Banshee by Terry Maggert Read Free Book Online Page B

child. West, then. Away from this place and, perhaps, to some semblance of my family, he thought, as the horse began to canter toward the setting sun . Through it all, French never shed a tear. That would come later.
    With the sun nearly at rest, French Heavener ceased his woolgathering and walked to the Grange. As the relatively new military leader for New Madrid, his duties were needed at virtually every meeting that took place, with the exception of agricultural exchanges, and he even sat in on some of those, too. He needed to be aware of who was planting what, and how far they would be from the safer areas inside the defensive perimeter that the residents knew were mostly for show. In the event of a major breakout from Underneath, nothing short of a three-story steel wall would stop some of the beasts who’d come roaring out of the darkness over the years. Every twenty-five yards a guard tower was turned toward the gaping hole in the earth that filled their dreams with fear. Atop each, an experienced rifleman would sit during the three nights before each killing moon. During the off times, at least one soldier would stand watch, hoping against hope that dragons would appear. They remained disappointed.
    The last dragon had winged toward the remains of Georgia nearly a year earlier. It wasn’t that they didn’t recognize the threat leering up from the earth; it was just that their instincts to go toward the coasts were more powerful than any other sensation in their draconic mind. Despite the protestations of their riders, the dragons insisted that they take the fight to where water met sand. On more than one of these leavings, the riders cast a long gaze of pity at the people of New Madrid. The rider’s eyes revealed what no one would say: the town was terminal, and the disease would bring about a painful end for everyone in range of the claws that were coming, month after month.

9
     

     
    Dragons
    “I mean, we sorta knew. I think that more than a few of us thought something bad was coming. I know that sounds stupid now, like there could be anything worse than the nine out of ten people on the planet dying or being eaten, but it was just this feeling . Asheville was like paradise compared to what we’d heard about. For the second time in two centuries, Atlanta and Charleston had been burned to the ground. Raleigh-Durham was—I don’t even want to talk about what I heard, but it was worse than cannibalism. As terrible as that sounded, I could at least understand the need to eat when your back’s against the wall and civilization is coming down around your ears every single second. And then the nights of no moon? Watching your family be cut to ribbons and swallowed by, by—demons, I guess. Early on, no one really knew what to call them, but then the usual religious nuts started screaming and suddenly, they didn’t sound so stupid anymore. Lots of people listened, but the truth was, even God wasn’t going to stand watch when those friggin’ howlers came up from basements and holes and wherever they could hide. It wasn’t just the end of the world, man. It was the end of the world in the worst way you could imagine. We ate fish from the rivers; it was one of the only ways to feed people, and there were lots of fish, big ones, so we returned to the old ways, sorta. People started seeing those freaky lice with eyes like people, and we were scared, yeah, but we just kept fishing. Just pluck those little horrors off of the fish, stomp them, and move on. Everybody knew, but nobody said anything, and then the monsters really came for us. For Asheville. For all of us. D’you know, only ten of us got out, one guy ahead of us, so, like eleven people in all? Out of a town of more than forty thousand? We struck west, anywhere away from the ruins, and the stink. The bones. I always wondered what happened to that whack job I saw on the river bank before the attack. I was militia, you know? A damned good shot. I saw those