Banshee (23 page)

New Madrid

Until the day before French and Saavin returned from their foray into the black underneath, dragon wings had been a sign of victory, or hope.

Not that day.

A tumult arose from the town’s hub just in time to spy the lean silhouettes of descending dragons as they circled New Madrid in a powerful cavalcade. Four lean, athletic dragons curled hurriedly downward, lighting in the open town center just as Banshee and his companions had days earlier. They were quickly identified by their color and nearly identical size; the Four Explorers had risen together, fought as a team, and shared a coloration of blues and cream that made them seem like a single beast with four parts. They were noticeably riderless, a fact that escaped none of the townsfolk who gathered around them to shout greetings.

Before their wings had settled, Banshee swept in from his resting place near the river, his eyes bright with distress. He knew harbingers when he saw them, and there were four in front of his eyes.

“Why have you left Trinity?” Banshee asked the four, making room for Dauntless, whose lumbering, groggy approach bespoke the depths of his sleep only moments before. Bertline and Rae muscled their way through the crowd to stand near their dragons, worry creasing both their faces.

“Where are Jindy and Hert?” Meri spoke for the Explorers, his clear tenor strained from a long flight and worry.

“Hunting to eat. You know Hert.” Banshee’s answer caused a ripple of laughter among the crowd; his legendary appetite was already well-known in New Madrid. The amiable dragon’s tone grew serious again. “Why are you not defending Trinity?”

The Four Explorers shifted in place, their body language telling a collective story that even the least perceptive resident of New Madrid detected. Something was seriously wrong. It was Nicolet who broke the news.

“Trinity is gone.” Nicolet spoke in a clear tenor, her words saturated with carefully-marshalled sadness. Dragons were notoriously skilled at forgetting; they were slow to anger and reliable in a fight. Their strength didn’t end when the fighting died. Dragons suffered no remorse, no adrenaline bleed, and no shakes. Above all else, they washed themselves of regret as soon as their minds turned to the next task. From the body language of the four blue dragons standing before Banshee, it was obvious that the death of their home was going to challenge that ability to the fullest. “All of it,” Nicolet growled. Her frill rose slightly as the anger took hold anew.

Banshee emitted an involuntary hiss. “Where are your—”

“I said Trinity is gone.” Nicolet’s tone invited no second question. The gathering tension around dragons and townsfolk went black with grief. “A few dragons were with their riders on regular coastal patrols. An entire wing is deployed permanently to the villages along the inland sea. Whatever killed Trinity will not strike there; they are forewarned.”

The dragon’s head slumped in a remarkably human gesture. She was tired from the flight and riven with sadness.

Banshee dipped his muzzle in apology before asking, “Who gave the command to protect the fishing outposts?” It was a swift and sensible decision, and he wanted to understand what, if any, order remained in their former home.

“I did.” It was Bartolome who spoke, his deep blue head tilting to one side as he regarded the gathered crowd with a level gaze.

“Why?” a wheezing voice asked from below. Harriet Myers looked up at the quartet of dragons, shielding her eyes with an angled hand. Perspiration beaded her sallow skin and she swayed slightly. Despite those signs of weakness, there was power in the woman.

Bartolome sensed her innate strength. Perhaps it was the deference accorded her by the crowd, but each dragon adjusted their stance to bow slightly in Harriet’s direction. “Good lady, you are ill?”

A quick nod was all Harriet could manage. “I am not long for here. Go on, please.” It was factual and succinct, dismissing any attempt to bring her personal situation into the discussion.

“It is quite simple. We were poisoned. Nearly 3000 dead, even some of my dragon brethren were sickened. Briefly.” Bartolome uttered this last bit of news with a touch of incredulity; dragons were impervious to toxins of every kind save one.

“Demons? How?” Harriet sputtered. Short of biting a dragon, there was no known way to deliver the venom of a hellbeast. Dragons were too tough.

Nicolet spoke again, and this time she sounded cautious. “Something new. We think we remember them, from a time before, but we are not certain.”

The brighter souls among the crowd began to murmur, but it was a tall, lean farmer who stepped forward to put a calloused hand on LaSalle, who was the dragon closest to him. Lynn Prestagaard was a quiet man with a preternatural skill at solving problems. His blue eyes narrowed in the sun as he raised his voice above the low level chaos.

“From when? Do you remember things from before the world fell?” Prestagaard’s question fell into a momentary lull brought on by his boldness.

The dragons said nothing, but not from an unwillingness to speak. Their collective silence was indication of group thought.

Meri, the largest of the four, broke the odd quiet. “I dream about the time before this place.” He looked abashed, if a dragon could be such a thing. “I feel echoes, sometimes. There are images of places I have fought, and the land is . . . different. Less civil than the world that just passed us by. The beasts are ancient things, hairy and wild, and they do not fear me in the dream.” He spoke with great precision, scrutinizing his own memories. “I have risen and fought near a lake. There were people nearby; they wore animal skins. I assume they were what you call Indians, but I can’t be certain. We fought demons on the ice of a long shore. That I remember clearly; I feel this was the most recent of my awakenings.” His voice grew more confident with the telling. “I know that we carry our histories with us and, in filtering mine for knowledge, I remember a beast that sickened us. They are shadows to me now, but they
are
present. We will consult one another to sift this particular set of half-saved secrets.” Meri gave a curt draconic nod and stepped back slightly, his outburst complete.

“Racial memory seems plausible, since you rose from the earth speaking and informed of the wider world.” Curt Moscowitz was an engineer first and foremost, and he applied that logic to the problem before him. If the dragons spoke of many lives, Curt accepted that and moved immediately to use such knowledge. His pragmatic side knew no limit, especially when confronted with the musings of a thoughtful dragon. “When you can speak more of these creatures who sickened you, will you meet with us? We may be able to prevent other deaths.”

Curt’s query was met with rumbling assent from all four dragons, but only LaSalle, who had not spoken until then, made a statement. The cream and blue beasts’ great eyes narrowed as he cocked his muzzle to one side, enormous fangs bared to the sun. His voice was dangerously flat, and a vulpine leer split the length of his maw. “I am sworn to fight and protect my human compatriots. Rest assured, I will apply the whole of my memory to pull a solution from the haze of time.”

The other dragons growled; a feral sound that vibrated in the chest of every person standing nearby.

“The answer is there. And when we find it, we’ll bring the full might of our wings to bear on these abominations, and they will understand what hell on earth truly feels like.”

Dragons

“Here and there, the beasts of hell ran into problems. For the demons who burst out of the rift in Lake Champlain, that problem ended up killin’ damned near everything that came outta that godforsaken split in the earth. You’ve heard of folks calling lake monsters a water horse, but let me assure you, there’s nothing about Champ that’ll make you think a pony is coming up outta the water to say hello. I’ve lived on the lake my entire life, and I never saw Champ but I had my suspicions. We all did. Vermonters are practical, but we aren’t simple or stupid.

“Winters are hard on the lake. You live two lives in that part of the country; one is a time of action and excitement, and it lasts about three months. That's summer. The rest of the year, your other life, is preparing for winter or coming out of the slog of it. Damn, but you get sick of dirty heaps of snow. Then, just when you think you're out of the worst of it, an Easter storm drops two feet of heavy, wet snow on your head and it's right back to wet socks and roads that are slicker than snot for another three weeks. Then you get the mud—there's no spring, just mud and slop, and finally some green. A little bit here and there, a fresh day or two, and you get a jaunty step because you know that soon enough you can plant the garden, swat the black flies, and live outside again.

“The demons came on the first real night of spring when the peeper frogs were chatting away, and some of the old timers were down on the lake fishing for bullhead. The first wave of . . . whatever they were, some kind of spider things, but covered in scales, God they were awful. Awful. Well, they snatched a half dozen people fishing the shore before anyone knew what was happening. I know, I was there. I'd gone back up to my truck for snacks, and I heard the screams. It was the smell, you see, that first warm breeze coming up off the lake, it filled my nose with the stink of blood and I just
knew
. I called the sheriff and turned my truck lights on, honking and raising as much racket as I could; I thought it might distract those things, but all it did was make ‘em turn toward the noise. They sort of gathered themselves, those black eyes in a circle on top of their heads, and it was like they were sniffing. I felt my guts go to water, but I still pulled my shotgun from the truck. I was too old to run and too proud to lay down, so I figured I'd fight until those spindly legs could carry the damned things up the beach to me. Turns out, I shouldn't have worried, but we didn't know that until later, when the divers photographed the opening the creatures came through.

“When you live around wild animals, you learn some rules, and the first rule is this: never,
ever
mess with the babies. I don't care what it is, if it's a squirrel, a raccoon, a muskrat—I don't care. You don't get near the babies. Those demons pushed their way through a thin stone wall to burst out into the lake, alright. They did it less than fifty feet from the sleeping hollow of Champ and her young. There were six of them, plus the parents and what we think was a sort of uncle, that big, scarred fellah that was on the news for a year. The huge blue-gray male with the white lines across his muzzle? What a beast. My god, did they lay into those demons. I saw it in the lights of my truck; it looked like a chainsaw got thrown into those spiders. Legs were flying, guts ripped out in ribbons, Champ and her family flailing about on their fins, kicking rocks and water, and
crunching
, over and over. I saw the daddy intentionally wounding some of the demons; he'd bite one or two legs off and let the kiddies at them. Their mouths were little, but their instincts were perfect; they'd slide up under the demon and rip into the soft parts. I almost felt sorry for the creatures of hell that night. Almost. The momma and daddy kept cutting loose with this hooting roar, and then they’d go after another spider as it came out of the water, trying to get its bearings. Not one of those monsters from underneath touched dry land. Not one. The big one, Uncle Blue, was so covered in black ichor that he had to wallow like a bird to get clean before he could get back in the fight. I stayed there watching it all, took a few pictures—yeah, that was me—and then before I knew it, the sun was coming up and it was me, a bunch of people from town, and the family of Champs just staring at each other. I waved to them, sort of a thank you, and the momma snorted at me once, then nosed her kids into the water with a flip of that stubby little tail. The eggheads from SUNY called them pliosaurs, but to us, they were just ours.

“You can see the big flat stone right where the demons come out each killing moon. Town put it there as a sort of memorial, but it turned into something a lot more useful, and mannerly, too, if you ask me. Fisherman put their best pike, trout, whatever they catch that's good, leave ‘em on that rock for Champ and her family. I've seen whole hogs, dressed and stuffed, but not as often. Champs like the fish. They come out without any fanfare, just sort of amble up, eat, hoot once at us, and back into the water. They're not tame, but they seem to understand that we want to help them, if we can. Everyone's real respectful too; we don't allow outsiders to come with cameras and nonsense that might upset the family. The navy sank a permanent camera near the rift, just to keep an eye on things, and it turns out that there's gonna be another litter of baby Champs real soon. We're thinking about putting another rock down by the water just to hold all the fish. Folks are pretty excited about the new additions, but the demons don't know what they're about to step into. Two angry mommas just might kick their spindly asses all the way back to hell itself, and that's okay by us."—Kevin Denslow, Colchester, Vermont

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