Banshee (3 page)

New Madrid, Territory of Mizzou

August 4, 2074 A.D.

It was true that smaller men did better in the caves, except in the case of one man, French Heavener. Over six feet tall and muscular from hard work, he sported an occasional sunburn, although he was never truly free from the touch of the sun. At twenty-six, he had already achieved near legendary status among the forces arrayed along the cave system and fault line known as New Madrid. Most of the soldiers who lived and fought within sight of the yawning black hole simply called it the underneath. Nearly a thousand feet across, the subsidence in what used to be the boot heel of Missouri was a gentle, sloping descent into the bowels of hell, as far as any human knew. Nothing grew around the edges of the entrance, and French doubted quite seriously that anything ever would. A miasma of toxic gas, animal poisons, and something wholly unknown to human science caused occasionally lethal fluctuations in the air quality, temperature, and overall survivability. In essence, if you were anywhere near the underneath on the night of the killing moon, you were dead. Over decades of war, that much was certain. Bone shards from the finest soldiers French had ever seen still spangled the rocks leading down into that ungodly place, and he made damned certain that no one was anywhere close enough to be overcome without giving a good account of themselves.

I owe the Progeny at least that much
. The last of the original holdouts had died a month earlier. That left a sparse generation to till land so clouded with death that starvation seemed to be a gentle way to go, especially in comparison to the monthly invasions from underground. The beasts that emerged were nightmare made flesh. The shock troops—never identical, but always somewhat like scaled hounds—would burst forth in a screaming rush. For the first years, their speed allowed them to make deep incursions into the farming communities around the area, before they were ripped apart with gunfire. Since so much of the former United States was a wasteland, the rich fields of the area must be defended at all costs. For decades it worked, and some optimists began to whisper about the American Reformation, doing so while ignoring the infrequent radio transmissions from around the world. Russia, they learned, had deteriorated into a vast area of butchery where enormous monsters ran amok, depopulating entire areas, season after bloody season. St. Petersburg held out, as did the bulk of the Kamchatka peninsula, where whole divisions of Russian military had been training after the calamity of The Rising. Once, they got faint signals from no less than six areas of China, although they knew for a fact that Beijing and all her souls had died in an orgy of violence. Snakes the size of city buses had ravaged the city, leaving nothing but flaming wreckage and scat. Europe was—well, Ireland existed, in some form, and so did most of the Aegean islands. Cyprus in particular held out well, even going so far as to launch counterstrikes against the invading monsters when and where they could. South Africa was a charnel house, but the central forests of the African continent proved too much for the creatures of hell to tame. In some areas, it was rumored that the supposed rulers from hell were being hunted for meat, an ignominious end to their reign of terror. There were eyewitness accounts of lions and hyenas making life for the emergent demons along the Rift Valley into a short, painful affair. Pictures of sixty lions bringing down a house-sized monster with horns and tentacles had circulated worldwide. The series of photos, taken in the first rays of dawn, showed that not all of nature’s children were going to tolerate an invasion without a serious fight. One brief video of an enormous grizzly bear in battle with a demon had attained iconic status. The bear, fifteen hundred pounds of muscle and attitude, had calmly disemboweled a long, leggy beast that resembled a hellish serpent with grasshopper legs. The bear had been cheered on by two conflict junkies, both former wartime reporters who drove to meet each emergence of the killing moon at a different location. Their luck had run out shortly thereafter, near the ruins of Juneau, Alaska, when a mass of half-ton trilobites with human faces stampeded their shooting blind and ripped them apart. Their film cases and cameras were found days later; their bodies were presumed eaten. Overall, the human populace was spotty, scared, and inexorably starving or being consumed. The dragons could only do so much and, when injured, it took them long periods of time to recover. To the world’s knowledge, the magnificent reptilian saviors did not reproduce, causing parties of hopeful militia to patrol deserted areas around the world in hopes of finding a newly-emerged draconic ally with whom to bond. They were often disappointed. With the pressure of a relentless wave, the demons, hellhounds, and every other screamer shat forth from the sulfurous depths, began to gain traction. From each successive raid, the radiomen of New Madrid began hearing less each night as they crouched, hopefully, in their cramped room at the top of a perilous wooden tower.

They were losing the war. French knew this, as did everyone else among the stragglers who hung on for dear life. But he refused to stop seeking ways to leverage something—
anything
—that would allow his men and women to take the fight underneath. With an exaggerated creaking, he slumped in his chair while poring over a handwritten report from a Canadian scout who had arrived half dead, starving, and wild with fear. The woman, a cagey operator and naturalist, had been covered in a moldy infection that was killing her as surely as a bullet between her eyes. She’d give her name as Collette, and was originally from the former walled city of Ontario. She used the past tense for her city because a deluge of sea serpents had raged forth three months ago, on the killing moon, and pierced the city defenses by sheer numbers. He remembered an old military saying about quantity having a quality of its own, and he believed it. Ontario was a pile of rotting bones and ashes from the fires that swept through the city during the attack. Collette told a tale of the second wave, vermin no more than five feet in length, but winged and possessing a hind claw long enough to gut a full-grown horse. When those horrors began dropping out of the sky, the provisional governor sent Collette and a full platoon of rangers south to get word out—the Great Lakes were swarming with the enemy, and may God have mercy on the soul of the city. She was the lone survivor, and if French was any judge, she wouldn’t last a week. That left Vancouver as the final substantial outpost of humanity in the sprawl of Canada, and he realized at that instant that Collette had brought him a decision of his own: send scouts from New Madrid. Find dragons. French called help from wherever and whenever possible to invade underneath and crush the enemy at its source. He knew in his marrow; he could feel it. The waiting game was the path to certain death. While his will was strong, his forces were weak, and his tactical sensibility told him he needed something new. Something deadly.

He needed dragons.

Dragons

“We had precious little military to guide us during the years after the war ground to a stalemate. For that matter, there weren’t many
people
, let alone anyone with experience at guiding a scared populace into a cohesive unit. My parents were both military; my father a Marine, my mother, career Air Force. I’d been fortunate to have them, and then, when I was still a stupid kid, I met Byrna. She was a natural leader, good with people and horses, and pretty much anything that needed to be handled. I didn’t stand a chance. She told me when we would marry, and I found myself laughing at the brazen girl on horseback who thought she could decide how my life was going to go.

“We had three kids, all beautiful, good—they never tell you what to expect when you become a father, do they? There’s advice about feeding and changing, every little ailment, but there’s no way to prepare for it. Not really. You brace yourself for everything except falling in love with that squalling little thing waving chubby fists at you every hour on the hour. Before you know it, all of your desperate dreams are gone, and you find the galaxy tipped on its side, rotating around that sleeping bundle. I’d been a hard ass of the first order, but the babies took some of the edges off me. Although, God alone knew why Byrna tolerated me during that first decade. I became consumed with making us safe. My folks started Trinity and, when they began to age out of the ability to command, I stepped in. For all my bluster, I was still just a big, dumb kid who thought his word was law. It took my parents’ insistence on education to teach me differently.

“Trinity was
relatively
safe. We had dragons, and guns, and we knew how to use both to the point that we were fostering a network of outposts to the west, and along the eastern coast where the fishing was good. Cocooned in that safety, I’d sit up watching our youngest sleep; she was going to ruin me and I knew it. Her curls and that face—God, that face, moving to a secret dream that only she knew. It broke my heart to watch her, so I’d read while sitting in the chair as she slept.

“I was reading Virgil’s
Aeneid
one night when I realized that, for all our skill and preparation, we had no walls. How this escaped my parents—and then me—was incomprehensible. Maybe it was the presence of the dragons contorting our views of necessity; after all, we’d never lost a fight. Demons came from the water, and there was nothing, save a hundred yards of sand between us, and whatever the killing moon would reveal month after month. I looked at what maps we had and found indications of sandstone close enough that it could be quarried, then flown by our dragons and their riders. We had excellent builders at Trinity, so I reasoned that walls and a gate would be simplicity itself.

“That arrogance cost us nearly two years of labor and over a dozen lives. There was sandstone alright, but it was near an unexplored fissure that held enough shadows to hide smaller demons for up to two days past the killing moon. The little bastards would avoid the sun just enough to survive, although they were always in terrible condition after their sojourn to the surface. In effect, the creatures were willing to commit suicide just for the chance at the taste of human flesh. Seeing a score of tiny, fanged demons drag a screaming stoneworker into the dark might have stopped most crews, but not ours. They doubled down and cracked that rock like our lives depended on it. They were right.

“The walls rose, thick and straight, and I realized that their bulk would afford us a sliver of breathing room, and we might start thinking of stabilizing the area around us, too. I—I’m not saying that was arrogant, but it was premature. I’d read about Troy. I knew how the city fell and, when I looked at our walls, and dragons . . . I knew that it would take a catastrophe to bring us to our knees, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.” – Commodore Moss Eilert

—
Bulwark Archival Materials, Access Date 96 A.R.

Trinity Outpost, August 8, 2074 A.D.

The Admiralty was one flood away from being stranded in an archipelago, as water gone from Texas for millions of years now spiked inland—salty, warm, and dangerous. After the catastrophic fall of the United States and the world, dragons intuitively winged south with all haste. They deposited their bewildered riders on the coast of what had been Texas, but was now something more like Stalingrad after the close of World War II. The collapse was breathtaking in its speed; no less than a quarter billion deaths in the first three weeks after the emergence of the dragons’ evil counterparts. Despite savage fighting, nothing could have prepared the survivors for the second wave, because it wasn’t just fang and claw, it was the planet as well.

Prior to the first killing moon of the end times, dragons warned any and all humans who would listen: something more was coming. The simple existence of the massive beasts should have been the lynchpin for a defense that had no time to form, but must stand and fight against something crawling from the collective muck of humanity’s racial memory. Even the sage advice of the dragons wasn’t enough. There was too much fear, and hunger, and disease to go with the mistrust and outright shock at what was happening.
Every
soul was scarred by the trauma, resulting in an enormous amount of hand wringing and denial. Then everything changed with the tide of the killing moon.

Earthquakes as severe as any in recorded history rattled the land, with waves so strong that homes, cars, and entire city blocks were hurled upward like chaff. The first quake, a long, terrifying rumble of additional destruction, struck in the early morning hours of June 11, 2019, and kicked the majority of the central United States back to the Stone Age. Memphis, Sikeston, Bowling Green—these cities simply ceased to exist, noted only by the fires that raged unabated for days before dying out from a lack of fuel. The mighty rivers of the Mississippi basin willfully slipped their bonds and caused extinction level floods all along the corridor of the watershed. Dubuque, Iowa collapsed into the river, only to be swept away, its bluffs eroded to nothingness in a matter of hours. Toward the Gulf, the once calmed Atchafalaya leaped from bank to bank and redirected a river course never meant to be under the control of man. In between, and as far east as Louisville, the Ohio and its minor tributaries answered the call of the tectonic fury by burying a third of Kentucky in muddy water. Two centuries of history were swept clean before the sun could rise. Bridges were nonexistent, horses became critical, and the only people in the eastern United States who were capable of survival remained ensconced in their mountain homes throughout the majesty of Appalachia. These survivors, of whom French Heavener was one by family history, would provide the backbone of many localized defenses against the incursions of the demons. While the earthquakes and floods had minimal damage in their areas, the karst geography meant that caves belched demons into their well-armed but still vulnerable midst each lunar cycle. It was only three centuries of self-reliance that taught the people who had been ridiculed as hillbillies a month earlier that they were now a precious commodity if the world would ever right itself. To their credit, they took enormous satisfaction in killing the invaders, whom they regarded as a physical manifestation of the devil himself. Despite having few churches, the armies of the devoted met and battled with the beasts of hell throughout the rich forests of the Appalachian, Blue Ridge, and Allegheny ranges. The tough mountaineers were lethal with guns, cunning in their territory, and foaming at the mouth to kill creatures that emerged from what they considered hell’s own nursery. Their stalking tactics were nothing short of ghostlike. In dozens of meeting areas in the eastern Piedmont, the skulls of slain creatures hung from trees like trophies taken while on safari in Satan’s game preserve.

While the men and women of Appalachia fought tooth and nail, their war was one of proactive aggression. Elsewhere, remnants of technological expertise survived, usually in the form of lone individuals who had been trapped away from the main cities during the fall of the nation. Here and there, scientists lived, asking questions, compiling information, and attempting to see patterns or weaknesses in the creatures who raged across the shattered land every twenty-eight days. Slowly, from the wreckage a picture began to emerge. Ideas formed. Tactics developed, then passed to the dragons and riders. In less than a decade, an unofficial but lethal doctrine of war became known to every man or woman who sat astride a dragon or stood watch on the ground.

The first true breakthrough was courtesy of a navy man who’d been stranded a hundred miles from home during the initial attacks, but gritted out an overland journey to return to his family. That determination would ultimately serve mankind well. August Dinardi was a twenty-year veteran of the United States Navy. During his career, the Master Chief established himself as a virtual wizard at the procuring and trading of goods for the benefit of his shipmates. Dinardi’s creative career inspired him to attempt a radical solution for a knotty problem: how to armor the men and women who were fighting the creatures from hell. He achieved this with the efficiency of any Yeoman. After a vicious coastal incursion near his hometown of Bayonne, New Jersey, Dinardi had a flash of brilliance. While eyeing the steaming corpse of a freshly-killed beast that resembled a six-legged rhinoceros, he casually walked over and plunged a sixteen-inch-long butcher knife into the monster’s hide. Noting the incredible resistance to the blade, he arranged a team of volunteers to hoist the animal partially upward using a block and tackle intended for diesel truck engines. This curious action was brought on by experiences from his formative years, when the teen Lothario was sent to spend summers with his paternal grandparents, who were third-generation farmers in Pennsylvania. After decades of intermittent poverty, his grandparents were experts in butchering animals, and masters at the art of efficiently using everything they produced on the farm. Combined with his decades of creative naval supply, it seemed only natural that he would look at the monster before him as more opportunity than a threat. After elevating the carcass, Dinardi opened a bottle of prized red wine, took a deep swallow, and went to work.

Eleven hours later, he had successfully skinned the entire monster, partially butchered the flesh, and removed anything that looked like it might be of merit. Like any good Yeoman, his policy of inventive usage truly shone forth over the next two days. By stretching the tent-like hide over a hastily-constructed aluminum rack, he cured the black, pebbled skin into something that he quickly realized was not only tough and durable, but waterproof. The curious hide was also light absorbing and unusually supple. On a hunch, his wife, an indefatigable woman who once owned a bridal store, cut and sewed the hide into a suit of what could be called the lightest armor ever known to man. Along the way, they realized something else about the magical animal’s skin; it reduced the sound of the wearer to nearly immeasurable levels and, with that,
whisperskin
became the first advantage wrested away from the invading armies of hell. From that point on, as news spread across the remaining pockets of humanity, and every single beast killed was dragged back to the safe confines of whatever habitation existed for the local populace. With each successive dissection, survivors learned more about their enemy. Biology and chemistry, while fascinating, faded into the distance in terms of immediate usefulness. Desperate humans proved to be both cunning and determined, and within a matter of months, worldwide uses of the denizens from the underworld were being discovered on an almost daily basis.

Over the years, certain experts emerged among the people who could not fight on the front lines but still dedicated their considerable skills to the war effort. The wiry, silver-haired Dixon Tenafelt was one such person. His mastery as a scrivener of all skins magical was legendary among the communities that dotted the coastal areas of the Bulwark and, to everyone except his wife, he was simply known as The Saddler. Tenafelt, being a modest man, eschewed such a title, but tolerated it in the name of unity. His shop was a study in contrasting areas of order and apparent catastrophe. From one workbench to the next, a dizzying array of materials in various states of coaxing all yielded to the finishing room. There, suits of whisperskin armor hung on wooden frames, the owner’s name tagged on each custom creation with a small paper label.

Not merely content to create armor from a skin that was magical in nature, Tenafelt employed a flash of brilliance to make the suits better still. This inspiration came to him while he watched two squeakers of the Admiralty performing their assigned task of sweeping and cleaning the dragon sleeping areas. The two youths marveled at the scales that had fallen from the beasts during their evening slumber. Draconic sleep was an active affair, punctuated by snorting, rolling about, and pawing the air. The nightly dance would have been comical if not for the real possibility of injury while in the vicinity of their energetic dreaming. He’d collected more than a dozen of the saucer-sized, nearly-unbreakable scales, and held them to the sun in wonder at their structure and color. They were elegant, tough, and flexible, much like the beasts that they protected. Peering through one of the scales like a church window, Tenafelt felt an idea take flight with such breathless speed that he nearly tripped twice in his haste to return to work.

“Scales protect dragons. The dragons protect us. The scales can be an extension of the dragons, too,” reasoned Tenafelt to no one in particular. He sat at a tall bench and carefully began to experiment on the first scale. He found success six days later, after nearly uninterrupted work, in which his wife helped, and then finally forced him to sleep and eat. With shaking hands and his eyes rimmed red with exhaustion, he summoned the three officers whose suits he had chosen to bless with his particular bit of genius. Tenafelt handed the first suit to a dour woman in her late thirties, known by her first and last names spoken simultaneously.

“Andi Kin, try it on,” he said as a rare smile cracked the round face of the rider.

She pointed at the augmentations at several key points. “Why only here? And there, and—why those places?”

During the exchange, the other two riders began to pull their completed armor on with religious awe. Both were experienced fighters, if young, and they knew an advantage when they saw it. The taller of the two, Dane Pellerin, slid into his as if he’d been wearing such things his entire life, grunting with satisfaction as the whisperskin encased him perfectly. The shorter but no less militant of the two was Lurvy Rostov. A plush woman in her early twenties, Lurvy had astonishing blue eyes, dark red hair, and a smile that told Tenafelt she couldn’t wait to field test the armor. All of the riders lived solely to kill their sworn enemy, and the Saddler had just granted them a tool for achieving exactly that. Lurvy, with her keen eye, tapped the scales on her suit and then snapped her fingers in a moment of enlightenment.

“Arteries. They cover major arteries,” she enthused.

Tenafelt nodded appreciatively at her astute analysis. “I call them blood points. They’re the locations where the suckers and fangs always try to hit when the baddies come up and out for their monthly romp. Trust me when I tell you”—he rubbed a worn hand over his equally bedraggled face—“that
nothing
attached to those creatures will puncture what is covering your most vulnerable spots.”

Before anyone could draw another breath, Lurvy whipped a military-issue knife down on Andi’s shoulder where one of the scales covered a large circle of whisperskin. The steel blade spangled with light as it slid harmlessly away. Andi let out a grunt of surprise, but her practical heart sang with the successful demonstration.

“Wha—oh, no kidding. It works,” Lurvy remarked casually.

Andi glared and examined her shoulder, brushing something from the surface of the dragon scale and nodding in appreciation. She might be a pragmatist, but she still didn’t enjoy being hit.

“Lucky me.” Andi gifted Lurvy with a wry smile.

In a moment of wanton excitement, Dane plunged his
own
knife down in a hissing strike, smacking into the scale that covered his femoral artery. The result was the same, even though he’d taken a leap of faith and put far more muscle into the strike. Then again, these were riders—they truly understood the wonder of dragonkind on a level that most humans would never grasp, despite living in proximity to them.

Lurvy patted herself down and did some experimental motions. She took close note of the scales and their positions. Shoulder, neck, legs, armpit, bent in a gentle curve—nothing spared for the sake of safety, and yet, the suit moved like a silent breeze. She smiled with malice. “Saddler, you’ve just created the biggest problem we’ve ever seen at the Admiralty.”