

  “He was the best friend anybody could ever hope for,” Marty said.

  “Well, he sure left you a fine set of wheels.”

  It occurred to Marty then, for the very first time, that he and Joe had a great deal in common now. “It’s a good Jeep,” he said.

  They drove back into town and Sullivan parked as close to the Air Force perimeter as he dared. “They’re keeping their supplies in what they consider to be their rear on their northern perimeter. We can keep to the side streets and walk right up to their supply column like I did the other night. They’ve still got night vision but they’re not keeping up a very good watch.”

  “What if we swipe one of their chargers?” Marty asked. “Plug it into the cigarette lighter here in the Jeep? That way we could drive without headlights, right?”

  “Let’s not get greedy,” Sullivan said.

  “What’s one look like?” Marty said. “I’m wearing an Air Force uniform.”

  “Whoa!” Emory said. “You can’t even walk the walk, Marty, much less talk the talk. And you’re wearing Adidas.”

  “Who looks at anybody’s feet in the dark?” Marty argued.

  “He’s a got a point,” Sullivan said. “And a charger would be a big advantage. Otherwise, these NVDs will be useless in a day or two.”

  “He’s got a death wish is what he’s got,” Emory said.

  “No, I don’t, Shannon. I really do want to see the crater.”

  Emory reluctantly agreed, then they came up with a plan. They used the night vision devices attached to their helmets to cover the last two blocks, easily slipping through the Air Force perimeter undetected. They grabbed two cases of MREs apiece from the nearest deuce-and-a-half, each case containing twelve complete meals, and hurried back to the edge of the perimeter. There were a number of sentries posted, but they were either sleeping or busy talking, most of them in total darkness with NVDs in the up position on the front of their helmets. Apparently they were feeling invincible now that the Mongol threat had been smashed.

  The trio stashed the food in a safe place and made their way back to the supply trucks, searching the cab of each for a charger. Not finding one, they were forced to penetrate deeper within the Air Force perimeter, finally taking cover behind a U-Haul truck near a well-lighted repair station where a number of airmen stood around talking and smoking cigarettes. A large green diesel-powered generator was running at the back of the repair bay, providing heat as well as light to a row of six fifty-three-foot Air Force trailers parked to the right of the garage.

  “That’s a command car over there,” Sullivan said, pointing across the lot to an armored Humvee festooned with multiple radio antennae.

  “If they don’t have one in there,” Emory said, “they don’t have one.”

  “I’ll be back,” Marty said, and stepped boldly from behind the truck into the light before Emory could grab him.

  “He does have a goddamn death wish!” Sullivan hissed, bringing his M-4 to bear, sighting on the group of nine airmen inside the bay.

  “I told you,” she muttered, doing the same, her finger on the trigger of the M-203.

  The airmen glanced in Marty’s direction as he strolled casually across the lot with the carbine slung over a shoulder, his hand in his pocket, waving lazily as he passed within a hundred feet of the open door. The wave was returned by a couple of the airmen who went right back to their bullshitting.

  “Check that out,” Emory said.

  “I’m still gonna jerk a half-hitch in his ass . . . if we survive this.”

  Marty walked past the trailers and over to the command car, which sat out of view from the garage, cloaked in shadow. He opened the far-side door and got in, shutting the door and using his red light to have a look around. There was a charger on the deck between the seats, resting on top of a grenade-bearing vest containing a dozen 40mm grenades. In the backseat he saw a medical bag like the one Emory had worn over her shoulder the day he and Susan met her.

  The grenade vest was confusing at first, but Marty was getting the hang of the military’s tricky contraptions, so he managed to shrug into it without much trouble. He tucked the charger away in his harness, shouldered the med kit, and got out of the Humvee.

  He heard a woman’s muted cry and froze. A man laughed. Marty looked up at the windows of the trailers, and his skin tightened into gooseflesh as he realized what the trailers were being used for.

  “No more,” he muttered, taking Joe’s .45 from its holster and stalking through the darkness to the closest trailer. He stepped onto the stairs and slowly opened the door.

  “Get ready to run,” Sullivan said, watching Marty through his NVD.

  “Go ahead, split,” Emory said. “I can’t leave him.”

  “You’ve got a death wish too now?”

  “No,” she said, resigned to her fate. “But I like the guy. He saved my ass.”

  “Fuck all,” he muttered, sighting down the barrel of his M-4 and getting ready to do battle.

  “Go on, Sullivan. You don’t need to stay here. You can make a good run without us. There’s enough food back there to last you a couple of months.”

  “Can’t do it,” he said. “You might be my only chance of ever getting laid again.”

  She patted him on the shoulder. “In that case, hon, you’d definitely better go. I’m playing for the other team.”

  He took his eye from the scope just long enough to see if she was kidding. “Still,” he said. “I got a pretty good tongue. You might get desperate.”

  “Hooah,” she said with a chuckle, and prepared herself to meet death standing up.

  Marty stepped into the trailer with the pistol concealed behind his thigh to find an Air Force sergeant sitting at a desk reading Hustler magazine. The sergeant pulled himself out of his fantasy and set the magazine aside, having a look at his clipboard and frowning as he flipped to the next sheet of paper.

  “You’re confused, Miller. You’re not up until tomorrow night.”

  “No, I’m up right now,” Marty said, pointing the pistol into the sergeant’s face, seeing that his name was Priest.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Priest said, cautious but unafraid. “You got shit for brains? You can’t wait twenty-four hours? Put that fucking thing away before I report your ass to Moriarty.”

  “How many men in the back?” Marty asked.

  The sergeant gave him a queer look, noting the dark stain on the collar of Marty’s jacket. “Who the fuck are you, buddy?”

  “Priest, I’m not your buddy. So unless you’d like to die with me, you’d better answer my question.”

  “Six,” Priest said, his mouth suddenly dry. “Three broads to a side.”

  Marty took a look around, now noticing the six rifles in a rack on the wall behind the desk. “Get the fuck out,” he said, stepping aside and waving the sergeant toward the door.

  Priest kept his hands shoulder high as he came around the desk, and Marty belted him in the back of the head with the pistol as he passed.


  Now, in every movie he had ever seen where a man got whacked in the back of the head with a gun, the guy always fell down; Priest did not fall down. What Priest did was grab the back of his head and spin around, swearing aloud and forcing Marty to belt him again, only this time on the top of the skull, which knocked Priest to his knees, but he still didn’t fall over. So Marty bashed him a third time, much harder, and the sergeant finally fell over, but he still wasn’t knocked out. He was, in fact, now sobbing like a child.

  This put Marty in a serious quandary, mindless brutality not really being his field of expertise.

  “Don’t hit me anymore,” the sergeant whimpered. “I can’t see. Jesus, you’ve blinded me!”

  Marty was suddenly feeling so bad for the man that he nearly started crying himself. “Don’t fucking move!” he hissed.

  “I won’t,” whimpered the severely injured man. “I swear!”

  Marty went down the hall and opened the first door to find a man humping a woman in her mid-forties. She had blond hair and was staring off into deep space.

  “What the fuck?” the naked man said, climbing off the cot from between the woman’s legs. “Get the fuck—”

  Marty shot him in the throat and turned around, kicking open the door to the room directly across the hall, where another woman was being violated. He shot the man in his stomach and turned to face down the hall, shooting each of the three men to emerge from their rooms. The sixth man had obviously chosen to hide, so Marty walked over the bodies and opened the door to find him cowering on the bed with his hands over his head. He was a young airman, no older than nineteen. The woman he had been molesting, even younger than her tormentor, was obviously in a deep fog like the others.

  Marty shot him in the head, nearly jumping out of his skin a second later to the sound of a thunderous explosion outside the trailer.

  “Kill me,” the girl begged. “Please!”

  Marty stepped forward, kissing his fingers and touching them to her forehead.

  “Close your eyes,” he said gently, hearing the sounds of men clamoring out of the next trailer, followed by those of automatic rifle fire. The girl closed her eyes and he did the same as he held the barrel of the .45 near her temple and pulled the trigger. The slide locked back on the weapon as the last shell was ejected, and he turned from the room without looking at her, ejecting the spent magazine and slapping in a new one. He did not look into the other rooms he passed, holstering the pistol and unslinging his carbine as he made for the door, stepping over the sergeant’s now lifeless body where he still lay on the floor in front of the desk.

  “What the fuck’s he doing in there?” Sullivan said as they stood waiting to find out what would happen.

  Ninety seconds later three half-naked men came piling out of the adjacent trailer with rifles in hand. Apparently none of the airmen in the garage had been able to hear Marty’s shots over the generator, but the men next door had.

  “The jig’s up!” Emory said. “I got the garage.”

  Sullivan shot down the men coming from the trailer as Emory fired a grenade into the bay, hitting the generator and blowing the men in the garage to kingdom come. He shot more half-naked men as they came scrambling from the trailers, and he nearly shot Marty too as he came running across the lot with ever more men showing up out of the darkness.

  “The fuel truck!” Sullivan shouted, banging Emory on the helmet and pointing far to the right of the trailers. “Burn it down!”

  She fired a grenade and blew up the fuel truck, roasting a number of airmen as they were running past it.

  Marty made it back unscathed and the three of them slipped away into the night, grabbing up the stashed MREs along the way.

  “You stupid fuck!” Sullivan said later, tossing the cases of MREs onto the ground near the Jeep. “What the fuck was that about? Huh?”

  “I couldn’t find a charger in the command car,” Marty lied. “So I decided to check the trailer.” He pulled the charger from inside his vest. “I got this med kit, and some more grenades for Shannon’s popgun too.”

  “Never again!” Sullivan said, jamming his finger into Marty’s face. “Never again! And I want your goddamn word! You don’t have the right to play games with my life!”

  “You’re right,” Marty said, chastened. “It won’t happen again. You’ve got my word.”

  They put half the MREs inside the Jeep and lashed the other half to the roof with the fuel cans. At first light they decided to stop for some rest and parked the Jeep off the road beneath an overpass in the desert. Emory volunteered to keep first watch because she was too wired to sleep, and soon Sullivan was snoring away behind the wheel with the seat back. Marty sat with Emory on the hood of the Jeep for warmth.

  “You should try and get some sleep,” she said.

  “I’m too wound up.”

  “I’m getting to know you. You lied earlier. Why’d you really go into that trailer?”

  “I heard someone hurting a woman,” he said. “Are all military men fucking psycho?”

  “No,” she said. “And not all those guys back there are psycho either, but if the good-natured guys are outnumbered, what are they going to do? They have to eat.”

  “They could take off like Sullivan did.”

  “And I’m sure plenty of them have, Marty. You’re talking about a lot of young guys with guns and no worthwhile leadership. It starts at the top. That’s what was wrong with our unit. We had a wife-beater for a C.O.”

  “Think we can trust Sullivan?” Marty asked.

  “He made a cute pass at me back there before your little show. I’m pretty sure he’s a gentleman.”

  “Does he have a chance with you?”

  “I dunno,” she said with a shrug. “Like he said, I might get desperate.”

  “Can you do that? I mean . . . you know.”

  She put her arm around his shoulder, pulling him closer. “It’s like this, Marty. There’s two kinds of lesbians. Those who like intercourse and those who don’t really care for it.”

  “Which are you?”

  “Well, I used to like it once in a while with the right guy. Now, I dunno. It’ll take time . . .”

  “Plus you might be—”

  “Oh, thanks for reminding me,” she said, letting go of him. “I’d actually managed to forget about that. With any luck, I’ll have a goddamn miscarriage.”

  “And if we make it the whole nine months?”

  “Well, you’re gonna have to deliver the goddamn thing.”

  “Me? I don’t know shit about birthing babies.”

  “There’s plenty of time for me to teach you all you need to know. Now, do me a favor and don’t bring it up again.”

  They sat quietly for a while, then Emory slipped down from the hood and stood looking out across the dim morning expanse of Arizona. “Marty, I don’t know what I’ll do if it looks like him . . . I might kill it.”

  “Nine months is a long time to grow attached, Shannon. Let’s wait and see how you feel by then.”

  “What about you? Do you have any kids out there anywhere?”

  He smiled sadly and shook his head.

  An hour later Marty was dozing in the passenger seat of the Jeep when something woke him up. It was the sound of a rotary winged aircraft, the first aircraft he’d heard in the sky since the impact. Sullivan was still snoring, but Emory was nowhere to be seen. He walked out from beneath the bridge to see her come sliding down the embankment.

  “Fuck me!” she shouted. “Gunship coming in along the highway, flying snake and nape!”

  “Snake and what?”

  “Nape of the earth, Marty. Get outta sight!”

  They listened to the helicopter come thundering overhead and on up the highway to the north.

  “They’re taking a serious risk,” Marty said. “There’s still too much part
iculate matter in the air. They’ll burn the turbines up.”

  “Must be why they’re flying so low,” she said. “That and they gotta be looking for us.”

  Sullivan had awoken to the sound of the rotors and joined them, watching after the helicopter. “Blackhawk, loaded with rockets. They’re definitely pissed.” He turned around and pointed at Marty. “This is on you, cowboy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well . . . forget it, we just gotta deal with it.”

  An hour later the helicopter came back. By now its engines were smoking from sucking in so much dirt and ash, but it swung wide of the highway by a hundred yards for a look beneath the bridge, where Marty had gotten out of the Jeep and stood hidden behind a column. The door gunner immediately opened fire on the vehicle.

  Sullivan stomped the accelerator and tore off in the direction of the helicopter. “Don’t miss, Shannon, or we’re fucking dead!” he shouted.

  They had removed the hard top, and Emory was standing in the backseat braced against the roll bar. She opened fire on the door gunner even as machine-gun bullets were hitting the fender of the Jeep. The gunner fell back into the aircraft, and the helicopter swung around to face them directly. Sullivan swerved right against the direction of its turn, hoping to throw off the pilot’s aim. The first rocket struck the ground to their left and just behind them, leaving their fate in Emory’s hands.

  Sullivan straightened the Jeep and she fired the M-203.

  Even as the projectile was arcing toward the windscreen of the aircraft, Sullivan was swerving hard to port. The pilot overcorrected and the second rocket struck the ground to their right. A fragment hit Emory in the hip and she fell down in the back of the Jeep as her 40mm grenade detonated against the windscreen of the Blackhawk, killing both pilots.

  The aircraft went into a violent spin, whirling around four times before smashing into the desert floor, breaking apart on impact and bursting into flames. Sullivan raced back toward the bridge where Marty stood waiting and locked up the brakes. The three of them raced to reattach the hardtop and quickly tied down the supplies, only to find the front left tire had gone flat. They changed it as quickly as they could, then Sullivan drove back up the embankment onto the highway.