Cannibal Moon
Ryan and Mildred took seats on flat rocks near the fire and propped up their boots, settling in for an extended rest.
At first, Junior Tibideau remained sullenly quiet. Unable to backhand away his nasal excretions, he let them trickle down his unshaved upper lip; when they spilled over onto his mouth, he spit.
Ryan and Mildred didn’t have to discuss the interrogation strategy. They both saw the same weakness in their enemy, and the same way to exploit it. When infected cannies neared death, they reaped so little energy from their food that they had to eat almost non-stop. No matter how much they ate, they were in state of perpetual near-starvation.
Junior Tibideau was a tough nut. He didn’t buckle under the psychological pressure, the anticipation of the terrible agonies to come. It took almost six hours on the post for his hunger pangs to become unen-durable. Mildred and Ryan watched him sweat, squirm, shiver head to foot; they listened as his high-pitched whimpers turned to guttural moans. And when Junior couldn’t stand it anymore, it was like a dam breaking. The cannie started talking, fast and furious, chatter-boxing like a jolt addict coming off a two-week binge.
“Do you really think this is how I dreamed of ending up when I was little?” Junior said. “Tied to a pole in a stinking cave with my shoulder shot and my belly on fire? Mebbe I deserve to die triple hard because of what I’ve done, but I had no choice. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a cannie. I woke up and I already was one. Mebbe you don’t want to believe it, but I’m as much a victim as the stupid bastards I’ve made my meat.”
Although Ryan and Mildred didn’t respond to his plea for sympathy, Junior pressed on. “That very first night, years ago,” he said, “when cannies came through our swamp, they could’ve butchered me on the spot, but they didn’t do me that favor.
“I was night fishing by myself down by the river. I’d just set my snag line when I heard them sneaking through the mangroves along the mud bank. It was too late to get away. I can’t swim a stroke. They had me sandwiched, all of them with blasters and long blades ready. I thought for sure they were going to eat me then and there. But that wasn’t what they had in mind. Turned out that they needed another hunter to fill out their crew. If I’d said no to joining the pack, they would have sundried strips of my flesh on the bushes and turned me into jerky.
“I didn’t taste human being that night, though there was plenty of eating going on. I ran with the pack, hanging back a little and watching what they did. How they hunted the tiny, shit-scrabble farms on the edges of the swamp, how they swept through the ramshackle buildings, chilling as a team. Some cannies ate way more of the bounty than others. They were the sick ones.
“I was back in my bed in my folks’ shanty before sunup, with no one the wiser. It was triple hard getting to sleep. All I could think about was running free and wild. I’d seen a different world through different eyes. I woke up feverish and dripping sweat the next morning. Through the heat of the day my whole body throbbed. It felt like it was going to explode. I just laid there on my straw and panted like a dog. The coolness of evening eased my fever but not the pressure inside me.
“At dark, when the cannies came back for me, I was shivering I was so ready to join the hunt. When they asked about easy pickings close by, I told them about a little dimmie boy I knew who lived with his pa on the other side of the swamp. I told them the dimmie was blond-haired and freckled—a couple weeks later I would’ve just called him a ‘hundred pounder.’ That’s gutted, hanging weight.
“I tricked the dimmie boy into coming out of his shack by standing at his window and calling his name real soft. He knew me from night fishing, so he didn’t suspect anything. I got him over to the edge of the woods and when his head was turned I whacked him on top of the head with a steel hatchet. I split his skull wide open with the first blow, before he could yell for help from his pa who was sitting in the shack, sipping joy juice, not fifty feet away. The dimmie was still twitching a little when me and the others dragged him deep into the thicket. We picked at his bones until dawn.
“One taste of long pig and I had to have more. I never went back home. Never saw my kin again. I’ve been on the Red Road ever since, with this pack and that.”
“Along the way looks like somebody managed to royally fuck you up,” Ryan said.
“Brother, the way you look, you must’ve pissed somebody off, too.”
Ryan shrugged.
“I got this face three years ago,” Junior said. “Dirt farmer heard our pack coming through her corn field and took her kids down in the root cellar to hide. We shot holes through the wooden door until we figured we must’ve nailed her. When I opened the hatch everything was quiet below, so I jumped down for a looksee. About then her oldest son cut loose with a black-powder handblaster. He got off one shot before I had hold of him. His pistol ball missed my head by a gnat’s ass, but the muzzle-flash caught me square in the peeper. Felt like hellfire burning into my brain. I screamed, but I didn’t let go. The others had to pry my fingers off the kid’s busted neck so they could fry him.”
“Maybe I should just go ahead and kill this filthy bastard,” Mildred said through gritted teeth.
“That’s your call,” Ryan said.
“Brother, your woman there isn’t telling you the whole story,” Junior informed him.
“About what?” Ryan said.
“The oozies.”
“Mildred, what’s he on about?”
“According to Junior, the oozies does more than chill,” she replied. “He claims it turns norms into cannies. The infection comes first, then strict cannibalism, and finally the array of debilitating symptoms leading to death.”
“Either of you ever see a norm with the oozies?” Junior added.
Ryan couldn’t say that he ever had. “Is that even possible?” he asked Mildred.
“Hypothetically, I suppose it is. If the oozie virus permanently alters the brain chemistry of its victims, it could affect sensory perception, ideation and ultimately behavior.”
“Nukin’ hell!” Ryan exclaimed as he followed that premise to its logical conclusion.
“You got it,” Mildred said. “If what Junior says is true, sooner or later, and long before I’m dead, I’ll end up just like him.”
“Not going to let that happen,” Ryan said. “No fucking way.” Rising to his feet, he unsheathed his panga. He leaned over one of the dead cannies and smeared the heavy blade with congealing blood.
“This what you want?” he asked Junior as he waved the bloody knife under his nose.
Whining, Junior craned his neck as far forward as he could. He opened his mouth wide and started to drool. The look on his face said he would have eaten his own hand if had he been able to reach it.
“Where did the oozie medicine come from?” Ryan said.
“For a lick, brother. I’ll tell you all about it for one little lick.”
“Answer the question, then mebbe I’ll give it to you.”
“Got the medicine down in the homeland. From La Golondrina.”
“What’s La Golondrina?”
“Who. She’s a who. Gimme my lick…” Junior thrust out a gray-coated tongue. Stretching. Stretching.
When Ryan pulled back the glistening panga, the cannie started to shake violently from head to foot. “Stop playing games, shitbag,” Cawdor said. “And spill it.”
“La Golondrina’s a freezie,” Junior hissed. “As far as anybody knows, she was the first case of the oozies. She came down with the sickness before the nukecaust. She was the very first cannie, too. Did some hunting on her own down in southern Siana until the predark law caught up with her. Law turned her over to the whitecoats for testing. They couldn’t cure her, and they were afraid the disease might somehow get out and spread. The legend says they put La Golondrina into some sort of deep sleep when she was in the last stages of dying. She was frozen, sort of. She woke up about a year ago, after there was some sort of malfunction. She still had the oozies, but it was too weak to chill her.”
“What’s that got to do with the medicine you took?” Ryan said.
“One drop of her precious blood keeps a hundred of us alive, brother. The word about La Golondrina’s healing power spread from pack to pack all across Deathlands. Cannies started pilgrimaging from the farthest corners to find her and be saved from the Gray Death. They’re still coming.”
Ryan turned and gave Mildred a dubious look.
“There had to be a Patient Zero, Ryan,” Mildred said with conviction. “An initial human case. If this woman survived, whether because of the freezing or thawing process, or the duration of her cryosleep, or some other unknown factor, she had to have produced antibodies to the disease. If oozie-infected blood can kill, blood with oozie antibodies can save.”
“Do you have to take the medicine more than once to be protected?” Mildred asked Junior. “Does its effect wear off over time?”
“Don’t know. I’ve only taken it the once. Four months ago. I haven’t gotten any worse.”
“It may not be a complete cure,” Mildred said. “In low concentrations, it could be just a temporary treatment, a palliative that has to be repeated to keep the final stage at bay.”
“How do we find this freezie?” Ryan asked the cannie.
Junior cackled, sensing a sudden turn of fortune. “You don’t,” he said. “Not without me to guide you.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You need me, brother. If what we did to you norms down in the valley was hell, the homeland in Siana is hell on wheels. You’ll never get close to La Golondrina without my help.”
“Let’s talk outside a minute,” Mildred told Ryan.
As they left the cave, Junior’s shrill pleas echoed against their backs. “Feed me! You promised you’d feed me!”
Squinting at the bright morning light, Mildred and Ryan stared across the wide river valley. They could see fires still burning out of control in the no-name ville.
“What happens to me is no longer the issue,” Mildred said gravely. “I don’t matter anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a much bigger problem, Ryan. Until now the oozies kept a lid on the population and spread of cannies. Until now it was one hundred percent fatal. If there’s a treatment that lifts that lid, there’s nothing to stop the disease and cannies from overrunning the continent. Every norm in Deathlands is a potential new cannie or cannie victim.”
“How can we follow a stinking bastard who’d eat his own mother if given the chance?”
“We don’t have any choice, other than hiding our heads in the sand. We’ve got to turn off the spigot once and for all, or every night is going to be like last night—or worse. We’ve got to find La Golondrina and kill her.”
“Jak’s gonna take the news about Siana triple hard,” Ryan said. “And the whole crew is gonna to be mighty unhappy if we bring Junior back alive.”
“Ville folk aren’t going to like it much, either. We have to convince them that he’s too valuable to chill.”
“Tough sell all around.”
As if to underscore his point, a familiar cry echoed in the cave behind them. “Feed me!”
“Junior won’t survive the journey unless we let him eat a little something,” Mildred said.
“Little is what he’s going to get. If we keep the bastard hungry, we keep him honest.”
Chapter Four
Naked to the waist except for her Army-issue bra, Mildred squatted beside the creek, sloshing her T-shirt in a shallow pool. She washed off the crusted vomit and gore, then wrung it out and pulled it back on, still wet and clinging. No way she could wash the smell from the inside of her nose. The cannie cave’s greasy pall of melted fat and burned flesh clung to her skin and hair, as well. Inside and out, she felt soiled, contaminated.
She inventoried her physical state with as much professional detachment as she could manage. In the wake of the forced feeding and projectile vomiting, her stomach ached like she’d swallowed, then expelled, a five-pound cannonball. There was no evidence of fever, though. According to Junior Tibideau, he had come down with symptoms overnight, after his first contact with the Siana pack. No flesh-eating on his part.
“Woke up cannie.”
An unlikely outcome, Mildred knew.
If oozie virus was inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it would take several days, perhaps even a week or two, to build up to the point where increased production of white blood cells would cause his body temperature to rise to the fever point. She also knew that brain lesions and radical changes in behavior didn’t happen suddenly in the absence of violent head trauma. Mildred concluded that Junior was flat-out lying, trying to deflect the blame for his vile actions, which were more voluntary than he wanted to let on; this in order to minimize or eliminate punishment. The wretched, weak-willed bastard didn’t want to admit that he had been so easily seduced by the cannie lifestyle.
Junior had proved himself a liar, so how could she believe him about the existence of the oozie medicine?
He wasn’t the only source of that information. The cannie with the caved-in head had bragged about it before Junior had dosed her, while they were still in complete control of the situation. So it couldn’t have been a lie calculated to keep the miserable bastards alive, or to make her a compliant member of the pack by dangling survival under her nose.
Before they left the cave, Mildred and Ryan had decided that she would have the only close contact with Junior. They couldn’t be sure how contagious the infection was; and she was already exposed to the max. Mildred checked his shoulder and found a superficial flesh wound, which she cleaned, but didn’t bother to stitch.
Then at blasterpoint they turned him loose for a couple of minutes on the dead ’uns.
It was triple hard to watch him go at it. He fed like a ravening animal on his own, downed packmate. Mildred couldn’t help but think she might be looking at her own future, and even more horrifying, the future of her companions. She had driven Junior off the charred corpse with a sharp blow of her pistol butt on the top of his head and a single, barked command. “Enough!”
She picked up her gunbelt and rose, still dripping, from the creekside.
Thirty feet upslope, Ryan guarded the cannie with his SIG-Sauer. Junior’s wrists were tied behind him. A thick, four-foot length of tree limb was thrust between his back and crooks of his arms. This served to keep the prisoner bent slightly at the waist, off balance; he couldn’t run five steps without falling on his face. Which made him much easier to handle. They didn’t have to keep him on a short leash.
Under a clear blue midday sky they continued across the Grand Ronde valley. In the distance, the ville’s dirt-and-log berm was still burning, sending up clouds of brown smoke and soot. As they neared the encampment’s perimeter, they could hear sounds of weeping, coughing and the intermittent crunch of shovels gouging the stony earth. When the blinding smoke shifted, it revealed a line of women, children and oldies digging a long communal grave in the hard-pan.
On the other side of the trench, more than twenty bodies were lined up on the ground, shoulder to shoulder. Young, old, male, female. Hacked. Shot. Incinerated. They had manned the barricades and defended the rutted lanes with their lives. Some had died trying to escape the cannie wolf packs. Mildred knew there were many more ville folk missing. On their descent of the valley, she and Ryan had come across numerous sets of tracks in the sand, twin, parallel tracks made by bootheels, the last impressions of unconscious victims as they were dragged away.
Downwind of the diggers, a wide, shallow pit belched low flame and coils of black smoke. Doused with gasoline, the heaped cannie dead were burning like garbage on a midden.
Mildred visualized ten thousand such narrow Pyrrhic victories. Adding up to an unwinable war against an implacable, ever-growing foe. After the long, valiant struggle up from the radioactive ash heap of Armageddon, it was the end of humanity’s hope. With considerable effort, she drove the awful images from her mind.
“Stop right there!” someone shouted from behind the berm. “Stop or we’ll fire!”
Blaster barrels poked over the berm’s ridge, and here and there through crude firing ports. Every sight was trained on them.
“Who you got there?”
Even at a distance Junior Tibideau’s identity was obvious from his filth, his disfigurement and his overwhelming carrion stench.
“That’s a cannie!” one of the grave-digging women cried, pointing at him with her shovel. “They caught a cannie!”
“Chill the bastard!” another woman shouted.
“Pulp his fucking head!” shrieked an oldie.
The column of gravediggers surged forward, waving shovels, clubs and pickaxes.
Mildred and Ryan drew their blasters but held fire. They had no cover. Shooting the diggers would only bring a withering response from the blasters along the berm.
For a second it looked as if they were going to be overrun and surrounded, perhaps summarily clubbed down by the mob. Then blasterfire chattered, freezing the crowd’s advance. The ville folk craned their necks to locate the source of the shooting.
J.B. stepped out of the berm gate with a smoking AKS aimed in the air. Mildred figured he had picked up the assault rifle from a dead attacker or defender. Jak, Krysty and Doc followed him with their blasters out and ready. They quickly formed ranks around Mildred, Ryan and Junior. Shoving, kicking, threatening, they made the diggers retreat toward the gate.
The companions regarded the trussed-up cannie with surprise and displeasure.
“What in dark night are you doing, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“Why he not dead?” Jak demanded, aiming his .357 revolver at Junior’s heart.
The mob cheered his question.
“Hang him high,” someone in the rear of the throng shouted.
“Skin him first,” a haggard, blood-stained woman countered.
Junior grinned nervously from around Ryan’s back.
“Let us have him,” the woman said. “Let us punish him, and no harm will come to any of you.”
“Can’t do that,” Ryan told her. “We need him alive for the time being. He’s ours. We’re not going to give him up.”
“Then you’re going to die, too, cannie lover.”
“Mebbe they’ve all gone cannie?” someone cried. “Chill ’em all!”
The crowd picked up the chant. “Chill ’em all! Chill ’em all!”
“How soon they forget,” Doc chided, sweeping the twin muzzles of his Le Mat over the crowd of mostly women, children and geriatrics. He shook his head. “This, dear friends, is an abomination.”
“We saved your rad-blasted bacon last night!” J.B. hollered at the belligerents. “Wasn’t for us there wouldn’t be one of you ungrateful bastards left!”
The truth silenced the mob for a moment.
“Too many good folks have died here, already,” Ryan told them. “Don’t make us add to it.”
“We don’t want you here no more,” an oldie brandishing a pickax informed him.
The ville folk shouted in agreement, spreading out and blocking the gate with their bodies and grave-digging tools.
“Don’t matter what you did or didn’t do for us last night,” said the haggard woman. “We can’t trust you today. Take your pet cannie and make tracks out of here. That’s all the thanks you’re going to get.”
One of the children picked up a stone and chucked it at them. Another did the same. Soon the companions were being pelted with showers of rocks, large and small.
“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. growled, touching off another clattering air burst, emptying the weapon’s 30-round magazine. The stone throwers scattered for cover. J.B. tossed the AKS aside as the companions rapidly backed out of range. There was no pursuit, no longblaster fire from the berm. The ville folk were content to see them gone.
“We have been cast out, like lepers,” Doc said.
“Like what?” J.B. said.
“The accursed, the afflicted, the unclean.”
“The misunderstood,” Mildred added.
J.B. scowled at what were to him unintelligible predark references. He turned on Ryan, scowl intact. “We want an explanation,” he said.
Mildred provided it. In clipped, emotionless terms, she described exactly what had been done to her.
The companions stood stunned as their battlemate read out her own death sentence.
Then J.B. swung his 12-gauge pump to hip height and advanced on the prisoner with murder in his eye.
Mildred blocked his path, pushing the wide barrel aside.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Couldn’t we catch it, too,” Krysty blurted, “just from being around him?”
She didn’t add, “And around you.”
She didn’t have to.
The companions were incensed, sickened, grief-stricken, but deep down Mildred knew what they were thinking.
That death walked among them.
Horrible, lingering death.
“If you could catch it that way,” Mildred said, “you’ve already got it, Krysty. We were all in the cave, in the confined space, all breathing the same contaminated air.”
“Why haven’t you chilled that unspeakable degenerate?” Doc demanded.
“Because there might be a cure, Doc,” Ryan replied. “And he’s the only one who knows where to find it.”
Mildred recounted the story to the companions. She told them about the supposed existence of the freezie Patient Zero, the putative first victim and the first survivor of the oozies. She told them about the supposed ability of La Golondrina’s blood to prolong the lives of the terminally afflicted. She didn’t have to explain the double downside of cannie longevity and the resulting spread of infection.
Because she owed nothing less than the whole truth to her friends, she also told them about the possibility that the disease and the cannie lifestyle were linked.
“Turn cannie on us?” Jak said in disbelief.
“Not if the medicine really exists,” Ryan countered at once.
“If it does exist and we can find it before the infection takes hold of me,” Mildred added, “I may have a chance. It’s my only chance.”
“Where is this Patient Zero?” Krysty said.
“Louisiana,” Ryan answered. “In what our prisoner, there, calls the cannie homeland.”
After a moment of shocked silence, the albino teen snarled a blistering curse. “Know people there,” he growled, advancing on Junior. “Left friends. Cannies take over?”
The companions had recently left Jak’s birthplace after taking down an evil baron. How quickly things changed.
“How the fuck do I know?” Junior replied in defiance.
“Only way to find out for sure is to go back, Jak,” Mildred said, putting her hand on his slim shoulder.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, my dear Ryan,” Doc said as he leaned heavily on his walking stick, “but are you and Mildred proposing that to save her we six enter the belly of this slouching beast, that we steal its greatest treasure, this life-giving serum, and to fore-stall any repetition of the threat we currently face, that we hunt down and chill the cannibals’ queen?”
“Nothing less,” the one-eyed man said. “Any objections?”
Though on its face the task seemed impossible there was none.
One by one, the companions turned toward Mildred and nodded their assent. They had long ago thrown their lots together, to do or die. They valued the lives of their comrades more than their own. A pact signed in sweat and blood. A pact of selflessness and sacrifice that served the survival of all.
“Looks like we’re gonna have to backtrack to the Hells Canyon redoubt for another mat-trans jump,” J.B. said.
The return trip was a four-day hike. But it was more than just a hard, uphill trek. Their descent along predark Highway 84 had been perilous, to say the least. Cannie snipers had taken potshots at them from the ridgetops all during the day; after dark, the flesheaters had come out in force. In beating back the cannies their third night on the road, the companions had nearly run out of ammo. If they hadn’t reached the ville berm by nightfall on the fourth day, they never would have survived.