Cannibal Moon

by James Axler

  A few of the vest-clad workers managed to break loose and run for the back of the room. There was no way out, of course. Their panicked screams for help were muffled by the insistent pounding from above. The Cajuns trapped the escapees in a corner, caught them and dragged them over to a row of double sinks full of bloody water. Pinning their arms behind their backs, the fighters forced their heads under the surface and held them there until they stopping kicking.

  Cheetah Luis then moved through his fighters, some of whom were already weeping, roughly shoving them toward the swing doors. “Go on, get out! Get out!”

  This wasn’t the time for mourning the dead.

  At the aft end of C Deck they located the fuel oil bunker. From the indicator gauges, it looked like ten thousand gallons remained in the double-walled tanks.

  “Fuel oil is nowhere near as flammable as gas,” Ryan said. “But under the right conditions of high temperature and pressure…ka-boom.”

  At Cheetah Luis’s command his fighters delved into their packs for some of the pipe bombs they had brought along. He showed them where he wanted them positioned, near the ceiling, their six-inch-long fuses pointing up. They used strips of duct tape to secure the bombs in place.

  “What do you think?” the Cajun asked Ryan.

  “I think we’d better be a hell of a long way off when this shit hits the fan.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mildred pulled Jak away from the captive Cajuns. “I’m the only one who can get out of here,” she told him. “All I have to do is yell up to Junior that I’m ready to give in.”

  “You give in?”

  “No, but he won’t find that out until it’s too late.”

  “What you do alone?”

  “More than I can do down here. Maybe I can get close enough to the queen to take her out. Maybe I can find a way to open that door and let the prisoners loose.”

  Like most native-born Deathlanders, the albino was a pragmatist and a fatalist. If he had warm and fuzzy feelings about anyone or anything, he kept them well hidden behind a stoic exterior. “Luck,” was all he said, but he meant it.

  Mildred stood directly under the open hatch, looked up and yelled for Junior as loud as she could. It wasn’t strictly speaking a howl, but it worked. After a minute, the scar-faced bastard peered down at her.

  “You got something to say to me?” he hollered through cupped hands.

  “I’m ready for some dinner,” she shouted back.

  Tibideau gestured to someone on the main deck. As the net came down, Mildred felt a wave of relief course over her. She hadn’t told Jak the whole truth. She hadn’t dared speak her fears out loud. Mildred had another reason for wanting out of the hold. What Junior had predicted was coming to pass. There was a terrible pounding in her head and a building tension at her core. Her body throbbed, crying out for action, release from the pressure that gripped it. She wasn’t hungry for flesh. She knew that. The aching need inside her hadn’t solidified into compulsion. Not yet, anyway. That was the last turn of the oozie screw. If she waited for it to come, Jak Lauren wasn’t safe from her, nor were any of the other innocent people in the hold.

  Mildred stepped onto the net and rode up and out of the pit.

  Up on the main deck, Junior had a charred joint waiting for her. “Chow down,” he said as he waved it under her nose. “This is a choice cut. You’re going to love it.”

  “I want to see La Golondrina first,” she told him.

  “Yeah, sure,” Junior said.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Everybody who comes on this ship wants an audience with her. Nobody gets one. Understand?”

  “Listen, Junior,” Mildred said, “I’m a freezie, just like her. I need to talk to La Golondrina.”

  Junior was immediately skeptical. “Don’t look like a fucking freezie to me,” he said.

  “How many freezies have you seen?”

  “Just the one…” He gestured up at the tower with his thumb.

  “Congratulations,” Mildred said, “now you’ve seen two.”

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

  “You don’t. But she will.”

  “Why should La Golondrina care if you’re a freezie?”

  “Because I was a research whitecoat before the nukecaust. With what’s in my head, I can help her, big-time. I can turn the cannie groundswell into a tidal wave.”

  Tibideau scowled, weighing the personal cost-benefit.

  “It’ll be a feather in your cap, too,” she assured him. “La Golondrina is going to be mighty happy you had the smarts to introduce us. I’m talking a major reward, maybe even a command of your own.” She paused, then added, “Or if you’re too scared to help me out, I can ask one of these other fine flesheaters for a hand…”

  “All right, all right. I’ll give it a try,” he said, relenting. “You’re probably not going to get past the Angels, anyway.”

  Mildred followed him down the deck to the bridge tower. As they got closer, she could see two huge, bare-chested men guarding the entrance at its base. She recalled what Junior had told her, that the Angels of Death were part of La Golondrina’s original hunting pack. The first partakers of the cure. What passed for cannie royalty.

  So as not to be mistaken for lesser beings, this pair of bruisers sported some unique skin art. Life-size human skulls had been branded into the middle of their chests. Ropy, red scar tissue made the elaborate designs stick out from their flesh. They looked as if they had been sculpted from blood. More angry branding scars licked like flames over their thick wrists and forearms. Their full beards and long hair had been woven into tight pigtail braids and tied at the ends with leather traces.

  There was no sign of wings on these Angels. All that sprouted from the tops of their shoulders were tufts of coarse, dark hair.

  The cure was evidently still working, though. Not a gray drop leaked from either trauma-flattened nose.

  “What do you want?” said the guard looming on the right of the entryway.

  “Need to see La Golondrina,” Junior said.

  “You know better than that, Scarface,” the other Angel told him.

  Mildred could smell his cadaver breath from five feet away.

  “Back off or you’re gonna lose an arm,” the first one warned Tibideau. He unsheathed the cutlass at his belt and measured the distance for a strike. The long blade was nicked along its length, but the single, upcurving edge looked razor-sharp, with more than enough thickness and heft along the backbone to do the job right.

  “This one,” Junior said as he retreated a step. “She’s the one who wants to see La Golondrina. Go on, tell them…”

  Mildred explained the nature of her request to the Angels, that she was also a freezie, and that she had specialized knowledge their queen could use to advance the cannie cause.

  No dice.

  “She’s nothing but meat. Why are you bringing her here?” the Angel on the right said to Junior. “Live meat don’t go upstairs, that’s the rule.”

  “I infected her,” Tibideau protested. “She’s about to turn cannie any minute. I know it.”

  “Why don’t we just wait and see, then?” the other guard said.

  Mildred was slammed by a wave of desperation. If her symptoms were a measure of the time she had left, her window of opportunity was rapidly closing. “Okay, listen to me,” she told the guards, “if you take La Golondrina a message for me, and she doesn’t want to see me after she hears it, you can chill me.”

  “We can do that, anyway.”

  “La Golondrina doesn’t like being bothered.”

  “This is important to her,” Mildred said. “She’s going to be mighty angry when she finds out you screwed this up. Maybe she’ll withhold the cure next time you need it.”

  The Angels of Death looked at each other dubiously. Then the one on the right shrugged. “If she turns you down,” he said, “we’re not gonna let you die quick.”

  He turned on Ju
nior, leaning over the much smaller man. “You, neither.”

  Tibideau’s face fell. “I knew it,” he said to Mildred. “Damn you, I knew it.”

  “What’s the message?” the Angel on the left asked.

  “I’m a freezie whitecoat and I can stop her bleeding.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “If that’s all you got, you’d better kiss your ass goodbye,” the guard said, then he disappeared through the doorway.

  As Mildred stood waiting, she tried not to question the strategy she had chosen. In for a penny, in for a pound. The fastest way to soften up the cannies for Ryan and the Cajuns was to chill the woman who was their leader. Under the circumstances, it was the only effective action an army of one could take. If Mildred survived the attack, releasing the prisoners came next.

  When the Angel returned, his face and chest were covered with sweat and he was panting hard. He had run down the twelve flights of stairs.

  And not for the privilege of hacking them to bits.

  “Come on, both of you,” he said, “get a move on.” He gestured at the door.

  “Me, too?” Junior whined.

  The Angel grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him through the entrance.

  On the other side of the bulkhead door was a stairwell lit by torches. The rusting metal treads led up into the dark. Mildred guessed the bridge tower had to have had an elevator once. It was either no longer operational, or it was reserved for cannie royalty.

  With a torch-bearing Angel in front and one behind, she and Tibideau mounted the steps.

  A century ago, the ship’s stairwell had been enclosed from the weather by riveted steel plate. The Apocalypse, the tsunamis, nuke winter and chem rains had turned the exterior walls into a cheese grater. Some of the stair treads had corroded away from their mountings. The assent was much more precarious than Mildred had imagined.

  After they had climbed eight flights, they took a detour around a collapsed section of stairs above. The Angels led them down a gritty tower hallway. All the window glass was missing. Mildred looked out of the empty frames, down onto the tilted deck, at the cannies cavorting below. The ship’s tower was like a mountaintop pyramid or castle, a symbol of authority. Elevation and separation bred respect and awe in the weak-minded.

  They crossed the width of the bridge and entered the stairwell on the other side. Below the fourth floor, the steps had fallen away completely. They mounted four more rickety flights, coming out on the unrailed bridge roof. The single-story wheelhouse stood in its center, overlooking the vast main deck. Some of its long, narrow windows were intact. The structure was guarded by four more Angels, each wearing a cutlass in addition to slung, folding-stock AK 47s.

  As Mildred approached the wheelhouse, she could see through the windows. Inside, the control room was lit by torches and lamps. Cozy, but for the sweltering heat. Mildred’s chin dripped with sweat and her underarms felt like they had been buttered. Gauzy brown fabric hung down in billowing channels from the low ceiling, giving it a Bedouin caravan sort of atmosphere. There were no chairs or couches in evidence, just scattered plush cushions, replete with tassels and embroidery. Through one of the empty window frames, Mildred smelled sandalwood incense. Definitely a feminine choice, perhaps to cover the putrefying stench rising from the decks below.

  “Stand here,” one of their escorts said. He left them and ducked into the wheelhouse.

  Mildred took a look over the edge of the roof. Below, more bound captives were dragging more bodies up the ramp onto the main deck. The happy meals would soon be hauling them away.

  After a moment, the Angel called out to them from the side doorway. “Enter,” he said.

  Inside the wheelhouse it was a good fifteen degrees hotter. The air was smothering, like breathing steam. At the far end of the room, behind a ceiling-to-floor veil of drooping gauze, faintly side lit by rows of oil lamps, a figure reclined on a mound of cushions.

  “Step closer,” said a woman’s voice.

  Mildred and Junior obeyed. It was impossible to make out the speaker through the folds of brown muslin.

  As they neared the canopy, Angels stepped forward on either side. Their cutlasses drawn, they were ready to chop down the visitors if they made a hostile move for the queen.

  “You know I am La Golondrina,” the woman behind the curtain said. “Tell me who you are.”

  “I am Dr. Mildred Wyeth. I was cryopreserved in December of 1999. I emerged from freezie sleep a hundred years later.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Yes, in research biochemistry and medicine.”

  “A real live scientist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why should I believe you? You could have memorized a couple of big words to try to fool me.”

  “You shouldn’t believe me. You should make me prove who I am and what I can do.”

  “And pray tell what might that be?”

  “I can eliminate the need for you to open your veins,” Mildred said. “I can cure the oozies without your blood.”

  La Golondrina was silent. Behind the brown muslin, she didn’t move a muscle.

  “The endless donations of blood must be a terrible drain on your strength,” Mildred went on. “And on your psyche. It must make you a prisoner here, in your own kingdom.”

  “If you have something to offer me, let’s hear it.”

  “I can isolate the active agent in your blood, the antibodies that weaken and suppress the oozie virus,” Mildred told her. “I can synthesize quantities of concentrated pure antivirus through biochemical means. You would have plenty of medicine for your flock, and you would be free to leave this place.”

  “How are you going to do something like that without access to a research lab?”

  “The technology is relatively simple. I can easily scrounge up or jury-rig the hardware I need. The basic methodology is already here.” She tapped her right temple with a fingertip.

  La Golondrina suddenly reached up and swept aside the gauzy curtain.

  Mildred was jolted by the sight of her.

  Something had gone very wrong with La Golondrina’s cryopreservation, either in the initial freezing or the subsequent thawing.

  Parchment-white flaking skin was stretched over nearly fleshless bone. Her eyes were such a pale blue that they hardly had any color at all; her lips were so bloodless that they were nearly invisible; her skin hung down in thin, drooping folds from the backs of her arms and the line of her jaw; her hair was dyed a lusterless black, its white roots showing in the central part; her wrists were heavily bandaged, the bandages spotting with red. La Golondrina was a scrawny, blue-veined hag in a slinky, spaghetti-strapped black cocktail dress, three sizes too big for her.

  Her appearance couldn’t have been the result of blood-letting, no matter how frequent.

  It occurred to Mildred that when the cannie queen had gone into the liquid nitrogen tank she might have already been old. A geezer seeking a cure for aging, and the diseases thereof wasn’t unheard of in her day.

  “I do know what you are,” Mildred told her, “but not how you got that way.”

  When La Golondrina smiled, displaying black-rimmed, yellow stumps of teeth, Junior retreated three or four giant steps.

  “You think you deserve that information?”

  “I guess that’s up to you.”

  La Golondrina wetly smacked her pale lips. “It pleases me that you weren’t afraid to ask me a question,” she said. “Thousands would have shit themselves at the very idea. We who have come through cryo are different than the others. We are changed in many ways.”

  “That’s so.”

  “Would you believe me if I told you that I have no idea how I came to be infected? And that I only have a rough idea of when?”

  Mildred shrugged. “Without more of the details I really couldn’t say.”

  “As you can imagine, over the years I’ve given a lot of thought to the source of my infection, tr
ying to pinpoint why this happened to me. Before the nukecaust I was interrogated extensively by military intelligence. They asked me about my daily habits, and my personal and business contacts over and over again, sometimes using drugs to boost my recall. Nothing added up. I got the feeling from my watchers that they thought what I had wasn’t a naturally occurring disease, that it had been tailor-made in a laboratory. Perhaps by the Soviet Union. Or even by some covert arm of the U. S. government. Containment was what they talked about most, in front of me and behind my back. They were afraid that whatever it was had already gotten out into the population.”

  “You mean, a bioweapon?”

  “That’s what they thought.”

  “That would have been in violation of the Geneva Accords.”

  “But think of the payoff. A disease that makes your enemies chill and eat their own people.”

  “How did your symptoms appear?”

  “Out of the blue,” La Golondrina said. “One day I was fine, the next I was sick as a dog. The day after that I was on the hunt. Until I was caught, predark law enforcement thought I was a male serial killer on a murder rampage through the South.”

  After all the years that had passed, that idea still seemed to tickle her.

  “Before skydark there was no room for an oozie-infected person like me to come to full flower. You remember what it was like back then. A world cluttered with laws and lawmen. Even so, I couldn’t help myself. After a while I didn’t even try. Of course, I didn’t look like this, then. I was in my late twenties, a Baton Rouge housewife, and I was a babe. I drove around Louisiana in a big old white convertible with the top down, my tanned breasts popping out of my yellow checked sundress, and a big, welcoming smile on my face. I had no trouble getting what I wanted. Dumb, young and tender.”

  Mildred did the math in her head. La Golondrina was about thirty-one years old, measured in the time she’d spent outside a cryo tank. In other words, she had prematurely aged. As though she had been in an extreme high-altitude/low-oxygen environment for too long, in what predark mountain climbers had called the Death Zone. The top of Mount Everest. A place where every organ of the body slowly suffocated.