He glanced back up at the mezzanine, but Michael and Magnolia had already left to search for the last Siren.
Les slotted a new bolt in his bow and bumped on the comm channel.
“Timothy, get Alfred down here to clean this place up and make sure we didn’t screw anything up,” he said. “And get me a damn twenty on the second Siren.”
“On it, sir.”
Les and Banks took off for the exit.
“Any ideas where this thing is going, Michael?” Les asked.
The reply crackled into his helmet.
“To find food, if I had to guess,” Michael replied.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Banks said.
The thought made Les run faster. “Have we secured all the shelters, Timothy?”
“Yes, sir, and I’ve got cameras monitoring all of them.”
“Michael, you and Mags go to the medical ward,” Les said. “I’m heading to the bridge.”
“Got it, sir.”
Banks and Les hurried up a ladder and out into a passage. The alarm siren was finally off. They ran all the way to the bridge. Both Cazador soldiers, armed with spears and swords, stood sentry outside.
Les nodded at them and moved inside the bridge to check on Eevi and Layla. Timothy stood with them, his glow illuminating the grieving Eevi’s features.
“What’s the status of the ship?” Les asked.
“Turbofan three is offline,” Timothy said, “and we have multiple exterior panels that were broken during that stunt we pulled back in the city.”
“Stunt?” Les snorted. “Oh, you mean when you turned on the thrusters and told me that the ship was clear?”
“No, I meant when you used our friend Cricket as bait,” replied the AI.
“You think that’s when the Sirens infiltrated our outer panels? Because if that’s the case, you should have detected that hours ago!”
“Guys, stop,” Layla said, rising to her feet. “This is not anyone’s fault.”
Les turned for the door. “Tell me when you find that Siren, Pepper.”
He moved out into the passage to continue the search.
Everyone on the comms reported the same thing. No one had any idea where the thing was.
Les felt a stab of fear. The thing had already caused damage in compartments ten and fourteen, knocked out a turbofan, and . . .
The floor shuddered.
Les halted in the passage as the lights winked off.
“Timothy, what the hell is happening now?” he said into his headset.
There was a slight delay, enough to make Les wonder whether it was intentional.
“Captain, this is Alfred. One of the valves to the reactor is damaged. We’re diverting power from several sectors to keep the thrusters online.”
The lead technician confirmed Les’s worst fear.
“How bad is the damage?” he said.
“Bad enough, sir. The conduit housing the valve is severely damaged.”
“Shit!”
“This wasn’t the beasts. The damage is from an arrow.”
Les cursed again. “Just fix the damn thing!”
He flipped on his headlamp and took off in the darkness.
Maybe Timothy was right. Maybe this was partly Les’s fault. He had used Cricket as bait to draw the Sirens away from the divers in the city.
It was also possible the beasts had gained access when he landed the ship to evacuate the divers and the survivors from the bunker.
Either way, he had failed to keep the monsters from entering the ship.
“Sir, I’ve located the second Siren,” Timothy said. “Inside the launch bay.”
Les cursed under his breath at the news. Of course the thing had gone to the launch bay. With all the people inside, it was the biggest food source on the ship.
“Everyone meet me there!” Les yelled back. Cradling his bow, he ran as fast as his long legs would carry him. Knowing the passageways by heart helped him calculate the distance.
It would take him two minutes to get there—more than enough time for the Siren to shred through the rescued passengers.
Worse, these people didn’t seem to know how to fight.
Les thought of his boy as he ran. Trey had sacrificed himself to find people in the wastes, and now that they had, Les would do anything to save them, even give his own life.
He was the first to reach the dark passage to the launch bay. Michael and Magnolia rounded the next corner and arrived a second later. Their headlamps captured the terrified faces of the refugees pounding on the hatches and glass. Behind them, Les glimpsed the Siren slashing at three men. One of them jabbed at it with a metal leg from a cot.
Les twisted the handle. Locked.
“Timothy, open the door!” he shouted.
“Sir, I can’t . . .”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“Alfred shunted power from that sector of the ship.”
Les backed away and kicked the door. That did nothing but hurt his foot. He kicked again, and again.
“Out of the way, sir,” Michael said. He used his robotic hand to smash the lock. When the door clicked open, Michael and Les grabbed the inside edge and pulled. The beast’s ethereal screeching rose above the shouts of terrified passengers.
Les couldn’t worry about the quarantine—the Siren’s knife-size claws would kill them faster than any invisible germs.
Michael grunted, and finally the two men pried the door open. The people on the other side flooded out, and Magnolia squeezed in, with Les and Michael right behind her.
Les shouldered his crossbow. The beast was on its back, wings extended. Two men stomped on the wings while a third straddled the chest. The dreadlocks over his shoulders confirmed what Les suspected. It was Pedro, the leader of these people.
He bent over, pushing on something.
Les hurried over to help. The beast jerked on the deck as Pedro shoved the cot leg into its open mouth, crunching through teeth and bone. He kept pushing until the creature went limp.
Covered in the creature’s blood and bleeding from several gashes of his own, the man limped away from the dead beast.
“Timothy, report to the launch bay,” Les said quietly into his headset. “And get a medical crew here ASAP.”
Pedro put his hand to the back of his dreadlocks and pulled it away bloody. Les stepped back to scan the room for bodies.
A man lay in a puddle of blood with several people crouched around, sobbing. They looked up when a blue glow washed over the open space.
“Tell them it’s okay now,” Les said to Timothy’s hologram. “Tell them the beasts are dead and we are sorry, and that in a few hours they will see the sun as we promised.”
* * * * *
X raised his wrist computer toward the dark sky. It was a balmy fifty degrees Fahrenheit, with a hint of radiation on the surface. Sporadic jags of lightning cut through the black drape of sky, illuminating the cracked earth he trekked across.
A rusted sign marked the way.
Déjà vu enveloped him. He had seen this one before.
Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State.
Miles trotted ahead, the hazard suit crinkling over his muscular body. Muzzle to the ground, he sniffed toward a cluster of blue weeds that writhed like octopus limbs at the side of the road.
“No!” X shouted.
Miles halted, just out of the tentacles’ reach. A single sting could end the dog’s life with a lethal dose of venom.
“You know better than that, boy,” he said, bending down.
The dog tilted its loose-fitting helmet for a better view of X. Then it brushed up against his hand as if trying to lick his gloved fingers.
X chuckled and stood. “Stay next to me this time, buddy.”
Sid
e by side, the man and his best friend set off again down the apocalyptic road toward their new home on the coastline. The view seemed to shift as he walked, and in a moment of clarity, he realized he was in a dream he couldn’t rouse himself from.
A collection of memories surfaced. The next thing he saw was a land bridge. Again déjà vu struck. He remembered what had happened here, and watched it unfold in slow motion.
Several fissures broke the ground. Jumping back, Miles went over the side of the embankment. X bolted after the dog, leaping another chasm.
Scrabbling with his forelegs, Miles tried to climb back onto solid ground.
“Miles!” X shouted.
Before X could get to him, a reddish tentacle shot out of the water and grabbed the dog, yanking him into the muck.
No matter how hard he tried to wake, X was stuck in the purgatory of sleep.
He jumped into the fetid water, darkness swallowing him like quicksand. Kicking upward, he broke the surface in time to see the twenty-foot monster swim past with Miles in its grip.
He pulled out his knife and slashed the creature, opening a long gash.
Pinkish eggs jettisoned from the rubbery hide. The beast let go of Miles and snaked backward through the water toward X. A fanged reptilian mouth opened.
The dream transported him again, this time to some sort of limbo between reality and nightmare. Voices seemed to call out in the ether. He could feel his wounded body again and the chill from his fever.
A few voices seemed familiar, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. They faded away, leaving him with a sensation of near weightlessness, like during the first few moments of a dive.
The dreams returned, and he was in a military bunker where he had taken refuge with Miles on his way to the coast. It was here that he repaired an old-world motorcycle. Here was also where he started coughing up blood. The continued exposure to toxins and radiation had finally caught up with him.
He was transported into yet another dream—more a collection of memories and not as vivid. He drove the bike with Miles strapped into the custom seat. A view of Miami’s ruins stretched across the horizon.
They had finally reached the coast, and the place he made into a home for himself and Miles. The high-rise building overlooked the shore, where glowing red vines flashed.
Not long after settling in, he had learned it was cancer eating his throat. Miles had whined all day, sensing something dramatically wrong with X.
The memories faded away into darkness, and he returned to the limbo between reality and dreaming. X recalled how he had felt lying in that small apartment, sealed off from a toxic world, coughing up blood while Miles watched helplessly. It was similar to how he felt now, stuck in a bed overlooking the ocean, with Miles at his feet.
Back then he had pondered killing Miles to prevent him from suffering and starving while X rotted away from cancer.
The dream pulled X back in, and he recalled that he had taken the other option.
To fight.
The throttle rattled in his weak hands, sending vibrations through his cancer-riddled body as he motorcycled to an ITC facility, to find the medicine that might save his life.
Along the way, he coughed flecks of blood onto the inside of his face shield. The blurred view almost made him dump the bike when a pack of Sirens attacked. But the blades attached to the hubs had saved his life, cutting several beasts in half.
The scene moved to the inside of the building, after he had scavenged the life-saving cancer medicine. He crouched in a dark passage, listening to something he had never heard on the surface: human voices.
He had tried to make it past them, but the Siren-hunting Cazadores had captured him and put him in a cage. Now he was face-to-face with el Pulpo. It was the first time they had met, the day he gouged out the king’s eye with a needle.
More events streamed across his consciousness, as if he were watching an old-world video with himself as the star. But the next scene of this kaleidoscopic video was one he didn’t remember.
X stood on a debris-littered beach. A fishing boat lay in the sand. The boat looked familiar.
Boot prints led away from the boat and into an embankment covered in red vines and tall bluish weeds. Skeletal palm trees towered above him, their fronds shifting in the toxic wind.
He followed the tracks to a field of more weeds. The blue tendrils writhed like sea anemones underwater, ready to latch on to a bug or beast. Or perhaps a human.
The tracks led into the field. Searching for a way around, X found more prints. Drips of blood darkened the soil along the path.
The dream seemed crystal clear, as if he were actually back in Miami, on the hunt for this mysterious person. The trail continued toward the row of high-rise apartment buildings once owned by wealthy residents of this city.
He stopped again to look at one he recognized. A black tarp covered a balcony door on one of the upper floors—the place he and Miles had called home several years ago.
It all came crashing over him. The boat, the tracks—they had to belong to Ada Winslow, the former executive officer of the Hive and Discovery, who had killed an entire crew of Cazador sailors. He had exiled her out here, with a map to his former home.
The tracks continued through the city’s ash-covered streets. He ran, needing to find her. Several spent cartridge casings and more blood dotted the ground on the next street.
A Siren carcass lay on a curb, bugs consuming the flesh. Maggots spilled out of the open mouth. The rot meant it had been here for some days, but where was Ada?
He kept moving until the dream suddenly ended, darkness like a wave washing away the city. Light broke through his vision. In the glow, several blurred faces hovered over him. One seemed furrier than the others.
Miles . . .
He had woken from his dream to the same familiar voices from earlier.
“X, can you hear us?”
The gruff female voice belonged to Sloan.
“King Xavier,” she said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” he growled.
Sloan, Dr. Huff, and Samson were huddled around his bed. Miles was at his feet, tongue out, panting. He moved over and nudged X’s bandaged right leg.
Huff tried to push him back, but the dog bared his teeth.
“How long have I been out?” X asked.
“Since just after the council meeting,” Samson said.
“And how long ago was that?”
“I don’t got a watch, but it’s been about a day,” Sloan said. “We have Ton, Victor, and an entire militia patrol standing guard outside your room just in case anyone gets any ideas about finishing you off.”
“Finishing me off . . .” X mumbled.
He tried to sit up, but his body wouldn’t respond. He felt paralyzed, as if he had been pricked by one of the blue weeds in his dream.
X didn’t even feel the doc pull off the chest bandage to check his arrow wound, but he saw the reaction.
Huff winced. “It’s infected, badly,” he said.
“Not surprised, considering X doesn’t listen to orders,” Sloan said. “Honestly, you’re lucky those arrows weren’t dipped in poison.”
X tried to move again, but his limbs wouldn’t respond. He tried to wiggle his toes and got one to move.
“Did you say I’ve been out a full day?” he muttered.
“Pretty much,” Sloan said.
X turned his head slightly to look at the hall. “Then where’s Michael, Les, and everyone else? They should be back by now.”
Samson coughed into his handkerchief and moved away from the bed. Huff looked up.
“You really should let me take a look at you, too,” said the doctor.
Samson waved a hand. “I’m fine—just a cold.”
X finally managed to sit up slightly. Nothing like fe
ar to energize a dying body, he mused.
“I asked a question,” he said. “Where is the crew of Discovery?”
Clenching his jaw, he braced for more bad news.
“There was an incident on the airship,” Sloan said. “A pair of Sirens somehow got inside after they left Rio de Janeiro.”
“You got to be fucking kiddin’ me,” X grumbled.
“I wish I were,” Sloan said. “Fortunately, there was only one casualty and minor injuries.”
“It was Discovery that took the most damage,” Samson said. He went into the technical details until X cut him off.
“English, man,” he said.
“A reactor valve was damaged, and they lost power to all six thrusters,” Samson said. “They also lost turbofan three.”
“So what’s keeping them in the air?” X asked.
“The rest of the turbofans.”
“How long until they get back?”
“Could be a while unless they get the thrusters back on,” Samson said. “Sounds like they’re going to put down to fix them, so they don’t risk crashing to the surface.”
X swallowed hard at the news, his throat burning just as it had when the cancer was eating away his esophagus. Spots darted in his vision.
Out his open window, a tiny black dot inched along the horizon.
“Is that a Cazador warship?” X asked.
Sloan looked, then nodded. “Colonel Moreto,” she said. “She left for Belize this morning, but appears to have turned back around.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
X closed his eyes, trying to fend off another wave of dizziness and anxiety.
Huff finally finished changing the dressing and moved on to the next one.
“Here, drink,” Sloan said. She helped X sip some water while the doctor worked.
When he finished, Huff said, “Go back to sleep, King Xavier.”
X nodded. This time, he wasn’t going to argue, even if it meant returning to the nightmares. He closed his eyes, then snapped his battered eyelids back open.
X grabbed Sloan’s wrist and said, “Lieutenant, if something does happen to me and I don’t make it, tell Michael I want him to take care of Miles.”
“You’re going to make it,” Sloan said.
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