Banshee

by Terry Maggert

  “Let’s get you cleaned up and hydrated first. Talk can wait.” The woman had an incredibly deft touch that extended to her husband, the commander of their entire sprawling township, and all of the militias as well. Over Byrna’s shoulder, Saavin saw the dark brown skin and high cheekbones of Moss Eilert. His piercing black eyes and keen intellect were chomping at the bit, held in reserve by the gentle request his wife made as she led Saavin to the kitchens. “Moss, you let this soldier get fed and watered before you begin your interminable questions.”

  The Commodore straightened to his full height, well over six feet, opened his mouth, thought better of it, then kissed his wife on the cheek with a deep bass chuckle. “Agreed, dear heart. Matters of security can wait, but when she’s ready, send her to me. I’ll be in Medical with our guest.” He nodded amiably at Saavin and decamped in three long strides.

  “Your guest has certainly caused a commotion,” Byrna quipped as she sat the bedraggled girl down gently at a rough wooden mess table. A squeaker, one of the youngest members of the Admiralty, brought a pitcher of chilled water, some precious ice, and a small plate of cut fruit. A single slice of dark yellow cheese sat on the plate as well, and Saavin felt her stomach growl in anticipation. When Byrna saw her eyes dart to the cheese, she said, “Drink first. Then eat. You need it. How many hours were you out?”

  After a long, frigid drink that brought tears of joy to her eyes, Saavin did a little math and said, haltingly, “Three days in all, but ten hours over. Carrying that rider was a lot harder than we expected. His mount wasn’t the problem; he was. He wouldn’t cooperate, and he kept trying to head back north. Banshee finally had to carry him in his claws to stop the fool from opening his wounds again.” She grimaced at the memory of those injuries. In addition to exposure, the man had a ten-inch tooth or claw, she couldn’t be certain which, jutting from the back of his shoulder. The object had a deep, poisonous green hue, and she hadn’t dared remove it without medical staff on site.

  “I heard he’d been attacked. Got a glimpse of him.” Byrna looked over her shoulder, then added, “He’s incredibly tough, that one. I saw no less than four gashes. He fought something terrible to a standstill, or killed it outright.” The wounds had been just this side of suppuration. His arrival saved his life, of that there could be no doubt.

  Saavin nodded sagely, despite her drooping eyes. It had been a long, hard patrol, and she remembered to ask if the other outriders were back. “Is everyone in?”

  Byrna nodded with relief. “All accounted for. And other than you, no injuries or dehydration.” That in itself was a rarity, given that they were at the absolute scorching peak of the summer. Even the fingers of saltwater that filled the chasms splitting the former United States failed to moderate the heat. If anything, the long, blazing stretches of the shallow sea made life even less hospitable, although the desalinization plants were much more effective, due to the proximity of their sources. The engineers wasted far less effort bringing precious water to the farms than if they had run pipelines over miles of a merciless desert once known as Texas. The remnants of the Daniel Boone Forest were cold comfort to hungry people. They knew, based on the log litter alone, a magnificent place that could have given shelter, fuel, and food, was now little more than bleached jackstraws. The bones of what had once been, acted ever to remind the survivors that here there was once life in abundance. Here was the world you will never know.

  After her third mug of water and clearing the plate of food, Saavin nodded toward Byrna decisively. “I’m ready to see the Commodore, and find out a little more about our mystery man.”

  Byrna smiled. “So am I, on both accounts.”

  2

  Dragons

  “Everyone on the planet thought the Progeny were the luckiest humans that had ever walked. Who wouldn’t? They had dragons. Not some imaginary, bullshit lizard, but an honest to God monster that talked the rider like it had known them all their lives. In a way, it had. It wasn’t like there was some mystery to how or why the dragons woke up and clawed their way out of wherever they’d been hiding. Once they got here, they all started talking from the moment they spread their wings to dry in the sun. Hell, we couldn’t get some of them to shut up, but it wasn’t as if we wanted them to be silent. The stories they told us filled in every blank spot in our history. Who built Stonehenge? What about the pyramids? Was Atlantis real? They answered it all.

  “It turned out that, even though the dragons had been sleeping, sort of, they’d still been listening. That was why they picked their own names. It depended on where they emerged during The Rising. Ilmatar, the first dragon to emerge in North America? She took her name from the Finnish goddess of the wind. When we asked her why, the explanation was simple: she wished to be familiar, not menacing, and it would have been vanity to select a name that was disrespectful to her new people. Since there were a lot of Scandinavians who settled in that area, her name made sense. We heard the same story over and over; as when Alignak rose among the Inuit, Revere in Massachusetts, and Metacomet, who rose dripping from the waters of the Potomac River. Some were cultural heroes, some were legends.There were plenty we’d never heard of until their namesakes explained, quite thoroughly, that history was positively crowded with heroes whose names had been lost to the ravages of time. Once the initial panic of The Rising wore off, people started asking some mundane questions, which the dragons answered primarily through action. They liked fish. Big fish, and they were experts at skimming the waters and plucking thousand-pound tuna like grapes. They were all manner of colors and sizes, regardless of their gender. Some dragons were as small—and that’s a relative term only—as thirty meters long, with a weight of eight tons. They were muscular, tough, and their forelegs were long enough to do a lot of damage in a fight. Their hindquarters were powerful, and their wings long and incredibly flexible. They had mouths full of long teeth, with six bicuspids to the side that could shear steel like paper. Their sight was better than their sense of smell, which was still excellent, and they had the ability, like any soldier, to fall asleep at any time, regardless of surrounding noise levels. For the first year, the dragons that had risen were smallish, up to thirty meters, but that trend ended in the first autumn after The Rising.

  “Gaspar burst from the waters of Tampa Bay on Halloween night. Even though—well, the world wasn’t really over a dragon rising, but he got everyone’s attention. Immediately. At first, the boats that saw him unfurling his wings near the Gandy Bridge began to run for their figurative lives. His emergence caused a swell nearly eight feet high and swamped several small craft that were fishing in the area. When he began to laugh in his booming voice, most of the boaters turned around to go meet the newest dragon on the continent. That is one magnificent beast. He’s still unique, what with those obsidian scales and oxblood highlights. When the press gathered to meet him in the morning, he was sprawled in the sun at Fort Desoto, dead asleep and apparently carefree. Upon waking to find nearly a thousand observers staring at him, he yawned hugely and inquired if anyone could direct him to the nearest school of fish. Gaspar was sixty meters of muscle and fang; he was like another species compared to the Firsters. I still remember that reporter with the big hair asking him if he was the biggest dragon ever. That was the first time anyone had seen a dragon become truly morose. He lowered his enormous head to within inches of her face and told the world that bigger dragons were coming. Much bigger. The sad part is, no one even thought to ask him why.” —Captain Richard Diamond

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

  3

  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.

  4

  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 wat
ching 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.