Cannibal Moon Read online

  * * *

  The wounded man staggered forward, then fell

  * * *

  Cheetah Luis knelt over the fallen fighter. “What happened to the others?” he demanded.

  “Cannies took them all. The living and the dead. Dragged off into the swamp…”

  “Did you see the live prisoners? Did you see them get taken away?” Ryan asked.

  The dying man nodded, but as he did so, his eyes fluttered shut and his chest stopped heaving. Ryan leaned down and grabbed the man’s chin. When he squeezed hard, the fighter opened his eyes wide.

  “Did you see a black woman and a pale-skinned man? Were they taken prisoner?”

  “Cannies took them both. Man’s in bad shape.”

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Time Nomads

  Latitude Zero

  Seedling

  Dark Carnival

  Chill Factor

  Moon Fate

  Fury’s Pilgrims

  Shockscape

  Deep Empire

  Cold Asylum

  Twilight Children

  Rider, Reaper

  Road Wars

  Trader Redux

  Genesis Echo

  Shadowfall

  Ground Zero

  Emerald Fire

  Bloodlines

  Crossways

  Keepers of the Sun

  Circle Thrice

  Eclipse at Noon

  Stoneface

  Bitter Fruit

  Skydark

  Demons of Eden

  The Mars Arena

  Watersleep

  Nightmare Passage

  Freedom Lost

  Way of the Wolf

  Dark Emblem

  Crucible of Time

  Starfall

  Encounter: Collector’s Edition

  Gemini Rising

  Gaia’s Demise

  Dark Reckoning

  Shadow World

  Pandora’s Redoubt

  Rat King

  Zero City

  Savage Armada

  Judas Strike

  Shadow Fortress

  Sunchild

  Breakthrough

  Salvation Road

  Amazon Gate

  Destiny’s Truth

  Skydark Spawn

  Damnation Road Show

  Devil Riders

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  Separation

  Death Hunt

  Shaking Earth

  Black Harvest

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Atlantis Reprise

  Labyrinth

  Strontium Swamp

  Shatter Zone

  Perdition Valley

  JAMES AXLER

  Cannibal Moon

  …Late August,

  I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where

  the moving dead still talk

  of pushing their bones against the thrust

  of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel

  or the laughing bee on a stalk

  of death.

  —Anne Sexton,

  “You, Doctor Martin” [1960]

  THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

  * * *

  This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

  There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

  But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

  Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

  Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

  J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

  Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

  Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

  Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

  Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

  In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

  * * *

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter One

  Pistol in hand, Dr. Mildred Wyeth leaped through swirling, acrid smoke. Blistering heat seared through the back of her gray T-shirt and desert camouflage BDU pants. The junked Winnebago RV behind her was swallowed up in a thirty-foot-high pillar of flame. Over the roar of the blaze and the mad crackle of blasterfire, she heard children screaming as they were dragged away.

  Cannies—as cannibals were called in Deathlands—loved babies.

  And cannies were everywhere.

  Dark, furtive shapes darted between the bonfires they had made of shanties, lean-tos, and wheelless, rusting RVs. Gunfire boomed from all sides of the ramshackle ville. Ricochets whined overhead. Somewhere in the maze of torched structures, the black woman’s five companions fought shoulder to shoulder with the ville folk, dealing death to the invaders.

  Mildred blinked her streaming eyes, every nerve straining. When the children screamed again, she zeroed in on the sound. For a split second she had a clear view of three cannies as they raced past the burning hulk of a station wagon. The two in front carried a squirming child under each arm. The cannie covering the hasty retreat clutched a remade Ruger Mini 14 rifle in both hands. Mildred snap-fired her Czech-made ZKR 551 target pistol, taking the only shot she had. She dropped the tailgunner with a single .38-caliber slug in the base of his spine. As she ran toward him, she got a last glimpse of the children’s kicking legs and bare feet, then they and their captors vanished through a break in the log-and-earth defensive berm.

  Mildred could no more wait for help from Ryan Cawdor and the others than she could will her own heart to stop beating. Unless she closed on the cannies quickly, unless she chilled them, they would escape into the night with their innocent prey.

  Howling, the flesheater she had wounded dragged himself after his fellows, clawing the dirt with both hands, trailing his paralyzed limbs behind him. Mildred jumped over his prostrate body. She didn’t bother shooting him in the head.

  A cannie wasn’t worth a second bullet.

  At the
edge of the berm, she struggled to pick up their direction of flight. Squinting hard, she could see perhaps sixty feet in front of her. The starlit world was a dim monochrome, varied shades of gray blotched with black. When she heard the faint sound of children mewling, she holstered her handblaster and broke into a run. The cannies were heading east, across the wide valley of the Grande Ronde river, probably making for a hidey-hole in the densely forested Wallowa Mountains whose craggy peaks loomed in front of her, blocking out the stars on the horizon.

  In daylight, the high desert valley was a fairly easy traverse. On a moonless night, it was like crossing a vast carpet-bombed battlefield. The depressions were deeper and the rises were higher than they looked. The impact of repeated, misjudged footfalls racked Mildred’s knee and hip joints. The sound of her own breathing roared in her ears. A burning pain stabbed her lungs, but she kept on running, full-tilt. She couldn’t see the cannies, but she could hear them ahead, crashing through the stands of brush. Burdened by their struggling prizes, the flesheaters were gradually losing their lead.

  From the darkness beyond the limit of her vision came nearly simultaneous thuds and yelps. Mildred’s fingers closed around her holstered gun butt.

  A moment later a pair of terrified little boys blundered into her path. As she reached out for them, they took to their heels, scattering to either side into the night. At least they had a chance now.

  “Run and hide!” Mildred shouted over her shoulder as she raced on.

  The fleeing cannies had each jettisoned a child to lighten the load and make better time. Carrying one small victim each, they quickly pulled away from her, their footfalls growing fainter and fainter. They weren’t circling or splitting up, trying to throw her off the trail or to catch her in an ambush. Afraid of losing their way in the dark, they were beelining for the foothills. The only signposts were the stars overhead. Mildred guessed they had picked a constellation on the horizon and were running toward it. She did the same, determined to play out the hand she had been dealt, but with fast-fading hope. Ahead was a vast maze of potential escape routes.

  The extreme northeast corner of Oregon had avoided the leading edge of Armageddon, the all-out U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange of January 21, 2001. There had been no military installations or population centers to attract the nuke-clusters of Russian MIRVs. Since the mountainous, heavily forested area was three hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, it had also dodged the great tsunamis, spawned by worldwide thermonuclear detonations that had devastated the coastline. Northeastern Oregon had drawn a pass for everything but the earthquakes and a terrible firestorm that had swept through mountains and valley, burning out the little towns in its path; and of course the nuke winter that had gripped the entire planet. Even before the end of civilization it had been a rugged place, thinly colonized.

  A little farther to the east, the landscape got even tougher.

  One hundred miles away was Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world, deep enough to hide twenty battleships, stacked one on top of the other. Hells Canyon also hid a predark redoubt, a vast bunker and storage facility, complete with a functional mat-trans unit. The mat-trans network was intended to move people and matériel across vast distances instantaneously. It was thanks to that system that Mildred and her companions had emerged unscathed into the wilds of Oregon.

  Most of the predark interstate highways in Deathlands led to uninhabitable ruination: miles-wide, nuke warhead impact craters, skeletonized cities, poisoned water, air and soil. Highway 84, which cut across northeastern Oregon, through the Grande Ronde valley, was an exception. Sections of its crumbling roadway still connected minor habitations and nowhere villes; out of necessity it had become a corridor of life and trade.

  Where there was life in the hellscape, there were predators. Two-legged, four-legged, winged and slithering…

  Running in the dim half-light, Mildred wished that Jak Lauren had been by her side. The ruby-eyed, white-haired, wild child could track a rabbit fart in a hurricane.

  The base of the foothills stopped Mildred’s advance. Above her the slope’s blackness wasn’t quite absolute. Faint starlight reflected off basalt bedrock, making it look wet. It was not. Ancient lava dikes and arches radiated trapped day heat like a furnace. Above the bedrock were densely treed slopes, fully recovered from the wildfires of more than a century earlier. If the cannies had climbed into the tree line, she knew she would never find them this night. And by morning it would be too late to save the children.

  Mildred scanned the rocky flanks of the hills while her heart thudded in her throat. Come on, you bastards, she thought. Come on. Where the hell are you?

  Then she saw something odd—a flicker of light bouncing off the black rock a couple hundred feet up the hillside. It was there, then it was gone. Not from the stars, because it was the wrong color. Pale yellow, instead of dead white. Had she imagined it? Were her eyes playing tricks?

  Breathing hard, she watched. After a minute or two the light reappeared. Then vanished. It was real. The Wallowa Mountain basalt was riddled with caves. Some were little more than shallow dishes. Others were long and winding. A campfire set deep in a cave, perhaps around a bend or two, would give off that kind of weak light. Light that could be completely blocked by some kind of barrier.

  At least she knew where they had gone.

  Mildred started to climb, careful not to dislodge any loose bits of rock. If there was an established track to the cave, she couldn’t see it. The sound of the gun battle was far behind her now. There would be no backup. And no going back.

  The cave entrance, a low arch in the basalt slope, would have been hard to find even in the daytime. Without the intermittent flicker of light, she might have climbed right past it. No one stood guard outside. The cannies thought they had lost her.

  Mildred brushed the sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand, then wiped her fingers dry on her BDU pants. By feel, she broke open her revolver, replaced the single spent shell, then softly clicked closed the 6-shot cylinder.

  She didn’t know how many flesheaters were in the cave. Cannies usually ran in hunting packs. They used footspeed and the cover of night to snatch away the weakest, the dumbest, the easiest chills. This night the no-name ville had been hit by multiple packs simultaneously, all competing for the spoils. Cannies didn’t like to share. And when push came to shove they ate one another.

  Mildred reached into her right pants’ pocket. With her fingertips she counted four, full speedloaders. She took one out and palmed it in her left hand.

  The ZKR ready to rip, she stooped to enter the cave. Inside the arch, the ceiling was eight or nine feet high. The walls were about that far apart, too. There was no guard on duty. Moving quietly, Mildred followed the faint light around a bend. Beyond it, the cave walls necked down and a ratty, brown-polyester blanket blocked her path. It hung from the ceiling to the dirt floor, leaking yellow points of light from a hundred holes and small rips.

  From the other side, she heard voices. And soft whimpering.

  Mildred stepped up and peeked through a hole in the blanket. It took a couple of seconds for her eyes to adjust to the glare of light, which came from a stone-ringed firepit in the middle of a wide chamber. She counted four cannies. She couldn’t tell whether the cave went on or dead-ended. Strewed in a corner was a pile of fire-blackened human bones. From the angle she had she couldn’t see the children, but the whimpering was definitely theirs.

  With a sweep of her hand, Mildred pushed back the blanket, looking over the ZKR’s sights. She caught the cannies flat-footed.

  The Czech target pistol boomed deafeningly in the tightly enclosed space. The closest cannie, a tall man with a bushy, foot-long chin beard, took the up-angled round through his left eye-socket. His hair, skull and brain matter splattered the cave ceiling and he toppled over, rigid from head to toe with shock, like a felled tree.

  Two others leaned over a boy and a girl who were huddled in a corner. The cannies whirled at the guns
hot, the slivers of fileting knives flashing in the firelight. Unblinking, Mildred shot them both rapid-fire, placing one slug below each breastbone.

  Heart shredders.

  Muzzle climb was her old and trusted friend, and she rode it onto the fourth target who had grabbed up a blaster and was coming at her fast. As the cannie charged, he swung the side-by-side scattergun from the hip. The full-length weapon came around slowly. Way too slowly.

  Center chest, point-blank, Mildred tapped him three times. As she pivoted away, the cannie’s filthy cotton shirt and matted chest hair burst into flames. Dead on his feet, he dropped to his knees, then crashed in a cloud of dust at her boot tops.

  With the ZKR aimed at the ceiling, she broke open the cylinder and flicked out the smoking empties. Muzzle down, her feet braced wide apart, her steady, deft fingers fitted the speedloader in place and twisted the cartridge release.

  She felt a rush of breeze on her neck as the blanket over the entrance whipped aside. In the next instant, something heavy slammed into the back of her head. Her knees buckled under her. Everything went black. She didn’t feel the ground when it flew up and hit her in the face.

  WHEN MILDRED OPENED her eyes, the world spun madly around her. She had a splitting headache. She tried to focus and was overcome by a wave of nausea. Shutting her eyes, she leaned back against what felt like a rough wooden post. It was wedged tightly between the cave floor and ceiling. Her wrists were lashed around the post behind her; her ankles laced to its base. The bonds were skillfully tied. There was no wiggle room, and no stretch whatsoever.

  As she waited for the vertigo to pass, she recalled the seconds prior to her blackout. She had been poleaxed from behind, and that was the source of her throbbing headache.

  Opening her eyes again, she looked up into a gaunt, unshaven face.

  At that moment she realized that a possible skull fracture was the least of her worries.

  The cannie’s right cheek was marred by a burn scar, a swathe of shiny, pink, pockmarked skin where whiskers no longer grew. To Mildred, it looked like a near-miss from a close-range black-powder discharge. A victim fighting for his or her life had failed to hit the point-blank ten-ring. The cannie had no eyebrow or eyelashes on that side. His right eyelid was shriveled to nothing and the eyeball was milky-white, like a hardboiled egg, cooked in its socket by a flash of Pyrodex. The bastard’s breath stunk like a three-week-old corpse.