CANNIBAL KINGDOM

by John L. Campbell

  It didn’t react or hesitate. Blinded, the head dipped as the bite came in at his throat.

  CRACK! A pistol shot only inches from his face made him jump, the sharp report deafening. The infected MP slipped off to the side, half its head gone, and a moment later Donny felt himself being hauled up by his combat harness. “On yah feet, soldah,” said a woman’s voice. It sounded faint and far away.

  Donny shook his head, trying to clear his head of the ringing caused by the handgun his rescuer was still holding. It was a woman in a flight suit, older than the F-35 pilot with her hair in a tight bun. A nametag read Boyle, and the gold oak clusters of a major were sewn onto her collar.

  She glanced at his bitten arm. “Looks like it fahkin’ hats.”

  Donny blinked. What language was that?

  The major slapped the side of his head. “Get yah head cleah and get back in it, soldah.”

  The infantry lieutenant found his rifle still slung around his neck and reloaded as he stumbled toward the fence. Bright Eyes was on her feet again, having dispatched whatever had pulled her down, but there was blood on her helmet and a fresh bite on one hand.

  “Keep up yah fiyah!” the major yelled, and Donny and the two female pilots poured bullets through the fence and into the mob swarming the vehicle on the other side.

  Garrison rammed the combat knife up under the chin of a trooper from the 101st Airborne, a young man who had flown from the Carolinas to provide security against the infected and arrived in Pennsylvania as one of them. The body fell away from the knife (not before clawing three raw stripes of flesh from Garrison’s face) and almost immediately another soldier made it to the roof of the Hummer and bit deeply into his left shoulder. POTUS rammed the blade through one eye and shoved the soldier away.

  Still more were getting on the roof, and Garrison was winded, his arms weakening. He knew he had the strength to fight off one more attack, two at the most, and there were dozens coming at him.

  Suddenly he was downrange at a firing line, the crack of semi-automatic gunfire filling the air, making him flinch and crouch, instinctively covering his head. The infected that had climbed the sides of the Humvee were flung back, bullets ripping chunks out of them. On the ground, figures turned toward the source of the fire only to be cut down. Garrison felt more than heard the hiss of bullets zipping past his head and punching into the unarmored vehicle beneath him.

  In less than a minute the firing stopped, leaving Garrison crouched atop a bullet-riddled and gore-slicked vehicle parked in a field of the dead. As he straightened, he saw the perimeter gate rolling back, a row of anti-ramming bollards sinking into a concrete pad to open the way. Two women in flight suits were soon joined by a young infantryman who emerged from the guardhouse and moved toward him. Garrison climbed down and met them.

  Both women stiffened when they realized who he was and snapped off salutes, which Garrison wearily returned. The infantry lieutenant simply stood there staring, then said, “Where’s your plane?”

  President Fox laughed and clapped a hand to the back of Donny’s neck, pulling their foreheads together and letting out a relieved sigh. “Still in Ohio, son. But here I am anyway.”

  Minutes later the gates were closing behind them. With all the battle damage, they were afraid that the Humvee wouldn’t start, but it turned right over. Then they were rolling up the road with four lives aboard.

  Garrison sat in the back seat cradling David King’s head in his lap.

  -43-

  LABCOAT

  CDC Atlanta – October 29

  Morphine. That’s all it had taken.

  Moira was back in the lab, perched before her laptop. In the patient ward, the last of the ten subjects was a blackened, motionless corpse like the others lined up in the beds beside it.

  After the initial discovery that a dose of morphine killed them, Moira experimented with lesser and lesser amounts, using only half an mL on the second-to-last patient. Even that tiny injection had destroyed the patient just as quickly and efficiently as larger doses with the others. On the final one, Moira decided to try something and dripped a single drop of the amber fluid onto the patient’s chest, without injection.

  The result was immediate. The body stiffened, the eyes went steely and lifeless, and the spreading necrosis consumed every inch of flesh in less than a minute.

  Morphine. Easier to make and distribute than bullets. Certainly it could be weaponized, turned into an aerosol of some sort and perhaps delivered through airborne spraying, the tiny droplets wiping out thousands at a time. But others would have to carry out that part. Her time was done.

  Sweat dripped from her brow as she stared at the laptop screen with its blinking recording light. She had added her startling discovery to the file…

  Was I talking? I did add it, right? So hard to focus.

  …and prepared the entire file for uploading to the cloud…

  Did I? Or did I just think I did it?

  …and now all that remained was for her to click send so that others would learn from her gruesome research. Her right hand rested beside the mouse, clenching and unclenching rhythmically. The nausea had passed, and that was good. She wanted to wipe the sweat from her face but it didn’t feel worth the effort. Perhaps she should tell it all to the recording again, just in case she hadn’t already. But being able to speak was now lost to her. All that came out was a giggle and a string of grayish drool that spilled onto the knee of her scrubs.

  Focus! Hit send before it’s too late!

  The yelling in her head reminded her of her mother’s voice, a woman with a short temper and a love of the bottle. She’d frequently told Moira that she was a stupid girl who better find a husband, because she was white trash who would never accomplish anything on her own. Daddy was different. He was kind, a man with hands that never hit who taught her to ride a bike…

  Stop! You’re slipping away, hit send!

  Her right hand twitched on the lab table beside the mouse.

  Hit send. Send. That was a funny word. What did it mean? Daddy would know. He’d been smart, he would… Moira sat and stared at a screen that was rapidly losing meaning, her clenching and unclenching hand bumping the mouse.

  Send. Need to send. Need to…

  Thirty minutes later, Dr. Moira Rusk was a snarling thing kneeling over the body of a dead lab assistant, ripping and pulling and feeding.

  -44-

  FEATHER MOUNTAIN

  Western Pennsylvania – October 29

  Dusk was coming on as a pair of headlights climbed the last hundred yards of road to arrive at the bunker’s blast doors. They illuminated a small school bus and a delivery van parked off to the side, a small group of people gathered beneath the fluorescent-lit alcove that sheltered the mountain’s entrance. Others in uniform were organized into a defensive perimeter facing outward, weapons trained on the approaching Humvee and the coming night.

  Garrison Fox immediately picked out his wife in the crowd, and like his son earlier he was out the door and running before the vehicle stopped rolling. Patricia, Kylie and Devon rushed to him, and the family wrapped itself in an embrace of sobs and happy tears. Garrison didn’t care who saw him cry. His family was alive, and they were together.

  Everyone wanted to talk at once, and Donny’s tiny squad stared at him as if he’d just arrived in a spaceship.

  “You brought back the President?” Corporal Woods said. Akins stared at his lieutenant in awe, then snapped off a salute. “What are your orders, sir?”

  Lt. “Bright Eyes” Forrester walked past, nudging his arm. “Badass,” she said.

  Donny smiled, then looked at his troops, pointing toward the civilians. “Use them to reinforce this perimeter, anyone with a weapon. It’s almost dark, and there’s more of them out there.”

  Private Akins hurried to carry out his officer’s command.

  Donny joined the First Family at the blast doors, along with Handelman and the Secret Service agent who had come in with the Vice
President’s family. A couple of civilians were there as well, and one shook Donny’s hand, thanking him and introducing himself as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff.

  “You can drop the deputy part,” Garrison said. “You’re the man now. Tommy would have wanted it that way. It’s how I want it.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Garrison looked at the man-door beside the vehicle entrance, at the built-in camera, optical scanner and proximity reader. “Knock or ring the bell?” he mused, then looked at Donny Knapp and raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President. I’m a brand new second lieutenant, and nobody tells us anything. I don’t have access.”

  “Hmm,” Garrison said, looking at his nametag. “We’ll figure it out. How’s our defenses, Knapp? I want my family and the others safe.”

  Donny’s eyes flicked over to a dark hardness that had not existed in him only days before. “Nothing will get through us, sir.”

  Garrison nodded and started to turn, then pointed at the young officer. “And that’s Captain Knapp, now.”

  “But sir, I’m only a second-”

  “Don’t argue with your Commander-in-Chief, son.” Then the President winked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The major with the Boston accent saluted Donny even though she still outranked him, and the others in uniform followed her lead. Then Captain Knapp was reorganizing the perimeter, augmenting with the armed civilians from the bus, all the pilots and both Secret Service agents. There was no way to alert those inside the mountain – if anyone was even alive and un-turned in there – and pounding on steel doors would accomplish nothing. They would just have to hope someone would notice them out here, so President Fox and Kylie took their places on the line. Devon remained close to his mother like a protective young wolf, pistol in hand.

  No one spoke as they watched the sun slide behind the trees, the sky shifting through golds and reds and into a deepening blue, stars beginning to poke through the night. Laughter floated on the cooling October air, coming from the forest and the cluster of base buildings not far away. Donny knew there were probably a couple hundred infected soldiers still within the base perimeter, despite how many they’d killed at the airfield. If they massed again and attacked in a wave like last time, the little group would be trapped against the side of the mountain, overwhelmed and slaughtered.

  Knowing they were out there in the darkness and not being able to see them was unsettling, but that lunatic chuckling – as if they were amused by the terror they inflicted – was like a promise of bad things to come.

  They waited, staring into the night and waiting for death to arrive.

  “We hold the line,” Donny said, walking its length, having some brief, quiet words with each of them before speaking to the group. “There is no fallback position. We stand and fight, no matter who falls.” He stopped at POTUS. “You set, Mr. President?”

  “Good to go, Captain.”

  Shadows moved in the deepening gloom, but whether it was furtive movement or a trick of the light no one could tell, so no one fired. There was too little ammunition to waste it on phantoms.

  A metallic BOOM from behind made them all jump, and the group turned to see the giant blast doors split down the middle and retract into the mountain, leaving a widening, vertical seam of darkness. Weapons turned in that direction, ready for whatever monstrosities would come spilling out.

  The lone figure that emerged was no monster. He was a fiftyish soldier with a severe, gray crewcut wearing blood-splattered combat gear. He looked tired, and more than a few bites could be seen on his exposed arms and through rips in his uniform. He smelled of gunpowder, and a red-soaked pressure bandage was tied to his neck. It was joined by what looked like a couple dozen, bloody dog tags worn as a grim necklace. Stars were pinned to the man’s collar.

  Garrison and Donny walked slowly toward him, and Donny saluted the man he recognized as the general who’d ordered him to hold the airfield. Rowe looked at his Commander-in-Chief. “Welcome to Feather Mountain, Mr. President. The facility is secure.”

  ECHOES

  -45-

  DEVIL DOG

  Feather Mountain Continuity Bunker – November 1

  The Army surgeon was happy to have patients he could actually help, and he tended to the wounds of all the new arrivals. As a precaution he tested them all for the active virus, including the President. Everyone was in the clear. That was important not only for the obvious reason; Feather Mountain was a large, complex facility, and everyone needed to be healthy because in time they would all be assigned jobs, from maintenance to food preparation to learning the consoles in the communication center.

  Agent David King was laid to rest in a pine grove near the mountain entrance. The laminated, Secret Service ID card bearing David’s image went into Garrison Fox’s pocket, where he would carry it every day for the rest of his life.

  Major Erin “Harvard” Boyle of Boston was told that eventually the President would be flying again, and when he did, any aircraft he was aboard would be designated Air Force One. Harvard would be the commanding officer in the cockpit.

  Lt. Forrester, call-sign Bright Eyes, had a different mission in mind, one of her own choosing. One night she cornered the newly promoted Captain Knapp in his quarters and attacked. It was a most welcome engagement.

  Garrison heard the entire story of Devon and Agent Handelman’s escape from Vermont, mostly from his son. He expressed his gratitude to the agent and gave him a warm handshake, naming him head of the presidential Protective Detail, such as it was. Marcus accepted without hesitation, but Devon Fox would forever remain his favorite protectee.

  “Mr. President, you’re needed in comms.” Sgt. Stipling had found his Commander-in-Chief in the mess hall having a quiet conversation with Kylie. Garrison had heard about his wife’s abduction and the steps Kylie had taken to get her back. As a father he anguished for what his daughter had gone through, while at the same time swelling with pride. She was tougher than he’d ever imagined, and he told her so. There were happy tears between them.

  Garrison followed the sergeant to the communication center where General Rowe was standing near a console. “Put it on speaker,” the general said to a nearby tech.

  “Mr. President,” Rowe said, “we’ve been broadcasting in the clear almost continuously since everything started falling apart, hoping to make contact with surviving units.” He smiled. “We’re starting to get responses.”

  “All reporting units,” the tech broadcast, “National Command Authority is listening. State your composition and location.”

  There was a pause before the speakers crackled.

  “Sergeant Bruce Irving, 82nd Airborne with a force of twenty-five just west of Chicago.”

  “Lt. Colonel Jessup, Georgia National Guard,” drawled the voice of an older man. “I’ve got two hundred pissed-off troops south of Savannah, Mr. President, and they’re ready for some payback.”

  “Trooper Easton, California Highway Patrol in Death Valley. We have fifty combatants, mostly civilians with a few cops, soldiers and jarheads, along with three times that number of kids and older folks. We’re sheltering at the Marine camp at Twenty-Nine Palms, and we have retaken the base.”

  There were others. A Navy destroyer with a skeleton crew steaming off the coast of Virginia; an airbase in Alaska; several U.S. submarines in international waters; pockets of civilian survivors that had formed themselves into militia units and were scattered across the western states; small National Guard and reserve units everywhere.

  “This is Captain Bauer, Pennsylvania National Guard. I’ve got three truckloads of troops and a pair of fully loaded Bradley fighting vehicles. We’re rolling into Custer right now, Mr. President, and we’re about to retake the Army Depot and airfield. Should take a couple of days, then we’ll head up to Feather Mountain to give your people some support.”

  More calls were coming in, clusters of uninfected humanity that had survived and come to
gether, each expressing their eagerness to start fighting back. Garrison Fox thanked them all and told them they’d be receiving orders soon.

  General Rowe walked away from the console with the President. “Sir, we’ve been contacted by a Doctor Wulandari, an Indonesian virologist working in New Zealand. He says he received an upload from the Secretary of Health and Human Services.”

  “Moira,” said Garrison. “She was at CDC Atlanta. Is she…?”

  “There’s been no contact, sir. But Wulandari says she was doing research since before this started and had a breakthrough. She found a way to eradicate the infected, Mr. President. Wulandari is working on that now, and he’s going to keep in touch with us.”

  Garrison shook the general’s hand. “We have a chance, Joshua.”

  Donny Knapp stood in the vast, domed central chamber of the entrance to Feather Mountain, the tarp-covered Humvees and Stryker armored fighting vehicle behind him, Woods, Akins and Sgt. Stipling standing to one side. Donny wore a relaxed expression and half a grin. Bright Eyes had made her nocturnal visits to his quarters a habit.

  Twin silver bars were now on his collar tabs. The President had pinned them there himself.

  “Attention!” Sgt. Stipling barked, and all four soldiers stiffened and saluted as Joshua Rowe strode into the chamber. “At ease,” he replied.

  “Good afternoon, General,” Donny said.

  “Captain.” Rowe stopped before him. “I have orders for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve heard the broadcasts,” the general said, “and help is coming to strengthen your force. More aircraft are headed this way, too. Feather Mountain is about to become a very busy place.”