Cannibal Reign Read online

  Cannibal Reign

  Thomas Koloniar

  Dedication

  For Claudia

  El amor de mi vida

  Epigraph

  “The near-Earth asteroid ‘2011 AG5’ currently has an impact probability of 1 in 625 for Feb. 5, 2040.”

  — Donald Yeomans, Chief of the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena

  As of the printing of this book, asteroid 2011 AG5 has been observed for only a little more than half an orbit, and the likelihood of impact is expected to adjust as observations continue; but it remains one of only two near-earth objects (NEOs) to be listed above “0” on the Torino Scale. Discussions are already taking place as to how it might be deflected.

  Though the exact composition of 2011 AG5 remains unknown at this time, it is 140 meters wide, and the impact of an object of this size could easily yield as much energy as any of the largest nuclear tests ever carried out by humankind.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Book One

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Book Two

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Book Three

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Book One

  Prologue

  “Ed, wake up!” the woman whispered. “There’s someone in the house!”

  Colonel Ed Lucket sat up in the dark listening. “I don’t hear anything,” he said quietly.

  “I heard a clunk in your study!”

  Lucket listened a moment longer and reached for his cell phone, only to find that it was gone from the nightstand where he put it every night before bed. “Shit. Stay here.”

  “But what are you—”

  “Stay here!” he hissed, pulling his arm free of her grasp before hurriedly stepping into a pair of pants.

  “Be careful!”

  He waved at her to shut up and poked his head into the hall, where he saw a light on in the study at the far end, a thin layer of smoke hanging stagnant in the dim glow. What the hell was going on? He made his way cautiously along the wall, a cold sweat breaking out across his chest. His heart skipped a beat when he heard someone shift in his chair, the leather creaking. The only firearm in the house was in the wall safe behind his desk.

  He drew a deep breath and stepped boldly into the room, instantly recognizing the man sitting at the desk. “Reeves!” he bellowed. “What the hell are you doing? You scared the billy piss out of me!”

  Jerry Reeves sat back in the chair, serenely smoking one of Lucket’s fine Cuban cigars taken from the humidor in the corner. He gestured with it to an open folder on the desk. “This file makes for a rather jarring read, Colonel.”

  The colonel saw his pistol and cell phone resting on the desk near the folder, the door to his wall safe ajar. “That’s classified, you son of a bitch! And how did you get past the security system? It’s the fucking best!”

  “Indeed it is,” Reeves chuckled, shaping the smoldering end of the cigar against the crystal ashtray. “Though an alarm system’s only as dependable as the man using it.”

  Lucket felt his face flush. Reeves was a civilian with Army intelligence, attached to the Pentagon, a crafty bastard he’d been trying to subvert for years. “I asked how you got in.”

  “I strolled into the garage right behind you and the—uh . . . lady. That is General Loughton’s wife, isn’t it? Of course it is, otherwise you’d have gone right for the landline.”

  “Get out of my house!” Lucket ordered, pointing at the door, the gray hair on his chest glistening.

  Reeves held up the file. “Colonel, who else is privy to this nightmare? Why are they so intent on keeping it a secret?”

  Lucket’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that rather obvious? The world would tear itself apart. Now get out!”

  “In due time,” Reeves said affably. “First, I want the video. The one your CIA pals made of me down in Havana last week.”

  Lucket was hard-pressed to cover his shock. “I . . . I’d say your illicit real estate deal is irrelevant now . . . given what you’ve just read.”

  “Quite the contrary. It’s even more relevant now than it was an hour ago when I stood watching you and the general’s wife have at it.”

  Lucket felt a worrisome tightness in his chest, bit back an obscenity. “Why is it more relevant?”

  Reeves tapped the file. “It’s obvious I’ll need someplace warm to weather this storm.”

  “There’s no place to run,” Lucket sneered. “No place to hide.”

  Reeves puffed the cigar as he considered his next move, realizing that Lucket would likely attempt to have him terminated now that he’d read the file. “About the video, Colonel?”

  “It’s not here,” Lucket said thinly.

  Reeves took the pistol and shot him in the leg, shattering his left knee. The colonel went down swearing: “You filthy bastard!”

  “I may be that,” Reeves said, rising, the cigar in his free hand, “but I’m not here to discuss my finer qualities with you. Now where’s the video? I’d like to hold onto my position
long enough to honor some old debts.”

  The colonel lay over on his side, his chest constricting, gripping his knee and barely suppressing the urge to vomit. “Middle drawer, you son of a bitch! Take it and get out!”

  Reeves took a small unmarked video card from his pocket. He’d already found it in the drawer but wanted to be sure of what it was. “May I assume this is the only copy?” he asked, the cigar caught in the corner of his mouth.

  Lucket realized he was a dead man. “You’re a filthy coward!” he roared. “Do you hear me? A filthy coward!”

  Reeves squatted beside him, a frown creasing his face as he put the weapon to the colonel’s head. “I didn’t come here to kill you,” he said solicitously, “but we both know you would have sent someone to kill me for reading that file.”

  “Burn in hell!” Lucket made a desperate grab for the weapon and was very nearly fast enough, though not quite.

  Reeves squeezed off the round in the nick of time, glad to have given the colonel a chance to go out fighting. He then wiped down the pistol along with anything else he had touched, locking it back in the safe and taking the file down the hall to the bedroom. He flicked on the light and knelt down to find Mrs. Loughton hiding under the bed.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said, offering his hand to the terrified woman. “I’ve never made war on women or children. Come on out of there.”

  Mrs. Loughton sat sniveling in a chair a short time later, Lucket’s robe gathered around her as she sopped at her eyes with a tissue. A blonde with nice skin, she was sexy for being almost fifty, around Reeve’s own age. “Is he dead?” she whimpered.

  “Very,” Reeves said, setting the cigar down in the ashtray on the nightstand and fluffing one of the pillows. “Were you in love with him?”

  She shook her head despondently. “Though I liked him a lot— You’re going to kill me!” she blurted.

  Reeves went around to remake her side of the bed. “I’ve already told you I’m not going to hurt you. What I’m going to do is take you home. And then you and I are going to keep one another’s secrets . . . which I’d say is more than fair.”

  She watched him tidy up. “Why would you trust me?”

  He finished and picked up the cigar, eyeing the file beneath the lamp. “Let’s just say I’ve learned something tonight that makes much me less worried about the immediate future than I might otherwise have been. Now go get dressed while I make a quick call.”

  General Loughton’s wife gathered her clothes and stepped into the master bathroom, closing the door.

  Reeves took her chair and pulled a satellite phone from inside his coat pocket, dialing a number from memory. The phone rang a number of times before it was finally answered.

  “I hope this is important,” said a tired voice.

  “Jack? It’s Reeves. Listen, I’ve got a file here you need to see, and soon.”

  “Classified?”

  “Oh, yeah, and then some. Looks like there’s a real nightmare headed our way . . . and this one’s right up your alley.”

  One

  Jack Forrest raised his head in Launch Control, cocking an eyebrow and listening as the heavy steel door above was pulled to and secured. A slight grin crossed his face as he returned his attention to a textbook on heavenly bodies.

  Wayne Ulrich trotted down three stories of a steel staircase and crossed through the common areas into Launch Control, where he stopped in the doorway and stood watching unhappily as Forrest sat reading.

  Forrest glanced up from the book just long enough to see the crease in his friend’s face. “What’s got your feathers in a ruffle?”

  Ulrich crossed the room and tossed a clipboard onto the console near Forrest’s feet. “Three more names have magically appeared on the roster,” he said, hands on his hips. “Any idea how that happened?”

  “I wrote them in with my magic pen,” Forrest said, dropping his feet to the deck and posturing up in the squeaky old government chair to stretch his back. A lean, muscular man of medium height, Jack Forrest was thirty-five, with a relentlessly sarcastic disposition. He had flinty blue eyes and chiseled features, thick brown hair cut high-and-tight in military fashion, and a two-inch scar on his chin where he’d been struck by a rifle butt years earlier during the Second Gulf War. “Got a problem with that, Stumpy?”

  Ulrich was the exact opposite. A die-hard pragmatist, he and Forrest had made unlikely friends during their Special Forces training in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He walked with an almost imperceptible limp, having lost his left foot in Afghanistan to an IED during the summer of 2006. Tall and slender with wispy blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a thin mustache, he was dressed in digital-camouflage trousers and a black underarmor T-shirt.

  “You’re damn right I do.” He pointed at the roster. “Do you realize how much extra food I have to come up with every time you add even a single name to that list? Two meals, every day, for eighteen months. Times three people, that’s 2,190 goddamn meals, Jack! Do you know how much food that is? I can’t just run down to the supermarket, fill up the family station wagon and call it a day.”

  “So rent another truck,” Forrest said, tossing the heavy book on top of the roster, then lighting a Camel cigarette with a brass Zippo lighter. “Come to think of it, rent two and take Kane with you.” He tossed the lighter onto the book and rocked back in the chair.

  “You’re missing the point,” Ulrich said. “People are going to notice. So when word finally gets out—and it’s gonna get out—somebody could remember us hoarding all that food. And they just might come looking for it.”

  “Then drive to Colorado for the food,” Forrest said, taking a drag from the cigarette. “Hell, drive all the way to Vegas for all I care. Only do me a favor while you’re there and visit a hooker, will ya? You get cranky when you haven’t had your ashes hauled.”

  “My ashes haven’t got anything to do with it,” Ulrich insisted, though both men knew that he would never cheat on his wife Erin, who was waiting back in North Carolina. “There are forty-eight names on that list. And that’s not counting the five of us and our families. How many more people do you plan on having down here? Eighty? A hundred? This old septic system’s only going to assimilate so much shit, you know.”

  “What? You haven’t crunched the numbers on that yet?”

  Ulrich bridled. “I haven’t got the slightest idea how much a single person shits in a year.”

  “Then I suggest you call one of those septic pumper companies and find out.”

  Ulrich hung his head with a weary sigh. “How many more names, Jack?”

  Forrest shrugged. “I keep finding people I want to save.”

  “You mean women. And how many of them are good-looking?”

  “A few.”

  “Jesus, you’re something else.”

  Forrest stood up from the squeaky chair, exhaling a cloud of bluish smoke as he crushed out the cigarette in a brass ashtray cut from a 76mm cannon shell casing. “Who do you suggest we save, Wayne . . . if not women and children? Sweaty biker types who’d kill us all the first chance they got? Old men and women who’re gonna be dead in a few years? How about some asshole businessmen? I put single mothers on that list for good reason. We get too much testosterone down here and we’re asking for trouble.”

  “Suppose none of these women are interested in repopulating?”

  “Oh, that’s got nothing to do with it,” Forrest said with a wave. “Whether they are or not, their virtue will be a hell of a lot safer down here than it will up there once this shit kicks off.”

  Ulrich rubbed the back of his neck, remembering the war-torn Middle East. Both men had seen the type of iniquities a woman could look forward to in the absence of law and order. “It just isn’t fair, that’s all. A pretty woman’s got no more right to—”

  “Look, if I could save everybody, I would. So would you. We a
ll would. But we can’t. People are going to die up there. They’re going to die by the bushel—men, women, children, ugly or not. And for the record, Stumpy, not every woman on that roster is a beauty queen. What do you think I am?”

  Before Ulrich could reply, Marcus Kane came around the corner, having heard their voices echoing along the steel blast vestibule leading from one of the Titan missile silos. A six-foot African American, Kane was recruiting-poster handsome, with a shaved head, smooth skin, and gentle almond-shaped eyes.

  “Y’all argue enough, you’d think you were married,” he said, taking a pretzel rod from a bag on the console.

  “Anybody on that list happen to be black?” Ulrich asked, wanting to stir the pot.

  “Don’t start,” Forrest said.

  “You didn’t pick any sisters?” Marcus said. “Man, come on now.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Forrest replied, “I’ve picked seven, all with kids.”

  “Suppose these folks want to bring their extended families or friends along?” Ulrich asked.

  “Tough shit,” Forrest said, shaking another cigarette from its pack. “Needless to say, anyone chosen will have some tough choices to make, and I expect most of them will choose to stay up there and face what’s coming.”