Forrest thought it over a moment and smiled. “Actually, Colonel, it wasn’t a meteor that hit us. It was an asteroid.”
The colonel smiled back. “Indeed it was. Captain, why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re really up to so I can decide whether or not to let you continue on your way? Otherwise, I’m going to lock you both up and throw away the key for insulting my intelligence.”
Forrest knew there was little choice now but to offer at least a version of the truth. “We’re living a couple hundred miles north of here, Colonel, in an abandoned missile silo with twenty civilians, mostly women and children. At half rations, we’ve got maybe enough food left for two months—we’re down to mostly flour and rice now. The reason Kane and I are here is that my niece has contracted meningitis, and we’re on our way to the hospital to find the antibiotics our doctor needs to save her life.”
“Why even bother? So she can eat hardtack and rice for another two months?”
“We’re not giving up until the end, Colonel.”
“And you’re worried I’ll lead my division north to rape your women and steal your flour and rice. Is that it, Captain?”
“It’s a realistic concern, Colonel, yes.”
“Well, you’re in luck, Captain. I don’t condone rape and neither does Sergeant Lee. As for your rations… even if you’ve lied by half, which I suspect you have, it’s not enough food for me to bother with.” He finished off his potatoes and directed his attention to Lee. “Sergeant, do you see any reason why we shouldn’t allow these men to continue on their way? They’re obviously not capable of causing us much trouble.”
“No, sir.”
“Then pick three men and escort them over to the hospital so they can gather whatever it is they’re looking for,” the colonel ordered. “After that, return them to the barricade and see them safely on their way with their possessions returned to them.”
“Yes, sir.”
The colonel rose to his feet and everyone else followed suit.
“You’re dismissed,” the colonel said.
Both Kane and Forrest snapped him a smart salute and turned an about face, following Sergeant Lee out of the room.
“The hospital’s outside our containment zone,” Lee explained as he drove them himself deeper into town in the Cadillac. There were soldiers with lanterns and flashlights here and there along the way, all of them armed to the teeth, most of them smoking cigarettes.
“We’ve got enough food left for maybe a couple months ourselves,” he went on. “After that we plan to commit mass suicide. That’s why you’ll see a grenade around most everybody’s neck. It’s a sign of solidarity against cannibalism.”
“So you’ve seen them too?” Kane said.
“We’ve seen plenty of ’em, and we kill ’em whenever we find ’em. Fuckin’ wild animals. It ain’t no way to survive. You gotta know when it’s time to hang it up. Our original plan was we’d all get drunk together before pulling the pins, but then we drank up all the booze.” He laughed. “So I guess we’re goin’ out sober. It’s too bad.”
“How’s the morale otherwise?”
“We’ve only had a few suicides,” Lee said. “But we’ve had some desertions lately, about twenty. We ain’t sure what that’s about. The colonel’s not keeping anybody who doesn’t want to stay. It just leaves more food for the rest of us. Last week ten dudes asked him for a truck and some fuel for a run to the coast. Couple of ’em said they knew how to sail and wanted to try for Australia. Colonel told ’em, ‘Good luck.’”
“What the hell’s in Australia?” Kane said.
“Beats me, bro. Don’t matter no way. I know them dudes, and they ain’t sailin’ to no motherfuckin’ Australia. Them dudes are gonna drown.”
“How many men do you have left?” Forrest asked.
“Around a thousand.”
“No women?”
“We had some females in the brigade originally, but the colonel ordered them all out with the last airlift to Texas. I think he knew how bad things were going to get here. They’d have gotten raped for sure, man. We got too many young hooligans in this outfit.”
“So what’s going on down in Texas?”
“Got no idea. We haven’t heard from them in months.”
“And you chose not to share your food with the civilians here? That’s what the battle was over? Food?”
“We distributed plenty of food,” Lee said, steering through town on the way to his billet. “That was our primary mission, but the civvies here got carried away. Redneck bastards started showing up at the distribution centers with guns and shooting our men. After that the colonel pulled us into this defensive perimeter and we tried to dispense the food that way. But then local warlords took over outside and started stealing food from those without guns, forming private armies… like fucking Somalia, man. At first they traded food for women, and when they finally had all the women, they let everybody else starve.
“After that, the warlords started killing each other off, and that’s when the colonel decided to quit distributing food altogether… which only forced the warlords into an alliance. Then they attacked us at different places around the perimeter, and they killed a few of us, but we wiped ’em out in the end. What you saw on the road in was nothing. On the city’s east side the bodies are piled up knee high for a quarter mile. Things have been pretty quiet out there ever since. The human race has had it, man.”
“No word from D.C.?” Forrest asked.
“The last word we got from anybody was months ago,” Lee said. “By shortwave—the satellite signals can’t penetrate that shit in the sky. We were told the President was dead and that we were all effectively on our own.”
“What happened to him?”
“Nobody said, but the colonel thinks there was a coup.”
“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Forrest muttered.
“This is my billet,” Lee said, shifting into park in front of a house lit up like Mardi Gras.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Kane asked.
“My place is party central. We’ve got more gas than food now, so we run the generator all night long. We don’t have any booze left, like I was telling you, so the guys watch a lot of dirty movies, have circle jerks, play video games. All pretty juvenile shit, but what else is left?”
“We got some gamers too, but we ain’t had no circle jerk yet.”
Lee chuckled sardonically. “We got a lotta kids in this outfit. You two wait out here while I get my men. I don’t need ever’body inside knowing about you guys. It could cause trouble.”
Ten minutes later an armored Humvee pulled up behind the Escalade and Lee got out, calling for Forrest and Kane to get in. Their weapons had been retrieved from the barricade and were returned to them, and they were each given a Kevlar helmet with a NVD attached.
“It gets dark as fuck outside the containment zone,” Lee said. “There’s a moon tonight, though, so the NVDs will light it up good. Inside the hospital we’ll have to switch to infrared. These are my homies: Grip, Clean, and Shodo.”
Everyone shook hands in the cramped space of the Humvee. All of Lee’s “homies” were black men in their thirties, and Forrest was glad he hadn’t brought along any of the young hooligans he had mentioned.
At the southern checkpoint, they passed out of the containment zone after giving almost no explanation at all. It seemed that Lee was something of an institution within the brigade and that whatever he said was taken as gospel. Forrest began to wonder how much control Colonel Short actually had over his men, now suspecting that he was little more than a figurehead, which did make sense under the circumstances. In fact, he was surprised to see as much military order as he did. They drove past a parking lot strewn with bodies, fallen one upon the other as if on an ancient battlefield.