Cannibal Reign (4 page)

Five

V
eronica sat up in bed and turned on the light. It was two o’clock in the morning. “Michael, wake up.”

Her boyfriend rolled over and squinted against the lamp light. “What’s wrong?”

“I need to talk to you about something.”

He twisted onto his side. “Okay,” he said sleepily.

“On the way back from Crissy’s I met this guy at a truck stop in Nebraska,” she said. “And he . . . well, long story short, he told me that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth in like eighty days or something and that he and some friends of his are going to try to save a bunch of women and children. I think they may’ve bought one of those old missile silos the government’s been selling.”

Michael’s face split into a grin. “Let me guess, he invited you to help him repopulate the Earth.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

He chuckled and rolled back over. “That story could have waited until breakfast. The man is obviously a paranoid delusional.”

She sat looking at him, a sinking feeling in her stomach. She wasn’t particularly close to her sister, but Michael had a large extended family and they were very close.

“You don’t want to hear what else he said?”

“Not particularly,” he mumbled. “I talk to crazy people all day, honey.”

“He was very convincing.”

“Paranoids often are.”

“He said that I could only bring you. No one else. Which means you’d have to leave your family.”

He turned back over. “Are you telling me you’re actually taking this goof seriously? Veronica, tell me you’re not.”

She sat looking at him, unblinking.

“Veronica, come on.”

“He said he had a friend at the Pentagon who broke a bunch of laws even telling him about it.”

“Now, hold on a second,” he said, popping himself up on an elbow. “Since when do you suffer fools so lightly?”

“I like to think I never do.”

“Then what’s different about this one?”

She shrugged. “Like I said, he was very convincing.”

Her body language was such that Michael had a sudden realization. “You were attracted to him.” His tone was not quite accusatory.

“I wouldn’t say that. But there was a very definite confidence about him.”

“Which is another way of saying what I just said.”

“I don’t think that’s fair, Michael. And so what if I was? You see women all the time you’re attracted to.”

“But it’s not the same,” he countered. “Men are chemically predisposed to chase after the opposite sex. For women it’s different, it’s cognitive.”

“Oh, I’m so tired of that bullshit argument! Every time I catch you looking at another woman, it’s the same crap.”

He frowned, feeling only slightly guilty for not being able to help himself. “All I’m saying is that you were affected on an intellectual level.”

“And don’t you dare psychoanalyze me. I hate it when you do that.”

He sighed and lay back, looking at the ceiling. “So have you talked to him since?”

“No. Are you going to listen to the story or not?”

He propped himself back up and smiled at her. “I’m all ears.”

When she was finished, he took her hand and held it. “You’re telling me you honestly believed all that?”

“I’m telling you that he was very convincing, and I don’t appreciate being patronized.”

“I’m not patronizing you. How’s this . . . In the morning we’ll Google the number and see what comes up.”

“I’ve already done that, as a matter of fact, and nothing came up on that specific number, but I did discover that it’s the same exact area code and prefix as the goddamn Pentagon.”

A shadow crossed his brow. “Okay, that’s odd,” he admitted, “but it doesn’t mean that’s really his number.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” she said, rolling out of bed.

“Honey, it’s two
A.M.
”

“He won’t care if he’s the sort of guy I read him to be,” she said. “And if he was lying, so what if I wake him up?”

“But suppose you get the Pentagon?”

“Oops, wrong number!”

She fished the receipt from her purse and punched the number into her cell phone.

Then she pressed the send button and put the phone on speaker so Michael could hear.

“Hello!” Forrest answered in a shout. There was some sort of drill motor grinding away in the background.

“Is this Jack?” she asked, almost ashamed of the relief she’d felt upon hearing his voice.

“Yeah, who’s speaking?”

“It’s the woman from the truck stop.”

“Veronica?”

“Yeah. How did you— Oh, you must’ve seen my plate.”

“Hey, Linus,” Forrest said to someone in the background. “Shut that fucking thing off a minute, I can’t hear this girl. It sounds like the meteor may have gone public. Okay, Veronica, go ahead. Have they gone public already?”

She gave Michael a gotcha look, and he sat up a little straighter in bed. “No, Jack. No, they haven’t gone public. At least not that I know of.”

“Is something wrong, then?”

“Well, sort of,” she replied. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk with Michael, my boyfriend. He doesn’t believe your story.”

Forrest laughed out loud. “Did you really expect him to? Put me on speaker.”

“You already are.”

“Okay, great. Mike, you there, man?”

“Yeah,” Michael said.

“Listen, I’m sorry. The story was bullshit. I was just trying to get in her pants. You know how guys are.”

“Yeah, I know how they are,” Michael muttered.

Veronica turned off the speaker and put the phone to her ear. “You son of a bitch! You tell him what you told me, goddamnit! Don’t make me look like an idiot!”

“Am I still on speaker?”

“No!”

“Veronica, listen to me.” She sat in bed and leaned over so Michael could listen in. “Put yourself in his situation. The story’s going to break soon enough. When it does, call me back.”

“What was that drilling sound when you first answered?” she asked, hoping to garner some more telling information.

“Oh, that . . . well, we’re busy with lots of arts and crafts right now.” They could hear laughter in the background. “Listen, Veronica, I gotta go. Call me if you hear something.”

“But wait!” she said. “What if it never goes public? What then?”

“Then I was obviously lying to you.”

“No! I’m sorry but you’ve all but convinced me, so you’re going to have to live up to the offer.”

Michael gave her a look.

She could hear the sound of Forrest’s Zippo lighter clicking open and then closed as he lit a cigarette.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell you what. If it never goes public, I’ll call you back at this number two days before the event, how’s that?”

“Do you promise?”

“What the hell would a promise mean, Veronica? You don’t even know me. Now try and get some sleep.”

Forrest broke the connection.

“See?” she said, throwing the phone down between them in the counterpane. “See what I was talking about? Does he sound remotely nuts to you?”

Michael sat looking at her, realizing with mixed emotions that she had already made some kind of a connection with this mysterious Jack, who very definitely had a certain unmistakable
je ne sais quoi
about him even over the phone. “I’ll admit that he seems to believe what he’s saying. Beyond that . . . all we can do is wait and see.”

“What do you think they were drilling?” she wondered, settling beneath the blankets. “You have to admit it’s pretty late at night to be up working, and it’s an hour later in Nebraska.”

He chuckled as he reached across her to turn off the lamp. “For all we know, Ronny, the guy was drilling his way out of a prison cell in Guatemala.”

Six

A
fter an exhausting round trip to northern Montana to visit his estranged wife, Monica, Forrest arrived back at the silo a day later, tense and strung out on amphetamines. He pulled up to a modest two-story house that had once been used to house Air Force personnel during the Cold War. The house had been built over the top of the silo entrance to better disguise it from Soviet satellites.

Ulrich stood on the porch of the house watching as a giant black German shepherd jumped out of the Humvee and ran across the yard to pee on a fifty gallon drum of diesel oil that was yet to be taken below.

“We running a kennel service now?”

Forrest gave no indication he’d heard Ulrich’s dig as he went about unloading the back of the Hummer, stacking fifty-foot bundles of NM-B type wire and five-gallon buckets of latex paint neatly off to the side. Ulrich came down the stairs and over to the truck.

“You expecting burglars or something? That’s another mouth to feed.”

Forrest stopped and looked at him in the light of the cab. “Are you intentionally being an asshole or do you really not recognize him?”

Ulrich turned for another look at the German shepherd. “You’ve been all the way to Montana and back? Jesus, you must’ve driven nonstop both ways.”

“Yeah, well, Benzedrine’s a wonderful thing,” Forrest muttered, grabbing up two buckets of paint as if they weighed little more than a pair of barracks bags and heading for the house.

Because of his prosthetic foot, Ulrich grabbed a single bucket and followed him. They set the buckets down in the hall and went into the kitchen, where Forrest took a couple of beers from the fridge, knocking the caps off against the edge of the counter and handing one to Ulrich.

Forrest gestured at the dog with the bottle. “He eats a fifty-pound bag of dog food a month.” He took a pull from the beer. “So we’ll need at least twenty-four bags. And be sure to get Purina. Don’t buy any of that generic shit. And get a bunch of those Milk Bones too. Fifty boxes or so.”

“That’s like six hundred pounds of dog shit somebody’s gonna have to scoop up, and it sure as hell won’t be me,” Ulrich said.

“Nobody’s asking you to,” Forrest replied testily.

Ulrich glanced over his shoulder as the dog trotted through the house sniffing everything in sight. “How did you talk Monica into giving him up?”

“I didn’t talk her into anything. She asked me if I wanted to save my son’s dog and I said yes. Now, are you gonna pick up the food or do I have to go get it myself?”

Linus Danzig stepped into the doorway and stood looking at the wolflike dog trotting around the kitchen. He was a big country boy in his late twenties, wearing nothing but a pair of purple underwear.

“Fuck are you made up for?” Forrest asked irritably.

Danzig shook his head and disappeared back down the hall, realizing Forrest was in one of his moods.

Ulrich drank deeply from the beer and had a seat. “Wanna tell me about it?” He put his feet up on the table.

“Nothin’ to tell,” Forrest said, ripping the cellophane from a brand new pack of Camels. “She don’t wanna live underground and she ain’t gonna, but then I already knew that.” He smacked a cigarette from the pack, lit it with the Zippo from his pocket and stood leaning against the sink staring at the floor.

“I can help you kidnap her,” Ulrich said quietly.

Forrest looked at him, his eyes welling with tears. “I’d never do that to her. She’d kill herself belowground the first chance she got. Hell, if it wasn’t for her horses, she’d have done it by now.”

Ulrich sighed and rocked back, the wooden chair creaking beneath the strain. “There’s a lot that’s unsaid, Jack, but you know I think the world of that woman.”

Forrest nodded, drawing pensively from the cigarette. “She’s just so . . . full of anger, Wayne. She never shows it but it’s there, right below the surface . . . Christ, that woman’s angry.”

“And she has every right. You guys lost your son. And who knows? Maybe if I hadn’t talked you into that last mission—”

Forrest held up a finger, banishing the thought. “You never talked me into anything I didn’t wanna do. Monica knows that. She’s no more angry with you than she is me. Who she’s really pissed at is him.” He pointed up at the ceiling.

Ulrich looked at his boots. “Wanna cash it in?” he said suddenly. “We can give the silo to the trio and go to Montana. Erin will agree to it, Taylor too probably. Hell, those women were all thick as thieves at one time . . . and they miss Monica.”

Forrest smiled wanly at his friend, knowing the offer was genuine. “Even if Monica wanted the company—which she doesn’t—there’s no way I’m letting any of your wives die if I don’t have to. One’s enough.” He crushed out the cigarette in the sink. “I’m gonna go bring the rest of that shit in. I picked up some new office chairs too, by the way, since that request seems to have gone in one ear and out the other.”

“Yeah, I don’t have enough shit to buy without having to worry about your creature comforts.”

“And there’s a lot of assembly required,” Forrest added with a chuckle, “so get the Dynamic Duo to put ’em together in the morning.” He took Laddie outside with him, and the moment he was gone, Danzig reappeared in the kitchen doorway with Oscar Vasquez. Marcus Kane was asleep in the silo below.

“Is he okay?” Danzig asked.

Ulrich tipped his beer and looked at them. “You know who’s gonna have to police up all that dog shit, don’t you? He sure as hell isn’t gonna do it.”

Vasquez grinned. “And that dog’s shit is gonna be
biiig
,
vato.
”

Danzig laughed, both of them cracking up at the look appearing on Ulrich’s face.

“Since you two dickheads are up,” he said, dropping his feet to the floor, “we just got some new office chairs that need—”

Both Danzig and Vasquez vanished instantly.

“That’s what I thought!” he called after them, taking another swig and muttering to himself. “Just what we need, the lingering odor of dog shit in those tunnels.”

Seven

H
arold Shipman came down the hall outside of his office at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to find Ester Thorn seated in a chair against the wall, her hand propped on her cane, overnight bag on the floor beside her. “Ester?” he said. “My God, what a surprise! How have you been?”

Ester took his hand and used her cane to push herself to her feet. “I’ve been well enough,” she said grimly, tired from her long flight over the Pacific. “But I’m afraid I come as a harbinger of bad things to come, Harold. May we talk privately?”

“Yes, of course,” Shipman said, puzzled but amused to see that Ester had barely changed since the last time he’d seen her nearly ten years before, when she was his senior at the observatory. “You should’ve called, Ester. I could have made arrangements.”

“There’s time enough for arrangements,” she muttered, watching him put his key into the door.

Shipman took up her bag and allowed her to precede him into the cluttered office that had once been hers, inviting her to sit across from him in one of the two chairs before his desk.

“So what in the world brings you all this way?” he asked.

“Thor’s Hammer,” she said, her old gray eyes unblinking as she allowed the silence to gather.

Shipman did not immediately respond, although he knew exactly what Ester meant, remembering well her vehement assertions that the industrialized governments of the world ignored the dangers of near Earth objects at the peril of all humankind. “Yes,” he said. “Well, it’s still out there somewhere, we all know that, but I’m afraid with all of the cutbacks and—”

“Would you like to see it, Harold?”

He went slack in the jaw. “Excuse me?”

“It’s coming out of Ursa Minor,” she said, referring to the northernmost constellation, often referred to as the Little Dipper.

Shipman turned in his chair, grabbing a chart of the heavens from a nearby table piled high with charts and texts. “Who’s spotted it?”

“A young astronomer from Mesa Station. Martin Chittenden. Ever heard of him?”

“I recognize the name,” he said, flipping through the chart. “I think I may have read something of his a while back in
Astronomy Today
. Something on deep space asteroids. Lots of conjecture. If I remember correctly, he thinks we’re not paying enough attention to empty space.”

“Turns out we haven’t been,” she said, her expression tightening along with the grip on her cane.

“Ester, what’s going on? Are you telling me we’re actually going to be hit?”

“We’ve got about eighty days to impact.”

“Eighty days? How big is it?”

“Three point two kilometers.”

“My God!”

“And it’s coming at us so fast it’ll make your eyeballs roll.”

“But that just can’t be,” he said, scanning the same chart he’d seen thousands of times. “There’s nothing out there, Ester. You know that.”

“It’s coming from the Great Beyond, and it’s maybe as old as the Earth.”

He turned the chart on the desk for her to see. “Show me where.”

She used the tip of her cane to indicate the northernmost star in the sky. “The brightness of Polaris has probably helped to keep it hidden all these years. Like the Red Baron coming out of the sun.”

“Thor’s Hammer,” he muttered. “I take it you’ve seen this creature for yourself?”

She shook her head.

“Well, then how do you know it’s even—”

“The night he came to ask for my help in taking it public, he was abducted from my front lawn by two federal agents. They shot the boy in the back with a Taser gun, Harold.”

“They’re trying to keep it a secret, for Christ’s sake? It’ll never work!”

“That’s not stopping the cowardly bastards from trying.”

“Well, we sure as hell won’t stand for that,” Shipman said. “Not if this fellow knows what the devil he’s talking about. I’ll turn the dome tonight and we’ll just have a look for ourselves. Though it could take weeks to come up with an orbital model that will prove our case.”

“All we need are preliminary estimates,” Ester said. “And those we can come up with in a few days, enough to get everyone on Earth with a telescope looking toward Polaris. Getting word out isn’t going to be the problem. The problem will be in prepping these islands.”

“Prepping the Hawaiians? For tsunamis? Where does Chittenden think it will hit?”

“North America. He’s seems fairly certain of that. So it’s not so much a tsunami of water I’m worried about. Once word gets out that the mainland is under the gun . . .”

“People will flock here by the thousands. We’ll be overrun,” Shipman concluded.

“That’s right. So I think we need to get the governor’s ear as quickly as possible. Do you know anyone in the local government?”

“I play golf with the mayor of Honolulu.”

“Perfect. I think it’s important that the Islands prepare to quarantine themselves. That might take some convincing at first, but once the insanity begins . . .” She shrugged. “Desperate times seem to precipitate their own desperate measures.”

“This explains a few things,” he muttered, sitting back in his chair and taking his pipe from a side drawer. “NASA’s been cutting funding across the board and suggesting all sorts of odd things for everyone to look at out there. Even the GLAST telescope has been kept aimed in almost the opposite direction over the past five months or so.”

“During my flight I was wondering about that new satellite program that was fast-tracked out of nowhere. The timing is too close. It has to be related. I’m even doubting they’re satellites.”

“You think they’re trying for a shoot-down?”

Ester sucked her teeth. “It’s all we’ve got, isn’t it?”

Shipman shook his head, saying, “At two miles across, it won’t work unless this thing’s made of butter. What class is it? Did Chittenden say?”

“M-class.”

“Well let’s hope he’s wrong, by God. Ester, you sure know how to wreck an old man’s day.”

“Oh, you’re not even sixty yet,” she said. “And look at it this way . . . neither of us has to worry about ending up in diapers now.”

He tossed the chart back onto the table. “I’d also like to bring Sam Ash in on this. He knows a lot of people in cable news. That might expedite things once we’ve got some orbital models to offer.”

“We have to keep this an absolute secret until we announce. And here’s something else . . . when we do announce, we have to be ready to counter the skeptics and naysayers—all those same idiots who are still denying global warming.”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll do our research, and then we’ll get in touch with Sam. He’s here on the island.”

“The situation will deteriorate rapidly after impact,” Ester went on. “First, it will be every state for itself. Then every city, every neighborhood, every block, and finally every man, woman, and child. This country’s headed back to the Stone Age, Harold, and nothing can stop it.”

“I’m afraid our immediate problems here will be of a somewhat different nature.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, Pearl Harbor is home to the United States Pacific Fleet. That’s a lot of permanently displaced sailors and marines. Who controls them after Washington goes out of business? What will the Admiralty decide to do about these islands? We could all too easily become a military state here.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “Obviously, the Navy possesses the facility to be either our saviors or the bane of our existence.” She sat thinking for a short while. “Does President Hadrian still live here on the island?”

“He does.”

President Barry Hadrian was a former president of the United States who had retired with his wife to his home state of Hawaii after two successful terms of office. He was in his fifties now and still very well respected.

“Perhaps your friend the mayor can talk to him,” Ester suggested. “I doubt either of them would like to see us ruled by the military. Who’s the governor these days?”

“Paola Reyes. A flimsy politician, to say the least. I don’t see her standing up to the Navy once disaster has struck.”

“Is she particularly popular among Hawaiians?”

Shipman shrugged. “Fifty-fifty. She goes where the smiles go, caters heavily to the tourists and local business.”

“Then she’ll not likely be missed,” Ester decided. “But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. The first thing we have to do is establish that Chittenden’s NEO actually exists. After that we go on the offensive.”