Chapter 24

2077 A.D.

“Well, Sharra, you have done an exceptional job for me on the CRT. I have recommended that Jackson De La Ventura, the incoming President, continue your role here, along with a letter outlining your many accomplishments. That includes the work you have done to implement and enforce the PCA and the state level Population Management Boards around the country. You have performed admirably in your role.

“If you choose not to continue to work with the Marshals and the CRT, you will have a full pension available to you should you choose to go into private life. Have you decided what you want to do yet?”

“I’ve given it a lot of thought, sir, and I don’t think I want to continue for a few more years. I am getting up there for field work, and the apprehension of the Butcher of Eugene, Oregon, took a lot out of me.”

The apprehension of the cannibal terrorizing Eugene had actually taken nearly a year to complete, and during that time, the killer they had been chasing had struck fifteen more times while they tried to figure out who he was. He didn’t discriminate, taking adults and teens, including a pair of boy/girl twins that were fourteen years old. That had been his downfall, since the outcry against harming children was deafening. It had galvanized the public to act, and thousands of eyes were suddenly searching for what happened to the twins.

The twins had gone missing from their bus stop in the morning, and when they didn’t make it to school, the alarm had gone out almost immediately. Law enforcement put out an Amber Alert, and that had hit almost every active cell phone in town within twenty minutes of the children disappearing.

Virtually everyone in Eugene had risen up to go after the man they had suspected of kidnapping the Winger twins, once a suspect had been identified. The mob had stormed out to his homestead on the edge of a national forest, and overwhelmed him, beating him pretty badly when he resisted their efforts to search his property. There was no way he was going to stop nearly fifty angry adults and parents, including the parents of the missing teens.

The mob had torn his homestead apart looking for any sign of the missing kids. For hours, it looked like they had the wrong person, until someone made the discovery of the hidden room under a secondary building, a large shed that was used to store outdoor equipment (lawn mower, snow blower, shovels, etc.).

It turns out that the Butcher of Eugene had seen the Amber Alert on his own cell phone, including pictures of the missing kids, while he was in the middle of tying the boy down to a large table, where he was about to behead the boy and get started on cutting him up while his sister watched.

Rather than continue his rather grisly intentions, knowing that he would have had to clean up and hide the evidence of what he had done, he had stashed the two kids in the specially designed room below the shed. It had a roughly poured concrete floor and cinderblock walls he had cemented together, and the roof of the room had been a wall of a ship, with a door still attached to it. It was a convenient place to stash other things that he didn’t want anyone to know about, including a cache of illegal weapons, some still in crates they had been in when stolen. He pulled up the ladder, dropped that in the shed, secured the steel ship door with the battens that were still attached to it, and closed the false floor in the shed above. Then he rearranged the equipment in the shed and locked the door.

That hadn’t been good enough, though, and the twins had worked together to untie each other. Then the twins had stacked a bunch of crates on top of each other, then they had taken turns standing on the crates and pounded on the inside of the steel door with a machine pistol they had found in the room. There wasn’t any ammunition, but neither of them would have wanted to fire a weapon in that enclosed space.

An FBI SWAT team member had been walking by the shed when he heard something, and he quickly identified the universal Morse Code sounds of S-O-S. Radioing for help, eventually they got the hidden room open and rescued the two teens, much to the distress of the Butcher, one Miles Benton, who was forced to watch as the two teens that he had been intent on eating just that morning had sealed his fate.

Under the National Emergency powers in place because of the coming famine, Miles Benton had been tied down to the table where the boy had been just a few hours before, and video cams had captured the sights and sounds of him being butchered alive.

But the act of humanity’s retribution against a particularly foul and horrific piece of human-shaped excrement had taken its toll on the people who were involved. And the discovery of others who had been taken and eaten over the preceeding years had been another scar on the souls of those that had run the monster to ground. Sharra had been there for it, and she had not been immune either.

Tucker Melville nodded. He had forced himself to watch the video of the end of Miles Benton, as part of his penance for being the President that had brought cannibalism to the human race. Deep down inside, he was certain he was going to hell for it when he died.

“I understand. Have you given any thoughts to what you want to do next? Maybe go back into scientific research again?”

“Actually, Gilda Rasmussen has been asking me to partner with her on some new projects. I think I might head out west and work with her for a while.”

Tucker nodded. “That would be an excellent use of your talents. You will be missed, but I know what you’ve been through. I have put together a special appropriation for your pension. As of yesterday, you are fully vested. Go have fun. DC will miss you, but you deserve to get away.”

“Thank you, sir.” Sharra paused.

“What is it, Sharra?” Tucker asked gently. He suspected he knew what was happening in her mind, but he waited patiently to see if she was going to bring it up or not.

She eventually got her courage up to ask.

“Do you ever regret it, sir? All the deaths? All the women and girls that we had killed and eaten to keep the greater darkness at bay? The horror we inflicted on our fellow citizens?” It came out quietly, but there was an intensity behind her voice and in her eyes that he expected. Sharra was nothing if not driven, and she gave her all to every task that was ever in front of her. That sometimes bled over into a focus that was difficult to understand and even harder to bear if it was directed at you.

Tucker sighed. “If you are thinking that, then you are feeling guilty, aren’t you?”

Sharra nodded. “More than a little. The nightmares keep me up at night sometimes. I get through it, but it’s tough. That’s why I want to leave the Marshals service. I just don’t want to feed anything more into the darkness inside. Every chance it gets when my guard is down, my subconscious throws the nightmare in my ‘face’ again to make me hate myself just a little bit more.”

Tucker nodded. He knew about the nightmares. He got regular reports from her therapist. He had ordered her to go to see a therapist nearly four years ago, after it was obvious that something was not right in her mind, and that she was suffering from what she had been involved in. If he were being honest with himself, he was shocked that she hadn’t attempted a more permanent solution a long time ago to what was plaguing her dreams.

“Sharra, you did what you had to do. We all did. The projections were, well, they were horrific on a scale that would have ended us all. Humanity would have never recovered. A surgeon will amputate a limb to prevent an infection from killing the rest of the body. This was no different from that except in terms of scale.

“We were facing the reality of having too many people and too great a birth rate as we tried to find male babies to keep the species viable. There were no good options. No neat solutions came along and saved the day. I am sorry that you had to be a part of forcing this horror on everyone, but you were the only one I trusted to get this done with minimal damage to everyone else. I am only sorry that you had to take all the damage that you did to get us to this point.

“But we are now at a point where everyone accepts that this is part of the fabric of our society and that excess women because of our horribly skewed gender imbalance are part of the food source for the future of the species. More than anyone else, we owe that to you.”

Sharra blushed slightly at the praise, shaking her head. She didn’t want the recognition. It was way too at odds with what she felt about herself inside.

“To answer your question, no, I don’t regret it. We did what we had to do. A good President will order troops into battle knowing that some or many of them will not survive. All we can hope for is that they will accomplish their objective in order to save as many as possible.

“There is very little difference between that and this. We ordered women to report to slaughterhouses to be killed so that they could not make more babies and so that they could be eaten. We did it for the survival of the rest of us. And it is working.

“Did you look at the latest projections? The male birth rate moved upwards very slightly four years ago. Instead of four-point-three male births per one hundred, the number is now five-point-one per. That means that the Chinese were right somehow, and that something is changing slightly somewhere.

“We don’t know if we agree that fewer children competing for resources is the cause, but we also don’t have any other hypotheses. At this rate, in another two hundred years, we might see a return to normal. Then again, things plateaued there three years ago, so I don’t know what to think about that. Then again, even if things return to whatever ‘normal’ is or was, people might decide that they want to keep things this way. Who knows? I do know that I will be long dead before that time happens.”