Kingdom of Monsters by John Schneider (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

And, naturally, the crazy bitches who tried to feed him to a T. rex were now living with her on the Mount.

All part of the Arc Project.  Crazy didn't matter – they were all of productive age.  Def-con priorities.

On the other hand, their presence was already an influence on the Mount – a ripple-effect on a community that was adjusting to section-eight-level stress as a daily reality.

Overall, the Arc Project had so-far gone anything but smoothly.  Their main depot site up top had been hit by a rex-attack – rare, this high in the mountains – and the beast had done ridiculous damage.  An entire shipment of equipment was lost, and nearly a battalion of troops.

Now everybody was housed in underground bunkers, buried hundreds of feet below solid mountain, and reinforced to take nuclear damage.

The residential bunkers were for civilians and soldiers.  The officers were housed separately – adjacent, but separated by floors, with the command station nearest the top.

On the residential mall was a centralized rec-area that reminded Sally of a chimp habitat, except instead of a swinging tire, it was tennis courts, and a swimming pool.

And you couldn't go outside.

Sally had been sequestered on bases for almost two years before coming to the Mount, but at least there had been OUTSIDE.

But these days, that was the price of security – and these dark rock walls were going to drive her purely crazy.  She had said so to Rhodes, who acknowledged the problem.

It had only been a few weeks and things were already starting to bubble.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

“Your friends are acting up,” Rhodes said.

Friends.  What that meant was, after she'd made her break into the woods, she'd spent the night with this band of nutcases, just before they were all captured again.

Probably not PC to say so – she couldn't imagine Rhodes taking it well.  Certainly not the Coven.  And it didn't hurt if that one night spent in that camp, before being taken together, had left them on better terms with Sally than most of the other women at the Mount – a dubious honor, but not a gift-horse to be stared in the mouth.

There weren't many of them – thirty members, all-told – but they were noisy.  And they were quickly becoming dominant in a number of subtly deliberate ways.

When she'd first arrived on the Mount, Sally had made friends with a military nurse named Rose, who told her the group of them seemed to have taken over the med-unit.

Everybody worked on the Mount, and one could optimistically see the job-preference as altruism – except, Rose said, she couldn't help think it was supposed to look that way – the encroachment of the infirmary felt more like infiltration.

“I've known a lot of stripper-types,” Rose told her, “who became nurses.  Lotta crossover there, for some reason.  Raising hell all night, good deeds during the day.  Like some sort of Karmic bargain.”

Rose shook her head.  “These crazy bitches are something different.”

Sally had also noticed the Coven's presence in the maid/janitor duty-rosters, which seemed surprisingly domestic.  She would have thought it unlikely the women she'd met would be so readily acquiescent to such menial, keeping-the-cave-clean, back-to-the-Stone-Age, Wilma Flintstone roles.

Perhaps passive-aggressive submissive types?

Or it could be, they understood the power inherent in those basic essential duties – the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and a maid has a key to locked doors.

It was also true that the world was now a place where the chain of command from house-staff to nuclear-authorization had grown significantly shorter.

Nurse Rose had disappeared two weeks ago.

She had simply gone – no trace.  It was assumed she had deserted, although Sally had never heard her express the slightest indication of any such intent.

In her place, running the infirmary was Ginger, the oldest of the Coven – late-thirties, at least, even though her body was whip-cord, surfer-girl tight, just like the rest of them.

Ginger was older sister.  During Sally's one night at their camp, Ginger was the one who had given her the pitch to join up.

Sally's failure to RSVP in the time since had cooled Ginger's demeanor somewhat, although she was careful not to become adversarial, as she respectfully recognized Sally's pull with Rhodes.

And while officially no foul-play was suspected in Nurse Rose's disappearance, at least one member of the Coven had been questioned on the incident – a tall, lithe Amazon called Michelle who, when Sally first met her, had carried a hand-carved spear and a ten-inch hunting-knife strapped to her hip – and who, in her first week at the Mount, had stabbed two servicemen with a fork.

Michelle's interview had been conducted personally – and privately – by Rhodes himself.  Sally didn't know the details, but in the time since, Michelle had been remarkably well-behaved.

So far, Rhodes had chosen not to engage any of the others, although he clearly intended the suddenly meek and compliant Michelle to serve as an example.

Still, the lot of them continued to stir-up generalized trouble.  Just the simple fact of a troop of sexy, nubile young things introduced among a bunch of mostly male troops was a bubbling cauldron all by itself, and the so-inclined could readily take advantage.

There were already accusations of harassment – he-said/she-said tales wafting out of the residential bunkers.  Rhodes told Sally privately that, in his experience dealing with such cases, nine out of ten times, the woman was telling the truth.  But within that remaining ten-percent, there were amoral alley-cats – ruthless and cynical – traits a combat General knew full-well to respect and fear in anyone.

And of course, the world's oldest profession had promptly sprouted up – one of the most basic forms of trade.

All fairly pedestrian stuff, but corrosive.  And small, intense factions did tend to take over larger social groups.

And based on short association, Sally had a good idea that this particular faction had been a bunch of end-of-the-world nutcases before the end of the world.  Now they had actual, physical