Banshee Screams

by Clay Griffith

  The kid hit the button and he heard the unsatisfying clicks of the nose-mounted needle Gatling gun. He waited four very long seconds for saturation, then followed up with the more visceral thumping of the autocannons. Behind the numbers in his eyesight, Ringo saw Legionnaires lock up helplessly and then get obliterated. He laughed.

  Only when the view wooshed away from the sykers did he realize that Stew had dropped the Stallion close enough to burn the Legionnaires' heads with the backwash. Then suddenly the ground floor of the Sanitarium loomed up black before them.

  "Stew!" Ringo shouted.

  "Mm hmm." Stew's response was a slight tightening of his facial muscles as he pulled back on the stick.

  The top of a Victorian turret swept past Ringo's window. He could count the shingles blown off in their wake. Then the stars filled his eyes as Stew climbed again.

  The former priest turned and smiled. "Nice shooting, Ringo."

  The kid swallowed without looking at him. "Thanks."

  Stew yanked the Hoss around for another charge. He checked over his shoulder and muttered with alarm, "No, no, no." He clicked his com. "Ranger Two, break off!"

  Ringo twisted in his seat to look. Far below them, he saw Chennault's Stallion roaring in low, cannons blasting the remnants of the square they'd just smashed. It seemed to Ringo that she was making good headway. But then he saw what caused Stew's concern. Another square, hidden from Chennault's view, was powered up.

  It fired an energy lance.

  Stew shouted, "Chennault, get out of—"

  The blast caught her Stallion directly across the cabin. The front of the Hoss vanished in a wave of green that backlit the shrapnel bits tumbling through the air. The headless gunship continued on its level flight, sparking and smoking, for fifty more yards. Then it tilted and rolled sickly. The machine crashed into the ground and tumbled, breaking into large, crumpled pieces.

  Ringo stared in amazement. Chennault and Tsukino had been in that ship.

  Stew was already diving on the Legion square that hit them. "Ranger Three, cover me."

  Ngoma's young voice came back, trying to hide its cracking uncertainty, "Roger that, One."

  Stew calculated the maneuvers it would take to destroy the remaining Legionary squads. Then he would set down, along with Ngoma's crew, and switch to clean up with small arms. It would be more difficult without Chennault's Stallion, but it would still get done. Every Legionnaire had to die.

  Ringo looked at Stew. Only the cold, blue eyes flicking between the windscreen and the controls betrayed any emotion in the pilot. Then those eyes darted toward the co-pilot, taking in the lost face of the young man.

  "Ringo," Stew said calmly over the ear-numbing whine of the engines, "mind your guns."

  "Yes, sir." Ringo turned back to his work, but his fingers felt numb on the triggers.

  The gunship roared down on the enemy.

  Debbi and Ross's boots echoed as they descended the grand staircase and trod past the diseased cadavers lying in the foyer. Ross paused to get his bearings.

  "I know where Quantrill must be," he said. "When I was here, he kept his Legionnaires stacked up in the basement. Runs under about half the house. This wing." He pointed toward a draped doorway off the foyer Debbi started off. "How do you get down?"

  "I always went through the kitchen."

  Debbi tentatively pushed through the drapery, studying the corridor beyond. Flickering candles in sconces spaced every twenty feet lighted the long hallway. There were several doors, but no cells. The striped wallpaper was peeling, and the paint cracked and puckered on the carved ceiling ten feet over their heads.

  "Come on," she said. "We don't have time for door to door."

  Ross agreed although he knew it was bad tactics to leave the rooms unchecked. They could be full of deranged inmates ready to pour out and cut off their line of retreat.

  The two Rangers started down the hallway at a trot. Their ears were tuned for any peculiar sounds besides the continuing rumble of battle outside. Debbi desperately wanted to know how bad things were out there, but couldn't spare it more than the fleetest thought. At the far end of the corridor, Debbi took one side of a massive double door and Ross the other. They threw the doors open, guns out.

  They found themselves facing into a formal dining room. This chamber, like the entire house, would have been magnificent once. Now it was a charnel house. The stench was horrible. The drone of swarming flies almost drowned out the distant chatter of gunfire. Skeletal remains were scattered around the room. The long banquet table was littered with bones, some still covered with bits of flesh, and crawling with insects. The bones were clearly human.

  "Quantrill's dining room," Ross said. "His table manners haven't improved. There's a door."

  Debbi and Ross walked alongside the table, swatting bugs that swarmed from the remains to them. Debbi placed her hand on another door stained with dark handprints. She pushed and, as the door swung in, the barrel of her Dragoon swept across the large stone kitchen.

  This room was empty too. Several human bodies, both male and female, were spread out on a heavy wooden table. They had been partially butchered. Arms and legs lay to one side. Chest cavities split open like chickens for broiling. Organs piled neatly in a rust-colored slurry.

  Ross muttered, "We should've just blown this place all to hell like Stew said."

  Debbi backed across the room with a deep breath. She couldn't take her eyes off the slaughtered remnants of the men and women on the table. Perhaps they had been inmates, or they could've been settlers taken by force and brought here to be butchered. Either way, the result was the same. Now they were just so much rotting meat.

  It was the Bone Camp all over again. With a shudder, Debbi realized this was what Quantrill had intended for Temptation and for Castle Rock.

  Perhaps this was what he intended for all of Banshee.

  Debbi stared at the waxy flesh of the butchered bodies and realized that she had been just as they were now. Their bodies were cold and lifeless. They were torn and abused. She had been too when she was lying in her casket in the ground.

  So had Quantrill been in his grave as well.

  Ross paused at a dark wooden door beyond an iron stove, with his hand on the doorknob. He looked back at his frozen partner. "What is it?"

  Debbi's breathing became more rapid and she felt clammy. She tried to keep her face calm. She didn't want Ross to know she felt weak and afraid. No, it was more than fear. Everyone going into battle was afraid, but she was experiencing a terror that sapped her intuition and instinct.

  Debbi blurted out, "We shouldn't be here."

  Ross cocked a sarcastic eyebrow. "No kidding. But it's a little late for that now."

  Debbi wiped sweat from her forehead. "This was a mistake. What can we do, the two of us?"

  Ross snapped, "Geezus, Dallas! Don't let him get inside your head before you even see him."

  Debbi swallowed her fear and frustration. It took intense effort, but she walked to the door without shaking. She felt perspiration dripping down her chin. She hoped her voice sounded of battlefield bluster, but it came out quavering. "You want to cut me some slack? The guy did kill me."

  Ross didn't show any sympathy, just anger. "I know that. But you wanted to come get him. Now run this damn thing or people who are counting on you are going to die."

  Debbi flushed with anger that quickly turned to shame. Her terror diminished slightly in the face of it. She searched Ross's typically snide squint for strength, but instead his eyes showed an unusual concern that she barely detected through her nervous energy. He was afraid too. For her. His way to deal with it was to push her.

  Debbi gave him her best glare and retorted with equal vigor, "Open the damn door and just follow my lead." Her ragged impatience was real, but her sudden nerve still reeked of unconvincing bravado.

  Ross worked his jaw for a second. He pressed his finger into her breastbone. "Can you feel your heart beating?"

  Deb
bi eyed him nervously. "Yeah."

  "Quantrill can't."

  Debbi did feel her heart pounding beneath his fingertip. She focused on the sensation and found it comforting like the thump of the surf or the trembling of distant thunder. Or the drumming of the wind against her ears in the Banshee desert. The Ranger regained control over her breathing and feeling seeped back into her limbs. It was surprising, even touching, to see Ross try his first attempt at motivation that didn't include the phrase "or I'll kick your ass."

  She took a deep breath. "Okay."

  "All right. Now, don't get me killed down here." He reached for the doorknob. "Cause I don't think the planet'll spit me back up."

  "Yeah." Debbi replied seriously. "The planet doesn't really like you."

  Ross actually smiled. His eyes crinkled in the shadow of his hat brim. "Well then, darlin', maybe I'll see you on the other side. Say when."

  She raised her Dragoon. "When."

  On the other side of the door was a stone staircase that ran down beside a glistening, moss-covered wall into pitch darkness. Ross knew it led to a large chamber that had been designed as a storage cellar for food and household items. When he was there, however, it had served as a holding pen for Legionnaire corpses awaiting revivification. They had been stacked like cordwood on the dank stone floor.

  Debbi led the way down the crumbling, debris-strewn stairs. Her breath misted in the dark air. Even through the starlite goggles, she could see very little because there wasn't much ambient light to enhance. She could, however, see the frozen glare on Ross's face and hear the sharp breath hissing from his nostrils. No doubt, this descent was bringing back horrifying memories for him. She didn't know much about how Ross had suffered at the hands of Lupinz and Quantrill, and hoped he remembered little of it himself. The fact that Lupinz turned out to be someone else must've robbed Ross of some of the relief he wanted by destroying him. However, what she was slowly beginning to comprehend was that when Debbi had died, Ross forgot about his own tortures. He had long since lost interest in exacting vengeance for his sake. This was all about her and Quantrill.

  The two Rangers went down the steps as stealthily as possible given the clanking hardware on their belts and the grit crunching loudly beneath their boots. They knew it was overly hopeful to think Quantrill wasn't aware they were coming. Debbi assumed the General was in some sort of psychic contact with his troops outside and perhaps with Lupinz, or whoever he really was, and knew the battle was on. She couldn't understand why he was lurking down in the cellar when there was fighting to be done. Quantrill was an inhuman creature, but he wasn't a coward. And he wasn't stupid.

  As they reached the bottom, Debbi and Ross studied the silent expanse of the dark chamber. It was strangely crowded and, at first, Debbi thought the room was full of Legionnaires standing in stiff order. But she was wrong. The chamber had been fitted with rows of hooks along the ceiling and dead bodies hung from them. She could make out close to one hundred of them, naked and desiccated. Through the cold air she smelled the acrid scent of smoke. This was a storehouse full of smoked meat for the Legion.

  Debbi noted that she was not physically repulsed by the sight, and that made her even more furious at Quantrill. The fact that she could become inured to this sort of horrific madness disturbed her. Ross pointed past her shoulder. She focused on a distant corner of the room where she barely made out a large mound of some sort. The ceiling was almost twelve feet high and the mound reached to it. Then, through the forest of hanging cadavers, she saw three more mounds around the chamber. More food?

  Only when Debbi's foot lightly touched the surface of the floor and she could peer under the rows of dangling feet could she clearly discern the nearest mound.

  It was a pyramid of bodies. Just as Ross had described. She recognized the tattered remnants of Syker Legion uniforms on the cadavers.

  Not food. New recruits.

  The Rangers crouched at the foot of the stairs, waiting, clutching their weapons and watching the blackness intently for any sort of movement.

  Ross tapped Debbi's arm and pointed off to the right. Although the other side of the room was invisible in the darkness, he knew the door out was that way. They stood and began to weave through the suspended cadavers. When they walked past the first pile of syker corpses, Debbi stared closely but saw no sign of animation.

  Their night vision started to improve, revealing the gray shapes of five piles of dead Legionnaires laid out in the four corners and the center of the chamber. Several stone pillars helped obscure the view, but Debbi saw a heavy wooden door beyond one mound.

  And then, with a shock, she saw General Quantrill.

  Chapter 15

  The dead General casually stepped out from behind a mound of his dead soldiers. He had his hands clasped behind his back and a stern glare on his rotting face. His ever-present adjutant lurked dutifully just behind him.

  Debbi and Ross swung their guns on him and a shower of black needles hissed into the air. Tiny green phosphorescences sparked in front of the syker. A force shield.

  Quantrill said, "Those toys are worthless now. It was a short-lived advantage."

  The sound of his gravely voice sent a rush of horror through Debbi. It had been a long time since she'd heard it, a lifetime ago. It was different somehow, weaker, strained, but she couldn't tell if it was him or her.

  "Tell that to Lupinz," Ross retorted.

  Quantrill smiled with his twisted lips. "Yes. A pity about him. But then, we all know death hardly means the end of a promising career here on Banshee." He nodded at Debbi as if they had an unspoken bond. The fraternity of the grave.

  Debbi could barely keep from spitting at him out of disgust.

  The General continued, "I'm not a monster, so I'll give you both a chance to surrender."

  Ross snorted derisively. "Thanks, but don't print the menus yet."

  Debbi aimed her Dragoon straight at Quantrill. "General, I don't think you can't keep it up for long. We know how your Legion works." She fired several shells and the force screen absorbed their impact. "I'm betting that if I keep pushing, you'll fold like a cheap, dead suit."

  "Fire every bullet you have." Quantrill stared closely at her. "I guarantee I've got the power to drive you down to the core of this planet you love so much. You see, I've given up my Legionnaires above. Most of them were gone anyway. But there is this."

  From behind the two Rangers came the sound of something sliding. Ross glanced back. In one of the mounds of the dead a scabrous arm moved. And a leg. Then more rustling, creaking noises signaled a second cadaver pile coming to unlife somewhere beyond the curtains of hanging corpses.

  The Legionnaires unfolded themselves, pushing free of the mounds of tangled limbs, and slipping to the ground. Like soldiers climbing out of their bunks after reveille, they were groggy and unfocused. Yet even before they could struggle to their feet, they lifted their heads to look at the two Rangers. Many had eyes in their decaying faces, but those with empty sockets stared too.

  "Son of a bitch." Ross shook his head. "I am so tired of this zombie crap."

  Debbi studied Quantrill. The General had not made a move, physically. If Hallow was right and the Legion was a network with Quantrill as its head, then he alone had to be coordinating these reanimating troopers.

  She would risk that the task was too intensive for him to do much more at the same time.

  Debbi pulled the second Dragoon off her back and turned on the nearest mass of squirming undead. She peppered them with black needles from two guns. Ross did the same. The sykers went predictably rigid. However, there were so many of them, their sheer numbers and close proximity to one another, arms enfolding arms, legs tangled with legs, prevented the Rangers from hitting them all. Plus, the effect of the needles was temporary thanks to the very networking that was keeping Quantrill occupied. Without destroying their brains, the Legionnaires would recover and keep coming.

  Ross waded into a group of the semiconscious soldiers st
ruggling to stand. He fired down with his shotgun, pumping shell after shell into the squirming mass. Bony fingers reached up and clutched at his legs. He kicked them off and kept shooting.

  None of the new Legionnaires were using any syker powers yet, probably because they were so new to this fresh life after death. Soon, no doubt, they would all regain their abilities and overwhelm the Ranger duo.

  Surely there was some way to defeat Quantrill, Debbi thought. When she had touched the tannis, when she pushed the automaton into the rock, she sensed power just beyond her fingertips. She'd seen Martool wield it at Castle Rock; Martool had destroyed the bulk of the Legion with just her mind. It cost her, but Debbi was willing to pay a similar price. She would pay any price.

  As if a switch had been pulled, Debbi's mind reached out in a way she couldn't control. She sensed the planet waiting for her to call on it. It was a quivering mass, a storehouse of power that demanded direction. But something was blocking it. A dark, oozing presence. A viscous morass of corruption that seemed frustratingly weaker than the sharp, solid power of the planet, but thrived by being elusive and uncatchable.

  Like an animal placing a tentative paw into a tar pit, Debbi had to push a little deeper, stretching for an important meal that was just out of reach. It was still safe. She could always pull free of the sticky blackness. And the reward would be worth it.

  As she plunged deeper into the darkness, she began to feel nauseated and her awareness clouded. Soon, though, she would break through. She had to; it was the only way to defeat Quantrill. His power was too great to confront face to face. Martool was right after all; mere physical force wasn't a solution. But Debbi had the ability to bring enough force to bear, to smash the enemy once and for all. She just had to fight through the dark.

  Debbi heard a voice shouting through the darkness. She couldn't tell who it was, but they needed help. She knew she had to go to them.

  The darkness clutched tenaciously at her. With a jolt of terror, she realized the tar pit had her trapped. The harder she pulled, the more she was pulled in. It was a cold, devouring presence. A lonely, hateful thing. Debbi struggled on.