Kingdom of Monsters

by John Lee Schneider

  Within two days, she was back at the Mount – rescued was the word they used – probably accurate enough, all things considered. But she still remembered that rush of freedom. After two years.

  She had not, however, fully appreciated all that waited outside the safety of these supposedly imprisoning walls.

  Rhodes had been disturbed that she'd tried to run.

  Sally expected him to be angry, and had been quite afraid of his reaction, but he actually seemed to feel badly – like dealing with a daughter who ran away from home, and struggling to make sense of it, knowing this should be where people ran to, not away from.

  Although, word-of-mouth that drifted through the Mount suggested that, in many places, people had done just that. In some spots, as military installations became known, survivors in the surrounding areas had appeared in significant numbers. There weren't many from the cities, where the initial blooms of giants were concentrated, but out in the sticks, there were those who had managed to hole-up through the worst of it.

  Resources for refugees were limited, particularly in the outlying outposts.

  It was said that, in several instances, push had come to shove.

  Sally was learning military dead-pan.

  It was a brass-shield against hard-core reality. Rights were not determinant anymore – scientific recommendation was now dictate – the justifiable priority being the survival and repopulation of the human race.

  Sally, who was just entering her second trimester, was what Rhodes called their 'most precious asset'.

  He had told her this in his office after she had tried to run. His eyes were hard as he said it, because while he might try to understand why she ran, it still could not be tolerated.

  Sally remained unsure of his motivations. While he had mentioned a daughter, he never spoke about any wife. Sally had no idea what any of that meant long-term, but there was no going back now.

  Rhodes didn't know why Sally had run that day. And while he seemed to have forgiven her, was even apologetic, she wondered how he'd have reacted if he'd really known.

  As her transport chopper had sailed over the tree-tops that day, Sally had looked down at the forest floor and she had seen Mark.

  He was running from the chopper like a rabbit from a hawk – just as Sally had seen him fleeing the shattered base that night, even as choppers had landed and troops had circled all around her.

  Protective custody had not suited Mark well – nor had it appreciated him.

  While Rhodes had taken an instant liking to Sally, he hadn't much cared for Mark.

  Sally's father hadn't liked Mark either, in point of fact – Mark, who was a baggage handler on the Pacific Princess, not a passenger, and certainly not good enough for his daughter.

  Rhodes didn't seem to think so either. Things started out testy over the course of their year-long-detention, culminating when Mark had slugged Rhodes in the jaw, nearly catching a bullet from the guards.

  Before Sally had taken sick that night, she and Mark had been planning to run.

  But it had to be that night.

  Sally actually didn't remember a thing. The nurse had given her a mild sedative, before somewhat sternly escorting Mark away.

  Mark, who had been at her bedside all day, had kissed her cheek and whispered, “Keep a candle burning.”

  Sally must have slept – perhaps even been knocked unconscious at some point, because when she suddenly awoke, it was over, and she was lying among rubble. The entire infirmary had been demolished – the bed she had been lying in was gone, as was the entire med-unit, and its staff.

  Simply lying limp, riding out the living blitzkrieg, Sally had somehow survived it – missing the crushing force like a beetle misses a rototiller blade.

  Battered, and semi-dazed, she had climbed out from under the pilings of rubble.

  And the moment she felt the night air, she became aware of two things – the first were the rescue helicopters arriving on-scene, circling down.

  Second was the sight of Mark, running for the perimeter, scaling the fence, and jumping for the forest beyond.

  Sally could have called to him, but then he would have stopped, and he would have come back for her, and they would have caught him. So she stayed silent, firmly believing she was never going to see him again.

  Then she had spotted him from the air.

  When the chopper touched down, it wasn't even a considered decision – she had simply bolted. The chopper had left him miles behind before landing, but if she could just find him...

  Instead, she had stumbled into a quaint little band of forest-dwelling psychopaths who called themselves the Coven.

  As it turned out, Mark had crossed paths with them too, and if he hadn't been running from the mountain before, he sure was now.

  It was the second time Sally had seen her child's father leaving her behind – all unknowing, believing her long dead, no longer even searching – and this time, most likely disappearing from her life forever.

  And, naturally, the crazy bitches who tried to feed him to a T. rex were now living with her on the Mount.

  All part of the Arc Project. Crazy didn't matter – they were all of productive age. Def-con priorities.

  On the other hand, their presence was already an influence on the Mount – a ripple-effect on a community that was adjusting to section-eight-level stress as a daily reality.

  Overall, the Arc Project had so-far gone anything but smoothly. Their main depot site up top had been hit by a rex-attack – rare, this high in the mountains – and the beast had done ridiculous damage. An entire shipment of equipment was lost, and nearly a battalion of troops.

  Now everybody was housed in underground bunkers, buried hundreds of feet below solid mountain, and reinforced to take nuclear damage.

  The residential bunkers were for civilians and soldiers. The officers were housed separately – adjacent, but separated by floors, with the command station nearest the top.

  On the residential mall was a centralized rec-area that reminded Sally of a chimp habitat, except instead of a swinging tire, it was tennis courts, and a swimming pool.

  And you couldn't go outside.

  Sally had been sequestered on bases for almost two years before coming to the Mount, but at least there had been OUTSIDE.

  But these days, that was the price of security – and these dark rock walls were going to drive her purely crazy. She had said so to Rhodes, who acknowledged the problem.

  It had only been a few weeks and things were already starting to bubble.

  Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

  “Your friends are acting up,” Rhodes said.

  Friends. What that meant was, after she'd made her break into the woods, she'd spent the night with this band of nutcases, just before they were all captured again.

  Probably not PC to say so – she couldn't imagine Rhodes taking it well. Certainly not the Coven. And it didn't hurt if that one night spent in that camp, before being taken together, had left them on better terms with Sally than most of the other women at the Mount – a dubious honor, but not a gift-horse to be stared in the mouth.

  There weren't many of them – thirty members, all-told – but they were noisy. And they were quickly becoming dominant in a number of subtly deliberate ways.

  When she'd first arrived on the Mount, Sally had made friends with a military nurse named Rose, who told her the group of them seemed to have taken over the med-unit.

  Everybody worked on the Mount, and one could optimistically see the job-preference as altruism – except, Rose said, she couldn't help think it was supposed to look that way – the encroachment of the infirmary felt more like infiltration.

  “I've known a lot of stripper-types,” Rose told her, “who became nurses. Lotta crossover there, for some reason. Raising hell all night, good deeds during the day. Like some sort of Karmic bargain.”

  Rose shook her head. “These crazy bitches are something different.”

  Sally had als
o noticed the Coven's presence in the maid/janitor duty-rosters, which seemed surprisingly domestic. She would have thought it unlikely the women she'd met would be so readily acquiescent to such menial, keeping-the-cave-clean, back-to-the-Stone-Age, Wilma Flintstone roles.

  Perhaps passive-aggressive submissive types?

  Or it could be, they understood the power inherent in those basic essential duties – the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and a maid has a key to locked doors.

  It was also true that the world was now a place where the chain of command from house-staff to nuclear-authorization had grown significantly shorter.

  Nurse Rose had disappeared two weeks ago.

  She had simply gone – no trace. It was assumed she had deserted, although Sally had never heard her express the slightest indication of any such intent.

  In her place, running the infirmary was Ginger, the oldest of the Coven – late-thirties, at least, even though her body was whip-cord, surfer-girl tight, just like the rest of them.

  Ginger was older sister. During Sally's one night at their camp, Ginger was the one who had given her the pitch to join up.

  Sally's failure to RSVP in the time since had cooled Ginger's demeanor somewhat, although she was careful not to become adversarial, as she respectfully recognized Sally's pull with Rhodes.

  And while officially no foul-play was suspected in Nurse Rose's disappearance, at least one member of the Coven had been questioned on the incident – a tall, lithe Amazon called Michelle who, when Sally first met her, had carried a hand-carved spear and a ten-inch hunting-knife strapped to her hip – and who, in her first week at the Mount, had stabbed two servicemen with a fork.

  Michelle's interview had been conducted personally – and privately – by Rhodes himself. Sally didn't know the details, but in the time since, Michelle had been remarkably well-behaved.

  So far, Rhodes had chosen not to engage any of the others, although he clearly intended the suddenly meek and compliant Michelle to serve as an example.

  Still, the lot of them continued to stir-up generalized trouble. Just the simple fact of a troop of sexy, nubile young things introduced among a bunch of mostly male troops was a bubbling cauldron all by itself, and the so-inclined could readily take advantage.

  There were already accusations of harassment – he-said/she-said tales wafting out of the residential bunkers. Rhodes told Sally privately that, in his experience dealing with such cases, nine out of ten times, the woman was telling the truth. But within that remaining ten-percent, there were amoral alley-cats – ruthless and cynical – traits a combat General knew full-well to respect and fear in anyone.

  And of course, the world's oldest profession had promptly sprouted up – one of the most basic forms of trade.

  All fairly pedestrian stuff, but corrosive. And small, intense factions did tend to take over larger social groups.

  And based on short association, Sally had a good idea that this particular faction had been a bunch of end-of-the-world nutcases before the end of the world. Now they had actual, physical dragons to play with, and had taken advantage of it.

  One of the young ones, a wide-eyed Lolita named Lily, had made past-tense reference to their 'men-folk', and was promptly shushed by Ginger.

  Sally had not pressed for details.

  She had, however, mentioned it to Rhodes, who nodded thoughtfully.

  “Witches,” he muttered. “Satanists converted to dragons.”

  “Witches aren't synonymous with Satanists,” Sally said, as she herself had been corrected by both Lily and Ginger.

  “But they are, right?”

  Sally nodded. “Right.”

  Rhodes had leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

  “Well,” he said rubbing his eyes, “I'm afraid you're going to have to tell your friends there will be some emergency war-time restrictions on their right to practice religion.”

  But Sally already knew the rest. By Rhodes' logic, they were still women.

  He had leaned forward.

  “They are assets,” he emphasized. “And they will be tolerated. But not enabled. Please relay that, so I don't have to.”

  That was another thing – Rhodes seemed to think Sally had some special pull with the civilian population at the Mount – puzzling, because Nurse Rose had been her only friend. Sally was quartered separate from the residential barracks, so her interaction was minimal – both the civilians and the rank-and-file servicemen most often saw her in the company of Rhodes. That was her identity.

  It was remarkable the roles you fell into.

  In her younger days, she was the quintessential sorority girl – they used to call her Delta Dawn.

  Now nuclear options were at her fingertips – just a maximum-security door away.

  Of course, every door was like that on the Mount. There were locks and codes and procedures – similar to how inmates operated and worked within a prison – only in this prison, the inmates slept a hundred yards away from the warden.

  “What's on the docket today?” Sally asked, as she followed Rhodes into the claustrophobic mine-shaft of an elevator, that gave her the horrors every time she stepped into it.

  “Going down to see the Doc,” Rhodes said, closing the door quickly before she could object.

  Doctor Victor Shriver dwelled down within the very bowels of this not-quite bottomless pit, down past the barracks, past multiple equipment and maintenance levels.

  At the very bottom of it all, was Shriver's lab. The mad lab as it had come to be known, populated by a single individual, who was without a doubt, the creepiest person in the entire complex.

  There was an unsettling drop in Sally's stomach as the elevator seemed to fall forever. The tiny electric light was military basic – if it went out, they would be in utter darkness.

  Sally could feel the oppressive weight of the mountain around them, only waiting for the slightest shift to crush their tiny lifeline shut forever.

  Chapter 9

  Dr. Shrinker, as he was known among the troops, WAS the science these days.

  His comments regarding the Arc-Project were succinct. As he put it, “We aren't forcing anyone to get pregnant, but if you put men and women together, it's going to happen. And yes, I'm all for encouraging just that.”

  Sally, safely knocked-up, standing at the General's shoulder, had another question.

  “What if a member of the community doesn't want to reproduce?”

  Shrinker – Shriver – had shrugged.

  “Then that member will have to perform some other function.”

  His voice was always very neutral as he spoke, as if any inflection at all might corrupt the pure factual logic. Nor did he invite dissent.

  “A worker or a breeder,” he said. “I think it's fair to call them both work. But you need to provide some function, or we can't afford you.” He dismissed the point as settled. “It's a tough world,” he said.

  Shriver's criteria determined who got onto the Mount – total numbers allowed versus gender-breakdown and necessary genetic diversity.

  So while Rhodes asked Sally her opinion on most things, here was one of the other people he asked. And Sally would daresay, the one he probably listened to the most.

  It certainly seemed that his was the weighted voice when it came to dealing with outbreaks – nuke a bloom, burn a bud – that was his.

  The thought of nuclear weapons being set off, literally beyond the end of the world, was nearly as depressing as the end itself.

  Nukes remained a threat simply because of their existence. During the weeks of battles that followed KT-day, missiles had fired that shouldn't have – that couldn't have – somehow overriding fail-safes that by simple numeric probability couldn't be overridden. Worse, missiles with targeting systems that had no hackable interactive technology were redirected.

  Three things needed to happen for a successful nuclear strike – the warhead needed to be activated, the missile needed to be targeted, and then it had
to be launched. Each of these levels was guarded by multiple levels of security.

  A sub-launch, for example, would require the participation of nearly every member of the crew – everything from achieving launch depth to the turning of keys – and a rogue launch would require PhD-level understanding to rework the targeting system, even after coding had released the keys. And once a missile was chambered and the sub was at sea, that should have been impossible.

  But somehow it happened.

  Errant nuclear strikes had been worldwide. The EMP had been as well – and not just a bad one, but designer-bad.

  The digital-age was gone. All that rot about what might survive? Exaggerated – all of it. Individual pieces of tech survived – items surrounded by any sort of makeshift Faraday cage – a tin waste-basket was often enough – but the networks were gone. And of course, the widespread EMP had been combined with a physical demolition.

  At this point, military communication was down to radio-relays and walkie-talkies, dotted with little bits of post-millennium tech.

  The surviving nukes, depending on where you found them, should still work, but required targeting commands from tech that didn't exist anymore – or barely existed. So each of these surviving missiles would require refitting. And then, whatever came online, by whatever method, also needed to be coordinated through the chain of command.

  All this demanded a bit of know-how, and now that ninety-nine-percent population reduction had likely been achieved, qualified experts had been pared thin.

  Then there was the simple fact that there had been a hell of a lot of land-based nukes out there, and not the least priority was to find out what was left.

  On the naval front, not so much. They had exactly one submarine that had somehow survived. The Anchorage had been stationed off the coast of Florida, and its Captain Terrance Mason had only made contact barely a month before.

  Rhodes considered the recovery of a submarine a real coupe. Post KT-day, subs were the only possible option at sea. You couldn't have ships, because the Megs would take them out.