Cannibal Moon

by James Axler

  With a roar the meat wag engines started up. A dozen headlights blasted deep into the night.

  Apparently the cannies weren’t going to wait around for the cave crew to join them. Not in this neighborhood. If the companions were coming to rescue them, they were too late, Mildred thought. She and Jak were on their own, to the bitter end.

  The cattle wag lurched forward onto the road. The bodies crammed inside swayed into one another. With hands tied behind them, the prisoners couldn’t avoid the contact. The steady vibration of the wheels on pavement rattled up through the metal floor and walls.

  The glare of headlights from behind poured through the trailer’s holes. The captive Cajuns had banded together, shoulder to shoulder, them against the world.

  Even though Jak stood beside Mildred, she couldn’t see his pupils. She didn’t know if he had suffered a serious head injury. The bleeding from his scalp had stopped, leaving a crusty scab in his snow-white scalp.

  “How’s your head?” she asked him.

  “Hurts some,” he said.

  “Seeing double? Feeling weak?”

  “Nope.”

  Mildred felt better upon hearing that. It meant he probably didn’t have a concussion.

  “They gonna pay,” the albino said flatly.

  Jak’s forehead was smooth. He wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t angry. He was determined. Many times Mildred had seen him dance the dance, slipping like a shadow between attacking adversaries, chilling with his leaf-bladed knives and that big Colt of his. She also knew Jak could get down to business with much less. A piece of sharp metal. A chunk of concrete. A length of power cord. If he had his hands free…

  Standing there, packed in like a sardine, with the breeze blocked by hot bodies, Mildred started feeling sick again. Hot. Jangly. Weak. Maybe even a little scared. She had to get her mind on something else.

  “Where are you from?” she asked the skinny young woman leaning against her right side.

  “Does it matter?”

  In the glare of headlights, Mildred saw matted hair, thick makeup and garish lipstick, mascara smeared into raccoon eyes. The woman wore a short skirt that barely covered her bottom and a flimsy blouse; her hightop black sneakers were laced with electrical wire. There were fresh and old bruises on her thighs and knees, and on her bare arms.

  “Cannies do that to you?”

  “No, paying customers riled up on jolt did that. Like to pound with their fists while they’re pounding you with the other thing. Working in a gaudy house is a shitty life.” Then to Mildred’s surprise and dismay, she giggled dementedly. “I made a funny.”

  “Yeah.”

  The slut tilted her head around Mildred to look at Jak. “He a mutie?” she asked. “How come he’s so white?”

  “Got hit hard in the head,” Mildred told her. “Made him go pale.”

  “Made his eyes all bloody like that, too?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can he still see?”

  “Sure.”

  “He’s not a stupe, is he?”

  The slut leaned toward Jak and bellowed in his face, “You’re not a stupe, are you?”

  “He understands what you’re saying. You don’t have to shout.”

  “Can talk, too,” Jak told her, smiling a crooked smile. Then his face went as blank as an empty page.

  “I come from Texas,” the slut said. “That’s where the cannies got me. Shot all hell out of the gaudy I was working in. Walked in the door and started blasting away. I was under a customer at the time, big old boy. He got hit in the back, died right on top of me. Cannies pulled him off and loaded him in a wag with the rest of the dead. Put me in this trailer.”

  “Everybody here come from Texas?” Mildred asked those around them.

  “We’re from Arkansas,” some folks answered.

  “Louisiana.”

  “Sippi.”

  “We been on the road for two weeks,” said a short man who was pressed against the trailer wall. “Rained on. Shit on. Pissed on. Starved.”

  Mildred looked up at the trailer roof. It, too, was ventilated.

  “Bastards pour the crap food they feed us through them holes,” the little man told her. “Make us fight for it like animals.”

  “Hard to fight with your hands tied,” Mildred said.

  “Hard to eat, too. Most of it falls through the floor.”

  Mildred gathered what information she could from the prisoners willing to talk. They were young and old, early teens to late seventies. Dirt farmers. Gaudy sluts and pimps. Swineherds. Sec men. Merchants. Scroungers. All caught up in the cannie net. All had doom in their eyes.

  “We only got one thing going in our favor,” said the old man from Arkansas.

  “What’s that?”

  “Damned cannies got to eat all the dead ’uns before they eat us. We won’t spoil, but the dead ’uns will.”

  Wedged in behind her was a fat merchant. Beside him was a little parakeet of a woman. Her stare was fixed, like a doll’s. “Michelle’s been like that ever since we got taken,” he told Mildred. The concentric rolls of his lower face shivered as he spoke; they had a greasy sheen. “She don’t eat. Don’t sleep. Just stares like that. She hardly ever blinks. I keep telling myself mebbe it’s all for the best. Mebbe she won’t feel it when they start to chill her. Then I get scared and think mebbe she’ll come out of it right when the pain starts.”

  The woman was textbook catatonic. Trauma and terror had caused her mind to crash in on itself. The prognosis was grim. To change the subject Mildred said, “What did you do in Sippi?”

  “We sold this and that from our shack in Poplar-ville. Scavenged predark items mostly. Farm tools, weapons, ammo, black powder. Also did a good trade in tobaccy and joy juice.” The fat man was talking fast, the words spilling out of his small, nearly lipless mouth. “Me and Michelle worked the shack inside Poplarville for ten years. Had lots of friends thereabouts. No complaints about my fairness. I’m not a hard dealer, too easy was what Michelle always said. But I figured life’s too short to do people harsh…”

  He shuddered, then said, “Not that it mattered in the end. Cannies came and took it all away. Rammed the gate with a 6x6 wag. Jumped out of the back and started chilling. They shot down the folks with blasters right away, then used their knives on anyone still fighting.

  “I seen firsthand what they done to my friends and neighbors after they were dead. Cut ’em like hogs around the neck and let the blood drain out. Strung ’em up by their feet and let it drip on the ground. Cannies aren’t like us. They aren’t human. They look at someone hurting, mebbe screaming, and it gives ’em joy. When they smell blood and guts, it don’t make ’em sick, it makes ’em hungry.”

  “Try to relax, breathe deep and slow,” Mildred told him. “You can’t help Michelle if you give yourself a heart attack.”

  She turned away. She couldn’t help him. She couldn’t help herself. Dust thrown up by the wags in front filtered through the trailer’s ventilated roof and walls in a steady stream. The constant vibration and the noise numbed the captives. Some of them actually slept on their feet, held up by the bodies around them.

  Mildred knew they were heading south, so when the convoy stopped at the foot of the bridge, she could guess what it spanned. The Intercoastal Waterway. A highway for boat traffic, commercial and recreational, before the Apocalypse. After a few minutes, the cattle wag pulled onto the ruined bridge and crossed the wide channel at a crawl. Because of the low speed, there was little dust to eat. The air smelled of salt and sea. The Gulf of Mexico was close at hand.

  They drove for another quarter of an hour, then stopped again. This time, with wag engines idling and headlights blazing, the rear doors of Mildred’s trailer opened and cannies climbed in, pulling, shoving, forcing their prisoners to hobble down the ramp.

  In headlights, Mildred could see the black water of the Gulf, the shoreline, and a makeshift dock. Tied to the dock was a motorized barge, the kind used to haul gravel or
sand. While the prisoners were lined up single file, one by one, the pickups backed up to the bow of the barge, then the cannies rolled the dead ’uns off tailgates onto the deck.

  Next to one of the pickups, Mildred saw Junior Tibideau. The scar-faced cannie was evidently back in his master’s good graces. He stood beside the cannie commander, grinning.

  When the dead were loaded, the living were marched down to the water and onto the boat. The troughlike foredeck was heaped with corpses. The captives were herded toward the tiny wheelhouse at the opposite end. They stood there, sweating.

  On the horizon, Mildred could sees the fires burning on Marsh Island. She had never been there, but she had read something about it in a magazine, some controversy about the drilling of a natural gas well on the edge of a state wildlife refuge. It wasn’t the kind of place tourists went. There were no hotels. No residences. It had no scenic charm unless you liked bugs, gators and snakes. It was just a lump of marshy land sticking up out of the Gulf.

  When the cargo was safely onboard, the cannies cast off the lines and the barge backed away from the dock. For a second, caustic diesel smoke billowed over the deck, then the barge turned and motored forward, heading for the distant firelights.

  The water was as smooth as a black mirror. The barge made good time. The wind rushing over the open deck cooled down the huddled captives. When they were about two miles off the island, Mildred heard the sound of drumming. Insistent. Repetitive. And she smelled something wafting from the shore.

  Wood smoke and roasting meat.

  The instant she was hit by that odor, stark, grainy images flooded her mind. Images of Auschwitz and Rwanda, her only frames of reference. But this was worse than the genocides of a century ago. Worse because the mass chilling wasn’t the end of it. The chilling was just the beginning of the evil. The smell engulfed the barge; there was no escape from it. When she breathed through her mouth, she could taste it in the back of her throat. To her horror, out of the blue, she began to salivate.

  Fight it, fight it, fight it, Mildred commanded herself, digging her nails into her palms until tears came to her eyes. She focused on the sharp pain until her head stopped spinning.

  The barge ducked into a cove on the island’s northeast corner, the entrance bracketed by bonfires. Dense plumes of smoke rose straight up into the still night air.

  The captives were ushered out onto the narrow beach. Above the sloping shelf of white sand the land was as flat as a tabletop. The drumming was louder and more distinct. Mildred could pick out the rhythmic pattern. Boom-boom-chank. Boom-boom-chank. It reminded her of a rock-song-turned-spectator-sport anthem that had been played countless times at every stadium in the United States. Only there was no singing or chanting now, just the drumming.

  After the bodies had been dumped on the sand, the cannies moved among the captives, using knives to cut through the ankle ropes that hobbled them. It wasn’t an act of kindness because there was nowhere to run. It was so they could tow the dead.

  Junior Tibideau put the loops of rope in Jak’s and Mildred’s hands. He seemed quite pleased with himself. “Giddy up!” he said, kicking the albino in the butt to urge him on.

  As they climbed the slope to the flatland, they didn’t look back at who they were dragging. They could see what the slut and the short man ahead of them pulled by the heels. A rubbery, human-shaped bag of bones.

  Atop the table of land, there wasn’t a single tree in sight. There was no cover above ground. She and Jak followed a dirt path polished slick by dredges of human skin and bone. In the leaping light of the fires, Mildred observed the terrain on either side of the track. It was irregular, potholed with standing water and probably quicksand. Drainage cuts brimming with brine crisscrossed the plain. And there were large ponds. In the daytime Marsh Island would be swarming with mosquitoes, deer flies and no-see-ums. It was the kind of place where alligators happily bred and grew fat. Mixed with the smell of meat cooking was the stench of rotting fish and rotting vegetation. Far ahead, Mildred could see dots of elevated light that marked a structure. The light was too dim to see the exact outlines, but given the distance, it had to be enormous.

  With their cannie minders following, the prisoners trudged on, over the winding path. It took a long time to get close enough to the structure to clearly make it out. Mildred figured they had walked about five miles towing a deadweight when she recognized the immense, hulking shape of a grounded oceangoing freighter. Torches burning along the rails and bonfires on the marsh below illuminated it.

  A jumble of steel cargo containers had spilled from its deck onto the marsh. They were the source of vile, sweetish aroma. The cannies had converted them into smoke houses. This was where the flesheaters cured their road food.

  About a hundred yards from the ship, the dirt path turned gleaming white. It looked like it was paved with alabaster cobblestones. Only when Mildred was actually standing on it did she realize she was walking on the tops of human skulls. Thousands upon thousands of them. Too many for this operation to have produced. They had to have been collected from the neutron-bombed coast, from the emptied, intact buildings.

  As the captives passed the cargo containers, Mildred looked inside one of the open doorways. Glistening red corpses hung on crosspoles by their heels, arms trussed behind their backs. The bodies had been shaved of all hair. The eyeballs were cooked white. A cannie standing in the doorway dipped a short-handled rag mop in a bucket of reddish liquid, then basted the corpses with it.

  Around and between the containers, other cannies danced to the beat of drummers aboard the freighter, whirling, staggering as if drunk. Their faces, hair and beards were shiny with grease, their eyes wild with delight. Piles of stripped clean rib and thigh bones lay scattered at their feet.

  “I’m scared,” the skinny slut moaned at top volume. “I don’t wanna end up like that.”

  “A little late to start worrying,” said the little man at her side. “You won’t know what they done to you after you’re gone.”

  “I can’t help but think about it,” the slut said. “About them touching me, and pulling my meat from the bones…”

  “Shut the hell up!” Mildred snarled.

  The slut looked back, sulky and hurt, but she stopped whining.

  Mildred had no more sympathy to give. A bonfire raged behind her eyes. Every time she breathed in, it felt like she was inhaling molten lava into her lungs. Her mind raced in looping, alarming circles of rationalization and depravity. She was losing her grip on every moral value she had ever claimed. She could feel herself dissolving into something unspeakable. That idea hammered inside the walls of her head. She couldn’t push it aside or throttle it. She couldn’t deny it.

  Mildred would have fallen on her knees and begged Jak to chill her then and there, but there was no way he could comply with his hands tied behind his back.

  She flung aside the tow rope, jumped from the trail and took off across the marsh. She could have run faster, but she wasn’t trying to get away. She was hoping to catch a mercy bullet in the back.

  The cannies did open fire, but only to send a couple of warning shots over her head. When she didn’t stop, they chased her down and tackled her, driving her into a shallow pond. They jerked her to her feet and while one bastard held her arms, the other started slapping her in the face. Using the cannie at her back for leverage, she kicked him in the stomach.

  As he crumpled, she spit on him.

  Reaching behind her back, she got her hands on the other cannie’s privates and squeezed as hard as she could. He let out a shrill yelp, then doubled over, gasping for air. When he straightened, she headbutted him a solid blow. By which time the first cannie had recovered. Grabbing her shoulder, he again flung her down into the pond. He put his boot sole on her chest, pinning her on her back.

  “That all you got, you big, brave baby-eaters?” she roared up at them, the water lapping in her ears. “You’re nothing but droolies, the lot of you. Brain-damaged pieces of shit
.”

  Suicide by proxy was what she was after.

  The cannies had no intention of giving it to her. Meat on the hoof was worth a lot more to them than meat on a rope. They hauled her up by her armpits, dragged her to the path and shoved her back in line next to Jak.

  “Dropped something,” Junior said. He picked up the end of the tow rope and put it in her hand.

  The beating had cleared Mildred’s head. There was a stinging cut inside her mouth; she tasted her own blood. She felt almost herself again. “I’m glad you didn’t try to help,” she told Jak.

  “Couldn’t,” the albino said. “Scar-face cannie had Python against head. You wanna die?”

  “Better to die than turn into one of them.”

  “Better chill some first. Pick time, place.”

  Mildred didn’t know how much time she had. That was the problem. At least Jak was offering hope, even if it was just for some token retribution. “Okay,” she said. “Chill some first.”

  The line of corpse haulers moved on, creeping toward the flank of the grounded freighter. Mildred speculated that the terrible tsunamis that followed the Apocalypse had lifted the great ship over the sandy strip of beach and deposited it, high and dry, on top of the marsh land, where it had sat for more than a hundred years. Its main deck and superstructure faced them, canted at about thirty degrees from vertical. The cannies, or more likely their prisoners, had constructed a crude ramp of hard-packed dirt that led from the ground to the freighter’s midship gangway.

  The drumming from the ship was so loud that Mildred could feel it in her bowels.

  On the edge of the bridge wing, lit by torches, she saw a female figure. She could make out long dark hair, white skin, black clothing. The woman was waving her slender arms at the dancing, weaving throng six stories below her.

  On the freighter’s main deck, cannies cavorted in long lines up and down the gunwhales. They beat in unison on the rails and hatches with pipes and rods. Boom-boom-chank! Boom-boom-chank!