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  “The walls rose, thick and straight, and I realized that their bulk would afford us a sliver of breathing room, and we might start thinking of stabilizing the area around us, too. I—I’m not saying that was arrogant, but it was premature. I’d read about Troy. I knew how the city fell and, when I looked at our walls, and dragons . . . I knew that it would take a catastrophe to bring us to our knees, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.” – Commodore Moss Eilert

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

  5

  Trinity Outpost, August 8, 2074 A.D.

  The Admiralty was one flood away from being stranded in an archipelago, as water gone from Texas for millions of years now spiked inland—salty, warm, and dangerous. After the catastrophic fall of the United States and the world, dragons intuitively winged south with all haste. They deposited their bewildered riders on the coast of what had been Texas, but was now something more like Stalingrad after the close of World War II. The collapse was breathtaking in its speed; no less than a quarter billion deaths in the first three weeks after the emergence of the dragons’ evil counterparts. Despite savage fighting, nothing could have prepared the survivors for the second wave, because it wasn’t just fang and claw, it was the planet as well.

  Prior to the first killing moon of the end times, dragons warned any and all humans who would listen: something more was coming. The simple existence of the massive beasts should have been the lynchpin for a defense that had no time to form, but must stand and fight against something crawling from the collective muck of humanity’s racial memory. Even the sage advice of the dragons wasn’t enough. There was too much fear, and hunger, and disease to go with the mistrust and outright shock at what was happening. Every soul was scarred by the trauma, resulting in an enormous amount of hand wringing and denial. Then everything changed with the tide of the killing moon.

  Earthquakes as severe as any in recorded history rattled the land, with waves so strong that homes, cars, and entire city blocks were hurled upward like chaff. The first quake, a long, terrifying rumble of additional destruction, struck in the early morning hours of June 11, 2019, and kicked the majority of the central United States back to the Stone Age. Memphis, Sikeston, Bowling Green—these cities simply ceased to exist, noted only by the fires that raged unabated for days before dying out from a lack of fuel. The mighty rivers of the Mississippi basin willfully slipped their bonds and caused extinction level floods all along the corridor of the watershed. Dubuque, Iowa collapsed into the river, only to be swept away, its bluffs eroded to nothingness in a matter of hours. Toward the Gulf, the once calmed Atchafalaya leaped from bank to bank and redirected a river course never meant to be under the control of man. In between, and as far east as Louisville, the Ohio and its minor tributaries answered the call of the tectonic fury by burying a third of Kentucky in muddy water. Two centuries of history were swept clean before the sun could rise. Bridges were nonexistent, horses became critical, and the only people in the eastern United States who were capable of survival remained ensconced in their mountain homes throughout the majesty of Appalachia. These survivors, of whom French Heavener was one by family history, would provide the backbone of many localized defenses against the incursions of the demons. While the earthquakes and floods had minimal damage in their areas, the karst geography meant that caves belched demons into their well-armed but still vulnerable midst each lunar cycle. It was only three centuries of self-reliance that taught the people who had been ridiculed as hillbillies a month earlier that they were now a precious commodity if the world would ever right itself. To their credit, they took enormous satisfaction in killing the invaders, whom they regarded as a physical manifestation of the devil himself. Despite having few churches, the armies of the devoted met and battled with the beasts of hell throughout the rich forests of the Appalachian, Blue Ridge, and Allegheny ranges. The tough mountaineers were lethal with guns, cunning in their territory, and foaming at the mouth to kill creatures that emerged from what they considered hell’s own nursery. Their stalking tactics were nothing short of ghostlike. In dozens of meeting areas in the eastern Piedmont, the skulls of slain creatures hung from trees like trophies taken while on safari in Satan’s game preserve.

  While the men and women of Appalachia fought tooth and nail, their war was one of proactive aggression. Elsewhere, remnants of technological expertise survived, usually in the form of lone individuals who had been trapped away from the main cities during the fall of the nation. Here and there, scientists lived, asking questions, compiling information, and attempting to see patterns or weaknesses in the creatures who raged across the shattered land every twenty-eight days. Slowly, from the wreckage a picture began to emerge. Ideas formed. Tactics developed, then passed to the dragons and riders. In less than a decade, an unofficial but lethal doctrine of war became known to every man or woman who sat astride a dragon or stood watch on the ground.

  The first true breakthrough was courtesy of a navy man who’d been stranded a hundred miles from home during the initial attacks, but gritted out an overland journey to return to his family. That determination would ultimately serve mankind well. August Dinardi was a twenty-year veteran of the United States Navy. During his career, the Master Chief established himself as a virtual wizard at the procuring and trading of goods for the benefit of his shipmates. Dinardi’s creative career inspired him to attempt a radical solution for a knotty problem: how to armor the men and women who were fighting the creatures from hell. He achieved this with the efficiency of any Yeoman. After a vicious coastal incursion near his hometown of Bayonne, New Jersey, Dinardi had a flash of brilliance. While eyeing the steaming corpse of a freshly-killed beast that resembled a six-legged rhinoceros, he casually walked over and plunged a sixteen-inch-long butcher knife into the monster’s hide. Noting the incredible resistance to the blade, he arranged a team of volunteers to hoist the animal partially upward using a block and tackle intended for diesel truck engines. This curious action was brought on by experiences from his formative years, when the teen Lothario was sent to spend summers with his paternal grandparents, who were third-generation farmers in Pennsylvania. After decades of intermittent poverty, his grandparents were experts in butchering animals, and masters at the art of efficiently using everything they produced on the farm. Combined with his decades of creative naval supply, it seemed only natural that he would look at the monster before him as more opportunity than a threat. After elevating the carcass, Dinardi opened a bottle of prized red wine, took a deep swallow, and went to work.

  Eleven hours later, he had successfully skinned the entire monster, partially butchered the flesh, and removed anything that looked like it might be of merit. Like any good Yeoman, his policy of inventive usage truly shone forth over the next two days. By stretching the tent-like hide over a hastily-constructed aluminum rack, he cured the black, pebbled skin into something that he quickly realized was not only tough and durable, but waterproof. The curious hide was also light absorbing and unusually supple. On a hunch, his wife, an indefatigable woman who once owned a bridal store, cut and sewed the hide into a suit of what could be called the lightest armor ever known to man. Along the way, they realized something else about the magical animal’s skin; it reduced the sound of the wearer to nearly immeasurable levels and, with that, whisperskin became the first advantage wrested away from the invading armies of hell. From that point on, as news spread across the remaining pockets of humanity, and every single beast killed was dragged back to the safe confines of whatever habitation existed for the local populace. With each successive dissection, survivors learned more about their enemy. Biology and chemistry, while fascinating, faded into the distance in terms of immediate usefulness. Desperate humans proved to be both cunning and determined, and within a matter of months, worldwide uses of the denizens from the underworld were being discovered on an almost daily basis.

  Over the years, certain experts emerged among the people who could not fight on the front
lines but still dedicated their considerable skills to the war effort. The wiry, silver-haired Dixon Tenafelt was one such person. His mastery as a scrivener of all skins magical was legendary among the communities that dotted the coastal areas of the Bulwark and, to everyone except his wife, he was simply known as The Saddler. Tenafelt, being a modest man, eschewed such a title, but tolerated it in the name of unity. His shop was a study in contrasting areas of order and apparent catastrophe. From one workbench to the next, a dizzying array of materials in various states of coaxing all yielded to the finishing room. There, suits of whisperskin armor hung on wooden frames, the owner’s name tagged on each custom creation with a small paper label.

  Not merely content to create armor from a skin that was magical in nature, Tenafelt employed a flash of brilliance to make the suits better still. This inspiration came to him while he watched two squeakers of the Admiralty performing their assigned task of sweeping and cleaning the dragon sleeping areas. The two youths marveled at the scales that had fallen from the beasts during their evening slumber. Draconic sleep was an active affair, punctuated by snorting, rolling about, and pawing the air. The nightly dance would have been comical if not for the real possibility of injury while in the vicinity of their energetic dreaming. He’d collected more than a dozen of the saucer-sized, nearly-unbreakable scales, and held them to the sun in wonder at their structure and color. They were elegant, tough, and flexible, much like the beasts that they protected. Peering through one of the scales like a church window, Tenafelt felt an idea take flight with such breathless speed that he nearly tripped twice in his haste to return to work.

  “Scales protect dragons. The dragons protect us. The scales can be an extension of the dragons, too,” reasoned Tenafelt to no one in particular. He sat at a tall bench and carefully began to experiment on the first scale. He found success six days later, after nearly uninterrupted work, in which his wife helped, and then finally forced him to sleep and eat. With shaking hands and his eyes rimmed red with exhaustion, he summoned the three officers whose suits he had chosen to bless with his particular bit of genius. Tenafelt handed the first suit to a dour woman in her late thirties, known by her first and last names spoken simultaneously.

  “Andi Kin, try it on,” he said as a rare smile cracked the round face of the rider.

  She pointed at the augmentations at several key points. “Why only here? And there, and—why those places?”

  During the exchange, the other two riders began to pull their completed armor on with religious awe. Both were experienced fighters, if young, and they knew an advantage when they saw it. The taller of the two, Dane Pellerin, slid into his as if he’d been wearing such things his entire life, grunting with satisfaction as the whisperskin encased him perfectly. The shorter but no less militant of the two was Lurvy Rostov. A plush woman in her early twenties, Lurvy had astonishing blue eyes, dark red hair, and a smile that told Tenafelt she couldn’t wait to field test the armor. All of the riders lived solely to kill their sworn enemy, and the Saddler had just granted them a tool for achieving exactly that. Lurvy, with her keen eye, tapped the scales on her suit and then snapped her fingers in a moment of enlightenment.

  “Arteries. They cover major arteries,” she enthused.

  Tenafelt nodded appreciatively at her astute analysis. “I call them blood points. They’re the locations where the suckers and fangs always try to hit when the baddies come up and out for their monthly romp. Trust me when I tell you”—he rubbed a worn hand over his equally bedraggled face—“that nothing attached to those creatures will puncture what is covering your most vulnerable spots.”

  Before anyone could draw another breath, Lurvy whipped a military-issue knife down on Andi’s shoulder where one of the scales covered a large circle of whisperskin. The steel blade spangled with light as it slid harmlessly away. Andi let out a grunt of surprise, but her practical heart sang with the successful demonstration.

  “Wha—oh, no kidding. It works,” Lurvy remarked casually.

  Andi glared and examined her shoulder, brushing something from the surface of the dragon scale and nodding in appreciation. She might be a pragmatist, but she still didn’t enjoy being hit.

  “Lucky me.” Andi gifted Lurvy with a wry smile.

  In a moment of wanton excitement, Dane plunged his own knife down in a hissing strike, smacking into the scale that covered his femoral artery. The result was the same, even though he’d taken a leap of faith and put far more muscle into the strike. Then again, these were riders—they truly understood the wonder of dragonkind on a level that most humans would never grasp, despite living in proximity to them.

  Lurvy patted herself down and did some experimental motions. She took close note of the scales and their positions. Shoulder, neck, legs, armpit, bent in a gentle curve—nothing spared for the sake of safety, and yet, the suit moved like a silent breeze. She smiled with malice. “Saddler, you’ve just created the biggest problem we’ve ever seen at the Admiralty.”

  The man’s eyes goggled at her choice of words. “Bigger than hell hounds coming to eat us? What could be worse than that?”

  Lurvy chuckled with mischief. “When the other riders see these, you’ll be sewing dragon scales until your fingers fall off.”

  Andi and Dane both hooted their approval at that.

  Tenafelt rubbed his scalp with an exaggerated slowness, and then sighed. “I guess I hadn’t thought this through.” He pulled at a lip and then clapped his hands together decisively. “Have the squeakers and middies round up all of the scales they can find from the stalls, midden heap—everywhere. Even cut down those ridiculous mobiles hanging on the Commodore’s porch. I want them here by this afternoon.” He looked around in dismay. “And get my wife. She’ll need to be here, too. As well as any of the other midshipmen who have too much free time this month. Or this year.” With one final grumble, he retreated to a supply closet and began pulling materials free. His already busy schedule just got more hectic, but if he was any judge, this was going to save lives. And in turn, that meant they could finally start thinking about winning this godforsaken war.

  6

  Dragons

  “We just didn’t know what was going on. It was—look, I know that a lot of smart people could see the dragons, put their hands on them, smell the spice of their skin. Hell, there was one senator who had a massive Firster male burp in his face after eating a truckload of tuna. It wasn’t like people couldn’t see what was real; they were as real as anything that had ever existed under the heavens. It was just that we couldn’t make these creatures who spoke to us like children fit our collective psyche. The whole planet was at war in one way or another, and there were idiots—politicians, yeah, but regular people too, and don’t get me started on those asshole professors who tried to say that the governments had gotten together and engineered the dragons. Like that could ever happen. All that nonsense about dragons being an extension of the military-industrial complex, and how we needed to find out who was really responsible for all of the missing people? It was insanity. There were like forty million people in the United States who just vanished, but then someone got the bright idea to start treating all of the holes in the ground—you know, mining tunnels, caves, whatever—like crime scenes. The first time that guy from New Jersey sprayed Luminol in a collapsed subway tunnel . . . I still remember the way the reporter screamed. That place lit up light a Christmas parade. There was blood everywhere, thirty-feet high on the ceilings, along the walls, just—all over. Who knew how many people had been dragged down there? I mean, who really gave a damn about their neighbors, you know? No one cared. No one paid attention to anyone except themselves, and maybe a small part of their family. We were like a herd of sheep who decided to ignore each other. We were the perfect prey. Those first few months, when the creatures were hunting, they did whatever they wanted, and no one fought back. Hell, no one even noticed. I know I didn’t, and I was a cop; I got paid to be observant. I didn’t even have time to f
eel sorry for myself, though. My wife was taken by something that looked like a dark green crab, six-feet tall that walked upright. It ripped into her and had her down a sewer before I could draw my personal weapon. After I sobered up a week later, I thought to myself that if anyone didn’t believe it now, they were as good as dead. They just didn’t know it.” – Officer Tomas Fusco, New York Police Department

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

  7

  Ruins of Louisville/Kentuckiana

  August 6-15, 2074

  Railways, that transformer of the American West, still existed in the newly-baptized destruction of the continent. Abroad, these staples of transportation remained—Europe, in particular-- and the railroads that endured were near the top of the technological heap in terms of surviving relics from the bygone era of modernity. South American railways were non-existent, as was functioning transportation of any kind near mountains, but Central Asia still held on bitterly to their trains. These were the locomotives that had ferried German soldiers as they hurried south to assist the Ottomans, more than a century earlier. France had no less than three routes still in working order, as did England. There were unconfirmed reports of former arms dealers using trains as mobile residences, looping endlessly across the scorched remains of Syria and Iran. In the American heartland, there was a reasonably functional loop that linked up as far as the ruins of Chicago to the north, and Corinth, Mississippi to the southeast. Trade continued via rail, even if the entire operation was held together with wire and prayers. The second purpose that the trains served was salvage. Little manufacturing existed on the entire planet, if at all, so the constant search for useful goods was unending. Venturing into fallen cities and towns was among the most dangerous work known to man, and the hardy souls who pursued that occupation were wild, morally-ambiguous people who rarely behaved long enough to stay in town more than a day or two. The last significant load brought in to trade was three entire cars loaded with appliances, parts, and tools from an abandoned industrial park in Louisville, Kentucky—or to be more accurate, the remains of what had once been Louisville.