The door to the Ranger office opened and slammed shut. Ahmed ibn Sharif stood panting with his back pressed against the door. He carried a long, bloody sword in his hand.
Ross sat shuffling papers in annoyance. He stood up at the caravan master's entrance, hoping for something to take him away from the desk.
"I just came from the Depot." Sharif uncovered his face that was still draped in fear. "What is happening in this town? It's bad enough zombies are milling around outside the walls, but what are those flying things?" He held up the bloody sword.
"Sit down before you fall down." Ross slid an empty chair around in front of the desk. "They're from the Toxic Jungle. We're infested. Sun's going down, so they're coming out. You didn't get bitten, did you?"
"No. Why? Are they poisonous?"
"Yeah. Real poisonous."
"If they are from the Toxic Jungle, why are they here?"
"That's a good question. You remember how bad things were here when you left before? Well, they're worse."
"So I understand. The word on the trail is Temptation is quarantined. No caravan will stop here. I had to leave mine to come here."
"I know. We haven't had a caravan through here in nearly a week. We've been eking by with what we get from freelance freighter pilots. But even they're starting to avoid us now." Ross pulled a bottle and glass from the desk drawer and poured a drink. He made no offer to Sharif who didn't use alcoholic spirits. "We're rationing food. The power station is down so we're running on generators and ghost rock oil. But we're running out of fuel. So we're rationing that. The water treatment station is already running half-speed. So we're rationing water too."
Sharif said, "I have some goods I can slip to you. It won't be much. I can't bring my whole team in here or I will be barred elsewhere."
"I'd appreciate anything you can do, Sharif."
"Of course. I actually came to deliver news, but it seems superfluous now. Do you recall Charlie Newcomb?"
"Yeah. The algae farmer." Ross took a drink. "I am a little busy to mediate right of way squabbles."
Sharif leaned on his sword. "Newcomb's dead. His farm has been wiped out."
That got Ross's attention. "What happened?"
"I am not sure. We passed through two days ago heading south. His spread was torn apart."
"Did you find Newcomb?"
"Parts of him. I hate to say it, but it looked like a Skinny got them."
Ross purposefully kept his face blank despite the sense of dread that swept over him at the mention of a Skinny. He flipped a few papers on his desk. "That's just great."
Sharif continued, "I wanted to report it because of the history I've had with him. I want it known that I had nothing to do with it."
Ross shrugged. "I wouldn't suspect you, Sharif. Anything else?"
Sharif considered. "Yes. I saw some odd vehicles in the distance."
"What kind of vehicles?"
"Old-style wheeled trucks. They were moving southeast. Their tracks came out of the Red River Valley and through Newcomb's spread."
"Reapers?" Ross asked with new interest.
"They had no markings. But they were carrying a strange cargo." Sharif paused. "It appeared to be dead bodies."
Ross sat up straight. "Dead bodies?"
"Yes. Several truckloads of them." Sharif reached into his robes and brought out an object that he tossed on the desk. "And I found this."
A bite-guard facemask used on dangerous lunatics wobbled across Ross's desk.
The crimson waters of the Red River flowed without heed as Ross and Reuben Olivares looked down at the distant ruins of the algae farm. The shacks had been burned. Drying beds were wrecked and the wet pans were dry. The remains of several bodies were visible, already picked of flesh by Banshee's vigorous scavenger population.
Ross and Olivares were ensconced on a high butte a mile away from the wreckage of Newcomb's farm. They had been camped there for a day and a half and had watched a line of three trucks pass through the farm and roll into the valley over a day ago. Now the Rangers waited for the convoy to return so they could follow it in a Stallion.
Ross poured Olivares a cup of coffee as they settled around a small fire. The Ranger from New Hope was up to speed on what Ross and Debbi had experienced in the Red River Valley, at least as much as Debbi had told Ross. He had also imparted information on the black guns to Olivares. Both of them had black guns attached to their pulse rifles. Ross felt a little guilty about being out while Temptation was still having trouble. But the situation in town was coming under control. And this wasn't a pleasure trip; it may well hold the answer to Temptation's woes.
Olivares offered Ross a cigarette. He passed; he hadn't smoked in many years although nothing brought back the longing like a quiet evening around a campfire.
Olivares lit up and tossed the smoldering twig back into the fire. "So you think the Reapers are up to something out here? And it has to do with what's going on in Temptation?"
"Yeah, that's the best I can figure. Nicolai all but said he caused the troubles in Temptation. Now, he could've been lying. But I haven't heard any noise about anybody else making trouble on a large scale."
"How's it possible the Reapers are responsible for the kind of stuff you've been seeing? Undead. Weird creatures."
"Skinny magic probably. The Reapers have always had some working with them. The Skinnies are responsible for Peck calling that worhul. So I don't see why they couldn't infest us with batrats. And reanimate the dead."
"Really?"
"Hell, yes. What isn't really around here? We don't know everything those freaks can do. It would explain the late General Quantrill being out here." Ross sipped coffee. "I don't care where it leads. I just plan on getting some answers."
Olivares lay back against a rock and stared up at the dusk sky. "You know, Dave, if we'd have gotten Nicolai at Carson, all this might be different."
"Could be. Might be worse."
"I miss ol' Jesse Coltrane. You always knew where you stood with him. I mean, he always had some of those anouk lovers working for him, but basically you knew Coltrane was a thief and if you had what he wanted, he'd kill you for it. Nicolai's different. He seems to believe the crap he spews out about oppression and liberation. And he makes the Reapers believe it too. You never know which way he's going to jump."
Ross shrugged. "One's the same as the other. It doesn't matter what color a mad dog's coat is."
"I heard weird rumors about Coltrane going off to learn Skinny magic."
"Yeah. I heard that too. If it's true, I hope the Skinnies killed him and ate him."
Olivares chuckled. "This time next year you figure the Reapers'll be running this planet?"
Ross huffed. "I'm not sure they aren't running it now."
"What'll you do if Temptation joins up with Nicolai and this Banshee Free State?"
"I don't know." Ross stood up and tossed the remnants of his coffee on the fire. "Maybe I'll find some anouks that'll take me in and become a shepherd."
"That's easy for you." Olivares laughed. "You speak some anouk."
"Little bit."
Olivares blew out a long trail of smoke into the sky. "I'm thinking of joining EXFOR."
"Oh, come on, Reuben. You gonna live the rest of your life on a space station?" Ross found it hard to believe that a hardened Ranger like Olivares was talking about packing it. He had thought his old friend would be the last to cave in.
"Better than spending the rest of my life running from the Reapers." Olivares replied quietly. "Sometimes a man gets tired of running."
Ross studied his companion across the fire. In the orange glow, Olivares looked older, though they were practically the same age. Ross wondered if he appeared as beaten down to others.
He pulled out an algae bar and listlessly chewed on it. The surface of the distant, slow-running river was pockmarked with windblown white caps. A small herd of wild barkas paused to drink at the river's edge.
They were large c
reatures with bad eyes and short tempers. They reminded Ross of feral longhorns back home. Barkas also had long dangerous horns on their heads along with sharp, short horns on their snouts, and their knobby legs and hoofed feet allowed them to run swiftly over rough desert terrain. Their meat was a little gamy, Ross remembered, but not too bad with enough booze.
The thought of food drifted together with the sight of a sunset over rugged buttes and the meandering sparkle of the river to remind Ross of home. He thought of picnics by the stream in the heat of summer. Chicken and potato salad and cold iced tea. The sound of ice on glass and her laugh and the burble of water and cicadas chirping in the sluggish air. Her red hair against the bluish wildflowers.
Ross felt the old pain that was so familiar it was like a friend. But he realized it had been a few days since he last felt it. A few days without thinking of her. That seemed impossible. She used to be the first thought every slow morning and the last every endless night.
Suddenly, the barkas' heads went up as one. They trumpeted as the herd turned and roared off into the desert.
Ross lifted binoculars to his eyes.
Olivares stared at the glowing ember of his cigarette. "Do you remember when you thought being a Colonial Ranger meant something?"
"Yep. This morning."
Olivares's moroseness was growing irksome. There was a time for moping, and there was a time for getting back to work. Ross wished he had brought Debbi along.
Ross caught sight of something moving in the distance. He drew into focus three heavy vehicles rolling alongside the Red River, moving out of the valley. Even in the dusk, Ross saw cadavers stacked like cordwood in the back of the trucks. Arms and legs were visible, protruding sickeningly from the tarp-covered truck beds. Patients in torn, stained whites drove the trucks.
"Holy God," Olivares murmured from beside Ross. He lowered his own binoculars. "You Temptation boys sure have some unique law enforcement problems."
"We've got some openings if you think you're up for it." Ross headed for the Stallion.
"Maybe."
"Let's saddle up and hit the trail."
"That's the Lupinz Sanitarium."
Ross and Olivares watched the distant trucks moving through the gates into the Sanitarium grounds. As the last truck rolled past, a tall man in black swung the gate closed and locked it. It was Dr. Lupinz.
The Lupinz Sanitarium was a sprawling mansion that crouched on the exposed crest of a lightly forested hilltop. Scraggly trees permanently bent by the wind vibrated in a pale silver starlight patina. The wind blasted the Victorian house and threatened to tear loose its wretched boards and inappropriate gingerbread trim.
The house, it was said, had been brought piece by piece from Earth by a senior executive of Hellstromme Industries who resented his assignment to this hellish planet. He therefore demanded that his new home be better than that of any other colonist and grander than anything he would have had on Earth. His reconstructed mansion on the hill did little to comfort the displaced man's nerves. The executive spent his time wandering night after night through the empty corridors of his creaking house while the winds of Banshee screamed outside, rattling the windows, sliding under the poorly hung doors, and plunging down the many chimneys. He would crouch in the dim glow of an expensive subspace communications set listening to the tinny sounds of random Earth signals that drizzled into the Faraway System through the Tunnel. The executive eventually went mad and became the first patient when his own house was turned into an asylum for the insane.
The grounds surrounding the Sanitarium were several acres of rocky, bare earth enclosed by a fifteen-foot fence topped with razor wire. Powerful searchlights on the fence swept out the dim grounds, ostensibly to prevent inmates from escaping.
"Damn it," Ross said. "Dallas sent Tsukino out here and he came back and told us Lupinz was clean."
"You think Lupinz is in league with Nicolai?"
"I don't know."
Ross swung the Stallion down into a crevasse not far from the Sanitarium. He and Olivares armed up and grabbed some supplies. They hiked through scrubby forestland and approached the lunatic asylum from the rear. They hunkered down behind some rocks to study the sprawling mansion inside its fenced grounds.
They could make out at least twenty patients wandering aimlessly around the property. Many of them were straightjacketed like the people Debbi and Ross had encountered at Red River. They seemed to come and go as they pleased in the mansion. There were also veritable herds of stray cats wandering the grounds. The patients stayed well away from them.
The three trucks were parked behind the west wing of the asylum. Their cargo had already been unloaded. Beyond the vehicles, the Rangers could see open double-doors leading down into what would have been a cellar in a normal home. God knows what was in that place.
Olivares said, "There must've been a couple of hundred corpses in those trucks. What is Lupinz doing in there?"
"We'll find out when it gets dark." Ross looked at his watch. He nestled down against the rocks and closed his eyes as if taking a nap under a chestnut tree after a church picnic.
"We're going in there? After dark?"
"No. I'm going in there. You're staying out here in case I don't come back. Then you get the Rangers and rip this place apart. Now shut up so I can get a couple of hours sleep."
Precisely two hours later, Ross's eyes snapped open. The sky was dark; neither of Banshee's moons had risen yet. The wind was howling. Olivares had been on watch, but now he slid back down toward their camp. Ross scrabbled through the supply kit he brought from the Stallion. He grabbed a powerful penlight and a small pair of wire cutters.
"This oughta do it." He and Olivares consulted their watches. "Give me an hour."
"Have fun. I'll be thinking of you."
Ross vaulted over the rocks and made for the fence in a running crouch. None of the searchlights were burning. Perhaps the generator was down.
Ross saw movement inside the grounds and halted. He hugged the dirt as a yellow, glowing oil lamp bobbed into view around the corner of the asylum. A lone patient wandered the grounds swinging the lantern and whistling, which was barely audible in the wind. Ross bided his time impatiently as the man strolled around the trucks. The inmate stopped and peered into the open cellar doors. A faint light glowed from inside. Then he walked on, around the asylum and out of sight.
Ross was up and running for the perimeter. He slung his rifle and gently tossed the metal wire cutters against the chain fence. No spark. The voltage was off. He immediately climbed. At the top, he used the cutters to snip a break through the razor wire. He took his rifle and carefully pushed away the wire, then slipped through without getting cut. The tired Ranger climbed down a foot or two on the inside and dropped to the ground.
Pausing to catch his breath, he listened. Silence. A cat sat silently in the dark watching him through slitted eyes without apparent interest.
There was no cover to exploit inside the fence. He ran straight for the trucks two hundred feet away and came in low behind the outside truck. It smelled of death.
He crawled between the trucks and rolled under the middle one. From a position between the front wheels, he could see into the cellar doors and down the ceiling of a long stone hallway. There were dim electric lights spaced every twenty feet and they were burning, so the generator obviously was working. He crawled forward on his belly until he was at the doors. Fifteen steps led down to a corridor. The hallway stretched about fifty feet under the asylum with one heavy wooden door on each wall. At the far end, the corridor branched into a "T" with double doors directly ahead. Ross listened, but heard nothing. Another cat sat on the steps washing its belly. It paused to eye Ross, and then returned to bathing.
Ross scrambled to his feet and was off down the corridor. At the T-junction, he slid an eye to the corner and looked left. That corridor vanished into darkness. He looked right and saw a thick wood and steel door twenty feet away. The double doors straight ah
ead had small windows. He stepped across the intersection and looked through the windows.
Inside was a massive warehouse-sized chamber. He couldn't see the full size of the room because the only light came from the windows where he stood. He saw men and women standing with their backs to him, row after row vanishing into the darkness. Their clothes were torn and filthy. They stood as still as statues.
Ross heard a clatter from the heavy door to his right. He darted back down the main corridor. A heavy key turned in a distant lock and a massive door swung on its noisy hinges. Multiple footsteps emerged into the corridor.
Ross grabbed the door handle nearest him. The door swung open sending a cat scurrying, and he slipped into the dim room. He gently pulled the door closed behind him and was instantly overwhelmed by the stench. The room was pitch black. He pulled out the penlight and clicked it on. The circle of light played over a pile of cadavers. They were stacked in an orderly, efficient crosshatched fashion. The bottom layer of about twenty-five bodies was laid in one direction and the second, smaller layer in the other, and so on, up for at least ten layers.
Ross stared at the grotesque sight in amazement.
As he swung the light around him, he saw more stacks of corpses. They stretched out as far as his beam of light carried. The room was immense, taking in at least half the length of the foundation of the sprawling mansion above. And it was full of pyramids of dead bodies.
The door handle rattled just behind him.
He killed his light and dove behind the nearest stack of corpses. He held his breath. The door opened and the entranceway was flooded with wavering lamp light. Ross heard steps on the cold, stone floor. There was also a tinny, jingling noise that he recognized as the sound of loose buckles on straight jackets.
The jingling came closer.
Ross gripped his rifle and eased his finger into the trigger guard. The tinkling buckle was just on the other side of the pyramid of cadavers. He lifted the barrel of his gun to catch whoever stepped around the corner. The jingling stopped.
Something grabbed his neck from behind.
Ross surged up and swung his elbow roundhouse, catching somebody solid in the chest. The sudden movement caused him to lose his footing in a congealed puddle of ichor. His momentum propelled him and the other person into the pyramid of dead. The structure gave way and began a sloppy, rubbery collapse. The bodies were cold, wet, and pliable. Ross felt clammy flesh all over him as uncontrolled arms, legs, and torsos pummeled him to the ground. An avalanche of rotting bodies buried him.
Banshee Screams Page 28