CANNIBAL KINGDOM

by John L. Campbell

  Number ten raged and strained against its bonds, snapping at the air. A man in his forties, the subject’s eyes appeared normal, not silver, though she couldn’t remember ever seeing that level of intensity or hatred in a normal person. She wondered if the change appeared after clinical death, and said as much aloud so the mic would record it. Using a pair of surgical scissors, she cut away the man’s hospital gown, leaving him naked.

  I’m about to perform a live autopsy, she thought, shaking her head. It’s the kind of thing Hannibal might do in a Thomas Harris novel.

  She selected a scalpel and for the microphone said, “This is Doctor Moira Rusk…”

  EXTINCTION

  -36-

  DANCER and DESIGN

  Near Limestone, New York – October 29

  Chained by the neck with an impromptu leash, Patricia sat in the cab of Billy’s big, redneck pickup truck, palming away her tears. She knew they wouldn’t do her any good, but they came anyway. Her large, foul-smelling abductor had plans for her at a house he said wasn’t far away, and Patricia felt a hollow terror knowing that her remaining hours would be filled with brutality and pain.

  She wanted to be strong, to fight for her life, but knew it would be a brief and pointless struggle. The tears fell harder, and she was no longer thinking of her family. The thought of what he was going to do to her was about to make her fall apart.

  Billy emerged from the gas mart with a bottle of Mountain Dew in one hand, a bag of Doritos clenched in his teeth and what appeared to be a hand pump attached to a long hose gripped in his other, meaty paw. He climbed into the cab, setting the Mountain Dew in a cup holder and tossing the chips into her lap. “Sure you don’t want any?” he asked. “You’re going to need your energy.”

  When Patricia shook her head he pulled the big Ford around to the side of the station, parking next to a collection of circular metal covers set in the concrete. Billy got out and fumbled with one of the covers, the pump and the hose, his face turning red from the exertion of squatting and struggling. Patricia wished a stroke on him.

  “I’ve never done this,” he shouted to the cab. “But I’ll figure it out.” And he did, though it took more than an hour for him to manage it and transfer enough fuel from the underground tanks to top off the Ford. He took a break in the middle to cram Doritos into his mouth and chug the Mountain Dew. He also asked her how she thought she’d look in black rubber, crunching and looking out the window and not seeming to be actually interested in the response. She didn’t give one.

  “Do you think I should fill some extra containers?” he asked. “I’m already pumping, might as well. I saw some inside.”

  Patricia said he should. Anything to delay what was coming.

  Billy finished his little break, leaving the pump hose in the underground tank. “I’ll be back,” he said, throwing a wave over his shoulder as he lumbered toward the gas mart. “Gotta make a poop.”

  Patricia shut her eyes and put her head down, the links of the chain pressing deeply against her throat, but unfortunately not enough to strangle her. The cold steel on her skin had a sense of finality to it, and she wished she could have told Garrison once last time that she loved him.

  Billy sat on the toilet, grunting in a small bathroom at the back of the store, the door open so he’d have some light. “Gotta eat more fruit,” he groaned, straining until he felt pressure in his temples and forced himself to relax, breathing deeply. It wouldn’t do to kill himself taking a crap, not with a freshly dead world out there filled with every conceivable delight.

  Outside the bathroom he could see shelves filed with chips and bottles of cheese and salsa. He’d stock up on provisions before he left for the house.

  No power here meant no power at home, since it was just over a mile away. He had a generator though, so it wouldn’t matter. The house was a pile of shit and he knew it; the property was covered in junked cars, rusting oil barrels, broken appliances and trash. He just threw his house garbage out into the rest of the shit, and didn’t the bears love that? The inside of the house was as much a trash heap as the outside, but Billy didn’t care. Landscaping and interior decorating wasn’t what drew his interest.

  The cellar, though…that was his passion.

  Sitting on the bowl and trying to move his bowels, Billy smiled at the thought of it. The cellar might have started out as a damp, dirt-floored space filled with dark corners and spiders, but now it was a clean, bright, fully equipped dungeon, exactly what he’d been fantasizing about since he was nine or ten-years-old and first started drawing pictures of what he thought naked women would look like after they’d had their body parts sawed off. And wasn’t it amazing what you could buy online and have delivered in just days, the purchases arriving in nice, discrete unlabeled boxes. Billy planned to use every toy he’d ordered, or at least as many as he could before the old cunt wore out and the life drained away from her.

  After twenty minutes he felt movement at last and let out a deep sigh. The bathroom filled with the rich odor of his waste.

  Billy had lied to Cunt, and that made him smile, too. She wasn’t the first woman he had taken, was actually the second but the first one hadn’t really counted. A housewife snatched from the darkness of a big discount store’s parking lot. She died of asphyxiation in his dungeon before he could even get going. Oh, he’d had some fun with the body afterward, but that didn’t really count either.

  The real problem had been with disposal. He could have buried her in the woods – God knew it was isolated enough – but the bears would have simply dug her up. Then he’d had a spark of brilliance and tucked her into an old refrigerator, chaining it shut and leaving it in plain sight in the trash field in front of his house.

  When the cops came to take away his guns (it wasn’t an incident, really, more of an indiscretion, he decided) they hadn’t even glanced at the fridge, and the stink seeping out from within was lost in all the other filth. But now there were no more cops, no more rules, and no more worries about how to dispose of corpses. He could toss them outside or even prop them up in a lawn chair on his porch if he wanted to. The bears could have them. Or maybe even the hungry things that used to be people.

  This time would be different. Cunt (he’d called the other one that, too) wouldn’t be allowed to die before he’d had his fun. Billy had learned, and knew how to be more careful this time. Practice, practice.

  Billy finished up and headed through the store, selecting a pair of empty, red gasoline containers from a high shelf and putting another bag of Doritos between his teeth. When he went outside, the door gave a happy little jingle that made him smile around the bag of chips. Off to the right, Cunt sat in his truck staring at him through the passenger window. He started toward her but then stopped.

  Parked at the pumps was a New York State Police Charger with a crumpled fender and a broken headlight.

  Uh-oh.

  The trunk was open.

  “Hey,” a voice said from behind him. Billy dropped the gas cans (not the chips) and spun, reaching for one of the handguns stuck in his waistband. As he turned he came face-to-face with the muzzle opening of a shotgun only inches from his nose. The piece of yummy candy from earlier was holding a twelve-gauge Remington 870, a sweet model with a pistol grip and a smooth, black finish. He had one just like it at-

  Kylie pulled the trigger, and Billy’s head above the lower jaw exploded in a storm of red and gray, bone, teeth and hair. The body collapsed with a heavy thump.

  She’d spotted the jacked-up Ford from the road, saw her mother chained by the neck in the front seat, and then rage took over. Now she spat on the corpse, then went through its pockets until she found the padlock keys.

  Patricia flinched when the shotgun went off. The result was horrifying – she’d never seen anything so awful, not even in horror movies – and instantly knew she would never erase the moment from her memory. But another part of her nodded with an unfamiliar, dark satisfaction.

  Several minutes lat
er her daughter was there, unlocking the chain and helping her down from the truck. They hugged and cried for a long time.

  “Are you okay?” Kylie asked at last, looking her mother over for injuries beyond the broken arm.

  Patricia nodded. “Are you okay…with that?” She nodded toward Billy’s headless corpse.

  A flinty look appeared in her daughter’s eyes. “Very okay. In fact once doesn’t feel like enough.”

  “I know what Bank Vault is,” her mother said, and Kylie said she had figured it out too. Patricia shook her head. “How did you find me?”

  Kylie guided her toward the Charger. “I’ll explain when we’re on the road. The GPS says Feather Mountain isn’t far. We’re almost there.”

  -37-

  LABCOAT

  CDC Atlanta – October 29

  Dr. Rusk sat back from the microscope and rubbed her eyes. She was perched on a stool in the lab, the work table before her covered with test samples, glass slides, reference materials and a spiral notebook where she was recording her findings, thoughts and theories, crazy though they might be. Her gore-spattered autopsy apron hung on a hook by the door to the patient ward, and she had changed into fresh, pale blue scrubs.

  She yawned and glanced at a wall clock. The afternoon was quickly running out. How long since she’d last slept? She was too tired to do the math.

  Three autopsies since she’d retaken the lab suite, the grisliest, most unimaginable time of her life. Cutting into three patients that continued to shriek and bite and thrash even as she spread open chest cavities, even as she removed organs. The last one had bucked so hard in its restraints that her hand had slipped, and the scalpel she was holding sliced a deep cut through the index knuckle of her left hand. Now it was clean and wrapped in gauze, uncomfortable and awkward. She’d taken only ibuprofen for the pain, though she could have gotten something much stronger from the supply closet. She wanted to stay clear-headed.

  The patients had fought – long after they should have been dead – right up until one of three things happened; infliction of trauma to the alien, gelatinous sacs that encased their brains, hearts or spinal cords. A simple needle stick didn’t do it, because the sac immediately closed around the puncture much like a muscle. But an incision of any real size caused a quivering, mucous-like substance to spill out into the rest of the body until the sac was essentially deflated. The gelatin stopped wriggling within seconds, the patient stiffened and went silent, and the luminescence went out of their eyes at once, leaving them as lifeless as dull pewter.

  Spinal trauma. Heart or brain trauma. It killed them, really killed them. Would that knowledge be useful to anyone? That same trauma killed healthy human beings, so what was the difference? The difference was that any other trauma, such as fatal wounds to the body’s organs other than those three, had no effect at all. To test her theory Moira had taken a bone saw to one patient’s big toe and took it completely off. Other than bleeding, the patient didn’t react except to keep raging. She decided that sawing off all four limbs wouldn’t change them. They would be just as aggressive, only more restricted.

  She said as much in her scribblings in the notepad, then tapped the pen against her chin.

  No change. That wasn’t entirely true. All her subjects had been alive – infected but still alive – when she began the procedure. Their eyes had been dark and hungry-looking, but biologically appeared normal. It was only after clinical death (excessive blood loss, the massive trauma caused by spreading the chest and removing organs) that the eyes changed to that glimmering, solid-silver surface without pupil or iris. She scribbled some ideas about what the change in the eyes might mean…possibly altered vision to aid in hunting…but also noted that she was merely speculating.

  The change from Phase-Three to Phase-Four, from violent predator to dead violent predator, was what frustrated her the most. The intervening time period was inconsistent. Terry Butters had taken more than an hour. His victims had turned in less than ten minutes. Her three autopsy patients had been still during the metamorphosis for six, twenty-two and fifty minutes respectively before their rebirth.

  All of them were just as vicious as they’d been before death, but continued to exhibit motor function that, quite frankly, was impossible for a corpse. She had no equipment to get an EEG reading (looking at brainwaves and post-mortem rooms didn’t go together), so she was speculating again, although her lab work seemed to have confirmed what she was thinking.

  At its heart, Trident was parasitic.

  It was alive.

  Moira yawned again and pulled her laptop toward her through the debris, enabling the voice-to-text function, a blinking red light above the screen indicating that the microphone was live. She looked at her handwritten notes and continued, dictating what she had scribbled down and including her own conjectures as well as conclusions she’d drawn from news broadcasts before those had gone off the air completely. There was no particular organization to what she said, she just talked. She was too fatigued, and this wasn’t prep for an on-stage presentation to the AMA. Time was running out and she had to get it all on the record.

  “Moira Rusk,” she said, “continuation of notes. I’m not sure if I said this before…maybe I just thought I did…so just to be safe. Phase-One is asymptomatic. The theory that Trident incubated for ten days was only partially correct, and was more of a false flag, because it seems to have been true only in early contact cases. It accelerates somehow, and I now believe that Trident is running on its own, internal clock, with a maximum of thirteen days from its first contact with the index patient – whoever that was – until what I’ve been calling the turning. That’s regardless of when a victim contracted the virus.”

  She looked at her notes and stifled another yawn, wishing for coffee. There was none to be had here in the lab suite. Then she blinked, realizing she would never drink another cup of coffee in her life.

  “I’m fatigued,” she told the recording, “so this will probably come out scattered. In simple terms, first exposure cases went a full ten days before turning. Those who contracted the virus even three days after the zero-point, who should have had a week and a half before outbreak, are prematurely turning at the same rate as the others. That’s why I’m suggesting acceleration. So even if you caught it yesterday, you’ll have turned by Virus-Exposure-Day thirteen, and that’s tomorrow. I have no idea why that would be. I’m babbling.”

  Moira recapped the rough numbers for resistance/remission and outright immunity. “By my calculations, anyone who can turn will have turned by end of day tomorrow.”

  She turned a few pages in the spiral notebook. “Phase-Two is the brief, symptomatic period we’ve all seen; lethargy, distraction, excessive salivation and reflexive motor activity, sometimes loss of control over bodily functions. An hour of this seemed the norm at first, but like everything else that has become inconsistent too.” She thought about the ward nurse and how she’d been able to subdue the dazed woman. “However long it lasts, this is when they’re most vulnerable.” It sounded like an odd thing to add to a clinical evaluation, but necessary considering her species was facing eradication from the aggression of another.

  “Phase-Three is the savagery we’ve seen, with predatory behavior and loss of reason, or at least how we understand it, and I don’t think that part is always accurate. Some of them behave like single-purpose killing machines, attacking head-on without regard for risk. Others exhibit varying degrees of problem-solving ability and cleverness. All of them are without fear and completely resistant to pain. And it should be noted that Phase-Threes are still alive in the clinical sense, and can be incapacitated or killed by most forms of violence.”

  The howls of the seven remaining patients in the adjacent ward floated through the intervening door. “Be right with you,” Moira murmured, then looked at her notes again.

  “I’ve seen evidence that a Phase-One, asymptomatic infection victim bitten but not killed by a Phase-Three, will undergo an almost immed
iate change – minutes only – and turn, becoming a Phase-Three themselves and bypassing the Phase-Two symptomatic period.” She tapped the pen against her chin. Was this even making sense? “My theory is that the turned strain, passed via fluid transfer, somehow activates the dormant strain. There are initial indicators, but someone else will have to figure out those details.”

  Moira took a deep breath. “Trident is definitely parasitic. The parasites hatching from the early virus structure attach themselves to everything; muscle, organs, nervous system, and they quickly manufacture the gelatinous sac growths in a manner similar to the way insects create cocoons or egg sacs. The growths house a large concentration of the parasites, and protect both them and the key organs.” A glance at her notes. “I also believe that the parasites have developed a hive mind, communicating and taking orders given by the organisms within the sacs, allowing them to continue controlling the host’s brain and body even after death.”

  “And Phase-Fours are dead, in every sense that we understand, but the parasites keep them going.” She talked about the sacs around the brain, heart and spinal column, convinced she was repeating herself but pushing forward anyway. “It appears that Phase-Fours can only be truly destroyed by rupturing one of these sacs, their three most vulnerable points. This makes them considerably more resilient than human beings. Admittedly, I have no idea if they are effected by other elemental conditions; fire, toxins, oxygen deprivation. I haven’t seen lung function in Phase-Fours. An earlier report suggested high doses of radiation could destroy them, but right now I can’t remember where I heard that or if it came from a credible source.”