Cannibal Reign (28 page)

“Around a thousand.”

“No women?”

“We had some females in the brigade originally, but the colonel ordered them all out with the last airlift to Texas. I think he knew how bad things were going to get here. They’d have gotten raped for sure, man. We got too many young hooligans in this outfit.”

“So what’s going on down in Texas?”

“Got no idea. We haven’t heard from them in months.”

“And you chose not to share your food with the civilians here? That’s what the battle was over? Food?”

“We distributed plenty of food,” Lee said, steering through town on the way to his billet. “That was our primary mission, but the civvies here got carried away. Redneck bastards started showing up at the distribution centers with guns and shooting our men. After that the colonel pulled us into this defensive perimeter and we tried to dispense the food that way. But then local warlords took over outside and started stealing food from those without guns, forming private armies . . . like fucking Somalia, man. At first they traded food for women, and when they finally had all the women, they let everybody else starve.

“After that, the warlords started killing each other off, and that’s when the colonel decided to quit distributing food altogether . . . which only forced the warlords into an alliance. Then they attacked us at different places around the perimeter, and they killed a few of us, but we wiped ’em out in the end. What you saw on the road in was nothing. On the city’s east side the bodies are piled up knee high for a quarter mile. Things have been pretty quiet out there ever since. The human race has had it, man.”

“No word from D.C.?” Forrest asked.

“The last word we got from anybody was months ago,” Lee said. “By shortwave—the satellite signals can’t penetrate that shit in the sky. We were told the President was dead and that we were all effectively on our own.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nobody said, but the colonel thinks there was a coup.”

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Forrest muttered.

“This is my billet,” Lee said, shifting into park in front of a house lit up like Mardi Gras.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Kane asked.

“My place is party central. We’ve got more gas than food now, so we run the generator all night long. We don’t have any booze left, like I was telling you, so the guys watch a lot of dirty movies, have circle jerks, play video games. All pretty juvenile shit, but what else is left?”

“We got some gamers too, but we ain’t had no circle jerk yet.”

Lee chuckled sardonically. “We got a lotta kids in this outfit. You two wait out here while I get my men. I don’t need ever’body inside knowing about you guys. It could cause trouble.”

Ten minutes later an armored Humvee pulled up behind the Escalade and Lee got out, calling for Forrest and Kane to get in. Their weapons had been retrieved from the barricade and were returned to them, and they were each given a Kevlar helmet with a NVD attached.

“It gets dark as fuck outside the containment zone,” Lee said. “There’s a moon tonight, though, so the NVDs will light it up good. Inside the hospital we’ll have to switch to infrared. These are my homies: Grip, Clean, and Shodo.”

Everyone shook hands in the cramped space of the Humvee. All of Lee’s “homies” were black men in their thirties, and Forrest was glad he hadn’t brought along any of the young hooligans he had mentioned.

At the southern checkpoint, they passed out of the containment zone after giving almost no explanation at all. It seemed that Lee was something of an institution within the brigade and that whatever he said was taken as gospel. Forrest began to wonder how much control Colonel Short actually had over his men, now suspecting that he was little more than a figurehead, which did make sense under the circumstances. In fact, he was surprised to see as much military order as he did. They drove past a parking lot strewn with bodies, fallen one upon the other as if on an ancient battlefield.

Forrest noticed in the red light of the interior that Grip had a pair of very large hands, and it occurred to him that this must have been the origin of his nickname. There was nothing about Clean or Shodo, however, to explain theirs. Clean certainly wasn’t at all clean. Two miles from the checkpoint, they pulled up to the emergency entrance of the hospital and piled out, taking time to have a good look around with their night division devices. Nothing moved in the blackish green, and only the sound of the icy wind pervaded.

“So what’s it like livin’ underground?” Shodo asked as they stepped through the shattered glass door into the emergency ward.

“It’s quiet,” Kane said, not wanting to make it sound too inviting.

“I bet,” Shodo said. “How many other GIs you got?”

“Ten,” Forrest lied.

“All green beanies?”

“That’s right.”

“You all got any women down there?”

“Bro,” Lee said, “what I tell you back at the crib?”

“Stacker, man, I’m just curious. Can’t a brother at least fantasize a little bit? Shit.”

“Get on point,” Lee ordered. “Find the fuckin’ pharmacy.”

They moved in a tight cover formation through the hospital, following the signs on the walls. They were forced to switch over to infrared once they were away from the windows because of the almost total lack of ambient light, which made it impossible to read the signs without having to use the flashlights on their weapons.

“Anybody else smell that?” Kane asked as they made their way up an open staircase to the second floor.

“Yeah,” Forrest answered.

“Smell what?” Lee said.

It occurred to Forrest that breathing the filthy air over an extended period of time must have desensitized the others’ olfactory systems.

“Smells like burnt meat,” Kane said.

The others froze in place.

“I don’t smell nothin’,” Grip said.

“Me either,” said Clean.

“I
think
I do,” said Shodo.

“Keep movin’,” Lee ordered. “How fresh does it smell, Kane?”

“I don’t know. It’s not real strong, but I didn’t smell it down on the first floor.”

They found the pharmacy and Lee’s men covered the halls while he and the two Green Berets used their flashlights to search inside. Forrest found a freezer with a padlock on it and bashed it off with the butt of the carbine, pulling the door open to shine his light inside. There were all sorts of frozen drug solutions, but he didn’t find any of the names that West had written down for him.

“Jack, got another freezer back here.” Kane bashed the lock and Forrest shone his light to find that the freezer contained nothing but antibiotics, including those he was looking for.

“Thank Christ,” he muttered, grabbing one of the bags and giving it a shake. The solution wasn’t frozen, but it was slushy and icy cold. “How many should we take, Marcus?”

“How many can you fit in the fuckin’ ruck, man?”

Forrest packed his rucksack tight. “We’re good to go, Sergeant!”

During their egress, the odor of burnt meat became strong enough that Lee and his men were able to smell it very well now.

“Fuck, that’s human!” Shodo said, all of them having smelled it before.

“Human?” Kane said.

“Grip, get on point!” Lee ordered in a hushed tone. “Find the source!”

“Guys, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” Forrest cautioned. “We don’t know the layout of the building.”

“Captain, you and your man cover the rear,” Lee ordered, ignoring the warning.

Forrest and Kane had little choice but to comply, both of them relieved that they had grabbed grenades at Lee’s behest.

“Cafeteria’s just ahead,” Grip whispered. “Keep it tight.”

All of them could see the heat plume at the end of the hall in their infrared view finders, and they switched over to night vision, realizing there would be ambient light now. They made their way into the cafeteria, which was a proper mess with tables dumped over and chairs scattered about. The vending machines had long been smashed open and raided. The acrid odor of frying meat was mixed with the stench of rotting human flesh, and both Forrest and Kane felt the hair rise on the back of their necks as they shuffled backward along the wall, covering the rear.

Grip could hear the sizzling of meat now as he peered around the corner into the kitchen, seeing a dark hooded figure cooking by candlelight over a Coleman camp stove. He also saw the severed arm and leg of a human being on the counter, most of the flesh gone from both, leaving bare bone, the hand and foot still in tact. Another figure entered the kitchen from the opposite side and spotted Grip peeking around the corner.

“Look out!” he shouted, and the cook jerked his head in Grip’s direction, pulling a pistol from his pocket.

Grip fired his carbine and killed the cook but missed the second man, who ducked quickly back out of the kitchen.

“Move!” Lee said, ordering the men forward. “Captain, cover this doorway!”

They cleared the kitchen and had a look around, the eerie blue flame still burning beneath the frying pan, smoke beginning to fill the kitchen. Kane felt his stomach twist at the smell of what he now knew was burning human flesh, and he knocked the pan from the stove to the floor.

“Oh, fuck!” Clean said. “Look at this shit, Sarge!” He grabbed a handful of dog tags hanging from a hook over the counter and held them up for Lee to see.

“Read me the names!” Lee ordered.

“Preston, Sipe, Leskavonski—shit, Sarge, these are our men!”

“They didn’t fuckin’ desert!” Shodo said. “They got eaten by fuckin’ cannibals!”

“Ever’body chill the fuck out!” Lee ordered, peering around the corner after the man who had escaped. The hallway was about fifty feet long with a turn to the left at the far end.

Kane squatted beside the dead man and picked up the .38 revolver, kicking the body viciously in the head to be sure he wasn’t playing possum. The dead man was grimy as hell with a thick black beard, and he stunk to high heaven of sweat and shit.

“These people have definitely gone wild,” he said to Forrest.

“Sergeant, we need to get the hell out of here,” Forrest warned.

“Not before we kill these motherfuckers. We helped you get what you needed, now you help us do what we need done.”

“I advise you to go back and gather a company of men first. You’ve got no idea the size of the force you’re going up against or how well equipped they might be. There’s a pile of fresh bones in this sink over here big enough to suggest they’re feeding a lot of people.”

“And suppose they’ve still got some of our men alive in this shit hole,” Lee said. “How long you think they gonna stay that way?”

“Getting killed won’t help them.”

“We’re taking them down. You with us or not?”

Forrest and Kane exchanged glances. Again they didn’t have much choice. The six of them carefully made their way down the hall and around the corner. Someone screamed deep within the hospital in the darkness. It was a bloodcurdling cry.

“I’m on point!” Lee said, shouldering his way to the front.

They moved smartly along, clearing any open rooms they passed. There was a flurry of movement at a four-way intersection up ahead and shots were fired. Lee and Grip both returned fire and someone screamed. The six soldiers moved quickly to secure the intersection, where a man lay against the wall wailing in pain, shot through the stomach. He stunk as badly as the cook and lashed out with a knife, trying to hook Shodo behind the knee.

Shodo brought the stock of his M-16 down on the man’s head and caved it in. “Fuck you, motherfucker!”

“In here!” Clean called from a nearby room.

The others had a look inside, where one of their missing men was chained to a bed with his throat recently cut.

“Son of a bitch!” Lee swore. “See? Goddamnit!”

“They only got shotguns and revolvers,” Clean said, dumping the shells from the cannibal’s .357 and flinging the pistol back in the direction they had come. “Let’s clean these fuckers out.”

Forrest realized that these soldiers had nothing to lose by pressing forward, but he and Kane certainly did. Farther along, a cluster of people burst from a room and dashed across the hall. Lee and his men gave chase.

“Sergeant!” Forrest shouted, but it was no use. He and Kane ran after them, covering the rear as they ran across a large conference room in pursuit of the fleeing figures. The double doors at the far side slammed shut before they could reach them, and the sound of crashing vending machines could be heard on the other side, effectively barricading the doors closed.

“It’s a trap!” Kane shouted, turning on his heel to dash back to the entrance. But these doors were also slammed shut before he could reach them, and again the vending machines outside were knocked over to barricade them.

“Goddamnit!” Kane shouted, whirling on Stacker Lee. “See what the fuck you did, motherfucker!”

There were sounds of maniacal laughter in the halls outside, whooping and hollering beyond both sets of doors, and a hail of bullets came through, forcing the soldiers to the floor and up against the walls.

“Now what?” Clean griped.

“I guess this wasn’t such a good idea,” said Shodo.

“No shit!” Kane remarked.

“Hey, fuck you!” Lee said. “Goddamn green beanie motherfucker! You dudes been livin’ underground suckin’ on cold beer and eatin’ pussy for the last twelve months! Who the fuck are you to tell us jack shit?”

“Cool it!” Forrest ordered. “We have to think our way out of this.”

They heard the sound of breaking glass in the center of the room and switched on their flashlights to see a dozen mason jars come dropping through a hole in the ceiling, shattering against the floor and releasing thick clouds of white gas.

“Fuck is that?!” Grip shouted, scooting away along the wall.

“Chlorine gas!” Forrest said.

“Where the fuck they get that shit?”

“Bleach and toilet bowl cleaner,” Forrest said, gathering the shemagh from about his neck and tying it over his nose and mouth. Lee’s men followed suit by tying green triangular bandages over their faces, and more jars fell through holes scattered all across the ceiling, shattering against the floor to fill the room with the poisonous gas.