Cannibal Moon

by James Axler

  “How did you get caught?” Mildred asked.

  “I guess you could say I got lazy. I hunted the same territory once too often. The FBI caught me in a dragnet with bloody clothes in my trunk. They didn’t know I was the chiller until after they put me in the parish’s holding cell with two other women. By then I was too long without food. The cops got it all on videotape.

  “As soon as psychological testing showed law enforcement and the state prosecutor that what I had was a disease and not a mental illness, they spirited me off to the Centers for Disease Control. After those folks studied me a bit, they realized what I had could be transmitted by blood and bodily fluids. Then I really fell off the end of the world. Level Four containment on an army base in Maryland. The military scientists there tried to evaluate my weaponization.”

  “Weaponize cannibalism?”

  “Back then I was an oozies-producing factory. Only they never called it that. They used initials. CJCD. Creutzfeld something something disease. I didn’t come down with terminal symptoms for another year. That’s when the whitecoats finally realized what they had stumbled on. If they could introduce the lethal virus to the opposing side of a battlefield, they could create self-terminating, indiscriminate engines of destruction out of enemy forces. The hypothesis that the disease had come from the Soviets sent them scrambling to find a vaccine. That never happened.

  “Rumors about what was going on leaked to the Net. The legitimate press followed up on the story. The scientists had to cover their tracks. That’s when they put me in cryostasis, in October 1999.”

  “How did they keep you alive before that?”

  “Finding food for me wasn’t hard. These were military black ops. They had unlimited, secret discretionary funding. They opened a funeral home in Baltimore. The remains meant for cremation came to me on a plate. The grieving families got kitty litter.”

  “How did you get out of cryo?”

  “An accident. A computer malfunction shut down the facility after a century of operation. I didn’t thaw right. As you can see, I had cellular damage. However, I came out of cryogenesis oozie-symptom free.”

  “But you’re still a cannie.”

  “Cure is relative term, I suppose. The terminal part of the disease is no longer a factor. Residual cannibalism is a minor inconvenience compared to being dead.”

  Mildred couldn’t draw any conclusions as to what brought on the reversal of symptoms and left the behavior in place. There were too many unknowns—the effect of long-term freezing, the nature of the viral disease and the brain changes attributable to it, prior trauma and predilections to psychosis and violent antisocial behavior. It was also possible that once a cannie, always a cannie, that the infection produced an irreversible effect, a permanent scarring of the personality.

  Mildred had to consider the prospect that the cure might stop her from dying of the oozies, but not from turning into a cannie.

  “How did you know your blood could cure oozies?” she asked.

  “I didn’t, at first. But I knew enough about biology from high school and from listening to my captors to figure out I had somehow developed powerful antibodies to the disease. Otherwise I’d still have been dripping gray pus. I didn’t know it would work on anybody else until I tried it on a couple of my packmates. They were goners, so I figured it couldn’t hurt them. A few drops of my blood made them rise from the dead.”

  “I always thought the hardships of the nuke winter produced the first cannies, and that the oozies was something transmitted through their lifestyle, like AIDS.”

  “Cannies and oozies were already out in the world before skydark. I’m living proof of that. Cannies were thriving in the hellscape when I stepped out of the tank. I’d like to think I had something to do with that, but there’s no way of knowing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I could have infected other people before the FBI caught me. I might have been contagious in the disease’s early stages. It’s also possible that the original source of the cannie plague, the lab or bunker or whatever that was responsible for my infection, got breached on nukeday or sometime after, and the virus was released into the atmosphere.”

  “I take it you didn’t have a plan when you arrived?”

  “A plan? I never thought I’d need one. Never thought I’d end up here, that’s for sure. When the scientists prepped me for the cryo with needles and IV lines in my arms, I thought they were going to execute me by lethal injection.

  “I started working out a plan when I saw how my blood cured my sick crew. Deathlanders are really stupid, ignorant fucks, as you must’ve noticed. They walk in the same shallow, muddy rut until the day they die. They don’t know anything about the past and they don’t care to know anything. Me, I got a hundred blue-prints for conquest from my good old middle-school history classes.”

  Junior Tibideau qualified as one of the aforementioned “really stupid, ignorant fucks.” He understood about a third of the words in their conversation, and got none of the references to science, and few pertaining to history. As the two women chattered on, he continued a slow, inexorable retreat. He positioned himself next to one of the wheelhouse windows where he could sneak an eagle’s-eye view of the main deck.

  “Well, lookee there….” he suddenly remarked, pointing at something interesting below.

  Mildred took the glee in his voice for a very bad sign. She stepped up behind him and looked over his shoulder. Down on the deck, at the top of the ramp, stood her four longtime companions. Cheetah Luis and his Cajuns were gathered around them. All were fully armed.

  “We got some…” Junior began.

  Before he could finish the warning, Mildred reached around his rib cage with both hands and yanked the captured pistols from his trouser waistband.

  “Whoa!” the cannie cried, instinctively clutching at his pants as they came unbuttoned and began to fall down over his hips.

  While he was thus occupied, Mildred reared back with her right foot and booted him in the base of the spine, hurling him headfirst through the open window and off the bridge.

  Flailing his arms and legs, his pants around his ankles, Tibideau dropped the first three stories screaming at the top of his lungs. Then he began somersaulting head over heels. He hit the steel deck with a resounding splat, narrowly missing a crowd of his brethren.

  Before Mildred could recover her balance, turn and open fire, the guardian Angels were on top of her. One jerked her away from the window and the other ripped the blasters out of her hands.

  With an arm securely pinned behind her back, Mildred was walked up to face the cannie queen.

  “Why did you do that?” La Golondrina demanded.

  “He had it coming,” Mildred said. “He infected me with oozies two days ago.”

  La Golondrina didn’t seem to care about Junior’s fate one way or another. “You’re definitely a spicy lady,” she said, showing off her stumpy yellow incisors.

  In that instant, Mildred saw the vile, frail woman as the helpless victim of her own success, trapped by the miraculous power of her blood. Not a reigning monarch, or a conquering general, but a prize cow who was drained of precious fluids at regular intervals. The Angels of Death appeared to be the ones in control of the situation. They had the blasters and swords. They kept her a prisoner in the tower. They supervised the blood-letting and the distribution of the cure to the needy. Mildred expected La Golondrina to embrace the chance at freedom she was offering, and thereby give her an opening for attack.

  As it turned out, Mildred couldn’t have been more wrong.

  In mentality, the queen of the cannies was as alien as a cockroach. She had no interest in leaving the grounded, rotting ship. She adored her life on the god-forsaken island, at the center of the stinking hive.

  “Boil some water and throw her head in it,” La Golondrina ordered the Angels. “I feel like soup.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ryan and the others climbed the stairway to the B
Deck landing, where Cheetah Luis dispatched two of his men to stand guard on the crew quarters’ door. “I want you to do nothing until you hear all hell break loose up top,” he told them. “When you hear that, lock the bastards in nice and tight and then join us in the bow on the main deck.”

  “Why do we have to wait for the shooting to start?” one of the fighters asked. “Why can’t we just lock ’em in now?”

  “We don’t want to arouse any suspicion before we get things rolling,” Cheetah Luis said. “Some cannie might come along, see the door jammed, and put two and two together. At the very least, the cannies in the crew quarters would get let out before we’re done up top. That’s why you got to wait until the last minute.”

  The explanation seemed to satisfy the Cajun and his partner. They slipped through the doorway and took off at a trot down the wide, torchlit hall.

  When the ragtag band reached the A Deck landing, they paused again, preparing to split into two groups, one predominantly Cajun, the other made up entirely of companions. The former was tasked with releasing and arming the prisoners; the latter with the chilling of La Golondrina.

  “How are we going to know when to start the attack on the main deck?” Cheetah Luis asked Ryan. “Should we hold off until the firefight breaks out up there?”

  “No, that won’t tell you whether we’ve won or not,” the one-eyed warrior replied. “You just watch the wheelhouse. We’ll let you know when we’ve taken it.”

  “What if you can’t take it?” the Cajun said “I don’t feature waiting around with my thumb up my butt. How long should we wait before we do the job ourselves?”

  “If we don’t signal you five minutes after the shooting stops up there, you can figure that we’re all dead. And the ball’s in your court. Don’t worry about us. We’ll find our own way out.”

  “I wasn’t worrying.”

  “Suck it up,” Ryan advised him.

  “You, too.”

  The Cajun led his fighters through the doorway onto A Deck to pick up J.B. and the others in the armory.

  Ryan and the companions continued up the stairs to the exit on the main deck. Looking back from the bow, he gazed down the length of the great, dead ship. The tower was a long way off, and there were dozens and dozens of very excited cannies between them and it.

  “Spread out once we’re on the deck,” Cawdor told the others over his shoulder. “It’s okay to hurry along, but don’t move in sync like a combat team. We don’t want the Angels in the tower to pick us out and know what’s coming. Blend in with the action. Dance if you have to. Take different routes. We’ll meet up at the far end.”

  Ryan took the point and began weaving his way through the milling flesheaters, cutting right and left, even turning sideways as he advanced. Again and again, he was slapped hard on the back. Congratulated for being something that he wasn’t.

  As he passed the first hatch, he saw the horse-faced woman leaning over the rim with her hands on her knees. “I’m going to eat you!” she shouted, pointing down into the captive hold. Then she threw back her triple ugly head and laughed. “Yeah, sweetheart, I’m talking to you!”

  Ryan looked away, repressing a grimace. His face was placid, without a readable expression. But in his mind’s eye he was visualizing all that lay in front of him destroyed, burning, the capering cannies left in chunks for the buzzards and the flies.

  As he passed midships, a pair of male cannies crossed his path. They were hauling a corpse by its heels, facedown. From the way the top of the head was pancaked like a squeezebox, Ryan guessed it was the body of the person who’d fallen from the tower. Whether it had been a man or woman was impossible to tell. As the cannies dragged the corpse away, the hamburgered face left a glistening red stripe on the deck.

  When he was beyond the kingposts, the crowd suddenly thinned out. For a second, he got a better look at the men standing guard on the tower’s main deck entrance.

  Cheetah Luis had told them that the Angels of Death were the biggest, baddest bastards of all.

  Ryan had begun to seriously wonder about that assessment. The Angels’ only mission was to protect their queen, who, as he understood the setup, wasn’t under any threat on this isolated shithole of an island. After their previous unsuccessful attack, her major adversaries, the Cajun fighters, had been reduced to conducting roadside ambushes on the mainland. The only visitors allowed were other cannies, and she was much too valuable for them to ever think about chilling her. The Angels of Death had retired from the stresses and excitement, the skill-sharpening of hunt, and been turned into palace guards.

  Glorified sec men.

  Warriors in name only.

  No doubt they still did plenty of murder, for their own pleasure and the pleasure of their queen, but chilling defenseless captives wasn’t the same as fighting an enemy that shot back. They had no competition, so they had no reason to stay on top of their game. Terror and fear kept them in power. It also kept them safe.

  And made them weak.

  Cawdor moved closer, halving the distance to the target, then paused at the rail behind a blazing oil drum and adjusted the Steyr’s ride on his shoulder. Blocking the tower doorway, their brawny arms folded across their bare chests, were two Angels of Death. They were bigger than Ryan had expected, and they seemed in excellent physical shape, their arms and chest muscles bulged with mass and power. They weren’t dozing on the job as he had figured, either. They were alertly scanning the crowd for early signs of trouble.

  Ryan doubted that they would actually intervene if a riot broke out on the main deck. There were too many cannies on tap with too many full-auto blasters. It was more likely that they would retreat behind the bulkhead doors until the matter sorted itself out.

  “Interesting look,” Krysty said as she joined her lover. “Think they take turns braiding each other’s hair?”

  “I believe there’s an excellent possibility,” Doc said, stepping up behind them. “Practitioners of the tonsorial arts must be in short supply in these parts.”

  Harlan Sprue showed up last. He took in the guards, then said, “We can’t shoot them down without having an unhappy mob on our asses.”

  “We shall just have to resort to cold steel, then,” Doc said. He unsheathed his rapier blade and held it behind his back, hidden by the long tails of his frayed frockcoat. He carried the ebony sheath in his left hand as a counterbalance. “Shall we proceed?”

  Long before the four of them got within Doc’s stabbing range of the guards, they were challenged. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” said the Angel on the right. To emphasize his authority, he puffed out his chest and flexed his arm muscles.

  Ryan admired the skull branding the cannie was thrusting in his face. He nodded in appreciation. “We need to see La Golondrina, right away,” the one-eyed man told him.

  “She never sees uninvited visitors, so back off.”

  His fellow Angel chimed in, “Yeah, why don’t you go beat on a railing, or something?”

  “You do not understand the situation, my good fellow,” Doc said to the first cannie as he closed the last two yards of distance. “This is a matter of some considerable urgency. We cannot possibly take no for an answer.”

  Looking at the tall scarecrow in front of him, the Angel let out a snort of contempt.

  It was his last snort of any kind.

  Doc used both hands and the power of his legs to drive the rapier’s razor point up under the tip of the cannie’s sternum and deep into his chest. The slim blade made a wet scraping sound as it sank in to the hilt.

  The skewered cannie stared down at the rapier’s crossguard in horror, his eyes slitted in pain. His massive chest heaved; the cords in his neck stood out like steel cables. Blood seeped like red tears from the corners of the two-inch-wide wound.

  When the big cannie didn’t drop dead instantaneously, Doc followed through with a full-power shoulder strike that knocked the Angel over backward, through the doorway. Together they crashed t
o the deck inside the stairwell with Doc on top, still holding on to his sword.

  Ryan, Krysty and Sprue launched themselves at the other Angel, overwhelming him with their sheer combined weight. As he gave ground, he stumbled over his dying comrade and the kneeling Doc Tanner. For a moment, it was a free-for-all punch-out. The companions rolled around on the deck with the huge cannie, landing blows to his face, doing their best to control his powerful arms, or failing that, to block his hands from reaching his weapons. As hard as they fought, even though they were all hanging on to him, they couldn’t keep him from standing again.

  Ryan let go of his grip on the flesheater’s wrist. As he slipped around behind the cannie’s wide back, the one-eyed man drew his panga from its sheath. He short-thrust the long knife under the Angel’s left shoulder blade, finding the space between ribs with its point, then with all his weight, rammed the length of the blade through the back of his heart.

  The panga’s point popped out of the front of the Angel’s chest. A red steel tongue waggled from the branded skull’s mouth.

  The tongue disappeared as Ryan ripped the blade out of the wound track. As the cannie slipped to the deck, the skull mouth vomited a geyser of bright blood onto his boot tops.

  To pry free the buried rapier, Doc had to stand on the other cannie’s chest and use the strength of his legs.

  Sprue immediately started dragging the other body around the stairwell’s corner.

  “No, leave ’em where they lie,” Ryan told him as he grabbed a torch from the wall. The staircase leading up was an all-metal affair, including the tiny grated landings. It was bolted to the well’s inner and outer walls.

  When Ryan hit the steps running, they shifted sickeningly under his weight, pulling away from the outside wall with a low moan. He paused, arms spread for balance, and they sagged back in place.

  “Take it easy on these rad-blasted stairs,” he warned the others. “They’ve seen better days.”

  With weapons drawn, they began carefully working their way up the stairwell. All the while, rusted steel creaked and groaned in complaint. In some places the treads had come loose from the steel risers and were only held down by the force of gravity.