Cannibal Reign (32 page)

Forty-Nine

W
ith two and a half months to go before hitting the one-year mark, the silo’s food and fuel stores stood at just over half of what they had started with—not counting the truckloads of MREs—so Forrest was pleased with their planning. There were hydroponic tomato plants growing in virtually every available space, and the twenty rats they had bred were all healthy and living in separate cages in order to keep them from reproducing before it was time.

Since agreeing to look the other way concerning Vasquez’s midnight trysts with his three girlfriends, the women seemed to be getting along even better than before. Nonetheless, Forrest didn’t believe for a moment that Maria Vasquez was the fool everyone else seemed to believe she was.

It was seven in the morning and he was in the middle of getting a shave when every alarm in the installation began to wail. He wiped his face with a towel and ducked quickly out of the shower room, running through the halls to Launch Control. “Whatta we got?”

“Serious fucking trouble,” Ulrich said, all the monitors cycling through the many camera feeds. “Multiple targets.”

Forrest took one look at the monitors and killed the claxon, grabbing the mike for the P.A. system. “All combat personnel to the LC,” he announced. “All combat personnel to the LC. This is not a drill, repeat this is not a drill. Civilian population will move to secure quarters in an orderly fashion . . . Keep calm, people. I don’t want anyone hurt.”

Emory was the first one to enter the LC, zipping her ACU jacket over her belly.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m com—”

“No way,” Forrest said. “You could have that kid at any minute.”

“Don’t shoulder me aside, Jack.”

“Then . . . take a seat and help Wayne,” he said, unlocking the weapons cabinet and strapping on his .45. “Wayne, I want all extra ammo transferred from the cargo bay to blast tunnel number two. Make it happen.”

“I’m already on it, Captain!” Vasquez said, crossing through the LC.

Ulrich tapped one of the screens, getting Emory’s attention. “This monitor is yours. I want you watching everything that goes on inside the house. Keep moving from room to room. I’ll be watching these other two to keep up with what’s going on outside.”

“Oh, shit!” she said, seeing three slovenly soldiers entering the house through the front door. “It’s the Air Force.”

Forrest exchanged glances with Ulrich. “What about ’em, Shannon?”

“We’ve already butted heads with these guys,” she said. “They were real bad news back in September. God knows what they’re like now. I wonder how they found this place.”

Sullivan and Marty arrived dressed in their combat gear, ready to perform whatever task was asked of them. Michael and the other doctors had come too. All of them were understandably disturbed by what they saw on the monitors.

“It’s that asshole, Moriarty,” Ulrich grated. “He’s back for his fucking MREs, Jack. See what getting greedy got us?”

“We don’t know it’s him, and if it is, we’ll deal with him.”

“Oh, it’s him all right,” said Marty. “I’d bet on it.”

“What do
you
know about him?”

“I heard that name when I had my run-in with them,” Marty said. “And it sounded like he was some kind of hard-ass. These people are rapists, Jack.”

“They can’t get in here, can they?” Michael asked.

“That depends,” Forrest said, concentrating on the monitors as he watched the motley outfit deploying around the grounds and into the house. He was trying to get a head count.

“Depends on what?” Michael said. “You said nobody could get down here.”

“These assholes are military,” Ulrich said. “If they’ve got the right shit, they can blow their way in.”

“Oh, great!”

“Mike, if you’re going to start, you’ll have to leave,” Forrest said. “Looks like about a hundred men. I count ten transports, five trailers . . . couple Humvees. Three fuel trucks.”

“If that’s all they’ve got left,” Emory said, “they’ve lost a hell of a lot of people.”

“Yeah, well, eating your own can have that effect.”

“Is it time we started thinking about the Broken Arrow?” Ulrich said.

“No,” Forrest said, still studying the monitors. “We can only dance that dance once. I’d rather give up the number one blast door first. But keep an eye on those assholes by the trucks. Tell me if they unload any ordnance.”

“What’s a Broken Arrow?” Michael wanted to know.

“Sean, Price,” Forrest said, ignoring the question. “Would you see to the women and children? I’ll keep you appraised.”

“Let us know if you need us to pick up a rifle,” West said.

“We’re a long way from having to arm the medical staff, Sean. Sullivan, you and Marty help Oscar and Linus in the loading bay. They’ll need help prepping the vehicles for emergency evac.”

“Sir!” Sullivan said, turning on his heel and taking Marty with him.

“Before you go, gentlemen . . . what you see in the bay is to remain top secret, is that understood?”

“Sir!”

“Okay, Major Moriarty,” Forrest said, turning back to the monitors. “What’s on your mind?”

“See these cases here?” Ulrich said, tapping the monitor where a pair of airmen were unloading some large green cases from the back of a deuce-and-a-half. “Those are M-92s, shaped demolition charges. They can use them to blow the blast doors out of their casements.”

“I wasn’t counting on us going up against professional demolitions people.”

“Well, you invited their asses, Jack. Makes it tough to avoid.”

“Hey, Wayne, do me a favor and pop the top on an ice-cold bottle of shut-the-fuck-up, will ya?”

Emory snickered.

“Okay, pregnant warrior,” Forrest said, moving around behind her chair and putting his hands on her shoulders as he watched the screens. “How were these assholes disposed when you went up against them before?”

“They had an attack chopper, but we shot that down,” she said, drawing a look from Ulrich. “Seriously . . . and they had at least one tank and plenty of small arms. That’s all we really saw in terms of armament, and this is only a fraction of the transport they had.”

“Discipline?”

She shrugged. “Lax at best.”

“All right. Then we can assume it hasn’t gotten any better.”

“Maybe if we offer them some soap and razor blades they’ll go away,” Michael remarked.

“Wouldn’t count on that,” chuckled Emory.

“What’s this here?” Forrest said, touching the monitor. “Looks like a cage built over the back of this deuce-and-a-half? Are those men locked inside?”

“They’re livestock,” she said.

“Jesus,” Michael muttered, folding his arms and watching Forrest very closely.

When Kane finally entered Launch Control, Forrest looked expectantly in his direction. “We set?”

“All set,” Kane said, wiping his hands with an oily rag.

“Looks like we’d better be,” Forrest said. “These pricks here are unloading shaped charges.”

Kane shrugged it off. “They’ll only get the number one door. We’ll still have numbers two and three after that.”

“How do you know they’ll only get one door?” Michael wanted to know.

“Would you knowingly walk into a goddamn blast furnace?”

“Blast furnace?”

“We got our own dragon lives in this cave,” Kane said. “You didn’t know that?”

“Um, guys?” Emory said, looking into her lap. “I think my water just broke.”

“What water?” Ulrich turned around. “Oh,
that
water!”

Forrest looked at Emory and laughed. “You can tell it’s Wayne’s kid, with the shitty timing.”

“Hey, fuck you, Jack. It’s not ‘my kid.’ ”

“It will be pretty fucking soon,” Emory said, taking Michael’s hand as she stood up from the chair. “Good luck with the battle, guys.”

Michael walked her down the hall to Medical.

Sean West was in the process of packing an emergency med kit in case they were forced to evacuate the facility when he looked up to see that Emory’s fatigue pants were wet. “Stress of the moment?” he said with a smile.

“Musta been,” she said. “I started having contractions the second I stood up.”

“Help her onto the bed, Michael. And go find Price, will you?”

“Get Erin too,” Emory called. “And be sure to tell Marty!” She took off her jacket and lay on her side while West went about preparing a semisterile environment. “Hey, Doc, do you have any of those silver suicide things?”

He turned around. “How do you know about those?”

“I don’t think anything’s a secret down here, Doc.”

A shadow crossed his brow. “What do you want one for?”

“Well, if those bastards get in here anytime soon, I won’t be any good for fighting
or
evacuating.”

“I’ll be taking care of you. Don’t worry.”

“No offense, Doc, but I’ve seen things go to shit way too fast in this current reality. I’d feel a lot better if I had one of those things in my jacket pocket right here by the bed.”

He stood looking at her, knowing she was right about the fluidity of battle. He opened a cabinet, took a titanium vial not much larger than a tube of chapstick from a steel box, walked over and put it into her jacket pocket. “Once this siege has lifted, I want it back. They’re too dangerous to have floating around down here with the kids.”

“No problem.”

Erin arrived and sat down on the edge of the bed with Emory, taking her hand. “How do you feel, honey?”

“Pissed. I’m supposed to be getting ready for a fight, but I’m in here having a fuckin’ kid.”

“Do you still feel like you want me to—”

“Erin, don’t even
try
getting out of this!”

Erin kissed her hand, suddenly overcome by emotion. “There’s no greater gift one woman can give another.”

“Bullshit,” Emory said, already bored with Erin’s sentimentality. “I can think of a few things right off the bat.”

“Like what?” Erin asked.

“Some good head, for one thing.”

West laughed out loud.

“You’re terrible!” Erin said. “You sound like Wayne.”

“Must be why he and I get along so good.”

B
ack in Launch Control, Forrest and the others stood watching as Moriarty walked into the house with a meter-long plastic tube under his arm, strolling into the kitchen like General Patton as he removed his gloves. They recognized him even with the beard as he faced the tiny fiber-optic camera hidden in the smoke detector on the kitchen wall. The fact that the kitchen table was stained dark with blood didn’t seem to bother him as he pulled a rolled-up blueprint from the tube and rolled it out on the table.

“Oh, that’s just fucking great!” Ulrich said, sitting back in the chair.

“What is that?” Michael asked.

“It’s a schematic of this facility,” Forrest said quietly. “The Air Force must have still had it on file locally.”

“That means we’re in big trouble, right? Won’t they go right to the lift elevator and blow their way through?”

“No,” Forrest said. “And if even they do, they’ve still got a pair of blast doors to get through—
if
they get past us in the cargo bay.”

Ulrich turned around in the chair and looked up at him. “Would you care to tell me what makes you so fucking sure he won’t go straight to the lift elevator?”

Forrest took a moment to light up a cigarette with his brass Zippo before replying. “Why would he look for something he doesn’t know about?”

“He’s got the goddamn schematic right there on the table, Jack!”

“He has the
original
schematic,” Forrest said. “See, I do my research, Stumpy. Only two Titan installations were given lift elevators. This one and another one clear the fuck up in North Dakota some place. And
our
lift elevator wasn’t added to this installation until two years after it went online. Hence . . . jerkoff up there knows nothing about it.”

Fifty

M
oriarty stood looking over the schematic, scratching at himself as Lieutenant Ford came into the kitchen with a couple of men. “This house obviously wasn’t part of the original plan, lieutenant. So the main blast door must be located beneath it. You two, go down and check the basement.”

Ford waited until the men were gone. “Are you worried about a booby trap?”

“Better safe than sorry,” Moriarty said with a shrug, again digging at his crotch.

The men returned unharmed and said the entrance to the silo was indeed located in the basement and that it was sealed shut.

“Told you,” Moriarty said quietly, rolling up the schematic. “It’s sealed, which means our Green Beret friends are still down there eating our food. Mark my words, Lieutenant. Before this is over, I am personally going to feed that smartass Captain Forrest his fucking liver.

“Sergeant Yoshinaka!” he said, stepping into the living room. “Are you ready to blow the doors off this beast?”

“They’re bringing up the charges now, Major,” answered a Japanese-American male with three dingy blue chevrons on his arms.

“And you’re sure you can do this?”

“These shaped charges were designed for exactly this kind of work, Major. Don’t worry. Three big bangs and this place is ours.”

“You’d better know what you’re talking about,” Moriarty said. “Because those six wretches out in that truck are the last of the livestock. After them, we’ll have to eat the women, and that won’t go over well with the men.”

“I still think we should send a foraging patrol ahead into Lincoln,” Ford said.

“No,” Moriarty said. “We can’t afford to risk losing any more men. Find the air shafts. There are two of them on the west side of the compound. Pour diesel oil down them and light them up. It’s time to let these jokers know we’re here.”

Moriarty and his remaining men had spent the last three months in North Platte rooting out the survivors there and scraping by on whatever scraps they could find, but the cities were becoming less fruitful as the months passed due to competitor armies, and their own force had been considerably worn down by attrition through combat, disease, and starvation. They were down to a hundred men, which was a large force to feed but not large enough so they could afford too many more firefights with rival groups. They were also starting to run low on ammunition.

Moriarty placed a great deal of hope in this installation and what they might gain by taking it. If he didn’t find a way to feed and reequip his men within the next couple of weeks, they would soon cease to exist as an effective fighting force. He followed Sergeant Yoshinaka and his men into the basement and watched them attaching the linear-shaped charges of composition C-4 to the concrete casement around blast door number one.

The charges were each three feet long with an aluminum V-shaped liner. The opening of the V would be placed against the concrete, which upon detonation would project a superheated explosion in one continuous, bladelike jet deep into the concrete, searing through the steel locking pins within the casement and breaching the underground fortress’s first line of defense.

Lieutenant Ford came down the stairs knocking the dirty snow from his boots against a support pole in the center of the room. “We just lit up the air shafts,” he said, batting the snow from his trouser legs. “And the exhaust fans kicked right on, so they’re definitely down there!”

“And they’re shitting their pants,” Moriarty said with a smile. “All this time they’ve been down there thinking they had life by the ass. But it’s like General Patton once said, Lieutenant: ‘Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.’ ”

When Yoshinaka was finished setting the charges, the three of them went upstairs and outside into the hip-deep snow where thick black smoke poured out of both ventilator shafts. Crouching in the back of one of the trucks, Yoshinaka attached the wires to the detonator.

“Ready, Major?”

“Blow that fucker, Sergeant.”

“Fire in the hole!” Yoshinaka shouted, and pressed the button.

They felt a shock tremor beneath their feet, and a deep boom came from inside the house. The windows did not blow out, however, since Yoshinaka had instructed his men to leave the front and back doors open to neutralize the pressure wave.

“Is that it?” Moriarty asked, having expected an earth-shattering
kaboom
.

“That’s it,” Yoshinaka said, hopping down from the truck.

“First squad!” Moriarty shouted. “Move up!”

Twelve men with rifles went running into the house, and Moriarty followed, waiting for them to make sure the enemy wasn’t coming out to fight.

Even with the dust still settling in the basement, he could plainly see that the steel door had been effectively blasted loose of the concrete casement. A number of men grabbed hold of the door and with gut-wrenching effort managed to pull it over onto the basement floor, where it landed very hard against the cement.

Moriarty shined his flashlight down the tunnel to blast door number two. “Beyond that door, gentlemen, is a stairwell leading down three stories. And that’s where we’ll find the door to the main complex.”

“Think maybe they got some women in there, Major?” asked one of the men.

“They’re stupid if they don’t, son,” Moriarty said, clapping the twenty-year-old on the shoulder. “Now clear the room and two of you go lug another case of charges down here.”

“What sort of defense you think they’ve lined up in there?” Yoshinaka wondered.

“They can line up whatever they want,” Moriarty said arrogantly. “Once we put the damn flamethrower to work in their tunnels, they’ll be screaming to capitulate. Trust me, Sergeant. This is shock and awe at its finest. We’ll go through these assholes like shit through a goose.”

Two men returned with a case of explosives and carried it down the tunnel to the second door.

“I’ll be outside with Lieutenant Ford,” Moriarty called down the tunnel. “All this dust is choking me.”

“Won’t be long,” Yoshinaka called back, going right to work unwrapping the explosives. He handed a flashlight to one of the men. “Hold this light, Sims, so I can see what the hell I’m doing here.”

The soldier beside Sims stood ready to fire should someone attempt to open the blast door from the other side. None of them noticed the small fiber-optic camera watching them through a tiny hole in the concrete above the door, but after a few seconds Sims heard a strange hissing sound in the ceiling right above his head.

“What’s that noise, Sarge?”

Yoshinaka looked up. “I don’t—
Run!
”

The three men dashed for the exit, but they didn’t make it. Six jets of flaming, pressurized gasoline shot down from six recessed holes in the ceiling, engulfing the entire tunnel in a scorching pyroclastic cloud of roiling black-orange flame, burning lava-hot to fry the meat from their bones. The charges exploded a few seconds later, the blast expelling the burning bodies from the tunnel.

“What the fuck was that?” Ford gasped outside on the porch, looking to Moriarty for the answer.

“Christ, Yoshinaka must have blown himself up!”

They took three men into the house, cautiously shining their lights down the basement stairs to see that it was filled with black smoke, smelling the stench of broiled flesh mixing with the smell of burnt gasoline.

“That’s the end of Yoshinaka,” Ford said grimly. “At least we’ve still got Edelstein to set the charges.”

“How did he fuck up?” Moriarty wondered. “C-4 is extremely stable.”

“Maybe somebody inside opened the door and tossed in a grenade.”

“No, that’s not cordite you smell,” Moriarty said. “That’s burnt gasoline. Something’s not fucking right here.”

They waited an hour for the smoke to clear, and then five of them went down into the basement with their flashlights and pistols in hand, seeing the three mutilated bodies piled against the far wall.

Moriarty shined his light down the tunnel and saw that the blast door was still intact. “Zeek, get in there and check that door. See if it’s been damaged at all.”

The young airman walked cautiously down the tunnel to the door and gave it a kick, but the hatch was as solid as a mountain. “It’s undamaged,” he called back. “Didn’t even scratch it!”

When Zeek was halfway back, the jets of flame blasted down into the tunnel again, engulfing him in another roiling ball of orange flame.

“Holy Jesus!” Moriarty screamed, dancing backward to escape the intense heat.

Ford jumped away too, but not before his left arm and back caught fire. He screamed and flailed around like a madman until Moriarty and the other airman managed to knock him down, using their jackets to beat out the flames. But by then Ford had suffered third-degree burns to both his back and shoulder.

“Medic!” Moriarty screamed up the stairs. “Somebody get the medic down here!”

They hauled the screaming Ford out into the snow and laid him down. The icy cold helped to deaden the pain, but it wouldn’t do much to prevent the inevitable infection the man was going to contract.

“Don’t let them eat me!” Ford was howling, clutching at Moriarty’s jacket, his face black and burned. “Don’t let the men eat me, Ben! Please!”

“Nobody’s going to eat you,” Moriarty said. “Morphine! Get this man some goddamn morphine!”

The medic shot him up with a dose of morphine, and they carried him off moaning to one of the trucks. “He won’t survive for very long with those burns,” the medic told Moriarty. “How much more morphine do you want me to waste on him?”

“Spread the word around,” Moriarty said quietly. “Let the men decide. If it sounds like they want to let him die, bleed him out. Be less of a mess for the butcher that way.

“Sergeant Jeffries!” he shouted, turning around. “Congratulations. You’re a mustang lieutenant.”

“Thank you, sir!” said a broad-shouldered man of twenty-five.

“Put two men on guard inside at the basement door then meet me in the command trailer. Do
not
let them go into the basement!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Edelstein, come with me. We have a puzzle to solve, you and I.” They went to the command trailer, where Moriarty dropped into a chair. The interior of the trailer was warm because they still had fuel for their generators, but it smelled like a pigsty. A bevy of malnourished women sat huddled together at the back of the trailer on the floor with their hands shackled behind their backs.

Moriarty told Edelstein exactly what had taken place in the basement. “So tell me this,” he said. “How do they know when to squeeze the trigger on us?”

Edelstein lifted his eyebrows. “That’s a good question.”

“That’s the key question,” Moriarty said. “Because if we can’t disable those flame throwers we’re never getting in.” He smashed his fist against the table. “Bastards think they’re pretty smart. Probably down there laughing their asses off.”

“Cameras,” Edelstein said suddenly. “Maybe they’re watching us.”

The obviousness of the idea hit Moriarty like a truck. “Son of a bitch!” he hissed. “I never even considered that possibility. My brain must be addled.”

“It’s the lack of nutrition,” Edelstein said. “It’s affecting us all, Major.”

“Get out there and tell the men to tear that house apart. If they do find cameras, I don’t want them destroyed. I want them covered with tape. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

When Edelstein was gone, Moriarty walked to the back of the trailer, squatting to look the women over, his face pitiless and his eyes flat like those of a reptile. “Now which one of you ladies wants to improve my mood?”