Cannibal Moon

by James Axler

  It was a celebration.

  A lovefest.

  Boom-boom-chank!

  Under the circumstances, the predark anthem’s threatening lyrics would have been overkill.

  Mildred was already rocked.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ten wagloads of cannie victims either shuffled under their own power or were dragged by their dead heels onto the waiting barge. With all the prisoners and bodies and the attending cannies, things were chaotic at the water’s edge, which made it easy for the Cajuns and companions to slip on board. There was no longer a reason for any of them to play dead. No reason for the cannies to think they were anything but their own dear brethren.

  Cannies not in terminal-stage oozies looked exactly like norms. It was a natural camouflage that allowed them to slip into villes unnoticed and do their worst. The hellscape was crawling with filthy, mean and ruthless sons of bitches. For norms to accurately pick cannies out of a crowd they had to see the bastards in action, taking an unholy delight in the chilling, and of course in the eating that came afterward. The difference between norm and cannie was internal, not external. It was behavior.

  In this case, the requisite cannie-mimicking wasn’t the chilling of the innocent or feeding on human flesh, but in doing nothing to free the ranks of poor, doomed prisoners.

  Doing nothing under the circumstances was hard.

  Ryan stood next to the tightly packed, trussed human cargo. Men and women, but no children. Cannies ate the children first. The captives were battered, bruised, bitten. Their clothing hung in shreds. The prisoners either looked at their own bound feet or stared off into the black distance. They wouldn’t meet a cannie’s gaze for fear of being chilled on the spot. They understood they were caught in the grip of pure evil.

  Ryan couldn’t look at the poor folk without thinking about Jak and Mildred. About what they might be suffering, or if they were already beyond suffering. It was possible that even in the unlikely event that he and the Cajuns won the battle, his two friends would never be found. Not if they were already dead and their stripped bones were tossed on a pile to bleach in the sun. But he would face that when it came to pass.

  There was another possibility, of course. One that was even worse. It was possible that Mildred had succumbed to the oozies, that the good doctor had turned cannie.

  Ryan pushed the thought out of his head. Again, he would face that when and if the time came. There were other, more pressing priorities. He had been in the belly of the beast hundreds of times before, places where death loomed on all sides, where survival was measured in split seconds. But he had never encountered anything quite like this. He had never seen organized chilling on this large a scale, like a vast meat grinder into which the population of Deathlands was being slowly poured. That the manifest evil was the product of a disease couldn’t excuse it, and it didn’t buy those infected a free pass. The disease had to be stamped out. Its victims had to be stamped out, too.

  It appeared that the easy part was going to be getting in. All around him, Cajuns with loaded assault rifles sat on heavy packs crammed full of ammo and explosives. No one in charge bothered to check them or the contents of their luggage. Finding out what they had under their butts wouldn’t have produced an alarm, anyway. Cannies carried blasters, ammo and explosives all the time. It was how they made their daily bread.

  “Where’s your meat?” said a raspy voice behind him.

  Ryan turned to face a big, rawboned woman. She wore her coarse, white-streaked hair in a braid as thick as a mooring line. Her chisel-edged front teeth were the color of sulfur, she had a bulbous nose and there was a spray of whiskers on her chin. She wore her blaster—a 20-gauge Ithaca Stakeout pump gun—on a lanyard around her neck. The muzzle dangled between her trouser-clad legs, suggestive of another distinctive male feature. The front of her duster was decorated with black blotches of dried blood.

  “In a pile at the other end of the barge,” Ryan said.

  “Got any near-goners in your pack?”

  “No, nobody’s that bad off.”

  “You’re lucky. Three of mine are laying over there, half dead. Haven’t taken the cure yet.”

  Ryan glanced over at the sick cannies. They were sitting on the deck with their backs leaning against the low gunwhale, barely able to hold up their heads. Gray spindles of mucous connected their noses to their chins and their chins to their chests.

  “Not a pretty sight,” the woman said. “They’re too weak to hunt. Have to hand-feed ’em. Go on, Luther, give ’em some more…”

  The cannie standing next to the terminal cases reached into a parts bag and pulled out a handful of something slimy and tubular. He pressed down on a gray-smeared chin to open the mouth and packed in the goodies.

  Gobble gobble.

  “Used to be we’d chill ’em when they got like that,” the woman said. “We’d crack their heads and eat the brains for pudding.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan agreed.

  The fully loaded barge backed away from the dock, then reversed course and headed for the firelights on the horizon.

  “Know why?” the cannie asked.

  “Sure. They were checking out, anyway. Might as well put the meat to good use.”

  “Nah. We’d do it even when we weren’t hungry, even when we had some fresh chilled hanging close by. We did it because looking at them poor, weak, sick fucks we was seeing ourselves, how we’d end up, and we was scared shitless. And purely hating every minute of it. We was like a dog biting off its own tail out of pure cussedness. La Golondrina changed all that. She freed us from the Gray Death. She pulled us together and made us a people. Made us a cannie nation.” The cannie hag’s eyes suddenly got all misty. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. “La Golondrina is our life,” she said. “Our hope.”

  It confirmed one of Ryan’s long-standing beliefs: one person’s hope was somebody else’s hell on wheels.

  “None of my crew has taken the cure,” Ryan told her, “but we’re all about to. We never been here before. Come a long ways to get the job done.”

  “She’ll do more than stop your nose from dripping, One Eye,” the woman said. “She’ll get inside you and wind up your spring, I guarantee it. The sound of her voice is something you will never forget as long as you live. It thrills the soul. It makes you want to march to her call.”

  “She’s the one who planned all this, right?” Ryan said. “Took some doing. Some brains. Does she ever hunt the road?”

  “Not anymore,” the woman said. “She don’t come out during the day much. I’ve never seen her up close, myself. She stays on the bridge of her ship. It’s like a tower. When the medicine’s ready, it’s brought down to the deck and passed around to the pilgrims.”

  “You ever been up in that tower?”

  “Nobody’s allowed up there except her special guards. The same ones she took up with when she first got here. Her original pack. Angels of Death, she calls them. They aren’t folks to mess with. Got no sense of humor, believe me. They carry these big old swords with curved blades. Razor-sharp from tip to basket.”

  “Cutlasses?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. One swipe and your head’s off clean, or split in two, crown to chin, still sitting on your neck.”

  “Thanks, I’ll keep a lookout for them.”

  Ryan heard the steady rumble from across the water. “What is that noise?” he asked.

  “It’s cannies drumming. La Golondrina likes it when we swarm the deck of her ship and drum in her honor. That ship is the only shelter on the island. It’s where we all stay during the pilgrimage. We store the live and dead meat inside the cargo holds. Dead meat stays fresh about a week after gutting and bleeding.”

  “Ship don’t float, from what I hear.”

  “Ain’t going anywhere, that’s for sure. It’s sitting on mostly dry land. Except for the bottom, which is buckled some, the ship came through the skydark in good shape. It’s rusting in places because we got no paint, but the hull’s so thick i
t’d take another hundred years to wear through. There’s plenty of fuel oil left in its bunkers. And gasoline, too. It was part of the predark cargo. We use it to fuel the convoys.”

  Ryan was suddenly all too aware of the doomed ones standing behind him, heads down, eyes closed, listening as the hag merrily jabbered away. He could imagine how sick at heart they were, knowing she would be jabbering on tomorrow and they and those they loved would be humble pie.

  The cannie with the parts bag wandered over to them.

  “You want some?” the stumpy bastard said, holding up a handful of wet, gray intestine.

  Ryan didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink his good eye. “No, thanks,” he said. “I just ate. Gotta go check on my crew.”

  “See you later,” the woman said.

  “Count on it.”

  Krysty, J.B. and Sprue were up in the barge’s bow, bent over, tinkering with their gear and trying their best not to pay attention to what was going on behind them. Doc was clearly having trouble ignoring the situation. Head lowered, he paced up and down the length of the starboard side deck in long, impatient strides. As he did so, he kept shifting his ebony sword stick from one hand to the other. Ryan could read the body language and the facial expression as Doc took in the lounging, carefree cannies. He wanted to draw his rapier blade and do some well-placed stabbing.

  Ryan stopped the time traveler with a hand and pulled him aside.

  “You’ve got to get a hold of yourself, Doc,” he said, leaning close, “or you’re going to get us all chilled.”

  “We are crossing the River Styx,” Doc rasped back at him, his eyes alight with fury, and perhaps even a touch of madness. “On the far side, the gates of hell await.”

  “Doc, you’re—”

  “Listen to that drum beat,” Doc interrupted. “Do you know what it presages? Do you have any idea? Ryan, this goes beyond the pale of mere recreational savagery, of the diversionary barbarism to which we have become hardened. This horror is biblical in its scope. What we face is irrefutable evidence that Satan not only exists, that he walks our cursed earth in human form.”

  “You know I don’t believe in those predark tales, Doc,” Ryan said. “I can’t believe in something I can’t see. Look around, for nuke’s sake. This is exactly what people do to each other. What they have always done to each other.”

  “Not so, my boy.”

  “Any evil that humankind can imagine will come to pass,” Ryan said with conviction. “The slaughter of defenseless millions. The flameout of two thousand years of civilization. The destruction of the planet. All products of the hand of man. No devil required.”

  “In that case I am afraid we are utterly lost. There is no hope of victory or salvation. If this evil resides inside us all, we can never escape it. That you could think such a thing sorely grieves me, my dear friend.”

  “In your time and in Mildred’s,” Ryan told him, “people still believed that something could stand between them and their black deeds. A buffer. An explanation. A robed ritual. A way to lift the weight of their guilt for actions or inactions. An illusion to give them comfort so they could keep on doing what they were doing in good conscience. This is my time, Doc, and I don’t need that kind of comfort. I bear no guilt for the blood I’ve shed in the past and the blood I’ll shed tonight. I have the right to survive because I breathe.”

  He patted the butt of his holstered SIG. “My only salvation lies here.”

  “Then tell me,” Doc countered, “why are we crossing this water to do battle if in the end the entire enterprise is pointless, if humanity is already doomed by its own corrupt nature?”

  “You know the answer to that. Because our friends have a right to survive, too.”

  At that, Doc seemed to gather himself. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Mildred and Jak. Mildred and Jak. We must recover them.” He was silent for a moment, then said, “Ryan, daily I am reminded that I have lived far too long for my own good, that what I am being forced to witness and take part in is something I was never meant to see, let alone comprehend.”

  “Accept it, and move on. It’s the hand you have been dealt. You can’t change it.”

  “Yes, yes, that is the only way to proceed.”

  Krysty stepped up beside Ryan as Doc drifted slowly away, apparently lost in sober reflection.

  “Is he going to be all right?” she asked with concern.

  “I don’t know. It might not matter.”

  Before she could ask for more details, Cheetah Luis joined them. “Stay together after we land,” he said. “Let the captives go ahead of us.”

  “What’s the terrain going to be like?” Cawdor said.

  “It’s as flat as the bottom of a washtub. Mostly salt marsh. Soft muck covered with seagrass. You don’t want to step off the path, take my word for it. We lost some brave fighters that way.”

  Ahead, bonfires framed the entrance to the landing cove.

  When the bow of the barge crunched up against the bank, the cannie crew jumped out and made the bowlines fast, tying them to clustered wooden posts driven deep into the sand. Standing on the deck, Ryan could see over the level of the beach. He stared at a featureless plain dotted by towering blazes. In the distance far to the south, a string of orange points of light winked at him. Elevated points of light, defining a vague hulking shape.

  The queen’s freighter.

  “Why didn’t they put us ashore over there?” he asked the Cajun.

  “There’s no place to land a boat on the southeast tip of the island,” Cheetah Luis said. “If they tried, they’d run aground a mile or two offshore, have to wade in from there, and deal with all the gators and sharks. That’s why we walk.”

  In groups of three and four, the prisoners were shoved off the bow and onto the sand. Some tripped and fell when they hit, knocking others down. Cannies with machetes moved through their ranks, chopping through their ankle restraints.

  Under any other circumstances, that would have been a positive development.

  The cannies put tow ropes in the prisoners’ hands and forced them at blasterpoint to drag corpses up the sand to the path. They weren’t concerned about the captives running away. They wanted them to be able to take longer steps, thereby hauling the bodies faster.

  When Ryan and the others mounted the path at the end of the line, they glimpsed a grim, sodden landscape. A marsh pocked with pools of water, fingers of it crept trickling downhill into the sea. There was not only nowhere to run, there was nowhere to hide.

  “Gators out there in the marsh,” Cheetah Luis told them. “That’s where the real monsters come to breed. The thirty-footers. They don’t like it one bit when you come near their nests. And there’s quicksand and plenty of poison snakes, too. During the day the biting bugs come down on your head like a sack and suck you dry.”

  “Why didn’t La Golondrina move off this stinking pile of shit after she got control of part of the mainland?” Sprue said.

  “Who knows what she’s thinking or planning?” the Cajun said. “I’ll tell you one thing—it’s a rad-blasted place to attack. We learned that the hard way. Have to come by water. It’s the only route. Have to carry everything you need on your back, and when you run out, you’re shit out of luck. There’s no cover to fight behind on the way in. And she’s got that steel ship to pull back and hide in. No reason for the bitch to budge an inch.”

  “Mebbe she’s waiting until cannies control the whole hellscape to make her move,” Krysty suggested. “Then she can sail across the Gulf on that barge and step ashore the queen of Deathlands.”

  A cannie nation, Ryan thought, but didn’t say. He didn’t have to. They were all thinking the same thing.

  “Sooner or later there won’t be any more humans left,” Sprue said, putting the shared thought into words. “What are the stinking bastards going to eat when that happens?”

  “Mebbe they’re not thinking that far ahead,” J.B. said.

  “Mebbe they are,” Ryan said. “And we just
don’t know what they’ve got in mind.”

  “Mebbe then they’ll start eating each other,” the convoy master said. “That’d be sweet. Too bad none of us will be around to see it.”

  “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed from the rear of the file. “What is that awful, polluted stench? It made my eyes water on the voyage over, but it is a thousand times worse on this blasted island. I can hardly breathe for the stink of it.”

  “Cannies got the coals from their slow fires banked up and burning night and day,” the Cajun told him. “They’ve converted most of the ship’s steel cargo containers into giant smokehouses for processing their meat for travel. It’s a long way between villes when they’re on the hunt, sometimes they get their butts kicked by the norms and come up empty on body count. The bastards are fussy about their vittles. Only thing they’re fussy about. They won’t eat anything but people.”

  “An army moves on its stomach, even a cannibal army,” Doc said in disgust.

  “Do you think the prisoners will help us fight?” Ryan said. “There seems to be lots more of them than cannies.”

  “They look in real bad shape to me,” Krysty said. “Beaten down physically and mentally. They know they’re gonna die hard. Mebbe they don’t have the strength left to be of any use to us. Especially after dragging those corpses across the island.”

  “If we can get their hands loose, they’ll fight, all right,” Cheetah Luis said with confidence. “They’ll fight with everything they’ve got. They know it’s their last chance.”

  “Will that be enough?” Sprue said.

  “If we’re triple lucky,” the Cajun replied.

  “We might well win the battle,” Ryan said, “but if we don’t get our hands on La Golondrina, we can’t win the war. We’ve got to find her, chill her, burn the body and scatter the ashes. Make sure there’s not a single drop of her blood left to make more cure.”

  Chapter Twenty

  To the jarring beat of steel hammering steel, Mildred and Jak hauled their corpse up the ship’s earthen ramp. When they reached the canted main deck, the cannie overseers made them deposit the body beside the others that were already lined up like trophies of the hunt. They let go of the tow rope and, following a cannie’s impatient gesture, joined their fellow captives near the gangway in the starboard rail.