CANNIBAL KINGDOM

by John L. Campbell

  He ejected the magazine of LaBeau’s Sig-Saur, thumbing off the rounds into his other palm so he could get a count, then feeding them back in before reloading. Nine bullets, plus one in the chamber. A dozen people outside and more on the way, people who only hours ago were professionals dedicated to the service and protection of the President. Hostiles now, all of them.

  If he tried to get out of the car, they would take him down in an instant. Ten bullets wouldn’t stop that. He could stay here and treat the presidential limo like a bunker, as he’d been taught to do by the Secret Service should the worst come to pass. He doubted they could get in, but how long could he survive in here? How long before a rescue? Was a rescue coming?

  There was no radio back here, and his private cell phone was in Danny’s coat pocket back at Key Plaza. He picked up the secure, satellite phone that rested in a cradle between the rear seats, a phone that could connect him with anyone, anywhere in the world. Right now he only wanted to talk to Patricia, to hear her voice and have her assure him she was okay.

  The phone produced nothing more than a dull, electronic buzz.

  The limo kept rocking.

  Garrison found it difficult to take his eyes off the ghastly faces pressed against the side windows. The beating fists of the infected were an unending drumroll.

  Infected. That’s the right word. It’s Trident, no doubt about it. I ignored the warnings and now the bill has come due. If he’d acted sooner, when Moira Rusk had advised him to do so, could he have saved lives? Probably. Maybe. He suspected he wouldn’t live long enough to bear the guilt resulting from his choice.

  Over the pounding came a new noise, and he looked up at the roof of the car. The heavy beat of approaching rotor blades. Garrison let out a selfish and very human breath of relief.

  Then the sound of the thumping rotors changed, a change in pitch combined with the high shriek of a straining turbine engine. Through a side window, between the bodies, Garrison saw a Black Hawk touch down a hundred feet away from the limo. Through the open side door of the helicopter he could see figures in black thrashing against each other inside, as one man in body armor and a helmet, a stubby machine gun hung across his chest on a strap, fell from the opening, found his feet and staggered away. The man was clutching his throat as a jet of red shot between his fingers. Then he fell to his face.

  The long scream of a turbine grew closer, rising in volume to the point he winced and covered his ears. The blur of another Black Hawk, shrieking, dropping, slamming into the one that had just landed.

  A half-second crunch of steel.

  The crump of an explosion.

  Then the world outside the limo’s window turned red as a pressure wave hit the Beast, rocking it harder than the infected ever had and flames washing over the car. Garrison was knocked to the floor between the seats as pieces of fast-moving metal slammed into the limousine’s side, one of them tearing a six-inch gash through the roof. An intense heat followed through the hole.

  Looking up, Garrison saw a Secret Service agent rising from where he’d been knocked down, returning to pound at the glass. His hair and suit were on fire, but still he gnashed his teeth.

  Then there was a loud, metallic clack that came from both doors at the same time, and in the space of a second a string of thoughts went off in Garrison’s brain.

  Door locks just opened.

  Wasn’t me.

  Driver has a lock control.

  Still beating at the partition.

  Hit the control with his foot.

  The left rear door swung open and a gust of super-heated air and flames rushed in. With it came the burning Secret Service agent.

  Garrison held up an arm to shield his face against the heat and fired LaBeau’s Sig twice at close range, hitting the burning man twice in the face and throwing him back. Then he thrust an arm into the fire and grabbed at the door handle, felt the burning, hauled back.

  Heavy! So heavy.

  Even as he pulled at it he realized that in four years he had never once touched the doors. Agents had always been there to do that. It slammed with a deep thump, and he hit the door lock button to once again secure the passenger compartment.

  Clack. The raging driver’s foot unlocked the doors again, and before Garrison could hit the button, the door on the other side swung open. A man and a woman – it was hard to tell who they were since they were both on fire – tried to climb through the opening together and briefly became wedged shoulder-to-shoulder in a gruesome parody of a sitcom gag. A wave of heat rushed in behind them, stealing Garrison’s breath, and he recoiled even as he opened fire, three quick shots, then a fourth when one didn’t go down immediately. He kicked the corpses out of the doorway with one polished shoe, scorching the cuff of a pants leg, and pulled that door shut.

  Even as he reached for the lock button the opposite door groaned open, letting in heat and fire. He twisted on the seat, bringing up the pistol to blast at yet another pair of figures trying to claw their way inside. Three more shots, the bodies fell away and then blackened fingers were gripping the metal frame, trying to pull it open further even as he fought against the weight and pressure and flames to keep it closed. The door behind him opened again and he held onto this one, pointing the pistol at the other opening and squeezing off a single round at a body bathed in fire before the pistol’s slide locked back on an empty magazine. The air, now tainted with the chemical stink of burnt jet fuel, tore the oxygen from his lungs and made his eyes water so badly that he could see only a blur. The inside of his nose was scorched, and his face felt as if it would bake right off his skull.

  His left coat sleeve was burning, but he couldn’t let go of the door handle. If he did, they would get inside. If he didn’t close that other, open door, he would burn to death, be overcome by smoke or become a quick meal for the infected that still stumbled beyond the leaping flames. The car was too wide for him to hold onto both doors at the same time.

  Blackened hands gripped the edge of the open door. Garrison dropped the useless pistol and used both hands to haul the door away from those charred fingers.

  David King gunned the CAT Suburban and shot through the unattended gate. Air Force One and her sister sat isolated out on the tarmac, but he accelerated to the right instead.

  Toward the burning limousine.

  The black marks of tires in a high speed right turn arced across the pavement in a wide crescent, ending at the blaze. The Beast had struck an airport vehicle – presumably what stopped its forward movement – and the nearby inferno of a pair of wrecked military helicopters had spread to blanket the President’s car in curling orange and white flames. These two had to be part of the trio of rescue choppers HQ had told him were inbound. Far beyond the treetops of a wooded area to the south of the airport, he could see a pillar of dense black smoke climbing into a clear sky. The missing gunship, no longer inbound.

  David had been close enough to the airfield to see the second Black Hawk diving in out of control, close enough to hear the long scream of its turbine, and for a moment he’d frozen behind the wheel, transported to another long scream from not so long ago. A cruise ship. A vacation that was supposed to be a last attempt to make things right again. A long scream that changed his life forever.

  He was in the present now, though, and couldn’t even take the time to wonder at the mathematics that would be required for Trident (it had to be the virus, what else could all this be?) to take out all three helicopters. Now there was only the Beast, and a man who – he hoped – was inside and alive.

  Black paint was blistering off the limo’s skin, but as he neared he saw it wasn’t completely engulfed. The fire was worst on the left side, closest to the helicopter crash, and within those flames he could see immolated figures still flailing at the side of the car before succumbing and falling to the pavement. Not all of them, though. Several were still tugging at the door, even as they burned. There was also a crowd of figures moving around the trunk to reach the right side, wher
e the fire was less intense. These people were burning too, but not as much as the others.

  Another dozen or so were running across the tarmac from the direction of the planes.

  David doubted they were friendlies, and wouldn’t take chances.

  He jammed the brakes and threw the big Chevy into park about twenty feet behind the President’s car, then scrambled out of his seat and into the back.

  He’d slapped out the flames on his coat sleeve, barely managing to hold the door handle against the pulling from outside. Flames licked through the narrow opening, and he turned his head away-

  -to see several smoking, burning figures appear at the opposite, open door. He was unarmed now. There was no way to keep them from getting in. It was over.

  And then he heard a high-pitched, metallic whine that seemed to spin up somewhere behind the limo, followed by a menacing chopping sound that he knew well from having heard it overseas. Mini-gun. Instinctively he hunched as a string of 7.62mm fire tore into the pavement outside, several thumps rattling across the armored limousine. He hung onto the door as the firing seemed to walk up and down both sides of the car, across the back and then off to the left.

  Suddenly he lost his grip and went back on his ass between the seats as the opposing pressure from outside vanished, the door banging shut. Heat, smoke and something else was coming in through the other door. It was one of the female stewards from the presidential aircraft, an Air Force sergeant with her hair burned down to blackened stubble and the skin on her face bubbling and scorched. She glared at him with glassy eyes and let out a choking noise as she snapped her teeth.

  Three short bursts of a smaller, automatic weapon – BRRRAP, BRRRAP, BRRRAP – stitched across the steward’s torso, nearly cutting her in half before exploding her head in a grisly cloud. The body slithered out of the opening. Then there was the sound of running boots, and a man appeared in the car’s doorway, backlit by flames. He was dressed in black tactical gear and carried a science fiction-looking sub-machinegun. His black ball cap bore the letters ERT in yellow stitching.

  The man glanced around the interior for only a moment, then at Garrison. “US Secret Service, Mr. President.”

  It was all Garrison needed. He scrambled out of the car, and then the two men were sprinting across bullet-pocked pavement toward a black Chevy Suburban parked close by. He recognized it as the CAT vehicle from his motorcade (the smoking mini-gun poking out of a roof turret made it hard to confuse it with anything else) but didn’t recognize the agent as part of the CAT team.

  Garrison climbed into the front passenger seat, and through the windshield saw the many crumpled bodies ringing the burning limousine, lying where the mini-gun had cut them down. He glanced toward the distant aircraft and saw more of the fallen, only a couple up and moving. His rescuer jumped into the driver’s seat.

  “The plane…?” Garrison started, but stopped, quickly realizing that Air Force One was no longer an option.

  The shooter dropped the Chevy into drive and cut the wheel as he accelerated into a tight U-turn. “Special Agent David King, Mr. President.”

  “Happy to meet you, David. Happier to be out of there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  -21-

  DANCER and DESIGN

  Eastern United States – October 28

  Kylie opened her eyes. One eye, at least. The other refused to obey and remained closed. Her head hurt, and so did her back. She closed her good eye. Didn’t she have a research paper due? Was she late for class? No, it was Saturday, she was certain of that. Had she been working on it and fallen asleep? Her thinking was slow and muddled. She opened her eye again.

  Shadows and purplish light. The smell of freshly turned earth, a dead leaf, fall smell and the reek of spilled gas. A blob in the gloom a few feet away resolved itself into the figure of a man, staring back at her. He was sitting, legs splayed out before him, back pressed against a curving white wall with a small, oval-shaped window above his head. He’d bitten off his own tongue, the ragged stump of it peeking out behind shattered teeth. One eye bulged, and his head on that side had been flattened. Kylie thought of a pumpkin left too long on the doorstep. Even in the shadows she could see that his jacket, tie and white shirt were soaked red.

  She looked at him, oddly not repulsed by his damaged condition, certain she knew him from somewhere. Horse? His name was Horse. No, Horsch. Secret Service agent in her Detail.

  Then it all rushed back at her. The screams, the fighting, a gunshot…the plane shaking, tipping and then…nothing. We crashed. I’m still alive. Then another thought, one which she spoke aloud. “Mom?”

  Kylie’s last lucid memory was of her mother being pinned between two rows of seats by an agent who was attacking her. There had been the BOOM of a pistol being fired twice, and the agent was thrown back. Where had Kylie been during that? She had a vague impression of someone dragging her out of her seat by the hair.

  “Mom?” she repeated, rising painfully to a hands and knees position, wincing at a sharp stab in her lower back. Something came close to her face and she jerked away just in time to avoid being cut by the ragged, aluminum shard of a broken seat armrest, and then she saw that the executive jet had been torn in half. She was in the tail section. A lavender glow of twilight came through the opening, and thirty or so feet away she could see what had been the front of the aircraft, crumpled and almost unrecognizable. The place where the jet had been torn in half was a jagged circle, shards of metal bent down like teeth in a gaping mouth, wiring dangling in tangles of blue and red, some of it sparking.

  She smelled the jet fuel, looking at the sparks. “Mom!” she shouted, moving in the direction she thought her mother had been, crawling over a motionless body.

  “Over here, honey,” called a voice, barely above a whisper. “Oh, God, Kylie…are you okay?”

  Kylie moved toward the voice, finding her mother in the semi-darkness. She was on the floor and wedged between two seats that had broken loose from their mountings. The young woman pushed at them, straining when they didn’t want to give, and finally moved them aside.

  “Are you hurt?” Patricia asked, not moving despite the blockage being cleared.

  “I’m fine,” said Kylie, crawling close, trying to see her mom in the shadows. “Are you okay? Can you move?”

  “I think so. My arm hurts.”

  Kylie could see that her mother’s arm was bent behind her at an odd angle. Broken or just sprained?

  “What happened?” Patricia Fox’s voice was thick and fuzzy.

  “The plane crashed.”

  “Where are…?”

  Kylie shook her head. “I think everyone’s dead. Mom, I smell fuel. We have to get out of here.” She couldn’t stop thinking about those sparking wires, imagined the air shimmering with vapors as it reached that exposed electricity and then WHUMP. Patricia nodded, tried to sit up and let out a cry.

  The girl flinched away at the sound, then clenched her teeth and gripped her mother by the shoulders, pulling her into a sitting position, closing her eyes but not stopping when her mother screamed. Now partially upright, Patricia sat and breathed heavily, her eyes shut for a moment, then nodded silently. With her good hand she pulled the broken left arm (it was absolutely broken) around in front of her, screaming again, then cradled it in her lap. Her chin rested on her chest.

  Kylie wanted to give her a few minutes to recover, but the fuel smell seemed stronger now. “We have to go.”

  Her mother bobbed her head, then let her daughter pull her to her feet, biting back another scream that ended up sounding like the whine of a wounded animal. Kylie supported her under the arms and moved them through the shattered fuselage toward the opening, picking her way over obstacles of twisted metal and sharp fiberglass, tilted seats and bodies. Dead people seemed to be everywhere, their broken shapes tangled with the wreckage, some badly maimed and others seemingly intact. These were most disturbing, for their eyes were open and appeared to look at her, as if they wer
e about to speak. The young woman tried not to stare back.

  “I shot a man,” Patricia whispered as they moved.

  “Good,” said Kylie. “He was trying to kill you.” She wished she had shot him, remembering the sight of a snarling agent trying to rip her mother apart. “Fuck him.”

  “Right. Fuck him.” Then they both laughed weakly.

  Kylie caught movement outside one of the cabin windows that remained intact. In the purple light of the descending evening she could see a person walking through the field into which the jet had crashed, headed this way.

  “Help is coming, Mom. Keep moving.”

  Stooping and moving carefully through the open end of the broken aircraft, avoiding the teeth-like aluminum shards, the two women emerged into a corn field that had recently been harvested. Now it was littered with aircraft debris. She led them away from the wreckage and toward the remains of the forward section of the plane, where they would find the cockpit and main cabin door.

  The person crossing the field began to run toward them.

  “Help!” Kylie shouted to the figure. “We need help!” She kept them moving. What she wanted was in that front section of plane (unless it had been thrown clear and was now somewhere in the field.) She remembered seeing it when they boarded in Boston, a white box strapped to the bulkhead, a red cross on its hinged lid.

  They reached the forward section and Kylie helped her mother sit down on the gouged earth, then stood and turned. The figure running toward them was thirty feet away now, a boy of about ten dressed in overalls and a simple, long-sleeve blue shirt. Seated squarely on his head was a black hat with a wide, flat brim. For an instant Kylie flashed on an old horror movie she’d watched in her early teens with her girlfriends at a sleepover; Children of the Corn. Then she thought, no, he’s Amish. In the twilight she saw his shirt was ripped at one shoulder, the flesh beneath torn by a bloody bite that had stained the clothing around it.