CANNIBAL KINGDOM

by John L. Campbell

  Major Boyle mouthed an obscenity, then opened her mic. “Custer is off the air, (it came out as Custah) Mountain-Six, and I already did a fly-over for a visual. Their field is obstructed by other aircraft and ground personnel, so they’re a no-go. You’re the one, Mountain-Six.”

  The voice came back immediately, and with a sharp tone to it. “Negative, Buffalo-Two-Eight. You are not cleared to land at this location.” After a brief pause, the controller added in a more level voice, “Sorry, but that’s how it has to be.”

  The second jet had made it in and taxied to the ramp, but Erin watched as the third banked away and cruised out of sight. She’d heard no radio traffic between them and Mountain-Six, and wondered why they were leaving. Then she saw a military helicopter cruising at treetop –level, angling toward a small structure on the field.

  “Military reservation,” Erin muttered to no one but the dead. “Goddamn secret squirrel base, probably goddamn CIA.” Squirrels came out as something close to squells. An instructor in Colorado Springs once told her to ‘Speak goddamn English, because the Air Force isn’t going to issue you subtitles,’ then announced that he was taking her to the yahd, fah some P.T. The memory made her smile, despite the flashing warning lights above her fuel gauge.

  The pounding at the cockpit door was non-stop. She wondered if it was the navigator, the loadmaster or some of her passengers. Major Boyle’s mission had been to ferry sixty-four combat troops from North Carolina to Pittsburgh, but after she had almost reached her destination the mission had been canceled without explanation, no new orders presented as an alternative, and then there had been no further contact with her command.

  And oh, yeah, she thought, every goddamn one of those sixty-four soldiers turned into a goddamn cannibal during the flight. Erin had been transporting a cargo of monsters for more than an hour.

  But not for long.

  “Ah, roger that Mountain-Six,” she said in her cheerful pilot’s voice, “I’m coming around fah my final approach.”

  “Negative, Buffalo-Two-Eight, that is a neg-!”

  “Yah breaking up, Mountain-Six.” She made a scratchy, whistling sound into the mic.

  Erin swung wide and then lined up with the airstrip nestled amid the pines, eyes sweeping across her instrument panel and frequently coming back to the blinking fuel gauge. She’d have to do this on the first try, no touch and go because there wasn’t enough gas to take this pig back up and around for a second attempt.

  And she’d have to land with the ramp down. She couldn’t close it from the cockpit.

  That should be fun.

  As she lined up, she glanced at the small, side-view mirror outside her window and saw several bodies tumbling out the back and into freefall. She nodded. A few less to worry about. The air controller was still demanding that she wave off, but she ignored him. No time to chat. Erin Boyle had been flying since she was sixteen, and being paid by the Air Force to do it since she was twenty-two. She’d taken the C-130 all around the world, had flown, landed and taken off in every conceivable type of weather, had even come in steep and fast to set down on desert airfields being peppered by mortars. This was an empty, flat airstrip on a cool, still October day. Yeah…sexy. But she’d never set one of these down with a deployed cargo ramp.

  Sparks and heated avgas. Oh, yeah, lots of fun.

  Despite the possibility of completing this landing as a tumbling fireball, and the incessant banging of raving cannibals at the cockpit door, Major Boyle’s hands worked with the smooth precision of a machine, lowering the landing gear and control surfaces, reducing power and easing the yoke forward as she lined up on the field. The tarmac rushed up at her, blue and white lights flashing by on each side in a blur, and then a TH-THUMP followed by the CHIRP-CHIRP of rubber on asphalt. Normal landing noises. The sound coming from the tail was not; a terrible screeching of metal being twisted and dragged, causing the massive aircraft to shudder and forcing her to tighten her grip on the yoke, even as she cut her engines back. A glance out the side-view mirror revealed a rooster tail of white sparks flying back from the cargo plane as it landed.

  Her heart rate remained constant, never elevating.

  A dull whump, a flash, maybe an instant of pain. When we ignite that’s what…

  Before she could complete the morbid thought, the C-130 was rolling into a taxi, the spark shower gone and her hands maintaining enough power in the turbo-props to get her onto the ramp, quite some distance further down than where the white business jet was parked. Erin shut down her engines and her systems as routinely as if this were the end of any other flight.

  “Buffalo-Two-Eight!” her radio screeched. “You are-”

  “I know, I’m not cleared to land.” She switched off the radio. After a moment of sitting and waiting to see if she would blow up after all, she unsnapped her helmet and tossed it into the lap of the corpse in the other seat. Scotty had been a close friend, but when he went cannibal he’d given up all claims to a decent treatment. She didn’t regret shooting him.

  Erin glanced out at her mirror again, seeing a stream of soldiers in full battle gear exiting the open rear of the aircraft, running across the tarmac like a mob. She looked over her shoulder and out the window, seeing that her unholy delivery was heading for a small structure and a tiny knot of people gathered outside it.

  I’m sorry, she thought, and she truly was.

  The pounding at the cockpit door continued – they hadn’t run off with the others – and the newly arrived Air Force major wondered how she was going to exit the aircraft.

  Donny Knapp stared in horror as scores of infected soldiers spilled down the now-mangled ramp of the C-130 (and what a show that landing had been) and immediately began charging toward his little group. Only about two hundred feet separated them, and the soldiers howled their madness and hunger.

  The young lieutenant thought fast, pointing at the Secret Service agent. “Get them inside,” he ordered. The man responded at once, moving the Supreme Court Justice, the President’s deputy and the VP’s family into the cinderblock house, leading with his pistol drawn.

  “Jones,” he barked, turning. “Watch our six. Everyone else on line and firing.” He snapped his fingers at the Green Beret watching the executive jet. “Except you. Stay on it.” Then hell broke loose as assault rifles and a squad automatic weapon fired at once, ripping into the wave of snarling, silver-eyed troops.

  Specialist Hancock had made it through Green Beret training, had served in Afghanistan and seen his share of live trigger time against targets that wanted to destroy him. His marksmanship and added firepower could be a deciding factor if added to those who were already blasting away, but he hadn’t fired a shot. The wet-nose butter bar had him watching a plane, as if the devil himself might emerge at any moment.

  As a Special Forces operator however, he was first and foremost disciplined. Regardless of Hancock’s opinion about the qualifications of the younger man, a U.S. Army officer had assigned him an area of responsibility with clear orders. He would carry out his assignment, trusting in men he didn’t know to handle their responsibility and put down the monsters racing toward them across the airfield.

  Because of this discipline, he was in position and paying attention when the side door of the business jet popped open and dropped into a set of short stairs. Flailing bodies tumbled out through the opening and ended in a tangle on the concrete at the bottom. All of them were in business suits, all but one, a pilot in a white uniform shirt spattered red, his arms and face covered in ragged bite wounds and claw marks. He fought free of the tangle, jerking his legs free from clinging hands. For a moment it looked like he might make it, but then they pulled him down. Hancock was glad he couldn’t hear the man’s death screams over the gunfire.

  One of them was crouched and feeding, but the rest scrambled up out of their tangle and started running, heading for the blockhouse. Hancock sighted on them through his combat optics. A dozen in all, hands curled into claws, grayish drool s
linging back from snapping mouths, eyes radiant as bumper chrome. In addition to being a Green Beret, Specialist Hancock was also close to finishing his bachelor’s degree in Political Science (he had plans for after the military) and as such, he was a news junkie. He recognized the two men at the head of the pack from their frequent appearances on TV. One was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The other was the senior senator from Illinois, the man challenging President Fox for election to the White House.

  Hancock put them both down with three-round bursts, one for each chest.

  Looks like the election’s over, he thought, then went to work clearing out the others who had spilled from the jet before shifting to add his firepower to the squad.

  Private Jones knelt beside the cinderblock wall, his rifle trained on the not-so-distant row of pines that marked the tree-line. He didn’t like having his back to what was coming out of that cargo plane – in fact it scared him so badly that he was shaking. At least being able to shoot at something would be better than this. But someone had to watch the rear, and as usual, he got the shittiest detail.

  He wanted to go home. He wanted to curl up in a ball in the back of his closet as he’d done when he was a child. Jones blinked back tears, listening to the howls climbing above the gunfire. He forced himself to keep watching, not to run, not to hide. He didn’t move, and wondered if somehow he had become paralyzed because all he wanted to do was move.

  Shadows shifting within the pines.

  No, it’s my imagination. I’m just…

  Definitely movement; rapid, darting shapes.

  It’s wind, it’s deer, not…

  A lone soldier emerged from the tree-line, a bloody Green Beret with pine needles matted to his uniform, a man with eyes like bright coins. His lips peeled back and he started running right at the young private.

  Then a hundred more like him burst from the trees and charged.

  Private Jones felt his bladder let go as he screamed, “Action rear!” and started firing.

  Bang…bang-bang…bang. The metal door rattled in its frame. Nope, not going away. Harvard was out of her seat now and staring at the oval-shaped door, fists planted on her hips. She could unbolt it and go out cowboy style, blazing away with her nine-millimeter, but there was no telling how many were out there. Besides, she might be a cowboy in the air, but she was no gunfighter. Pilots weren’t selected for their skill with handguns.

  It had to be plan-B, almost as risky. A twenty foot fall to the unforgiving concrete could finish her just as surely as hands and teeth. She stepped onto the pilot’s seat, reaching up to grip a pair of yellow handles set in a two-foot-square hatch directly above. Stenciled in yellow letters was the word ESCAPE (how appropriate) and a warning about depressurization (of no consequence here on the ground.) She pulled both levers at the same time and pushed upward.

  Nothing. The hatch didn’t budge.

  She pushed again, much harder this time, remembering the voice of some instructor telling her that sometimes excessive heat (like in Iraq) could cause the rubber seals of the opening and the hatch itself to fuse together. That would be bad. She grunted and heaved.

  The emergency hatch popped with a sticky, ripping sound, and she moved it to the side, letting go of the handles. It slid across the smooth, curving skin of the aircraft and plunged to the pavement. Then she pulled herself up and out through the small opening, grateful that she worked out and watched her diet. She wasn’t sure how many of her bigger, male colleagues could actually have fit through the small space. A moment later she was in the open and crouched on the upward curve above the cockpit.

  The roar of gunfire made her look right. The odds of infected soldiers versus the tiny group of defenders was overwhelming, and Erin felt a sharp twist of guilt in her chest, knowing that she had just delivered at least half of those monstrosities. She wanted to get down there, to join the fight, but the cooler side of her made it clear that Erin and her sidearm would not tip the balance of that battle.

  She rose and walked carefully up the centerline of the aircraft’s spine until she reached the wings, then chose the starboard side, the one opposite the battle. Another sixty feet brought her to the extreme end, where she sat and dangled her legs off the tip of the wing. It was still going to be a considerable drop to the concrete. She checked the area below for infected soldiers, but they seemed to be occupied elsewhere.

  Her remorse over delivering monsters to the remote airstrip and her desire to somehow make amends by joining the fight were emotionally based, and emotions had no place in a military flier’s world. The Air Force had taught her that a skilled pilot was a highly valuable resource, one to be protected and recovered for future use. Anyone could pull a trigger, they’d said, but few could handle complex aircraft. Evade and escape, those were the words she’d been conditioned to live by should she ever have to ditch in combat. That she was now operating under wartime conditions was painfully obvious.

  Major Boyle gripped the edge of the wing and swung over, hung fully extended (now she wished she was taller) and let go. She tried to bend her knees to absorb the impact, but it was a long drop and although she stayed on her feet, landing in a crouch, she felt a sharp jarring all the way up her back, as well as a soft pop in her left knee. She winced. Then she was jogging and favoring that leg, moving away from the C-130, away from the continuing sounds of battle on the other side of her aircraft. Pistol in hand, the pilot disappeared into the pine trees.

  Bodies were falling, but not fast enough, and not enough of them. Soldiers in packs, helmets and slung weapons continued to close the distance, with more leaping out the back of the stopped cargo plane.

  It’s the body armor! Donny suddenly thought. He was about to order his squad to slow their fire and aim for the heads, but before he could, Jones screamed “Action Rear!” He pivoted and saw a wave of things – men of his company mixed with Green Berets – swarming out of the pines.

  They’re too close, too close, no chance…

  “Vaughn,” he shouted, “shift fire to our rear!”

  The PFC swung his SAW around to try to suppress the oncoming wave, firing from the shoulder, expended brass flying through the air and tinkling against the side of the blockhouse. Lt. Knapp, his nostrils burning from the expended gunpowder, added his own assault rifle to the mix, chopping into targets that had no fear of gunfire.

  Donny heard Vaughn yell, “Gonna have to load another belt!” and saw that Private Jones had already dropped an empty magazine and was fumbling to insert a fresh one. All of a sudden the fire to protect their rear had dropped off to only Donny’s aimed three-round bursts.

  Too close! Never reload in time!

  And then both waves of snarling cannibals slammed into the defenders, front and back.

  Donny heard screaming, and decided it must be him.

  -32-

  DANCER and DESIGN

  Western New York – October 29

  The First Lady sat unmoving in the passenger seat of the big, jacked-up Ford F-250, listening to the hum of oversized tires on asphalt and to the madness coming out of her captor’s mouth.

  “No more rules now,” he said, grinning.

  He talked so much and so fast that Patricia had the idea that he frequently had no one to talk to, or at least anyone who would listen. Smart or at least perceptive people, she decided, would move away from this man as quickly as possible.

  “No more TV news telling me what to believe,” he said. “No more government telling me what guns I can and can’t have. No more rules!” He banged the horn with each word, but then frowned. “I’m gonna miss that ancient alien astronaut guy, though. The one with the nutty hair.” A wink. “Now there’s a man who knows what’s what. I’m surprised the CIA hasn’t shut him up already.”

  Shortly after he’d taken her and hit Kylie in the head with a tire iron (Is she dead? Is my daughter dead?) he had pulled over long enough to retrieve a short piece of chain and a couple of padlocks from a rusting tool
chest installed in the truck bed behind the cab. He had tapped the rear window with the muzzle of one of the pistols frequently, staring at her, just in case she got any ideas while he was outside. She did, of course, but none that made any sense, and then he was back in the cab. He locked one end of the links to an empty gun rack mounted in the rear window, then looped the other end around her neck and padlocked it tight. When she’d tried to fight against it, he grabbed her broken arm and gave it a shake, making her scream and causing her vision to gray at the edges.

  It was full morning now, and the road was empty. She couldn’t tell what time it was exactly, or how long they’d been driving; the dashboard clock was broken. A passing highway marker said 219 in a shield symbol, but couldn’t tell her what state they were in. The New York State Trooper car made it a good bet, but where in New York, and were they even still in the state? She had also finally remembered what Bank Vault was, and where it was located. Not that she would ever see it.

  Over on the passenger side her feet were lost in trash; McDonalds wrappers, empty Mountain Dew bottles, potato chip bags and dog-eared porn magazines about naughty nuns. Both the truck and the owner smelled like a damp, blackened onion. He was still talking.

  “…and I said, ‘I did not grope that customer,’ and he said, ‘Yes you did, it’s right there on camera,’ and I said, ‘Show me,’ and he said, ‘No.’”

  Patricia didn’t want to look at him, was trying not to, but he was loud and animated and she was afraid he would hurt her again. She wanted to at least see it coming. Not that she would be able to stop him. He was over six feet and easily three hundred pounds, with arms that were soft-looking but strong underneath the flab. His face was flushed and patchy with a beard coming in unevenly, and his dark, collar-length hair hung like oily curtains around a stained trucker hat advertising Winchester Firearms.