CANNIBAL KINGDOM

by John L. Campbell

  “Mr. President!” David shouted, snapping Garrison out of his horror. For the briefest instant he’d thought about charging into the motor home to rescue the girl, but he knew it was already too late, and even if he tried it, Agent King would probably shoot him personally. Instead he forced himself to run around the Humvee and jump into the driver’s seat.

  King gripped the hood and jumped up and down on the bumper, while Garrison gunned the engine each time he came down. Tires continued to smoke and both vehicles shuddered. There was movement to the right and left now, but Garrison couldn’t tell if it was fleeing refugees or attacking cannibals, and didn’t dare take his focus off his job.

  Come on! Come on you son-of-a-

  With a squeal of metal and a violent lurch that made the Secret Service agent leap clear, the Humvee tore itself free of the RV. Garrison had barely hit the brakes to stop his reverse when Agent King had his slung P90 to his shoulder, firing bursts first to the left, then pivoting to fire on the left.

  “Get in, King!” the President shouted. “We’re leaving!”

  A few more bursts from the P90 hurled running bodies to the ground, and then David King was climbing in, slamming the door and thrusting his SMG out the passenger window, still firing. “Go! Go!”

  Garrison cranked the wheel hard left and stomped the accelerator. The heavy utility vehicle shot off the road, bounced through a shallow drainage ditch and tore out into a field to the north. He accelerated across the October ground, the plow furrows making it feel as if they were driving across a washboard at high speed. Moving at a forty-five-degree angle forward and away from the traffic back-up, they were able to get a broad view of what was happening.

  People were still running between the parked cars, a few were crouched and hiding, while others fled across the fields. Many were pursued by others, no longer refugees but nightmares in human form. The two men watched as they saw frightened civilians go down under flailing arms and snapping teeth.

  At the same time they noticed that someone else had climbed up to the gunner’s position of the Humvee on the bridge, and this man abruptly swung the ring-mounted machinegun out toward Garrison and David’s field. Crackles of white announced the muzzle flashes just as gouts of dirt started kicking up around their bouncing Hummer.

  King pounded a fist against his door. “What is that crazy-?”

  The ding of bullets punching through the sheet metal of their soft-skinned vehicle was followed by shattering glass in the rear, and a grunt from Agent King. He sagged against his door. Garrison saw the blood and shouted, “No!”

  He pushed the Hummer as fast as it would go, swerving dangerously in an attempt to evade the distant machinegun. More dirt kicked up around them, and one bullet punched through the hood. The President waited for the burst of steam and hot oil, but it had missed the engine’s vitals. A few more bullets clattered off the rear, and then they were at the edge of the field, angling left to put their tail to the gunner and racing directly away alongside a line of Cottonwood trees growing beside the narrow waterway. A bend in the stream suddenly put the trees between them and the madman on the bridge. The bullets were no longer coming their way, but Garrison didn’t slow down, the Humvee still thudding across the field. Agent King flopped in the passenger seat, his eyes closed. Garrison kept going until he found a break in the foliage and what looked like a wide, shallow point in the stream. He crossed the ford, gunned it up the opposite embankment and kept following the stream, now on the other side.

  The GPS showed their little blue arrow in the center of a green space with no road in sight. All Garrison could do was keep driving.

  He did find a road, though it was another half hour of cross-country driving before he came upon the narrow dirt track cutting through farmland; tractor ruts more than anything else. The GPS recalculated and kept him going in the right direction. He crossed into Pennsylvania and eventually found his way to paved roads, still heading east and pulling off to conceal the Hummer behind trees or buildings when he saw other vehicles. Those he couldn’t avoid paid him no attention. Shooting across Interstate 79 and passing between Edinboro and Meadville, he found his way to US 6. The GPS showed him that the Alleghenies were ahead, and he was about two hours from Bank Vault, the military installation at Feather Mountain.

  Garrison had stopped shortly after crossing the border and pulled David into the rear seats. Thirty minutes of effort left the floorboards covered in bloody gauze and packaging. Now the Secret Service agent reclined against the far door, shirtless and with his torso wrapped in bandages and a trauma pad. It had taken all the supplies from the first aid kit to get to this point.

  “I think we’ve stopped the bleeding,” Garrison had said.

  David was gray, his eyelids half open. Occasionally he sipped at a bottle of water, and the slight movement was obviously painful. “Thank you, sir,” he said, his voice soft. He added, “I’m sorry I let you down.”

  Garrison wanted to yell at him for saying something so stupid, but held back. He knew the emotion in his voice would crack into a sob. He’d been here before, gripping the hand of a man – one of his men - critically wounded in combat and clinging to life, trying to keep them talking as they waited for a medevac helicopter. But there would be no such chopper today.

  Instead, the President shook his head and gave the man’s hand a squeeze. “Bullshit. You took a bullet that would have hit me. You have more than fulfilled your duty, Mr. King.”

  The agent sighed and closed his eyes, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “That’s what every Secret Service agent imagines, right? Taking that bullet?” He coughed, and a few drops of blood appeared on his lips. Garrison wiped them away. Another sigh, but more like a wheeze. “It was going to happen anyway,” the man said. “Here or Alaska. This is better.”

  Garrison didn’t understand, but didn’t press.

  Agent King opened his eyes and looked at the President. “You have to get there, sir. You have to keep going, and don’t you hesitate to put me out the second I jeopardize that mission.” He took a deep breath and winced. “Do you hear me?”

  “No one’s getting put out anywhere.”

  The Secret Service sniper suddenly reached out and gripped Garrison’s wrist tightly. “A lot of good men and women went down to get you this far. I…” He coughed. “Honor that sacrifice, Mr. President. Acknowledge.”

  Garrison looked at his agent, and at the fresh patch of red seeping through the trauma patch taped to his side. “Copy that, Agent King. But you’re still going with me.”

  David nodded weakly and closed his eyes.

  Now, less than two hours from their destination and driving through increasingly mountainous terrain, King slept in the rear seat, belted in so he wouldn’t slip off the seat. President Fox drove with his eyes looking eastward and his assault rifle ready on the passenger seat beside him.

  Almost there.

  -35-

  LABCOAT

  CDC Atlanta – October 29

  The Laughing Dead.

  Because of her complete immersion in work, pop culture only existed on the distant fringe of Moira Rusk’s life, and so she didn’t connect the similarity between the title of the sensational TV series and what she was hearing from the lab. All but two of her staff (those bodies were destroyed and hardly recognizable, but mercifully mostly out of view behind a work table) were back on their feet now, crowding against the door to the patient ward despite the fatal wounds inflicted on them by Terry Butters. Severed arteries, ragged throat wounds and disembowelment hadn’t kept them down. Bloody and silver-eyed, they bumped against one another as they pounded at the door, smearing the glass with their gore and making horrible chuckling sounds.

  They were dead, at least clinically, but something was keeping them up and functioning, fueling their movement as well as their need to kill and devour. Moira had her suspicions about what that might be, but to confirm she would have to perform more autopsies, and she needed the lab. Need
ed them out.

  She’d already secured the door between the post-mortem room and the lab, the door through which the late Terry Butters had made his dramatic and deadly entrance. And they couldn’t get into the patient ward. Now she needed to clear them from the rest of the suite. She thought she knew of a way, but wondered if she had the courage to do it.

  Moira considered the patients raving in the ward behind her; they had all turned now. At the first reports of outbreak violence, she and Dr. Fisher had decided to place them all in restraints, and thank God for that. But even now, as they thrashed against the Velcro straps, howling with rage and hunger and long past resembling anything human, the thought of what she had planned for them made Moira close her eyes and take a deep, shaky breath. She’d taken an oath to heal, to do no harm. But it couldn’t be helped. She needed answers.

  Before any of that though, she’d have to deal with the ward nurse.

  The woman was in Phase-Two, that dazed and lethargic period where symptoms were presenting – staring, drooling, reflexive clenching and unclenching of the hands – the time right before she would turn into a violent Phase-Three. She was still slumped at her desk at the far end of the room, perched on a simple swivel chair on rollers, with her head on the desk and turned away. A puddle of urine had collected beneath the chair.

  Time was short. Moira didn’t know how long she’d been like this, and it was dangerous to assume that Phase-two always lasted an hour, just because Mr. Butters had before making his first attack in the lab. The nurse could turn at any minute, and Moira had no way to defend herself if that happened. She supposed she could try to fight her off with a scalpel, but that was laughable. A scalpel hadn’t kept Butters on the table, and he’d been cut wide open.

  After a quick trip to the supply closet, Moira began wrapping the ward nurse in white fabric surgical tape. Round and round she went, lashing the woman’s arms to her body and body to the back of the chair. She wanted to tape her mouth shut too, but that would require lifting her head and Moira was afraid the movement would bring her out of her daze. It felt like she would never be finished, but after using up twelve rolls of tape she decided it would have to do. She’d have preferred the Velcro restraints, but there were none to spare.

  Moira got behind the restrained nurse, pushing the woman and her rolling chair to the oversized door that opened from the ward into the hallway outside. She took the plastic access key card from the pocket of her scrubs and clenched it between her teeth, feeling her heart accelerate.

  A cautious peek out the window set in the door. Nothing there. Then she blinked. A while back she’d looked out this window and seen the arm of a dead person lying on the floor, the rest of the body out of view. Now the arm was gone. In its place was a red handprint on the white paint, the kind of mark someone might leave if they were using the wall to lever themselves off the floor.

  Of course you got up. Just like Terry Butters.

  She caught a sudden chill, the implications of it all becoming quite clear. Eighty percent turn rate. She thought about the world’s population, about the vastly outnumbered few who’d been lucky enough to have immunity. Then she thought about the considerably reduced number of those who’d survived the initial killing during the outbreak, an even lesser number surviving the subsequent hunting. She didn’t realize she was quietly doing math in her head until the calculations abruptly went sideways at the thought that those infected who were killed didn’t stay dead, or at least didn’t stay down. That element essentially doubled their numbers, giving them a second chance to kill.

  Then a single word cut through her thoughts. Extinction.

  Even as it hung there before her, another thought came to Moira Rusk, something clearer than anything she’d ever considered. Her mission was no longer about understanding or even curing this plague. She knew she wouldn’t live long enough to do that. No, it was finding a way to destroy them irreversibly, to save a thin slice of humanity by eradicating the rest.

  And she would do it, destroy them all if she could.

  Moira took a deep breath, one hand resting on the back of the nurse’s chair. She held her key card to the proximity reader and quickly put it back between her teeth. The indicator light turned green and the unit made a soft beep before the door popped open several inches, the vacuum letting off a hiss. Then she was moving, shoving the wheeled chair ahead of her as she went out into the tiled hall.

  The woman in the chair suddenly growled and snapped her head to the right, biting at the air and struggling against the tape. She let out an animal scream that carried down the empty corridor, and Moira gave her a tremendous push to the left. The chair rolled about six feet, and then the nurse’s thrashing tipped it over. She went down about where the red handprint stained the wall, slamming into the tile face-first with a crunch. She immediately twisted her head to snarl at Moira, still struggling, her nose broken and her face a bloody smear. There was no reaction to the pain.

  Moira left the door to the patient ward open and ran right, down to the lab’s outer door, the one that opened into the room filled with cubicles. The nurse’s howls chased after her, making the doctor’s skin ripple with goose flesh at the thought of what those sounds might summon from the depths of the CDC.

  A quick look through the window in this door showed the cubicle room to be empty, although something could be hiding within one of the mini-offices and she wouldn’t know it. The partitions were blood-splattered and the carpet soaked brown in places from the earlier slaughter. At the far end, the door to the lab stood open. That’s where they would be (she hoped,) crowded against the door to the patient ward.

  Before she could lose her nerve, Moira took the card from between her teeth and held it to the reader. A beep, a hiss and the door popped open. She pulled it wide, stepping inside. Her hands were shaking.

  Hey you? Come and eat me you bastards? She settled on, “Terry Butters!” and wondered if the thing would understand its name. The shout worked, regardless, for a chorus of howls answered and a moment later the dead boiled out of the lab and into the office. Silver eyes locked on the fifty-eight-year-old physician.

  Moira ran.

  It was ninety feet to the ward door, and Moira sprinted toward it. She heard them spilling out of the office behind her, giggling and chuckling their madness, a flesh and bone chainsaw of teeth and nails.

  The door. I have to make it to-

  Moira gasped and stumbled. Doctor Karen Fisher was standing in the hallway beyond, her hair in tangles and clotted with gore. Her lab coat looked more like a butcher’s smock now, and she was hunched slightly forward, arms dangling like an ape. She twitched her head up just the slightest, and the fluorescents caught her eyes, causing them to give off a metallic shimmer.

  Moira’s friend let out a piercing shriek and raced toward her as the pack from the lab closed from behind. The older woman let out a small, strangled cry and started running again, legs pumping and heart hammering, knowing that Karen would get there before she did, that she would be torn apart from in front and behind.

  But it was Moira who got there first, only a couple yards ahead of Karen Fisher and the pack. She grabbed the door’s inner handle and flung herself inside, pulling as hard as she could. Bodies hit the door from the other side like football tacklers and slammed it the last few inches closed. The vacuum hissed as it sealed.

  Crazed faces pressed against the small window, hands beating at the door. Moira looked into the face of a creature that had once been her friend and sobbed, but she quickly wiped her eyes. There was no time for heartache. She wasn’t done.

  Moira hurried through the door to the lab, praying they had all followed her into the hallway, that a few weren’t lingering, and knowing she was dead if they had. The lab was empty. She shot through it, almost went down when her shoe hit a blood puddle on the floor, throwing her against a wall with a grunt, then she recovered and headed through the cubicles. She tensed as she ran the last few yards, waiting to be jumped by so
mething lurking behind a partition, and then she was pulling this door closed, gripping the handle tightly. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she let it out in time with the door’s sealing hiss.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the coolness of the small window. When faces appeared there and the pounding commenced once more, she paid it no mind. The medical suite was hers now.

  The doctor let out a deep sigh and walked back to the lab. Her hands had stopped shaking. It was time to get to work.

  By definition, the Latin term Post Mortem meant after death, the only time that such invasive and destructive processes could be performed on a human being. Any one of the procedures would kill a living patient almost immediately, which was why – under normal circumstances – there were so many safeguards to ensure that the body on the slab was truly dead and not simply paralyzed or in a coma. Moira would have no need of those safeguards in these circumstances.

  Although they were on wheels, the patient beds wouldn’t fit through the post-mortem door, and there was no way she was going to remove the Velcro restraints on any one of these ten raging things in order to shift them to a gurney, so she decided to bring the autopsy to them. Relocating instruments, carts and what lights she could from the other room, she pulled patient number ten’s bed into the center of the ward and set up around it. She couldn’t bring in the small video camera wired into the lighting system above the stainless steel table, so there would be no visual record. She’d have to go slow and be careful to verbalize and describe everything she did and saw. The wireless microphone clipped to her rubberized apron had enough range for the receiver in post-mortem to pick it up.