“Everyone, just relax,” Erin said. “I’ll be here to guide you the entire way to the surface.”
Despite the rumors of what happened on the dive that killed most of her team, Les believed Erin’s words and her version of the story. She had been a good teacher, and it was damn brave of her to suit up with them now when she could be kicking back on the bridge and monitoring the mission from the skies.
One of the first lessons she had taught them was to stay calm. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep his heart from racing. He imagined that command was monitoring their heart rates. The monitors would all be beeping out of control right about now. He continued trying to manage his breath as he looked down at the swirling black clouds beneath his boots.
“One minute to drop,” Hunt announced over the comms.
Tom panted heavily over the network.
“Phoenix Three, cut the floor noise,” Erin ordered.
The labored breathing quieted. Les felt the sweat beading across his forehead. He looked down at the pistol holstered on his duty belt, the knife, and the blaster strapped to his leg. He had never used any of them for real—just practiced in the simulations yesterday.
Oh, shit. Is this really happening?
“Thirty seconds,” Hunt said.
“I’m going to puke,” Tom said.
“Take a deep breath, Phoenix Three,” Erin said.
“This is crazy,” Jennifer muttered. “This is fucking crazy.”
Erin growled out her response. “Phoenix Three and Six, keep it together. You’re going to be fine. Once we jump, follow my lead and I promise you’ll be okay.”
The red lights shifted to a cool blue. Les wasn’t sure whether it was some effort to calm the divers, but it didn’t work for Tom. He gagged over the comms, throwing up inside his helmet.
“Let me out of here,” Tom moaned. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to go—”
His words cut off as the final alarm buzzed. Before Les had a chance to steel himself, the glass doors under his feet whisked open, and he plummeted into the black abyss.
He tried to scream, but all that came out was a hoarse croak. The blue glows of the other battery units shifted around him as the team cut through the clouds.
“Stay calm,” Erin said, her voice crackling.
Les did what he was trained to do, and made a half barrel roll into a back-flying position. A shiver rippled through him as the wind took his long legs to the side, breaking the position. He tumbled head over feet, screaming in terror.
“Hard arch, Phoenix Two!” Erin shouted. “Then pull into back-flying position.”
He caught a glimpse of her—at least, he thought it was her. The silhouetted shape wasn’t in back-falling position, either. She was diving headfirst through the clouds to keep up with the others.
He checked on the other blue dots. Three of the divers were falling erratically. The only person who seemed to be doing okay was Ty.
Lightning flashed in the distance, and bile rose up in Les’ throat. He struggled to gain control of his fall and managed to stop rolling. Now in an arch position, he slowly maneuvered his body the way Erin had taught him—arms and legs bent, helmet slightly downward.
The floor of cloud cover wasn’t much to look at, and doing so made his guts clench. He focused on his HUD instead, trying to ignore the scalloped gray mattress beneath him.
The electrical interference was minimal, allowing the system to operate normally. He was already at fifteen thousand feet and falling at a rate of a hundred miles per hour and ticking upward.
“Phoenix Two is in position,” Les reported.
“Phoenix Six is, too.”
“Phoenix Five is good.”
“Roger,” Erin said. “Phoenix Three and Four, how are you doing?”
Tom and Olah both answered at the same time.
“I can’t control it,” Olah shouted.
Tom’s garbled voice sounded like the caterwauling of some wild animal.
Les checked his HUD. Twelve thousand feet.
Lightning illuminated the interior of a shelf of clouds to the east. The thunder rattled his suit and shook his brain inside his helmet. He bit down on his mouth guard as a pocket of turbulence jerked him about. He fought to keep his mass in a stable position.
All the other team members had disappeared into the cloud cover, but he could see their beacons flashing on his subscreen. Everyone was still alive.
“Tom, bring your arms and legs out,” Erin said.
The gurgled response made no sense. Was he choking?
They were at eight thousand feet and 110 miles per hour. Les tilted his head back to look up at the sky. Even in the green hue of his night-vision optics, he couldn’t make out anything but clouds. Where was everyone else?
The world seemed to bend around him, the darkness shifting. He felt as though he was falling into an endless pit. There was no longer any sense of up or down—just darkness, and a terrible pressure against his limbs. The sporadic lightning didn’t help.
Five thousand feet.
Les’ entire body seemed to quiver as his speed continued to increase. His muscle fibers stretched, and his joints groaned.
Lightning flashed under his flight path, and he instinctively jerked to his right, rolling and flipping out of stable position.
Shit, shit, shit.
He fought around into a back fall while Erin continued talking Tom and Olah through the dive. The militia soldier seemed to be doing okay for now, but Tom couldn’t form a coherent reply. His voice sounded as though he was gasping for air and choking at the same time. Maybe the poor son of a bitch had inhaled his own vomit. That’d be a hell of a way to go.
Back in a stable position, Les looked up at his HUD.
Three thousand feet.
They had only a few seconds to deploy their chutes.
When Les looked down, he saw something he had never seen before: the actual surface of the earth. The checkered brown terrain was the strangest, most beautiful thing he had ever seen. In the distance, rolling hills surrounded the ruins of an ancient metropolis. The buildings looked like jagged teeth.
My God, people really did live down here.
Part of him had always wondered whether it was true, or the surface was just a myth. Now here it was for real, yawning up at him.
“Get ready to deploy chutes, Phoenix,” Erin said.
Les checked his HUD to identify the drop zone. They weren’t far from where the beacon blinked. Several supply crates were already there, waiting with the gear they would need after they landed. They would send the crates back up with any supplies they found.
“Pull your chute,” Erin ordered.
Les pulled the ripcord and felt himself yanked upward as the suspension lines went taut. He reached up for the toggles and gripped them, keeping his eyes on the surface.
Hundreds of buildings waited below, all of them skeletal, rusted structures. Les could all too easily imagine being impaled on those ragged spikes if he missed the DZ. His heart caught in his chest when he saw the crater in the distance. Was that where one of the bombs had detonated?
“Phoenix Two, deployed,” he remembered to say.
All the other divers replied except for Tom.
Les looked up into the sky to see five of the flickering blue lights break through the cloud cover. Each trailed an open or opening chute—all of them but one.
Tom’s body was falling limp through the sky—and he was headed right for Les.
Pulling on the toggles, Les steered left, swinging his body out of the way just as Tom flew past.
“Pull your chute, Tom!” Erin shouted.
But Tom either couldn’t hear or was too out of it to reply. He plummeted toward the surface.
“TOM!” Erin shouted.
The other divers al
l yelled over the comms, but it was no use. Tom hit the earth a few beats later. There was no sound—just a poof of dust where his body landed.
Les stared as his chute lowered him toward the ground. To his right, Jennifer had just flared her chute and was stepping down out of the sky. Olah was about to do the same. But Les couldn’t bring himself to move. Tom was dead. Not even five minutes into their first dive, Phoenix was down a man. It could as easily have been Les. Even now, he could imagine Sergeant Jenkins delivering the news to his wife.
“Phoenix Two, prepare for landing!” Erin yelled.
Les snapped out of his trance. He performed a two-stage flare, just like in training, but out here, with the wind whipping his body, it was nothing like the simulations.
The brown floor rose up to meet him, and his boots hit the ground way too fast. He tried to run out the momentum, but his legs couldn’t carry his body fast enough. He tripped on a clump of dirt and crashed to the ground, sliding on his belly.
Shouts filled the comms. It sounded like sobbing. Was that Jennifer?
Les rolled to a stop, wrapped up in his chute and tangled in the suspension lines. He fought his way to his knees, nylon fabric billowing around him. Reaching behind him, he found the thick riser and popped the capewell, spilling the wind from his chute so he could wad it up and stuff it in the supply crate.
With the chute out of the way, the first thing he saw was a corpse. The impact had half-liquefied Tom’s body and shattered his helmet. Blood, brain matter, and vomit spattered the cracked visor.
Erin offered Les her hand, and he took it, rising to his feet.
“You okay?” she asked.
Les could only nod.
Jennifer joined them while Olah ran over to Tom’s body.
“Shit,” Erin said, kicking the dirt. “He wasn’t ready.”
“None of us were,” Jennifer said.
“We should see what we can salvage,” Olah said.
“So we’re just going to strip him and leave him here?” Jennifer asked.
Olah looked up. He had already plucked the battery from the center of Tom’s chest armor. “What else are we supposed to do? He doesn’t need this gear anymore, but we do.”
Ty bent down next to Olah and began removing weapons and other gear from the body. Jennifer just stood beside Les and watched.
Lightning cracked overhead, and Les slowly took in his surroundings, seeing the world down here for what it was: rusted, gray, and dead.
A voice pulled him back to Tom’s mangled body. Olah looked up at Les and Jennifer. If Les didn’t know better, he would think he saw a smirk on the soldier’s face.
“You guys thought I was going to be the first to die, huh?” Olah said.
* * * * *
Michael’s paddle stroked through the swamp water, roiling the brown muck. He forced himself to scan the water constantly for hostiles, but he could hardly keep his eyes open.
Rodger stabbed at the water to the right, his stroke doing little to move the two boats, which had been roped together. They all were exhausted, having been on the open water all night and into the morning. The islands out here had turned up nothing, and despite the long hours of paddling, they had traveled only about five miles according to his wrist monitor.
“Timothy, do you copy?” Michael mumbled into the black bead of his mike.
“He’s not coming back for us,” Magnolia said. “Give it a rest, Commander.”
“I never trusted him,” Layla added from her perch in the stern of their kayak.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” Michael said.
Layla looked over her shoulder. “The thunder kind of makes that impossible, Tin.”
The storm continued to rage overhead, its nearly constant lightning illuminating the way as they paddled across the swamps.
“You got eyes on anything, Rodger?” Michael asked quietly.
Michael scanned the water, looking for the snakelike beasts they had spotted several times throughout their journey. So far, the creatures had left the divers alone, but it was only a matter of time before one of them grew brazen enough to attack.
“I don’t see anything,” Rodger said. “This place is terrible, and no matter what I do, I can’t get the stink out of my helmet.”
“That’s not this place,” Magnolia joked. “It’s you.”
“Hah!” he replied. “The Rodgeman smells fantastic.”
Referring to himself in the third person was a nervous tick that Michael had noticed Rodger doing more and more when he got embarrassed or scared. As with so much of Rodger’s personality, Michael couldn’t decide whether it was endearing or annoying. “Hold us steady for a few minutes, Rodgeman,” Michael ordered.
Rodger stopped paddling and checked the rope connecting the boats, while Michael pulled out a map and compass. His eyes flitted from the tools to the minimap in the upper screen of his HUD.
“We’re about seventeen miles from the source of X’s last transmission,” Michael said after a few minutes. “At this pace, it’s going to take us at least another day to get there if we can’t find land.”
“My hands are already covered in blisters,” Rodger said.
“I’ll take over,” Magnolia said, sitting up. She stretched her arms and reached back for the paddle, but Rodger held it out of her reach.
Michael’s eyes were drawn to a ripple of water to the right of the boats. A long, sinuous shape breached the surface before vanishing back into the soup.
“Everyone quiet,” Michael said.
He gently placed the paddle back in the boat and grabbed his rifle. The weapon was already charged and ready to fire, saving him the trouble of pulling back the bolt. He slowly scanned the water in all directions. Another hump-backed body appeared on their left.
“We’re being surrounded,” he murmured.
He flashed several hand motions, and the divers held their weapons at the ready, covering all quarters.
“Timothy, this is Commander Everhart reporting our coordinates.” Michael continued to relay the information to the AI just in case he was listening.
Water slurped against the sides of the boats as lightning rippled across the sky, backlighting more spurs of land that spread across the horizon. The earthquakes had turned most of Florida into wetlands and provided a home to a type of beast Michael had never seen before.
Something darted through the water in front of Layla. She flinched and trained her gun on the ripples.
“Hold your fire,” Michael whispered.
He heard another beast behind their boats but didn’t look in time to see it. The wake from the creature’s movements hit the side of the boats, rocking them and pushing them slightly through the murky water.
Rodger let out a high-pitched yelp as a red tail suddenly shot out of the water and wrapped around him. It yanked him backward, but his knee caught on the stern. Magnolia reached for his legs and grabbed hold while Michael aimed at the ropy coils looped around Rodger’s neck. Rodger dropped his pistol, the weapon clanking on the bottom of the boat as he reached up to grab the beast.
“Use your blades,” Layla said to Magnolia.
Before Michael could fire a shot, another snake emerged from the water. An elongated skull on a thick neck tilted to look at Layla and Michael in turn, studying them as a sharp black tongue flickered out at them. Spikes flared around its head, forming a crown.
Michael fired a round point-blank to the center of its head, right between the almond-shaped eyes. The impact flung the creature back into the water.
Rodger let out a scream as a second snake cinched around his arm and tried to drag him out of the kayak. The beast pulled hard enough to yank both boats backward, and the rope between them fell slack. Layla reached out to grab it as a third snake wrapped around the front of her boat, yanking it in the opposite direction.
<
br /> “Fire!” Michael shouted. Anger boiled through him, giving his fatigued muscles a new surge of energy. While Layla hacked at the snake holding on to the bow, he turned and fired two shots into the closest snake pulling Rodger toward the water. The rounds cut through the rubbery flesh, nearly severing the head.
Rodger let out a wail. “Don’t shoot me; shoot him!”
Michael aimed carefully and pulled the trigger at the body still holding on to Rodger. The round sliced through the stringy flesh, and Rodger jolted forward with a length of red-orange tail still wrapped around him.
Magnolia, both blades out, whirled to strike the beast at the bow of Layla and Michael’s boat. Together, they cut through its coils, leaving the front of the blue boat covered in gore and slick blood.
The serpentine bodies undulated up and down in the water around the divers. Michael followed one in his sights and fired a three-round burst, sending the creature back under the surface. As he scanned the water around them for another target, a snake burst up from the deep and curled around his chest. Its face loomed right in front of his visor, the halo of spikes flicking up around its head as it opened its mouth and let out a loud hiss. The creature’s tongue flickered over his visor, obscuring his view with gooey saliva.
Layla was screaming Michael’s name, but he didn’t have the breath to reply. He tried to squirm, but the motion just made the coils wrap tighter around his chest, arms, and stomach.
A whipping sound emerged in the distance that sounded almost like flapping wings. Or was it just in his mind?
Layla disappeared from view as he was yanked backward, out of the boat. The snake pulled him deep into the murky swamp, tightening its grip around his body so he couldn’t even squirm. Water churned inside his helmet. It smelled awful and tasted worse. He spat it out, trying his best not to swallow any.
“Help!” he shouted into the comm.
Static crackled in reply.
He could see the lightning flash above, and the outlines of the two boats. But the darkness quickly surrounded him as the snake writhed deeper into the water. There wasn’t much he could do now. The creature had him wrapped so tightly, he couldn’t even squirm. The farther downward he was pulled, the more he didn’t want anyone risking their lives saving him.
Hell Divers III_Deliverance Page 16