Hell Divers Series | Book 8 | King of the Wastes

by Smith, Nicholas Sansbury

  Frantic, she searched for a way to barricade the door, but the narrow tunnel was empty, and the rickety thing wasn’t going to hold for long.

  Turning, Ada started toward another door at the end of the long passage, where it seemed to widen. The door was wider and thicker.

  And wide open.

  Ada brought her rifle up as they approached. Jo-Jo was first inside, ignoring orders to stay back.

  By the time Ada entered, the monkey was already halfway across a sizable chamber. Bunks and tables lay thrown about.

  This was some sort of bunker.

  Ada hobbled over to the door’s keypad and pushed a button. It hissed and began to close, clanking, and grinding.

  She aimed her rifle at the beasts already surging forward, their red eyes glowing in her lights.

  Pulling the trigger, she unleashed a volley of laser bolts into their shells. Green fluid dribbled out of holes in the ravenous creatures charging on their clawed legs.

  The door was taking too long to shut. Ada could tell it wasn’t going to happen in time. So she kept firing calculated shots as she had been taught, keeping the weapon snug against her shoulder and blasting pieces of shell across the floor.

  The two creatures in the lead went down, blocking the passage for a few short moments before the next batch climbed over their dead brethren.

  Ada went down on one knee, firing right until the gap was only inches wide. And she kept the barrel up even as the crossbar dropped into place and locked.

  The monsters on the other side shrieked and scratched at the door, but they weren’t getting through.

  And, of course, the downside: Jo-Jo and she were not getting out.

  Ada started poking around for another way out. Supply boxes were scattered throughout the room. Rusted food cans and plastic wrappers littered the floor. From what she could tell by the evidence, no one had been here in decades, maybe longer.

  A hall led to quarters furnished with beds and desks. Filthy, tattered clothing and torn bags were draped over the beds. Shirts still hung from clotheslines.

  Across the dark space, a mess hall was a similar scene of upended tables and chairs. She found a pantry that had long since been stripped clean.

  It appeared that a fight had gone down here against the monsters. Empty shell casings lay scattered on the floor. But there were no bodies or even remains.

  When she reentered the chamber, the scratching continued outside. It was joined by another sound: a rumbling that seemed to come from the walls themselves.

  Ada walked over to them, listening.

  She followed the noise down the wall, back to the passage, and into the quarters. Finally, it came from the mess hall.

  She turned her light up. As she watched, cracks appeared across the ceiling.

  Oh, no . . .

  Ada hopped back, but it was already too late.

  The roof came crashing down, burying Ada to her chest. Pincer claws broke through the opening and popped up through the dirt.

  The juvenile turtle creatures clambered toward Ada. She squirmed and tried to move, but she was well and truly stuck.

  Jo-Jo tried to pull on Ada’s armored shoulder plate and her free arm.

  “Run!” Ada screamed. “Get out of here!”

  The creatures climbed over her, slicing the air with their sharp claws. One of them snapped a pincer claw at Jo-Jo, drawing blood from her side.

  With a howl of pain, Jo-Jo smacked the beast in the face, crushing the skull. Grabbing another by the pincer, she twisted it off and stabbed it into the face of a third beast.

  Jo-Jo tried to fight them back, but the army of monsters kept crawling and falling out of the ceiling. In seconds, they had Ada overwhelmed. She watched helplessly through her visor as they clambered over her helmet.

  The howl of pain and anger from her animal friend grew louder and louder.

  “Run!” Ada shouted. “go!”

  A claw smacked on her visor, cracking the glass.

  She bumped her comm channel on.

  The cobweb spread across her visor, threatening to shatter.

  She shouted into her headset. “help us!”

  Twelve

  “Ada, do you copy?” Kade said.

  Only static. He had thought he heard something earlier, but maybe it was nothing. According to the beacon on his HUD, she was alive. And so was Jo-Jo.

  “Ada, do you copy?” he repeated.

  Getting no response, he climbed down from the tower and joined the team, huddled in the former observation post over the canal. Kade had selected the position for the view and the concrete shell that protected them from the wind and acid rain.

  He moved his binos to the window frame and glassed the crater he had sailed over on the dive. Ada was underground, but across the canal there was no sign of Magnolia or Edgar, or the monsters that had taken them.

  Their beacons were offline, which meant they were either without their armor or dead.

  Kade wasn’t fooling himself. Captain Rolo was probably right about Edgar and Magnolia having Buckley’s chance of being alive now.

  After a final scan, Kade whispered to the other divers, “We head to the crater, scope it out, and if it looks safe, I’ll go search for the divers.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Sofia said.

  Gran Jefe didn’t offer his services. He was a soldier but still very much a greenhorn.

  “Stay close and keep alert,” Kade said.

  They moved out of the building and into the storm. The rain turned the fine, loose soil into mud, making progress difficult. It also left behind their tracks.

  Kade used docking stations along the rim of the canal for cover, moving from one to the next and scanning each time for contacts. Derelict industrial equipment—wrecked cranes and container lifts, ruined derricks—littered the slopes ahead.

  He worked his way down into a field of overturned containers for the added cover, but cleared each with his rifle. Inside, the contents were long since raided or washed away by the tsunamis that obliterated this place.

  It took an hour to get near the crater. By that time, the rain had stopped. Kade kept an eye on the radiation level, which rose the closer they got to the opening.

  He almost didn’t see the smaller hole ahead. Gran Jefe reached out and grabbed his arm, stopping him short.

  In front of them were dozens of smaller vertical shafts in the ground, all looking quite fresh.

  Kade motioned for the divers to spread out through the maze of holes. It didn’t take long to find tracks.

  He crouched down to inspect the boot prints, which had to be from Team Raptor. But they weren’t the only tracks.

  Long claw marks gouged in the dirt had filled with water.

  “Over here,” Sofia said.

  She bent down and poked what Kade at first took for a rock. But as he drew near, he saw that it was the shell of a creature with a leathery tail and hard, sharp legs. It had a turtle face with a beak-shaped muzzle.

  “Thing’s as ugly as a hat full of arseoles,” Kade said.

  “Huh?” Sofia asked.

  “Means very ugly.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Sofia replied. “But I’ve never seen one of these before.”

  Kade looked over the terrain, imagining the ambush, the divers fleeing.

  If Arlo was the only one to get in the sky, it meant that whatever happened had gone down very fast. Now at least, Kade knew what awaited them.

  He gave the signal to advance.

  The team pushed on to the rim of scree surrounding the large crater. Kade stepped up to the edge and looked over. Using his NVGs, he studied the tunnel with the strangely ridged walls. The bottom was maybe two hundred feet down, with a bowl-shaped floor.

  Ada was down there somewhere.

  They saved you.
Now you gotta save them.

  He pulled out a rope with a figure-eight knot clipped to his belt by a screw-gate carabiner.

  Gran Jefe took three aluminum stakes and jammed them deep into the dirt, forming a triangle. Then he looped some webbing to equalize the tension, clipped two biners into the webbing, and clipped the rope.

  “Keep that line secure, mate,” Kade said.

  “No hay problema, güero,” he boomed.

  After clipping in to his rappel device, Kade nodded at Sofia and Gran Jefe.

  And down the shaft he went, his boots knocking clumps of dirt from the wall. With each push off, he lowered deeper into the darkness.

  Halfway down, a crunching sound came from the wall behind him. Then a skittering of hard limbs. He eased the rifle around on its sling to train it on the wall as he rapped down.

  Braking the rappel with one hand, he pointed the weapon into a cave in the wall of the shaft. He thought of shining his light inside but decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The night-vision optics allowed him to see enough without it anyway.

  Looking down, he spotted more horizontal tunnels in the wall of the shaft. Nothing emerged, but he could hear something moving inside.

  Rifle in one hand and rope in the other, he rapped past the holes, with the unsettling sensation of being watched.

  Miscalculating his next bounce off the wall, he fed a little too much rope through and swung into a tunnel.

  Heart pounding, he half expected creatures to scuttle out and tear his legs off. But nothing came, and within seconds he had pushed off again and was rappeling smoothly down the wall. Passing another tunnel, he angled his rifle inside. When again nothing came for him, he rapped the rest of the way to the floor. He stood there a moment, looking around.

  Several other passages led away, including one of reinforced concrete. This wasn’t just the home of mutant life forms. He was near a former subway station.

  He pushed onward, toward the twisted wreckage of an old train knocked on its side. The metal hull was riven open, and seats lay scattered across the tracks.

  From maps of the area, Kade remembered the subway that had run from Panama City, under the canal, to the resorts.

  He walked toward it, but the rope brought him up short.

  “Kade,” Sofia said over the channel. “You down?”

  “Aye, but stay put, I’m checking this out.”

  Reaching down, he unclipped his rappel device, then started across the open area with his laser rifle roving over the darkness. He could hardly see anything with his NVGs—mostly just outlines.

  Ada’s beacon seemed to be somewhere in the train tunnel not far ahead, with Jo-Jo close.

  He entered through an opening carved by a monster. Stepping over hunks of rubble, he started down the tracks, moving heel to toe, heel to toe. Just the way he was trained to do as a young Hell Diver two decades ago.

  Light faded with each step. Soon, not even his NVGs would penetrate the dark void. He resisted the urge to turn on his helmet lamp when he heard what sounded like hard little running feet.

  Crouching, he listened for the source, but the sound seemed to grow distant, as if its source was moving away.

  He kept moving until he got within a few feet of where the beacons should be. There, he turned off the NVGs and activated his helmet light. He raked the beam over the tracks and platform, back and forth.

  A sticky trail snaked away from the tracks, toward a crack in the concrete. He shined his light on the gooey ribbed body of a worm easily ten feet long, with an eyeless T-shaped head.

  That head swung around toward him, opening a mouth full of needle-

  sharp teeth.

  Kade backed away, but the creature seemed just as afraid of him. It slithered into a hole in the cracked concrete wall.

  He turned off his lights and, with rifle up, stepped carefully to the toppled train car. Stepping up to the back door, he stopped and looked at his HUD.

  Both beacons were ten feet ahead.

  “Ada,” he whispered. “Ada, you in there?”

  Something stirred, followed by a shuffling sound.

  Kade halted at the back entrance to the car.

  Taking one hand off his rifle, he reached up and flicked on his helmet light. The beam lit up the back of the train car, capturing the spiky black hair of a large creature hunched in the doorway.

  A pair of saucer eyes stared at him.

  “Holy shit.” He took a quick step back as the monkey hopped out of the car. It reached out to Kade as if to show him something.

  “Where’s Ada?” he whispered.

  The creature led him into the train car, the beams guiding them inside the rusted compartment. Upon entry, Kade stopped and angled his light at gooey orange lumps covering a body.

  He checked out the rest of the train car and found skeletal remains on the floor and seats. A body hung from the ceiling by some sort of cartilaginous net.

  Kade tried to make sense of it. Was this some sort of feeding ground?

  Whimpering, Jo-Jo went over to the body, which had to be Ada. He ran his light down the saffron-hued lumps and found armored legs protruding from the mass.

  “Bugger me,” he breathed. “What in the dingo shit . . .”

  Slinging the rifle, he drew his combat knife and leaned down.

  “Ada,” he said.

  He shined his light over the gelatinous substance covering her upper body. He touched one of the lumps with his knife. Inside, a tiny black embryo no larger than a tadpole squirmed and wriggled in a sac of fluid.

  Kade reared back. “Shit a brick!” he whispered.

  She was covered in some sort of eggs, and she was alive, just not conscious.

  Using his blade, he began gently scraping the lumps away. Several burst open, releasing their contents. He took a moment to examine a slithering yellow body. As soon as the sac encasing it burst, the creature writhed and died with a faint hissing noise.

  Jo-Jo grew frantic, waving a clawed hand as if to tell him to stop.

  But Kade continued cutting away the lumps, eventually freeing her torso and chest. With each cut, the creature tried to stop him.

  “She’ll be right,” Kade whispered, using slang.

  He leaned down and finished removing the eggs around her neck and helmet.

  “Ada, wake up,” he said.

  Upon closer inspection, Kade saw the reason she wasn’t answering. The eggs had gotten inside her cracked visor.

  Jo-Jo moved closer to him as he twisted her helmet and pulled it off.

  As soon as it was off, Ada’s eyes met his.

  Kade wasn’t sure what to do at first. The egg sacs clung to her face, so that only her eyes, nose, and part of her mouth were visible.

  “Ada,” he whispered.

  She blinked rapidly.

  “Ada, can you hear me?”

  Her blue lips moved slightly, but no words came.

  “It’s okay, I’m here to help,” he said.

  Kade painstakingly removed the eggs attached to her face and in her hair. She was breathing rapidly but still wasn’t moving, as if her body was paralyzed.

  “Blink if you can understand me,” Kade said.

  She blinked.

  “Blink if you can’t move anything,” he said.

  She blinked again.

  Kade nodded. “I’m going to put your helmet back on, okay?”

  Another blink.

  He twisted it back on her head and reached down to pick her up.

  “Better yet, Jo-Jo can carry you,” Kade said.

  The monkey was smart enough to figure out his gestures and picked Ada up. They left the train, treading on the removed sacs, which hissed as the embryos burst.

  A staccato clicking sounded in the distance, followed by a rumbling.

 
Kade jumped out the back of the train and motioned for Jo-Jo to follow him back toward the main chamber.

  “Sofia, Gran Jefe, do you copy?” Kade whispered.

  “Copy,” Sofia replied.

  “Get ready, I’ve found Ada and Jo-Jo,” Kade said. “Send down a second rope.”

  “On it.”

  Kade reached the chamber a few minutes later, flitting his lights around the vertical shaft for contacts. The rumbling grew louder, shaking the ground under his feet.

  Something was coming. Something very big.

  He clipped the dangling rope to Ada, who was still draped over Jo-Jo’s shoulder.

  “Ada’s secure,” Kade said over the comm.

  The rope pulled up, lifting Ada off Jo-Jo’s shoulders.

  Kade had no idea how he was going to get the monkey out of here, but he wasn’t leaving her behind.

  Sofia tossed another rope down. Kade grabbed it and had just clipped the biner to his belt when the rocky floor beneath his boots pushed upward.

  He didn’t even have time to reach over to Jo-Jo as a quake shook the shaft, dislodging chunks of dirt and rocks.

  Jo-Jo took off running.

  With Sofia and Gran Jefe busy pulling up Ada on a Z pulley, Kade was on his own. He jumped onto the muddy wall and started jumaring up the fixed rope with his ascenders.

  As he made his way up the wall, the ground seemed to be rising up toward his boots.

  It took him a moment to realize that the “ground” was actually a shell.

  “Bloody hell,” he stuttered.

  He clambered up the wall as a chitinous shell the size of a small airship rose out of the ground.

  Looking up, he saw that Ada was almost at the top. But there was something else along the walls around her. Orange shells popped out of the holes he had passed on the way down. Claws reached out, snapping at her.

  Kade planted his boots and fired at the closest turtle beasts, forcing them back into the tunnels, as Gran Jefe and Sofia cranked Ada upward to safety.

  The shots announced his location to more of the shell abominations climbing out of holes around the shaft.

  Below, pincer claws big enough to snap a man in half snaked up toward him.