Jordan shut off the feed. The video ended on a happy note that now felt like a cruel joke. The future he lived in was anything but bright.
Only a few people on the Hive knew the rest of the story. The archives were vast, but bits and pieces of the big picture had been lost to time. Some of the files were corrupted; others had been erased. Though the details were vague, it seemed that mutually assured destruction had worked as designed, and brought the world to an end. During the Third World War, the very ships built to protect the United States had ended up destroying the planet with powerful bombs that turned the surface into wastelands.
Jordan still wasn’t sure who had caused the last war of humanity, but he knew that no corner of the earth had been spared from the perpetual darkness and the electrical storms that the bombs had created. North America. Europe. The Middle East. Asia. It was all gone.
With a snort, he turned away from his computer. This was exactly why he didn’t share the radio transmissions from the surface with the general population. Those messages could cause a riot.
No, he had to keep his people focused on their daily survival. There were only 442 people left on the ship. Scientists said it took at least 150 healthy humans to carry on the species. There were more bodies than that aboard the Hive, but they weren’t healthy by any stretch. Most had cancer at one stage or another. The radiation poisoning was slowly killing everyone.
He put his head in his hands. How much longer could he stave off the inevitable?
Jordan raised his head and scooted his chair closer to the monitor. Captain Ash had marked the Hilltop Bastion as one of the most promising places that could hold survivors. She had taken a deep interest in places like it in the final year of her life. In the end, it had also driven her mad and forced Jordan into some very difficult decisions for the safety of those aboard the Hive. He keyed in his credentials and unlocked her final logs, which painted a grim picture of the woman Captain Ash had become during the last years of her life.
* * * * *
The lower decks smelled worse than Michael remembered from his last visit. The shit cans weren’t being composted but once a week, and showers were running only a fraction of the time because of the energy curtailment. That meant overfill and the threat of disease, not to mention the rancid smells.
Curious eyes followed Michael and Layla down the corridor, which was lined with pathetic dirt-filled troughs where the lower-deckers tried to grow a few extra carrots or spinach plants. The leaves were pale and shriveled, like the people who lived down here. It made Michael sad and angry to see the way they were treated.
“Hell Divers,” hissed an old woman as they passed. Norma, an elderly gardener with a crooked spine, staggered after them, holding up hands caked with dirt. “Tell that captain we need the grow lights back on!”
Layla approached her, smiling gently. “We’re doing our best. I’ll pass your request on to Captain Jordan personally.”
Her calm voice seemed to soothe the old woman, who shuffled away toward one of the troughs and went back to propping up a tomato plant. How many thousands of times in her life had she performed that task? Michael wondered. Perhaps that was the reason she was bent like one of the struggling, stunted plants.
“Good job,” he said to Layla.
“We can’t stay down here much longer. People are going to start asking us questions.”
“We’re almost there,” Michael said. They hurried through the dark hallway into one of the least-visited rooms on the ship.
“Ugh!” Layla groaned. “Why are we at the library?”
“Do you remember when Captain Ash died?”
She looked at him strangely. “Of course. We were in our first year of engineering school and about to start our apprenticeships.”
“The last time I saw her and Mark, I was fifteen years old. Except that I didn’t know it would be the last time. I visited her in her private quarters. By then, the cancer had eaten her throat. She couldn’t speak, but she could write. The instructions on the note she gave me with this envelope said to open it here.”
Layla wrapped her arms around him. “I’m sorry, Michael. I know how much she meant to you.”
“I was close with Mark, too. They were the closest thing I had to parents after mine died.” He thought of them both every day, but sometimes it was just too painful. Mark had died of a heart attack two months after the cancer took Maria. They had loved each other fiercely for over thirty years. Michael hoped he would get a fraction of that time with Layla.
She kissed his cheek and stepped back. “I went through the same pain when I lost my parents. It never fully goes away.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
He pulled the note out of his pocket and pushed the door open. They stepped into a small room furnished with three desks and lit by a single candle. The glow danced over shelves of ragged books with faded covers.
“May I help you?” an ancient voice croaked.
“Hi, Mr. Matthis,” Michael said to the librarian. “Been a while.”
Jason Matthis stood and squinted in the candlelight. “I’m sorry, but my vision is failing me and I don’t recognize your voice.”
Michael and Layla crossed the small space, stopping in front of Jason’s desk. He smiled, flashing decayed teeth at them. The whites of his eyes reflected the lonely, flickering flame.
“It’s me, Michael Everhart.” He paused and then added, “Tin.”
“Ah,” Jason said. “And who is with you, Commander Tin?”
“Layla,” she said.
“And what brings you two here?”
She looked to Michael. He cleared his throat. “Research.”
“Then please let me know if I can assist you.”
“Thank you,” Michael replied. He led Layla over to the desk near the starboard bulkhead and took a seat. Before sitting down beside him, she fished a lighter from her pocket, lit the candle on the table, and pulled it close.
Holding her gaze, Michael used a fingernail to unseal the yellowed envelope. For five years, he had held on to this note, and for five years he had fought the daily temptation to open it.
Captain Ash had been the one to lift Michael up. She had taken him in after X didn’t return from Hades. She had saved his life, and he loved her for it. But she had always kept things hidden from him. Now he was finally going to find out the secrets she was hiding.
Michael unfolded the letter and held it to the light, reading the text in a whisper. “The New World Order. Page ninety-four.”
“That’s it?” Layla asked.
“No,” he replied. “That was just the beginning.”
ELEVEN
Rodger followed Andrew through the rubble. He swept his rifle over the terrain, searching for contacts. Though he didn’t look it, he was one of the best shots of all the Hell Divers. That didn’t mean he enjoyed killing.
He gripped the wooden stock with one hand and raised the other to check the rad readings on his monitor. There was a joke somewhere in his mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to crack it. Today, he was all business. No jokes, no farts, no laughs. This wasn’t some green dive. His life and the lives of his fellow divers depended on him.
Magnolia’s life depended on him.
“You think she’s okay?” he asked.
Andrew turned slightly. His big shoulders cast a wide shadow on the path.
“Shit, Mags is tougher than you think.” Andrew stood there a moment and then laughed. “You really dig her, don’t you?”
Rodger felt his cheeks warm. Was it that obvious?
He kept walking, eyes on the sky. The gift he had been making for her wasn’t finished, but he had brought it with him anyway. Tomorrow was never a guarantee, and a mostly finished present was better than nothing.
The sharp crack of thunder made Rodger flinch. A few hundred feet to the left, a
nd the strike would have ended him. But the lightning arced into a pile of broken rock and concrete instead.
Thirty minutes had passed since Weaver’s last transmission, and Rodger was growing anxious.
“We need to find that crate,” Andrew said. “It’s gotta be close.”
Rodger nodded. According to the minimap on his wrist monitor, they were almost on top of the supply box that their shipboard team had dropped. The nav marker he had set blinked.
“After you, Mr. Pipe,” he said, bowing.
Andrew shook his head, shouldered his assault rifle, and took point on a path lined on both sides by ten feet of debris. The nearby buildings had been reduced to rubble. In the distance, a hill rose above the destruction. On top of it stood an almost cubical concrete structure with a domed roof.
That was their target.
But first, they needed supplies.
Rodger raised the scope to his visor and zoomed in on the charred slope of the hill. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the trees that had once shaded the dirt. He had seen pictures of trees in the archives, from spindly saplings to forests of giant ponderosas. Why couldn’t he have been born three hundred years earlier? He would have built himself a nice little cabin away from everyone, a place on a lake with a good view of the mountains.
It was a pipe dream. In this devastated world, his greatest ambition was that someday he would see a real tree.
They skirted an immense crater. This wasn’t from a bomb. Rodger could tell by the radiation readings. They were high, but not that high. The hole was probably once a man-made lake. A place where people picnicked. Now it was just poisoned dirt.
He took a second to scan the sky, searching again for Weaver and Magnolia. “Those rads are increasing,” Andrew warned.
Rodger checked his wrist monitor. They were already in deadly territory. Without their suits, they would have been dead after a few hours. The numbers didn’t inspire confidence of finding any survivors—at least, not aboveground.
The mountains of rubble continued after they passed the crater. Andrew stopped in the center of the road to look at the one on his left, then his right.
“Damn,” he muttered. “I bet the crate landed on one of those.”
Rodger followed Andrew’s finger to the top of the four-story pile on the right. It wasn’t the first time their supply crates had been dropped somewhere inconvenient. Sometimes, he thought the support crew did it on purpose.
“Better start climbing,” Andrew said.
“Why me?” Rodger cradled his gun across his chest and glanced up the pile of concrete, glass, girders, and plastic.
“’Cause I hold rank. Stop wasting time and get your skinny ass up there.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Pipe, sir,” Rodger said. He laughed and looked for a route up. Hunks of concrete sidewalk stuck out from the pile. They looked sturdy enough. He would use them as makeshift steps. He threw the strap of his rifle over his shoulder and climbed up the first two with ease. Then he jumped onto the loose rubble. The loose grains slid under his boots. He took another step, packing it down, but still it felt unstable. He grabbed a piece of rebar sticking out of the mess and used it for balance.
Glass crunched under his boots. There was a little bit of everything out here, like a giant scrap yard of shit from the Old World: plastic, sheet metal, concrete, brick, and even some preserved wood. He was always on the lookout for it. But rarely did he find anything he could use in his shop. Most of the time, he didn’t have lift capacity in the crate to get any noncritical items back anyway.
He stopped halfway up the pile to check the sky again. The higher vantage point gave him a good view of the scrapers near the ocean. The flashing glow in his night-vision optics seemed weaker. Each green pulse illuminated the skyline, and by its light he saw a flurry of motion.
“I think I see them,” Rodger said. He took another step and stopped to focus on the spot where he had seen movement. He shut off his optics, expecting to see the blue glow of battery packs, but there was only darkness.
“What the hell?” he whispered.
He bumped the optics back on. There to the east, just over the scrapers, something was moving just below the clouds. Rodger reached for his rifle and pushed the scope to his visor.
A transmission fired over the open channel as he zoomed in.
“Apollo One, this is Angel One. Do you copy?
“Roger, Angel One,” Andrew replied.
“Have you found the crate yet?” Weaver asked.
“Negative. We’re still looking.”
Weaver’s voice cracked, and not from static. “Find shelter immediately, Apollo One. I repeat, find shelter!”
Rodger bumped off his NVGs again and zoomed in on the dots he had mistaken for Weaver and Magnolia. He flinched as the red light of the towers backlit a sky full of winged creatures.
The otherworldly wail of Sirens sounded in the distance.
Rodger lost his footing, and his boots slid.
“No, no, no,” he moaned. After regaining his balance, he pushed the scope back to his eye and saw just one sparkling blue dot.
His heart stuttered at the sight. Where was …?
He zoomed in again on Magnolia and Weaver, sailing away from the beasts flapping after them. Now he knew why the commander had asked for the supply crate. They were going to need heavier weapons.
“Move your skinny buns, Rodger Dodger!” Andrew shouted. He looked up at Rodger from the street. “We need to find a place to hide.”
“No, we have to help them!”
Rodger turned and loped down the hillside. The grit gave way under his boots, but he broke the slide with his heels. He leaped onto a hunk of concrete, then onto another. He jumped down onto the street and ran out his momentum. Halfway down the street, Andrew was already rounding the first corner of debris.
“Get back here!” Rodger shouted. “We have to help!”
Andrew yelled something in reply that was more profanity than anything else.
Rodger chambered a round in his hunting rifle and swung it up to the skyline.
“Don’t worry, Mags, Rodger Dodger’s got you.”
He got the creatures in his scope. They were about a quarter-mile behind Magnolia and Weaver. It was a near-impossible shot from here, and Rodger knew better than to waste precious ammunition.
But Andrew must have had other plans. The crack of his gun sounded, and Rodger turned just as Andrew opened fire. He wasn’t aiming at the sky.
Andrew shouldered his rifle and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashes silhouetted his broad shoulders as he fired at targets coming from the opposite direction.
Another round of swearing came over the channel. Andrew was calling for help, but Rodger needed to protect Magnolia and Weaver. Bringing the scope back up to his visor, he followed their progress. The chute was lowering them toward the city streets. Sirens, with their eerie high-pitched wails, were sailing in a V formation. And they were closing the gap.
“Rodger!” Andrew shouted. Through the incoherent streak of curse words that followed, Rodger heard a sentence that chilled him to the core.
“We’re being flanked on all sides!”
* * * * *
The experience from eighty-nine dives kicked in as soon as Weaver heard the monsters’ electronic discords. The alien shrieks echoed over the devastated city like an emergency siren on an airship. The sound of the alarms had paralyzed him as a child, but now it forced him to action.
“Hang on tight, Mags!” he shouted.
Sirens—at least a dozen, judging by the racket—were trailing him and Magnolia. The creatures were gaining on them, but Weaver didn’t risk a glance to see just how much trouble they were in. He could already hear their leathery wings beating the air.
To the north, a road twisted like a river through a canyon of debris. Trash
and blackened metal formed a skirt at the bottom of the heaps of destroyed buildings. The shells of old-world vehicles protruded out of the scrap yard.
At the end of the path was salvation. The Hilltop Bastion, now nothing more than a concrete bunker at the top of a dirt hill, enticed Weaver with its promise of safety.
About halfway there, standing on top of a mountain of rubble, was a lone figure. Weaver saw the muzzle flash, then heard the gunshot ring out half a second later. An enraged shriek followed as one of the beasts plummeted to the street below.
Farther north, behind the domes of rubble, came a flurry of gunshots. Weaver couldn’t see who was who down there, but judging by the high rate of fire, it was Rodger. He never conserved the precious bullets.
Another flash from the crest of the eastward mound, and a second Siren spun down. The shrieks of rage rose into a cacophony that pricked up the hair on Weaver’s neck. He turned his head to look at the beasts, but he couldn’t see past Magnolia’s helmet.
“How many are there? And how close?”
“Ten!” she yelled. “They’re closing in!”
“Well, make yourself useful, princess,” Weaver said.
“How? I don’t have a gun!” she shouted into her mike.
Her voice hurt Weaver’s ears almost as much as the screech of the monsters.
“Use my blaster. And don’t hit the shroud lines!”
Weaver felt the gun being pulled from the holster on his thigh. Magnolia had clipped her locking carabiner to Weaver’s armor, allowing her to let go of him with one arm and turn to fire. He pulled on his left toggle and steered the canopy toward the road curving between the mountains of destruction.
He heard the blast, and the recoil from the gun sent the canopy banking right. The blaster’s barrel hit Weaver in the shoulder.
“Son of a …”
“I got one!” she yelled.
“Great. Now kill the other nine!”
Three rounds in rapid succession came from the pile of scree below. The flashes lit up the slope, and in their light Weaver saw skeletal figures scaling the sides toward the diver at the top.
Hell Divers II: Ghosts Page 13