James Axler - Cannibal Moon

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.