Cannibal Moon

by James Axler

  But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  Stalactites of gray hung glistening from both his nostrils. The thick discharge had smeared and crusted like a snail trail through the dark stubble that covered his upper lip and chin. He was infected with the scourge of Deathland’s cannibal clans, a contagious, blood-born, inevitably fatal disease known far and wide as “the oozies.”

  Mildred looked past him. There were two more cannies. Live ones. The trio had entered the cave as she had started shooting, probably rejoining their running buddies for a share in the spoils. With no one covering her back, she had left herself open to attack.

  The two kids were still alive, huddled in each other’s arms on the dirt floor, crying softly. From stories told on their mothers’ knees, they knew what was coming next.

  The scarred one smiled down at her, showing off yellow incisors filed to points. He was the pack leader, the alpha. Without a word, he reached around her hip and groped her buttocks. Not in a sexual way. His interest was entirely culinary. Mildred tried to twist away from his powerful fingers. He squeezed harder, until she stopped struggling, then he let go.

  “She’s a tough one,” the alpha said to his pals. “We’ve got to pit roast her. Slow fire, wrapped in wet leaves. Let her cook all day.”

  The other two cannies stepped closer. They had hollow-cheeked faces, skinny arms and legs. Bloated potbellies.

  “Or we could slice her into steaks,” the nearly bald one suggested. “Pound ’em flat with a rock. Quick-fry ’em in baby fat.” The fringe along the sides of his head fell in long, greasy coils to his shoulders.

  The third cannie licked his cracked lips. He had a narrow groove across his forehead where the bone had been crushed by a blow, perhaps by a tire iron or piece of rebar.

  Mildred looked from face to grimy face. Gray pendulums of snot swayed from their noses. Gray discharge leaked from their filthy earholes. They were all goners. Terminal stage oozies.

  There had been no such disease in the scientific literature when Mildred Wyeth had graduated from medical school. There had been no such disease when years later she had undergone a relatively minor surgical procedure and had experienced a negative reaction to the anesthetic. In a last-ditch attempt to save her life, her colleagues had put her in cryogenic stasis. That had been shortly before the cataclysmic events of January 21, 2001. After sleeping through the end of western civilization, and a century or so thereafter, she had been revived by Ryan Cawdor and the others, reborn into a strange and violent new world.

  Medical science no longer existed. What information there was, was anecdotal and unsubstantiated. Rumors and lies. Lies and rumors. From her own limited experience over the years, Mildred had come to no conclusions about the true nature of cannies, or their fatal affliction. They didn’t exhibit the gigantism or chimerism found in Deathlands other mutated species. Superficially at least, their flesh-eating seemed more like an addiction. One taste of human flesh and they were forever hooked. Oozie infection only seemed to increase their depravity, giving them a bottomless hunger.

  In human history, cannibalism was almost always a ceremonial choice, Mildred knew. Eating one’s fallen or captured enemies was a way of taking their physical and spiritual power; it was never the mainstay of diet. Epidemiological studies that might have answered the questions about cannies were no longer an option. That kind of research had vanished forever, along with the Centers for Disease Control.

  Dr. Mildred Wyeth stood disarmed and helpless, facing a truly horrendous fate, but she wasn’t thinking about herself, nor about how far she had come to die so miserably. She was thinking about the children. The only way she could protect them was by getting eaten first. There was still a remote chance her companions would track her to the cave before the cannies got hungry again.

  “I did your packmates a favor when I blew them apart,” she taunted her captors. “It was mercy chilling. You ought to thank me for easing their way to hell. Dying from the oozies is triple hard, as you boys are finding out. First come the uncontrollable hand tremors, then you start shitting yourselves. You can’t digest human flesh anymore, but you can’t eat anything else. You eat more and more but still you slowly starve, until you’re too weak to fight off the blades of your own blood brothers.”

  “We’ve been final stage for over a year,” Rebar Head bragged. “Still hunting strong. Took our medicine…”

  In Deathlands, white-coated doctors and scientists had been replaced by raggedy charlatans riding from ville to ville in donkey carts, dispensing homemade potions and elixirs in recycled plastic pop bottles. They were miles away by the time their customers started dropping dead from the “medicine.”

  “There’s no drug for what you’ve got,” Mildred said. “It’s turning your brains to pus. That’s what’s dripping onto your boots.”

  “You don’t know shit about shit, Lamb Chop,” Alpha said, his carrion breath gusting in her face.

  “Let’s eat the bitch first,” the bald one snarled. “Pay her back for chillin’ half our crew. The kids’ll keep.”

  “Gotta much better idea,” Alpha said. He pulled a long knife from a sheath hidden in the top of his lace-up boot. It was a predark Ka-Bar combat knife with a black Kraton handle. Alpha knelt beside the first cannie Mildred had shot. He lifted the dead man by the armpits, holding the torso propped upright. Using the knife’s bluesteel pommel, he pulped the residue of brains left in the cratered skull. Mortar and pestle. When he was satisfied with the result, he tipped the man’s head, slopping the lumpy mess into a tin plate.

  “Old Tom, here, is gonna have his revenge,” he said, shoving aside the corpse. “Open her mouth.”

  Mildred went rigid against the pole. She clenched her teeth with all her might.

  Twenty filthy fingernails couldn’t pry her jaws apart, four hands couldn’t hold her head still.

  Alpha broke the stalemate, sucker-punching her in the stomach. The others exploited her moment of weakness. Baldy pulled down her bottom jaw, Rebar Head forced a thick stick crossways, between her back molars.

  Mildred couldn’t snap the stick and close her mouth. She couldn’t dislodge it by shaking her head. She flexed her throat muscles, shutting her gullet, her eyes wide with panic.

  Then came the metallic taste of the plate on her tongue, followed by warm goo flooding her mouth. Before she could cough out the pureed brains, hard fingers pinched off her nostrils and a callused palm covered her mouth.

  Mildred’s stomach heaved violently, but she couldn’t expel a single drop. The resulting explosion of pressure only drove it up into her sinuses.

  “How do you like it?” Alpha inquired, pinning the back of her head to the pole and holding it there.

  The taste of death was shrill, feral, fecal. The stench in her nose burned like battery acid.

  With the hands shutting off her air, it was either swallow or suffocate.

  She wanted to suffocate, but the choice wasn’t hers to make. Her nervous system’s hardwiring wouldn’t allow it. Just before she passed out, she swallowed.

  When Alpha released her, she gasped a breath, then projectile vomited across the cave floor.

  The cannies brayed at her dry heaving, and her frantic coughing and spitting. “You been dosed good,” Baldy said.

  “You’ll be hungry for long pig in no time,” Alpha added, wiping his leaking nose on the back of his hand.

  “The oozies might chill me, but it won’t make me a rad-blasted cannie,” Mildred said defiantly.

  “You think cannies are born that way?”

  The monsters laughed some more.

  “Which came first, the cannie or the oozies?” Alpha asked her. “Guess you’re gonna find out.” Then he glanced over at the children, his good eye narrowed to a slit. “Throw some more wood on that fire,” he told his packmates. “Let’s get something cooking. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m fuckin’ starvin’.”

  Chapter Two

  Ryan Cawdor followed in Jak Lauren’
s footsteps, trying hard to keep up, his SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster in hand. Behind Ryan in a tight single file was the remainder of the companions. Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s red-haired, emerald-eyed lover, was wrapped in a long, shaggy black coat, and carried a Model 640 .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. John Barrymore Dix, Ryan’s comrade since the days of riding with Trader’s convoy, had his trademark fedora screwed down on his head; his military-style, M-4000 shotgun swung on a shoulder sling. Theophilus Algernon “Doc” Tanner, Oxford scholar circa 1881 and reluctant time traveler, brought up the rear in his tattered frock coat and cracked riding boots. In one fist he held a massive Civil War relic black-powder handblaster; in the other an ebony walking stick that concealed a rapier blade.

  One of their number was missing.

  They wouldn’t rest until they recovered her.

  Krysty had watched Mildred vanish into the night, chasing a pair of cannies who carried off two young children each. Pinned belly-down by withering blasterfire, the tall redhead couldn’t go to her friend’s aid, and in the deafening clatter of the exchange couldn’t summon the others to help. It wasn’t until almost half an hour later, until after the attack had been beaten back and the cannies driven out of the ville’s berm, that Ryan and the companions had regrouped and begun the pursuit.

  They had covered less than a hundred yards when Jak called a halt to the advance. Kneeling, he holstered his .357 Magnum Colt Python and carefully examined the narrow strip of churned-up ground.

  “Cannies dropped kids,” the albino announced.

  “No bodies here,” Ryan said as he looked around. “They must have been alive. Looks like they got away.”

  Jak walked on a few more yards. “Cannie tracks both heavy on one leg,” he said.

  “They’re still carrying a kid each,” Krysty said. “I saw them take four from the ville.”

  “I wonder why our Mildred did not stop to round up the escapees?” Doc asked.

  “They probably hit the ground running,” Ryan answered. “Even if she saw them she couldn’t catch them in the dark.”

  “That way,” Jak said, pointing due east.

  The companions resumed the chase. They moved triple fast and triple quiet. There was only the soft hiss of their bootheels on sand as Jak led them across the valley, toward the dark screen of mountains.

  As Ryan ran, he thought about the ville they had just left, and the dozens of bodies strewed in its rutted dirt lanes. How many of its folk had died fighting? How many had been carried off to meet a worse fate than a bullet? How many women and children had either been suffocated by smoke or burned alive in their underground hiding holes? The exact cost of victory was impossible to count until after daybreak, which was still hours away. The shambling shacks could be rebuilt, of course. The stacked logs and heaped earth of the defensive berm could be repaired, and its design much improved. But Ryan knew it would take years to restore the human population to its former size.

  All the while with flesheaters hammering at the gates.

  Taking the battle to the cannies, finding their dens and chilling them one by one, was the only way to tip the balance. It was a daunting task, given the mountainous terrain and their apparent numbers. Even before the attack there hadn’t been enough ville folk to handle the job. Unlike Deathlands numerous mutated species, cannies were still essentially human beings. Humans gone psycho-renegade. They fought with blades and blasters instead of teeth and claws. This night they had been particularly well-armed with semiauto and full-auto centerfire weapons. Several of them weren’t remades.

  Over the years, after numerous skirmishes, Ryan had cannies pegged as cunning, cowardly adversaries. Their normal strategy was hit and git, like true pack-hunting predators. Cannies worked a vulnerable territory until it could no longer support them or until they were chilled or driven out.

  Because they looked human, cannies sometimes infiltrated villes and mingled with norms, then struck without warning. Children and the dimwitted simply disappeared overnight. Cannies were blood traitors to their own species, universally despised and feared. The happy downside to the cannie lifestyle was the oozies, a horrible, wasting disease that ultimately claimed them, one and all. It was widely assumed that they got it from eating the infected brains of their own packmates.

  No one knew their exact origins. From the time-honored campfire tales, it appeared cannies had been around since skydark, when nuke winter had forced the surviving humans to make awful choices about protein sources. Although the companions had come across isolated small bands that roamed Deathlands interior, Ryan had never seen or heard of cannies unleashing a coordinated, mass attack on a bermed ville. Their organization had always stopped at the pack level, the primary hunting group.

  The hellscape was full of mysteries. Explanations, when they came, were usually incomplete.

  Jak somehow picked out Mildred’s trail in the weak light, leading the companions across the high desert valley on a near dead run. How the albino managed the feat was a puzzle to Ryan, especially after Mildred had explained her twentieth-century understanding of albinism to him. Before the Apocalypse it had been a well-documented genetic disorder, caused by a random mutation that stopped production of a chemical vital to normal development of skin pigmentation, eyes and brain. According to Mildred, predark albinos always had poor vision, were susceptible to sunburn and had blue-gray or brown eyes. Jak had exceptional eyesight. He never sunburned. And his eyes were ruby-red. The youth vehemently insisted that he wasn’t a mutie—those with mutie blood were Deathlands untouchables, often chilled on sight—but the evidence said otherwise. Whether he was seeing the bootprints in the sand, or smelling out the track, or using some other extra-norm sense that had no name, Jak was bird-dogging. The pace he set was grueling, but no one complained, and no one asked for a rest.

  Ahead, the impenetrable black of the mountain crags loomed larger, the landscape tilted underfoot, and the companions began to climb the gradual incline of the valley side. As the physical effort increased, body heat built up. Sweat peeled from Ryan’s hairline, down his forehead, burning into his good eye. The other socket was an empty hole, covered by a black leather patch. A livid scar divided that eyebrow and split his cheek, a secondary wound from the knife slash that had half blinded him. Ryan ignored the growing ache in his thighs, pushing the pain aside as though it belonged to someone else.

  Mildred Wyeth was more than a treasured friend, more than a trusted comrade in arms; she was a resource the companions couldn’t afford to lose. Mildred had been a physician; she understood the workings of predark science and technology. She had come from a time not only with different knowledge, but very different values.

  Would any of the other companions have taken off on their own to rescue the children?

  Mebbe.

  Mebbe not.

  When the five reached the base of the mountains, they paused for breath, faces upturned, searching the black vastness above.

  “Where’d she go?” J.B. said softly.

  Jak tugged on Ryan’s sleeve.

  “There,” the albino teen said. “Cave mouth.”

  Above them, weak firelight flared against bedrock, then it was gone. They all saw it.

  “How can you be positive that’s where Dr. Wyeth has gone?” Doc asked.

  “Can’t,” Jak said.

  “That fire didn’t start itself,” Krysty said. “Got to be cannies hiding inside. Nobody else would be out in the bush around here.”

  “Nobody in their right mind,” J.B. added.

  “We need to have a look-see,” Ryan told the others. “Spread out, take it slow, make sure of your footing. We don’t want any rockslides on the approach.”

  The companions climbed the mountain flank, closing in on the cave entrance with blasters raised, safeties off. They saw no movement and met no resistance. The cannies weren’t expecting company. Probably because they considered themselves well-hidden and figured no one would try to hunt them down before dawn.

  As
Ryan neared the cave mouth, he smelled wood smoke, charring meat and burning hair. His stomach twisted into a knot.

  Not Mildred, he thought. For nuke’s sake, not Mildred…

  He ducked under the low arch, entering the outer chamber, where the trapped smoke and stench hung like an evil fog.

  When all companions were inside the arch, he led them through the smoke, toward the source of the flickering yellow light. Around the cave’s bend, they spread out on either side of the blanket that served as a door, weapons aimed, fingers resting lightly on triggers.

  Holding the SIG-Sauer braced against his hip, Ryan leaned forward and peered through a rip in the fabric. He saw two men, one bald and the other with a badly scarred face, crouched on the far side of a roaring fire. There had to be a vent in the ceiling, he thought, a fissure in the rock drawing most of the smoke up and out. The cannies were eating with their bare hands, pulling greasy strips of charcoaled meat off the shoulders of a human corpse. They had removed the dead man’s clothing but hadn’t bothered to cut up his body. They had simply shoved it into the fire like an oversize log, burning it at one end, flame-roasting the head and upper torso.

  A third cannie stood with his back turned to the entrance, urinating torrentially against the cave wall. When Ryan saw Mildred tied to the post, the weight on his shoulders lifted. She was still alive. The children were huddled in a corner. Still alive, too.

  Ryan turned to the companions and held up three fingers. Three targets.

  “Mildred?” J.B. whispered.

  The one-eyed man gave the thumbs-up.

  At his signal, Krysty ripped down the tattered blanket. Ryan and J.B. burst into the death chamber, shoulder to shoulder.

  Before the bald cannie could stand, J.B. blasted him full in the face with a load of double-aught buckshot. The cannie jerked violently backward, a plume of skull and brains flying; J.B. cycled the M-4000’s action and fired again. The scar-faced cannie was already moving sideways, lunging for a nearby weapon. J.B.’s buckshot missed its intended target by a foot. Instead of taking off his head, the blast slammed the cannie in the left shoulder, bowling him over as a cloud of dirt and rock dust rained from the ceiling. The creature landed hard and stayed down.