Cannibal Reign

by Thomas Koloniar

  “What’s she need?” Forrest said. “Write it all down exactly and I’ll go and get it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Michael said. “You can’t go out there.”

  “I can do any goddamn thing I want. Make me a list, Sean.”

  “Jack, any intravenous antibiotics still out there aren’t likely to be any good by now. They need to be frozen in order to keep long-term, and even in that event they’re generally not kept longer than thirty days.”

  “It’s twenty degrees out there,” Forrest said. “The whole world’s a freezer.”

  “Jack . . .” West had known Forrest for a long time, and he knew the man just didn’t have any quit in him. “Even if you find some that are frozen, they may have thawed and refrozen by now. After five months it’s an extremely long shot you’re talking about.”

  “Is it impossible, Sean? If I find some that are frozen, will you use them?”

  “There would be very little to lose . . . so, yes, I would.”

  Forrest and West went to Launch Control, where Vasquez was watching the monitors, and Forrest called for the rest of his men to join them there. After they gathered, West explained what he thought was wrong with Melissa and why. Forrest then told them that his intention was to go to the hospital in Lincoln to gather the items West needed to save her life.

  “The entire run should take me less than twelve hours,” he concluded.

  Not surprisingly, Ulrich was the first to speak out against the idea. “I think you need to consider this very seriously, Jack. As emotionally invested as you are—”

  “I’m going, Wayne.”

  Ulrich looked at the others, who, to his relief, didn’t seem overly keen on the idea of Forrest leaving the flock. “I think this is important enough that we need to take a vote,” he said regretfully. “There are too many other souls down here depending on you.”

  Forrest stood looking at him. “You’re actually going to challenge me on this?”

  “It’s not a challenge. This is the command structure we all agreed to. And you’re talking about doing exactly what we were all dead set against doing from the beginning.”

  “You’re willing to let that girl die just to stand on fucking principle?”

  “Oh, come on, Jack! Principle has nothing to do with this. Sean’s not even a hundred percent sure of the diagnosis, for Christ’s sake. And you want to go hunting for drugs that aren’t going to be any good anymore.”

  “Then take your goddamn vote!”

  “Hey, Jack,” Kane said gently. “We did all agree, man.”

  Forrest looked at them, wanting badly to overrule them, but this was no longer the U.S. Army and he was no longer their captain. And he had agreed.

  “So vote,” he said again.

  “Before we do that,” Kane persisted, “we need to know if you’re gonna honor it. Or if you plan to take off in the middle of the night with our only Humvee.”

  Forrest shook a cigarette from its pack and lit it right there in Launch Control, breaking his own rule. “You guys all know I’d never do that.”

  “Okay,” Ulrich said. “What do you think, Oscar?”

  “I think Wayne’s right,” Vasquez said. “I’m sorry, Jack. We haven’t even had to crack the hatch yet and you’re talking about lowering the lift elevator.”

  “You should be more sympathetic than anyone,” Forrest argued, referring to Vasquez’s finite insulin supply.

  “That’s not fair!” Ulrich said. “What about you, Linus? What’s your vote?”

  “If there was a real chance of saving her, Captain”—for Danzig, old habits died hard—“I’d be with you, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to jeopardize the rest of the group. You’re too important down here.”

  “Well, that’s it, then,” Ulrich said. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “No, that’s not it. I want a show of hands. Who says I stay? Get ’em up!”

  Three hands went up, but Kane’s remained in his pockets.

  “Marcus?” Ulrich said.

  Kane stood for a moment looking at the floor. “I’m going with him,” he said finally.

  “What?!”

  “This is a one-man mission, Marcus.”

  “Either I go, Jack, or you don’t get my vote.” Only a 4 to 1 vote could override one of Forrest’s decisions.

  “You’re both out of your goddamn minds!” Ulrich rapped, realizing he’d lost.

  “The vote’s three to two,” Forrest said. “I win. I’m going into the bay to prep the Humvee. We’ll take two cases of MREs and plenty of water. Marcus, get us two M-4s, six bandoliers of ammo, and a pair of .45s out of the armory.”

  Kane looked at Ulrich and shrugged. “It was a fair vote, Wayne, and the girl deserves a chance. You on board or not?”

  “I think it’s a crazy fucking idea, but I don’t have a choice. Know this: if you two die out there, I’m gonna put my prosthetic foot up both your asses!”

  “You’re always gonna do something to somebody’s ass when you get pissed,” Forrest said. “Why is that?”

  “I had a fucked-up childhood. What’s your excuse?”

  An hour later Veronica caught Forrest just as he was about to open the blast door into the cargo bay. “You were going to leave without even telling me?” she asked, very pissed.

  “I’d planned on being back before you knew I was gone,” he said with a grin. “Who’s sitting with Melissa?”

  “Michael’s with her. Which is where you should be too. She’s only asked for you half a dozen times.”

  “Tell her I’m running to the pharmacy.”

  “You’re not funny,” she said. “You can’t save her, Jack, but you can at least give her some comfort while she’s still conscious. How am I supposed to tell her that you’ve gone on a goddamn suicide mission?”

  “It’s not a suicide mission, for Christ’s sake. You sound like Wayne.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then why aren’t you taking Laddie with you?”

  The door opened at the other end and Andie came into the tunnel. “Excuse me just a moment,” she said to Veronica, moving past her to kiss Forrest on the cheek. “Be careful please?”

  “Of course,” he said with a smile.

  Andie touched Veronica on the arm and left them alone.

  Forrest waited until the door was sealed, then said, “See? That’s how you’re supposed to send a man off to battle.”

  “You know, this is all just one big adventure for you, isn’t it?”

  “At least I don’t look at it as one big social experiment. How’s the dichotomy working out for you these days?”

  That hurt her feelings, and she turned away so he wouldn’t see the tears forming.

  “I honestly don’t know how Monica did this. How many times did you leave her waiting to hear that you’d been killed?”

  “Too many. She was even waiting when Daniel was killed. I can’t undo the past, Veronica. And I won’t hide down here and let that girl die when I know she can be saved. Now turn around and give me a kiss so I can go.”

  She turned around without opening her eyes, reaching to put her arms around him. She kissed him on the lips and turned away again, going to the door and slipping out of the tunnel, absolutely certain that she had spoken to him for the last time.

  People were eating one another out there.

  Andie was waiting outside the door for her, and the two of them hugged and went to Launch Control to watch the monitors.

  “I’m ready when you are, Marcus,” Kane heard Forrest announce in his earpiece.

  “Roger that,” he said. “Opening blast door number two.”

  Standing at the top of stairwell, dressed head-to-toe in his NBC suit, complete with gas mask, he turned the lever and opened the door, accessing the security vestibule for the first time since the impact.
He went in and Vasquez sealed the door behind him as he made his way to blast door number one.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m cracking door number one.”

  “Roger that.”

  Kane turned the wheel and pulled the lever to open the door, keeping his .45 at the ready as he stepped from the vestibule into the basement of the house. He pulled the door closed behind him and told Vasquez that it was clear for him to come and seal it.

  Vasquez opened door number two and ran down the vestibule, pulling the lever to seal blast door one tight behind Kane and spinning the big red wheel. Then he left the vestibule and resealed blast door two, restoring complete integrity to the silo. “LC, we’re a hundred percent again,” he announced over the net.

  “Roger,” Ulrich replied from Launch Control. “Marcus, we’ve still got zero movement above. You’re clear to enter the house.”

  “Roger.” Kane ascended the stairs and opened the door into the house. The first thing he noticed was that the floor was covered with a thin film of grayish black dust not visible on the monitors. “I’m in the hall,” he said.

  “We’ve got visual.”

  “There’s a lot of ash in here,” he remarked, moving into the living room, where everything looked filthy now and the dead body was mostly eaten away. Outside, the day was gray and overcast, with a dark layer of continuous cloud looming much lower over the ground than he had expected.

  Stepping out the back door, Kane scanned the landscape through the scope of his M-4, seeing nothing alive, not even a bird. The only movement was the ash and dust blowing about. The mutilated corpse of the dead man by the grill was frozen and covered in filth. The outside of the house was scorched, the tan vinyl siding twisted and melted by the heat of the grass fires as they had passed. Nothing had regrown and there was no real color anywhere.

  He scanned 360 degrees around the house to make sure there were no threats on the horizon, then took a rake from the back porch and went to the garden. “It’s all clear up here, Jack.”

  “Roger. I’m lowering the lift.”

  Kane saw the garden begin to drop into the earth and stepped back as the sound of the hydraulic lift pervaded the breezy silence. Dirt fell over the edges of the opening as the deck descended fifteen feet to the bottom of the cargo bay. Kane stood looking down as Forrest drove the Humvee up onto the garden-covered deck, which was just big enough to hold a single Army six-by-six truck. Forrest then jumped out of the Humvee and hit a button on the wall.

  “Raising the lift,” he announced, and ran to jump back onto the lift as it began to rise. It stopped at the top, locking into place, and he drove the Humvee out of the garden and across the yard to the gravel drive. “Lift up and locked.”

  Ulrich acknowledged the transmission as Kane went to work with the rake, quickly smoothing away the tire tracks in the dirt and raking away the square depression in the soil outlining the edges of the lift. In a few hours’ time the wind would do the rest.

  Forrest got out of the Humvee and waited for Kane to put the rake away. “Have you tried the air?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Forrest took the Geiger counter from inside the vehicle. “Background radiation is a tad elevated but still in the green. I’m going to try the air.”

  “That’s not a good idea, Jack,” Ulrich said over the net.

  “I’m not wearing this mask if I don’t have to.” He pulled the mask from his head and drew a shallow breath, the air smelling to him more like a dirty fireplace than anything else. “There’s a lot of particulate matter but I don’t think it’s volcanic. It’s not hurting my lungs.”

  The two loaded up. Kane got behind the wheel and took off his mask, tossing it into Forrest’s lap. “Ready?”

  “Definitely. Wayne, we’re going off the net, but leave the receiver on until we get back.”

  “Roger that. Good luck.”

  “Back before you know it.”

  Kane put the Humvee in gear, drove down the hill and out through the fence, stopping at the road. “This is some fucked-up shit here,” he said, leaning into the wheel and looking out. “It’s high noon and look how dark it is. This sky’s never gonna clear up before we run out of food, man.”

  “It has to,” Forrest said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Because if it don’t, we’re fucked.”

  Kane grunted and stepped on the gas. “This is a dumb idea, Jack . . . just so you know.”

  Forrest chuckled, lighting up a cigarette. “So why’d you vote with me?”

  “Because you’re the best officer I ever had . . . and if this is gonna be your last mission, I’m gonna be on it.”

  Forty-Three

  Forrest and Kane had covered all five major medical centers in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, by late afternoon, and they hadn’t found a single frozen bag of intravenous antibiotic in any of the freezers. What they had found were dozens and dozens of dead patients who had been left behind to die.

  “I’m sorry,” Kane said, getting in on the passenger side of the Humvee. “It was worth the try, Jack.”

  “I’ll drop you back at the silo,” Forrest said, hitting the starter.

  “Drop me what?”

  “I’m pressing on to Topeka.”

  “I knew you’d pull this shit,” Kane said. “Lemme drive.”

  Forrest watched the highway as they rode, eyeballing various abandoned cars and trucks, remembering Iraq and Afghanistan, where such vehicles were once as likely to explode when you passed as not. Here, though, he was more concerned about an ambush.

  There was almost nothing else to see on the ride south to Topeka, only a few buildings and no sign that anyone had passed that way in the last four months. Even the abandoned vehicles looked decades old, covered in grime, some of them burned to the frame, tires melted into the asphalt.

  “McCarthy sure as hell got this part right,” Forrest muttered.

  “Who’s McCarthy?”

  “He wrote a novel years back about postapocalyptic America. His world was postnuclear rather than postmeteor, but this is almost exactly what he described. He won the Pulitzer for it.”

  Kane had never been much of a reader, having always preferred to play sports in his free time. “That’s why I never liked to read, Jack. Who’d want to know about this shit sooner than you had to?”

  An hour later he said, “Did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “Over there to the left, way out. I think I saw a flashlight.”

  “You think or you’re sure?” Forrest said, craning his neck to see into the blackness.

  “Can’t be sure,” Kane said, not daring to take his eyes from the highway, his speed no faster than forty-five miles an hour. The headlights of the Humvee did not penetrate far enough into the murk for him to be sure they wouldn’t hit some kind of obstruction or debris in the road. Spits of snow had begun to fall as well, adding to the miasma.

  “Remember the eighty-four-mile marker,” Forrest said. “On the way back we’ll want to keep our eyes peeled.”

  Thirty miles farther on they were approaching the outskirts of Topeka. Along the highway, they began to see signs of past military action, civilian cars armored with welded boilerplate, riddled with .50 cal machine-gun fire, some blown apart—probably by javelin antitank missiles. They passed an M60 tank that had thrown a tread while running over a pickup truck but was otherwise undamaged. They drove slowly through a shattered roadblock, seeing scores of dead bodies strewn about in the dust, all of them strangely mummified now, freeze-dried in the arid cold.

  “I’m not sorry we missed this,” Kane said. “They slaughtered these people.”

  “Looks like somebody didn’t want them getting into the city,” Forrest surmised. “I’m guessing it was the Forty-fifth I.D.”

  A mile farther ahead a pair of large spotlig
hts unexpectedly snapped on in the pitch-black, blinding them both. Kane slammed on the brakes and grabbed for his carbine, but Forrest caught his arm. “It’s gotta be the Forty-fifth. Give ’em a chance to look us over.”

  Both men shaded their eyes and waited as a group of soldiers surrounded the Humvee, shouting for them to show their hands.

  “Hold your fire!” Forrest was shouting at them. “We’re with the Eighty-second!”

  “Exit the vehicle!” someone shouted. “Hands in the air!”

  Both men exited and stood with their hands up, still squinting against the intense light.

  “Hold your fire, guys,” Forrest said. “Take it easy. We’re on your side.”

  “Move it!” a soldier said, prodding him forward with the muzzle of an M-16.

  They were marched through an opening in a barricade of cars stacked two high, then across an open lot into a Texaco station with blacked-out windows. The inside of the makeshift command post was well lit with military lanterns, and the shelves were empty, all of them jammed up against the walls out of the way.

  A black sergeant with a bald head sat in an easy chair behind the counter smoking a cigar. His uniform tag said that his name was Lee, the patch on his shoulder the dingy gold thunderbird of the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, a division reactivated a few years before the asteroid had ever been spotted.

  “These men were trying to get into the city,” one of the soldiers said.

  Lee stood up and came around the counter to Kane, the cigar caught in the corner of his mouth. They were of equal size and height. “You two smell good enough to fuck,” he said, puffing at the cigar. “Where the hell you comin’ from?”

  “I’m afraid that’s classified information, Sergeant,” Forrest said.

  Lee turned to look him over. “That’s a term that’s lost most of its meaning around here, Captain.”

  “The fact remains. Who’s your commanding officer?”

  “These guys are Special Forces,” one of the soldiers said, pointing out the patches on their left shoulders. “They must’ve been in the rear with the gear all this time.”