Cannibal Moon

by James Axler

  At that moment, with an ear-splitting shriek, the stairway above them collapsed.

  Sprue shoved Ryan through the hallway’s open door where the others waited. As he ducked in after, it all came down.

  Ripped loose from the walls, the staircase treads were no longer connected to the risers; there was nothing to hold the structure together. It fell in an avalanche of twisted scrap steel and boiling dust. The Angels toppled along with it, yelling at the tops of their lungs.

  One after another, their bodies hit the fourth-floor landing like 250-pound bean bags. Poom. Poom. Poom. And on the third poom, with a guncrack snap, the landing was ripped away from the wall. Seconds later, a crash roared up from the bottom of the stairwell.

  Ryan didn’t bother closing the door.

  It led nowhere.

  The companions were crouched on either side of the fourth-floor hallway, weapons ready. At the other end of the corridor, cannies stood in front of the windows with longblasters and armfuls of extra mags. A few looked over at the newcomers in alarm, others were preoccupied with the job at hand, getting ready to rain down death on the deck.

  Outside the bridge, the pipe bomb explosions had ceased, but blasterfire continued to rage.

  Ryan waved the others forward, intent on sweeping the hallway clean of hostiles.

  They had run only forty feet or so when really big bangs from directly below jolted the entire superstructure. The floor jumped so violently under them that they either fell to their knees or were slammed into the walls. Dust cascaded from the ceiling and rose from the floor.

  The attention of all the would-be snipers immediately turned to the battle on the deck, and the threat it posed them. They knelt in front of the glassless windows and shouldered their AKs.

  Cawdor dashed ahead, closing the distance to the first shooter. He didn’t realize it was the horse-faced woman until he was almost on top of her and she half turned his way. She smiled at him, then squinted back down her rifle’s sights.

  She still thought he was a cannie.

  “Get yourself a blaster,” she said as she cut loose with a short, aimed burst. “From up here it’s a fucking turkey shoot.”

  There were several AK-47s on the floor at her side, along with a pile of loaded magazines.

  Ryan picked up one of the assault rifles. He checked the chamber for a live round, stepped between her and the cannies down the hall and shot her once in the head.

  With all the firing going on, the other bastards didn’t even notice.

  At Ryan’s direction, the companions gathered up the other blasters and mags. Fanning out, they turned the appropriated weapons on the cannie shooters, peeling them away from the windows with hot lead.

  Only the two snipers at the far end of the corridor managed to pull back and return fire.

  With high-powered slugs streaking past, Sprue grabbed Doc by the waist and carried him through an open doorway on the left.

  Over the clatter of blasterfire, Ryan heard the piercing scream of a rocket motor. He launched himself into Krysty and Mildred, knocking them to the deck, shielding them with his body.

  The RPG warhead detonated with a brilliant flash and mind-numbing concussion. The explosion tore the door Sprue had ducked through off its hinges and sent it cartwheeling down the hallway.

  The HEAT warhead did a lot worse to the snipers. Their pulped remains were sprayed like red stucco over the walls, floor and ceiling. Dark smoke billowed from the four-foot-wide hole in the metal wall where the rocket had exploded.

  Gathering themselves, Ryan and the companions charged through the smoke to the door that led to the only stairway down. They had three floors and six more flights to go.

  Everything went smoothly until they passed the second floor, when they heard the sound of many boots, then felt the vibration. The staircase shook and groaned.

  “Bastards on the steps, coming this way,” Sprue said, “retreating from the main deck.”

  If he was correct, Ryan knew the cannies were forewarned. They had already seen the flames shooting from the wheelhouse. They knew trouble was above them. They would be advancing with weapons up, ready to shoot anything that moved.

  Ryan took another AK from Mildred, dropped both weapons’ selector switches to full-auto. An assault rifle in either hand, he charged down the stairs to meet the cannie wave head-on.

  The one-eyed man knew that fighting downhill was a lot easier than fighting up. He didn’t have to take his eye off his targets to keep from tripping. He was already looking down.

  The oncoming cannie wave broke over an immoveable object. Firing from the hip, Ryan stitched bullets through their heads and shoulders, sweeping them aside. He riddled their backs as they turned to run the other way. Some of them jumped the rail to keep from being shot.

  When his weapons locked back empty, Krysty took over with another of the appropriated AKs, firing short bursts into the last of the fleeing flesheaters. Few of the cannies had the clarity of mind to fire back, and when they did, their aim was hasty and off target.

  The companions clambered over the shambles of heaped bodies Ryan and Krysty had left in their wake. They ignored the wounded. Even if mercy had occurred to them, there was no time for coups de grâce.

  As Ryan reached the main deck, he saw smoke boiling up from the stairwell that led to the next level down. The steps were black, twisted ruins. Cannies could still climb them, but with difficulty. He could hear them coughing, but no targets appeared out of the smoke.

  Ryan hurried the others into the open, into the lee of the bridge tower.

  Blasterfire echoed from the second and third floors above. The cannies assembled there weren’t shooting at them, but at something—or someone—farther off on the island.

  The deck in front of them was littered with bodies and parts of bodies, and scorched with thirty-foot-wide blast rings.

  Nothing moved.

  “Where is everybody?” Mildred asked.

  Nobody had an answer to that.

  “Time to leave,” Ryan told them. “They still think we’re cannies. They won’t shoot their own kind.”

  The companions crossed the deck at a measured pace. Not panicked, but focused. As though they had business to attend to.

  At the head of the ramp they looked out at the desolate marshland.

  “I can’t see anyone,” Doc said.

  “Look, out on the path,” Krysty said. “See? Way off in the distance? Someone’s waving.”

  “Damn, they sure are far away,” Sprue said.

  Ryan added, “I don’t like the look of this.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As rifle fire from the ship’s tower continued to fall on the path, the Cajuns and former cannie prisoners took to their heels, trying to get out of range.

  Some made it, some didn’t.

  Those who didn’t, dropped in midstride, either howling and thrashing in pain or silent and still in death. Slugs smacked the salty puddles and flicked the blades of marsh grass.

  A sparse leaden rain, whizzing to earth.

  “Face it, your friends are all chilled,” Cheetah Luis snarled down at J.B. “There’s only one way on and off that ship. There’s only one path leading to it. And you’re looking at it. There’s no other place for them to go. If they aren’t here with us, they’re goners. And you’re about to join them. A lot of brave fighters gave up their lives tonight. A lot more are gonna die if you don’t shoot.”

  J.B. said nothing in response. He continued to scan the side of the distant ship, but with failing hope.

  “Either fire that rocket, or hand it over,” the Cajun said. “If you don’t, I’m going to blow your head off.”

  J.B. reached up and shoved the M-16’s flash-hider away from his face. “You want the HEAT, you got it, Chief,” he said.

  As J.B. lurched to his feet, he jammed the pointed nose of the warhead into Cheetah Luis’s flat stomach. His finger rested on the launcher’s trigger, ready to rock.

  The C
ajun looked down at him, shook his head and said, “You don’t have the balls, little fella.”

  “Got any last words?” J.B. asked him.

  “If you fire, you’ll die, too.”

  “In case you’re interested, mine are ‘fuck you.’”

  “Look!” Jak cried. “They come!”

  The albino’s sharp eyes had picked up movement at the top of the freighter ramp.

  In the light of the main deck’s oil drum fires, J.B. could make out Krysty’s red hair and Mildred’s dusky skin. He couldn’t identify with certainty the two tall men with them, but he figured they had to be Ryan and Doc. Sprue, the fat man, was unmistakable, even at six hundred yards.

  “You are one lucky crawdad-eating son of a bitch,” J.B. told the Cajun as he lowered the RPG-16.

  “No luckier than you are.”

  Jak grabbed a torch from one of the fighters and started waving it overhead to get the companions’ attention.

  It worked. The five of them came barreling down the dirt ramp.

  For a short distance after they reached ground level their backs were protected by the height of the ship’s hull. The shooters in the tower couldn’t see them below it. But as soon as they appeared on the path, heading at an all-out sprint to join the retreating attackers, the cannies figured whose side they were really on.

  Blasterfire chattered from the second and third floors of the tower, no longer aimed at the Cajuns and former captives, but at the companions.

  J.B. knew the cannies had the wrong weapons for the job. He had seen the limits of their arsenal, and there wasn’t a real sniper rifle in the lot. What they had was raw firepower. Great for shooting ducks in a barrel. Great for “human wave” assaults. Piss-poor for hitting scattered, running targets.

  The raw firepower quotient took an upward jump as more and more cannies appeared on the deck, lining the rail with their assault rifles.

  It was clear to J.B. that his side had hardly made a dent in their numbers, this while suffering high losses, particularly among the skilled Cajun fighters.

  J.B. was sure he could see somebody storming around on the deck, no doubt whipping up and organizing the pursuit.

  It felt as though everything was about to fall apart.

  “They’re coming down the ramp, dammit!” Cheetah Luis cried.

  Indeed, the cannies abandoned ship in hordes, chasing after the fleeing quintet. The bastards who remained along the rail and in the tower continued to fire at the companions’ backs.

  J.B. and Jak could do nothing to aid their comrades. They knew firing on the pursuit was a waste of ammo. They couldn’t hope to hit running cannies with assault rifles at six hundred yards.

  The Cajuns didn’t share that pessimism. Several opened up with their long blasters.

  “Dark night, no!” J.B. shouted as he turned on them. “Don’t shoot! From this angle you’re just as likely to hit my friends!”

  Behind them, the escapees had taken advantage of the targeting shift. They were already two hundred yards farther away, and well beyond the accurate range of the tower guns.

  J.B. knew the cannies couldn’t have cared less. They planned to run down the captives long before they reached the other side of the island.

  Under a torrent of blasterfire from the ship, Ryan and the others ducked between the cargo containers-smokers.

  “They’re clear now,” the Cajun growled in his ear. “Fire the fucking thing!”

  “They’re still too close to the ship!” J.B. shouted back. “The shock wave would chill them!”

  Ryan had to have realized that, as well, because after a few seconds he and the others burst from cover, dashing along the path, trying to put more distance between themselves, the freighter and the pursuit.

  There was another thing that J.B. was sure had registered in his old friend’s mind. The farther they got from the ship’s burning oil drums, the less light there was for the cannies to shoot by. It was bright enough looking back at the vessel, but looking away from it was like looking down a deep, dark well.

  J.B. knew it was coming up on crunch time. The companions were about three hundred yards away. The cannies trailing them were about 150 yards beyond that, and closing rapidly. If he and Jak waited until the companions got completely clear of the blast zone, it was going to be too late. The cannies coming up behind would have already shot them in the back.

  “Get set,” he told the albino.

  Jak shouldered his launcher and peered through the sight.

  “About fucking time,” Cheetah Luis said.

  J.B. ignored him. “Gasoline is in a hold on the first deck just forward of midships,” he said to Jak. “It’s on our side of the ship.’

  “Got it.”

  “Clear behind!” J.B. shouted over his shoulder. He acquired the target and adjusted his aim for the distance. The bull’s-eye was big, but it was a half mile off. When he tapped the trigger, the rocket launched with a roar.

  Jak’s rocket was away a second later.

  The twin tracks of the exhausts glowed orange as they streaked over the marsh, arcing up to the maximum height of their trajectory then dropping down the last thirty yards. They made what seemed like pip-squeak flashes and booms against the freighter’s steel skin. The primary, shaped charges had exploded on impact, boring holes for the secondaries to slip through. A fraction of a second later, the bigger payloads detonated, blasting huge rips in the side of the vessel.

  That was it.

  No subsequent explosions.

  No chain reaction.

  “Try a little more to the left,” J.B. said as they hurriedly reloaded their launchers.

  The rockets sailed away with a blistering whoosh. Again, J.B. followed the glowing embers of the tail-pipes as the warheads closed on their target.

  Both warheads detonated, tearing holes in the hull’s sheathing.

  Again, no cigar.

  “I thought you knew what you were doing,” Cheetah Luis said.

  “I do,” the Armorer said as he sighted and again fired.

  Jak had his reloaded launcher up, but he never got the shot off.

  The fifth burning ember was the charm. J.B. scored a ten-ring hit on the hold with the gasoline, which was right next to the armory with the RDX. Both were above the ten-thousand-gallon oil bunker.

  The explosion was much, much bigger than J.B. had expected.

  Quasi-nuclear.

  In a split second the vast ship became a dome of light from one end to the other. A light so bright it seemed to turn the steel translucent. The sides of the vessel peeled open under the awesome pressure. The deck and superstructure were launched upward in billions of fragments.

  The blast’s concussion sent a hundred-foot-high wave of dust rolling outward, a doughnut of churning black propelled by a thousand-mile-an-hour tailwind.

  J.B. watched in astonishment as the pursuing cannies were engulfed by the racing cloud. An instant later, astonishment turned to horror as the companions were swallowed up, too.

  Ryan, Krysty, Mildred, Doc and Sprue vanished.

  Even though J.B. could see it coming right at them, he wasn’t prepared for what happened next. The shock wave and the sound of the blast hit him like a battering ram. For a moment, he blacked out. When he came to, he found himself twenty feet up the path, flat on his rear end.

  If he had underestimated the power of the blast, he had also underestimated the diameter of the blast zone. Parts of the freighter began to fall all around them: sections of steel railing; hunks of three-inch-wide wire rope; anchor chain links; eight-inch rivets. Other items, too. Unidentifiable things, but definitely on fire. All of it thudded to earth.

  Junkyard hail.

  A mooring cleat landed on a Cajun standing right next to Jak. The cleat weighed three hundred pounds if it weighed an ounce. It crushed the poor bastard like a grape.

  J.B. and the albino did the only thing they could.

  They ran like hell.

  Chapter Twenty-Eightr />
  It took a full minute for all the debris to come down through the swirling dust. First came the heavier objects. They screamed to earth like meteors. Hunks of the ship the size of semi-tractor-trailers splashed into the marsh’s pools. The debris fell in ever-smaller waves, peppering the ground with impacts.

  When the deluge finally ended and the dust began to settle, a pall of noxious black smoke started to pour from the burning oil bunker. It spread like the densest fog over the landscape, obscuring everything, even the roaring blaze that spawned it.

  J.B. and Jak didn’t speculate on the odds of finding their friends alive. They didn’t speculate on anything. Without a word, they pulled rag masks over their noses and mouths, and after borrowing a couple of torches from the Cajuns, they moved back down the path in search of their companions.

  The torch lights barely penetrated the thick smoke. To view the ground, they had to hold the crackling flame a yard away. They followed the trail by feel and by stepping on things. When they stepped in water they knew they were veering off the path.

  They found other things by feel and by stepping on them. Human body parts were mixed in with the scrap iron and steel, the remains of cannies from the freighter’s main deck, blown four hundred yards from the epicenter of the explosion.

  “Do you see anything?” J.B. asked, his voice already hoarse from the smoke.

  “Nope,” Jak said.

  They both dreaded the prospect of finding their friends in pieces, but they had to look. They owed Ryan, Krysty, Mildred and Doc that. On either side of the path were thousands of small, scattered fires from objects hurled far out onto the marsh. They cast a ghastly wavering light through the curtain of smoke.

  As they proceeded to search, minor explosions popped off from the direction of the ravaged ship. J.B. and Jak couldn’t see the vessel itself, but the yellow glow of its blaze reflected dully off the banks of low-hanging clouds.

  They found their friends three hundred yards down the path, roughly where J.B. had seen the dust wave overtake them. They found Krysty Wroth first. She was facedown, unbloodied but still.