Banshee Screams Read online

  Banshee Screams

  A Novel for Deadlands: Lost Colony

  By

  Clay & Susan Griffith

  This electronic book is copyright Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Redistribution by print or by file is strictly prohibited.

  Banshee Screams

  Written & Designed by: Clay & Susan Griffith

  Editing & Layout: John Hopler

  Cover Art: Chris Appel

  Interior Art: Richard Pollard

  Cover Design: Zeke Sparkes

  Logos: Ron Spencer, Zeke Sparkes Deadlands created by Shane Lacy Hensley.

  Author's Dedication: To Our Parents—How did they put up with us?

  Publisher's Dedication: To Clay & Susan, who have the patience of Saints.

  Banshee Screams is set within Pinnacle Entertainment Group's Award-Winning Deadlands game. Look for it and other exciting settings such as Deadlands: the Weird. West, Deadlands: Hell on Earth, Weird. Wars, Hostile Climes, and Savage Worlds at your favorite local gaming store, or visit us online at WWW.PEGINC.COM.

  Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Inc.

  WWW.PEGINC.COM

  Visit our web site for free updates! Deadlands, the Weird West, Hell on Earth, Lost Colony, Hostile Climes, Weird Wars, the Deadlands logo, the Pinnacle logo, and all proper characters and locatiosn within this book are Trademarks of Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Inc.

  © Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Printed in the USA.

  Book I: The Horror Lords

  Prelude

  "Run! Now!"

  Her command was lost in the blinding, choking smoke and the acrid reek of burning metal. The man beside her stared in bewilderment.

  Debbi Dallas shoved the man down the murky hallway.

  "The escape pod is down that corridor! Go!" Her voice was hoarse from shouting and coughing in a vain attempt to clear her lungs. She brushed damp auburn strands of hair off her soot-stained face.

  The man finally got his feet moving in the right direction. Five more figures followed blindly after, clinging to each other for dear life.

  The Cabal space station shuddered. The sound of grinding metal filled Debbi's ears. Screams followed as they were all thrown to the ground when the station violently shifted. Pressure conduits ripped and expelled hot steam and gases, making it even harder to breathe. Debbi scrambled to her feet, dodging the dangerous streams.

  "Go! You don't have much time!" Debbi urged the small group. They disappeared into the steam.

  She grabbed a railing along the wall, but immediately yanked her hand away. It was hot. The floor rumbled as a nearby escape pod blasted into space. The station continued to groan.

  The warning lights strobing through the swirling smoke cast a surreal glint on the pewter walls. Debbi tried to shade her eyes against the piercing glare.

  A scream echoed somewhere in front of her. It was not a scream of panic, but of terror. She pulled her gun and raced down the corridor.

  Something was here. She could feel it. She waded through the smoke as if it were a gauze curtain.

  "Colonial Ranger! Anyone here?"

  The scream came again and then gurgled into silence. Something wet-sounding hit the floor just a few feet in front of her.

  "Who's there?" she shouted.

  She crept forward and stumbled over something. It was a body—a man. He had been shredded. She stepped back in horror, one hand fumbling against the scorching wall to support her. The man's chest was ripped open. Fighting down the bile in her throat, she heard the faint sound of something scratching against the metal deck. Her hand trembled as she shifted her gun around her, trying to keep it trained on every shadow. She couldn't see anything.

  The air in the corridor was filled with a putrid, organic stench that cloyed her breathing even more. Dear God, she thought, what could have done that?

  A control panel on the wall beside her was blown apart. That explosion could have been the cause of the man's violent death.

  Debbi heard movement in front of her again. Her gun swung out, her heart slamming against her chest. "Show yourself!"

  A group of bedraggled figures, mostly children, emerged from the smoke. A trim, petite woman wearing the stained scrubs of an overworked doctor carried a small girl.

  "Mom!" Debbi exclaimed.

  "Debbi! I couldn't leave them!"

  "I know! But we have to go. Right now!" Debbi dropped her jacket over the body at her feet to hide it from the children, and then helped her mother herd them down the hall to an escape pod.

  "Is it going to...?" Her mother broke off her sentence for the sake of the children. The station was slanting wildly now. They ran unsteadily, clinging to the railing despite its searing surface.

  "Yeah, it is," Debbi replied. She reached down and picked up two struggling kids. She felt the telltale rumble of another escape pod firing.

  A boy with brown tousled hair and ash-smudged cheeks asked in a quivering voice, "They'll wait for us, right?"

  Debbi looked down at him and nodded. "Of course they will." She hurried their pace and met her mother's gaze for an instant. "Of course they will," she reiterated fervently as much for her own sake as for everyone else.

  Their booted feet thudded dully against the metal floor. Debbi could just make out the last of a battery of escape pods at the far end of the corridor. If they didn't make this one, there would be no time to reach another in a different part of the station.

  "Hold up!" she shouted.

  Inside the crowded pod, a tall, bearded man with panic-filled eyes was about to hit the switch, but an elderly man well into his sixties slapped his hand away.

  "We've got room," the older man yelled, waving to Debbi and the others. "Hurry!"

  The bearded man glared icily.

  Debbi sprinted forward and jammed herself into the doorway, making it impossible to close the hatch. She ignored the bearded man as he pushed against her. She angrily shoved back and stood her ground. The kids piled in. Her mother passed a child to the kind man who had held the door for them.

  There was a shout from down the hall. "Help! Wait for me, please!"

  Debbi's mother turned. "I'll get him!"

  "Mom, no!" Debbi shouted. "I'll do it!" But in the few seconds it took for Debbi to deposit her two kids in the escape pod and once again push back the bearded man from the release button, her mother had gone into the swirling smoke. Debbi could feel the station losing its rotational axis as the floor tilted. People in the pod screamed and grabbed hold. They hurriedly strapped themselves and the children in.

  "Launch it! Launch it!" a blonde woman shrieked, scrambling for the red button with torn crimson nails. Debbi couldn't tell if it was nail polish or blood.

  Debbi blocked the woman's outstretched arms, but then was grabbed and shoved to the floor. The bearded man pinned her down. Fury boiled up inside her.

  "Get off me!" She wrestled for leverage. A shrill scream reverberated in the hall outside. It was her mother's voice.

  "Mom!" Debbi had a flash of the man she had found torn apart. The foul stench filled her nostrils again. She struggled wildly. An inhuman shriek resounded a second later and then silence. "No!"

  The bearded man hit the side of Debbi's head with something solid and heavy. Bright spots flared as she labored to stay conscious.

  The older man who had tried to help her was also pinned to the floor by panicked passengers. He tried to reason with them. "Don't do this!"

  "Hit the release!" the bearded man shouted. The woman with the blonde hair complied. The hatch rumbled closed and a second later the clamps blew free. The escaping pressure as the pod was jettisoned pinned them all to the floor and to their seats.

&nb
sp; The lone window showed the universe spinning around them. Every ten seconds the distant violet dot that was the planet Banshee swung by, and then in another five seconds, the remains of the space station drifted past.

  Oh God, Debbi sobbed silently.

  Mom!

  Debbi jerked up out of her nightmare, choking back her cry. She was drenched in sweat and gasping for breath. The dimness inside the room disoriented her and it took her a moment to realize that she wasn't on the station. She was in her own bed.

  The night sounds of Banshee drifted through the open window. She was planetside. She was safe. It was over. She rubbed her face roughly and tried to quiet her ragged breathing.

  A sharp knock on the door startled her.

  "Dallas?" came a voice from in the hall.

  "What?" She prayed the quaver in her voice wouldn't be noticeable.

  "Ross wants to see you. You've got your first solo assignment. Ten minutes."

  "Alright," she snapped, not mad at the messenger, but furious at herself for allowing the dreams to return. Hardly a day, hardly an hour passed that she didn't think of the last time she saw her mother. But she had believed she was through the worst of it.

  A new posting. A new life. All that should have stopped the dreams these last few months.

  She took a deep breath and answered more calmly, "I'll be there."

  Footsteps retreated and she flung off the blankets. She padded to the window and pushed it wide open, letting the cold night winds of Banshee fill her lungs. Her drenched skin quickly cooled. The sun was just rising over the town walls and cast a beautiful, vibrant azure hue into the retreating night sky. She was grateful to have solid ground beneath her feet.

  She shoved away the remnants of the nightmare and moved to the closet, clinging to the fact that she was no longer up in cold, dead space but instead on a living, breathing planet where life teemed and new hope was offered.

  It should have been more than enough. Why wasn't it? Why couldn't she let go of the fear?

  Chapter 1

  Debbi had been riding for most of the day. She was exhausted from wrestling the speeder bike through sand drifts that meandered like giant, thoughtless snakes across the prairie. Now she slid through the dangerous, loose shale bottomland of a mountain valley.

  The trip should've taken two hours. But the map she'd been given was as old as she was. It had been drawn twenty years ago for the UN during the Anouk Revolt. Twenty years ago there had been a creek running through this mountain pass that fed the distant Red River. Now there wasn't. The Worldstorm had seen to that. Many of the map's landmarks and topo features were gone.

  Debbi's mission was to find a cabin. In all this vast territory, she had to find a single, solitary log cabin. The master of a caravan that passed through Temptation had reported to the Colonial Rangers that three miners were prospecting illegally and unwisely in mountains that were sacred to the anouks, the indigenous inhabitants of Banshee. If a native war party were to discover the miners, they would certainly kill the intruders and perhaps, more to the caravan master's concern, exercise their outrage on every human they found—including innocent caravans.

  Therefore, the miners had to be rousted from the valley. Debbi's boss immediately passed the assignment to her. It was a nothing job, so naturally it was handed out to the new kid. And that made it even more important not to screw up.

  "Just move them out," her boss had said. "And keep it quiet." He didn't want the miners arrested and brought back to Temptation where they could make a public stink about how the law protected anouks and persecuted humans.

  She geared herself up for the heckling she expected from the prospectors. She'd seen their type many times before. They would focus on her looks and underestimate her. Even the big gun on her hip wouldn't hold their attention for long. Debbi was tall and fit with cascading red-brown hair and bright green eyes. She had a structured face set off by high cheekbones with naturally mischievous eyes and a knowing smile.

  Debbi swerved the speeder bike around a tree that seemed to reach out for her, and in a clearing ahead, saw the prospectors' log cabin.

  It had been torn apart.

  Debbi brought the speeder to a sharp stop, the heavy bike skidding in the yellow sand. Leaping free, she scrambled behind a rock outcropping and pulled her sidearm, a heavy Colonial Ranger Dragoon.

  She yanked the goggles off her eyes. It looked like the anouks had already struck. And they might still be here.

  "In the cabin!" she shouted. "Colonial Rangers! Throw out your weapons and come out with your hands up!"

  There was no response.

  She waited fifteen seconds and fired into the air. When the echo died, she called again, "Colonial Rangers! This is your last warning! Come out!"

  Debbi breathed out slowly between pursed lips. She didn't have any smokers to lob into the cabin. Weapons, like everything else, were scarce on Banshee. All the young Ranger had was her ingenuity and a few shots from her Dragoon. She scanned the area one last time and rolled out into the open. She fired two shots at the cabin, came up and ran for the decimated doorway. She slid in low and peered inside, her pistol trained for movement. A small flashlight attached to the barrel of her weapon cast a bright beam wildly around the dim interior of the cabin.

  She wasn't prepared for what she saw.

  The walls were awash in blood. Bodies were strewn around the floor. Debbi could see three corpses, all men. She could tell by the ghost-rock-stained clothes they were miners.

  Then she realized there were only two men, not three. One of them was torn in half and his bottom portion was sitting in a chair at the table. A cold shiver enveloped her. Violent death was a natural occurrence around here, but this type of slaughter was beyond normal even on Banshee.

  It didn't look to be the work of an anouk clan. More likely, she thought, a group of human blackliners was responsible. That Reaper trash, when they were narked out on tannis or worse, ghost rock, was capable of the most animalistic behavior.

  The scent of blood was still thick in the air and there was no sign that scavengers had been picking at the bodies. This murder scene couldn't be more than an hour old. Whoever the killers were, it was likely they were still in the vicinity.

  And if they were close, they would've heard the speeder bike approaching and her gunshots. Debbi had lost any element of surprise. She slipped inside the cabin for cover; surprised she hadn't been shot in the back already. By the look of it, the killers hadn't looted the cabin yet, which meant that she had interrupted their spree.

  She was in a bad situation and she knew it. But she was on her own. There was no calling for backup way out here. The signal probably wouldn't get through to Temptation, and even if it did, it would take close to an hour for anyone to reach her in the Rangers' fastest vehicle.

  Fingering her weapon for comfort, she crouched at the door and glanced outside. She tried to control her breathing so she could listen.

  She heard only a mass of thorny hedgerows encircling the cabin creak and moan in Banshee's constant wind.

  She studied the dismal contents of the cabin—a few bedrolls and some cooking equipment. There were also bottles of algae and liquor. And there were a couple of relatively sophisticated, portable geo-pingers for locating ghost rock veins underground.

  This isn't right, Debbi thought. Anouks and Reapers would've taken the pingers to trade. And if this raid was the work of lowly scavs, not only would the equipment be gone, the prospectors' bodies wouldn't have been mutilated because the scavs would have wanted their clothes.

  She stood and felt a chill, her eyes noticing something they hadn't before. The dark wooden logs around her were covered with deep gouges, exposing streaks of lighter core wood. Debbi put her hand against one of the shredded logs.

  Claw marks, she thought. Her head snapped up and she took another nervous look around.

  She walked over to one of the bodies, the one still relatively intact. The prospector was gutted, his chest cav
ity pulled open. Her lips compressed into a thin grimace. Her breath quickened as the sight brought back a memory of the dead man on the space station. This grotesque mutilation looked the same. The room darkened for a moment as she focused on the body. She desperately tried to regain control of her fear. This wasn't the same at all, she argued to herself.

  That really didn't make her feel any better.

  It took some effort to turn her attention to the body that was ripped in half. The face that belonged to the upper half of the torso looked remarkably calm to be fifty feet away from its legs.

  She saw a rifle clutched in his hand. It looked to be a standard semiautomatic. It had a length of cord tied for a makeshift shoulder strap. Beneath the barrel, however, there was an attachment she had never seen before. It was a long slender tube, about a foot long, with a four-inch cube at the base. A wire connected the cube to a small touch pad affixed near the top of the rifle's rear grip.

  Debbi holstered her weapon and forcefully pulled the miner's rifle from his death grip, a scowl marring her face at the effort. Ignoring the previous owner, she hefted the rifle. The touch pad was placed for the thumb; it was easily pressed while the rifle was held at the ready. She aimed the rifle out the door and pressed the pad. Nothing happened.

  The tube was jury-rigged to the rifle, but the tube itself didn't appear to be something the miners could've built. People in the wastelands of Banshee learned to fend for themselves for the most part, and they created the most bizarre assortment of inventions. However, this new contraption seemed a little too refined. She assumed it had an off-world provenance.

  The rifle was locked and loaded. And it had been recently fired. Unfortunately for these miners, whatever benefit they thought the attachment would provide had failed miserably. Their mutilated corpses testified to that. Regardless, this was unknown technology and it had to go back to Temptation with Debbi.

  The deep scraping of claws against shale echoed for just a moment in the heavy wind.

  Debbi spun around, hefting the rifle, her breath locked in her lungs. Perhaps her mind was playing tricks on her. The winds of Banshee were famous for their strange sounds. She eased herself against the back wall, straining to hear more. The cabin interior was now a shadowed tomb and the heavy stench of death clogged her nostrils.