Hell Divers Series | Book 8 | King of the Wastes

by Smith, Nicholas Sansbury

  “Muerto,” Gran Jefe said. “The monkey—he is dead.”

  “You don’t know that,” Magnolia said.

  Gran Jefe finished stuffing a chute in a pack. “Oh, sí. I do.”

  “Or, like Yejun, Jo-Jo’s alive,” Magnolia said. “After all, the animal was born in the wastes. It can survive in the wastes.”

  “Yeah, good point, Mags,” said Arlo.

  Gran Jefe shrugged. “They say your man, Rogelio, got saved by los delfines. Dolphins. ¿Verdad?”

  The big man scratched his beard with its beads and small animal bones woven in.

  “His name is Rodger, and eating dolphins is barbaric,” she said.

  “Hmm,” Gran Jefe mused. “We stop eating them when sky people came, pero, how do you say . . .” He licked his lips and patted his belly.

  “Tasty,” Arlo said. “You’re sick, bro, sick indeed.”

  Gran Jefe muttered in Spanish.

  Arlo stiffened. “What’s that mean?”

  “You don’t want to know,” came a voice.

  Sofia stepped into the launch bay, holding Rhino Jr. in her arms.

  A smile crossed Magnolia’s face as her best friend walked over.

  “This is where Mama works,” Sofia said. The baby looked about.

  “I don’t think he understands,” Arlo said.

  Sofia shot him an are-you-really-that-dumb glare.

  Magnolia laughed, her heart warming. It felt good to feel some joy for once.

  After all, they had survived and were back home. Rodger and Michael, too, and for that, Magnolia was eternally grateful.

  Gran Jefe lumbered over to Sofia and leaned down to the child.

  “Hola, hombrecito,” he said.

  The baby glanced up at Gran Jefe and raised a tiny hand.

  “Big like his papá,” Gran Jefe said. “Rhino fue un guerrero—great warrior. Someday you will be muy fuerte, maybe king.”

  “He doesn’t want to be king,” Sofia said. “But you’re right, he will be big and strong like his father.”

  “What did this nimrod say earlier?” Arlo asked Sofia.

  Sofia shook her head. “Arlo, I really . . .”

  Gran Jefe grabbed his crotch. “I say I got big cojones, and you got peanuts.”

  The room broke out in laughter, and Arlo turned pink.

  He was used to being the jokester. Now, it seemed, he had competition.

  Magnolia almost felt bad for Arlo.

  “You know what they say about men that brag,” Sofia said. “Usually, they got a pequeña snake.”

  Gran Jefe reached for his belt, and when Magnolia realized what he was doing, she shouted, “Knock this shit off!”

  “Okay, no problema,” Gran Jefe said, still glaring at Arlo.

  “Hey, the greenhorns are gathering outside,” Kade said from the launch-bay door.

  “Good,” Magnolia said. “Tell them to help us bring the gear down the ramp.”

  Kade pushed a button, and the port-side doors opened. A ramp extended down to the platform where the Vanguard was docked. Outside, the rookies stared up into the belly of the airship that would dump them into the wastes.

  Magnolia waved them up. “First things first,” she said. “We need to go through all our gear and make sure it’s ready for training, which begins tomorrow at first light. So buddy up, check your gear, and check your buddy’s gear.”

  The divers started grabbing gear from the pile the veterans had already double-checked.

  The new members would be assigned to Teams Angel and Phoenix, whose ranks had thinned during the past few years and during the war for the islands. Magnolia had considered instituting a new team name to mark a turned page, but first, they needed a new commander.

  Edgar was her first choice, and Sofia was also in the running, although Magnolia didn’t want to see her best friend continue diving.

  She couldn’t count Kade out, either. He had proved he was still a top-flight Hell Diver.

  As Magnolia looked out over the fresh faces, she had the same feeling she always did: dread that most of these people wouldn’t survive more than fifteen jumps.

  It was up to her and the other remaining veterans to train them and keep them alive.

  “Follow me,” Magnolia said.

  She led the group of divers with their gear to the launch tubes that once dropped bombs during the Third World War.

  “Soon, those of you who pass training will find yourself in one of these tubes,” Magnolia said. “When that moment happens, I want you ready. Tonight, we’re going to teach you how to dive in an electrical storm.”

  Scrutinizing the faces for their reaction, she saw about what she expected: pure terror from most of them. A few were intent on looking tough, among them Tia, an eighteen-year-old from the ITC Victory with dark braided hair. Her gleaming partially shaved head had three tribal tattoos reflecting her descent from the aboriginal New Zealanders, the Maori.

  Magnolia didn’t know much about her, only that she was an orphan. The girl had the same look Magnolia remembered from when she was that age: a fearless attitude of immortality.

  “Gear up, everyone,” Magnolia said. “Let’s go.”

  The greenhorns dispersed, and Sofia said to Magnolia, “That one reminds me of me.”

  Magnolia glanced over at Tia and chuckled. “Reminds me of my younger self, too.”

  Kade was talking to the young woman now. She perked her ears to listen.

  “I told you, your dad didn’t want this for you,” Kade said. “Fair go.”

  “I am being reasonable.”

  “Hell no, you’re not!”

  “Yeah? Well, you don’t want me to be a soldier, either, so what can I be? You want me to spend my days counting beans or pruning tomatoes?”

  Kade bent his burned hat brim nervously. “Yeah, but bloody hell, Tia,” he said. “Both those options sound better than diving. It ain’t roses and sunshine down there.”

  He pointed at the launch doors. “When you jump, you go arse over tit, straight into the black pit of hell. Then, if you make it through the storms and land alive, you get to face mutant monsters that will eat you for breakfast.”

  “You can’t scare me, Kade,” Tia said. “This is what I want. You had the chance to train me, but you didn’t. Now I’m doing it on my own.”

  She stormed off, and Kade wagged his head wearily. He looked at Sofia and Magnolia, who both shied away.

  Sofia shifted her growing son to the other arm. “He must be her caretaker or something,” she said when Kade walked away.

  “Yeah, reminds me of someone.”

  Sofia changed the subject. “I was thinking, you and Rodger should stop by my place for dinner. I’m going to make some seafood gumbo. I’ll invite Michael and Layla and Bray, too.”

  Magnolia smiled. “Sounds great, but we’re both super busy . . .”

  “Mags,” Sofia said sternly.

  Rhino Jr. stirred in her grip.

  “This is all I have left of Rhino now,” Sofia said. “He was my heart, my soul. He was everything to me, and I would do anything to spend another day with him.”

  “I know, I’m so—”

  Sofia interrupted her with a click of the tongue. “No, Mags, I don’t think you do. You have something special with Rodger, but I can see in you the fear to commit. Life is hard. It’s never guaranteed in our world, and while you’ve lost many friends over the years, you haven’t lost Rodger.”

  “I know. I’m just afraid of giving myself one hundred percent and then—”

  “It’s better to give and lose than to hold back and regret it.”

  Sofia smiled and carried her son away. “You better not miss my gumbo,” she said.

  A voice called out, and Magnolia turned to the last person she expected to see climbing
a ladder up to the platform.

  “Ada, what the heck are you doing here?” Magnolia said.

  The young diver walked across the deck, hair blowing in the breeze. She had a slight limp. Magnolia met her halfway.

  “Keep working,” she said to the other divers, who were staring.

  The greenhorns went back to their equipment checks, but Magnolia could feel their attention on her.

  “You should be resting,” Magnolia said.

  “I’m here to keep training,” Ada said. “X promised we’re going to find Jo-Jo.”

  “He did?” Arlo asked.

  Magnolia frowned when she saw him walking over. But it wasn’t just Arlo. Edgar, Gran Jefe, and Kade joined them.

  “You should be in bed, Ada,” Edgar said.

  “I’d be in the air if I could fly the Vanguard,” she replied. “Jo-Jo may not be human, but she’s a Hell Diver, and she needs us.”

  She looked at Kade.

  “I haven’t gotten the chance to thank you,” Ada said. “You saved my life.”

  “He’s getting really good at that,” Magnolia said.

  Kade doffed his cowboy hat.

  “Doing my duty, mate,” he said. “I learned a long time ago never to leave a man or woman behind on the surface.”

  Eighteen

  Twelve years ago . . .

  “Mission is a quick grab, bag, and bail,” said Captain Rolo. “You’re landing at an industrial facility on the border of Rapid City, in South Dakota.”

  Kade Long, Hell Diver commander of Team Dragon, stood in the center of the launch bay on the ITC Victory, stiff and stern in his black jumpsuit and armor. He listened to every word as the captain and three crew members briefed him and Johnny, the greenhorn diver tagging along.

  A team of technicians and support crew worked on the launch tubes, making last-minute preparations for the dive.

  “This is a yellow zone on the border of a red zone,” Rolo said, “and while I have no record of any other airships having raided this area, I would be willing to bet a silver dollar there are beasts down there.”

  “That’s why Cowboy Kade has his six-shooter, right?” Johnny said.

  Kade looked over at the only diver not standing straight. He was bending down and lacing up his worn boots.

  “My six-shooter is to save your biscuit,” Kade said.

  One of the technicians chuckled until Rolo shot her a glare.

  “Be careful,” Rolo warned, turning back to the divers. “I don’t want any mistakes. Everything by the book today, got it?”

  “Aye, sir,” Johnny said.

  Kade nodded and put his helmet on over his shaggy brown hair. He took a breath of filtered air that tasted like plastic. Then he chewed the end of his mustache—a nervous habit he always indulged before climbing into his launch tube.

  He lowered himself in, landing on the thick glass floor. Then he did something else that was habit before a dive. He reached down and felt the wooden grip of his “monster hunter,” an ancient six-shooter he had found in a museum.

  According to the dusty placard in the glass display case he shattered to get it, the gun had belonged to an American sergeant during World War II. He had acquired it by trading his 1911 Colt .45 to a Filipino resistance fighter. Now it was Kade’s.

  He thought of his family. His wife, Mikah, had cried this morning when he kissed her goodbye, but his sons were dry-eyed and stoical—even the youngest, Sean, who was only three.

  “I’ll be okay,” he had assured them. “I’ll be home by supper, I promise.”

  Kade had taught his boys that a promise was a pact that a man did everything he could to make good on. And today, Kade would do everything he could to make that promise a reality. He would be home by dinner, with the loot in hand.

  An alarm wailed, indicating the final countdown to the dive. Sixty long seconds remained.

  Kade would rather just get on with things, but there were protocols: final weather scans and checklists that had to be completed by officers in the command center, as well as Captain Rolo.

  The captain’s voice surged over a private comm frequency.

  “Kade, when you get to the surface, I want you to use the new coordinates in the map I’m uploading to your HUD,” he said. “I know this is different from your briefing, but you will see why, if you find what I think is down there.”

  Thirty seconds to launch.

  “Wait, Captain,” Kade said. “What supplies am I bringing back to the ship?”

  “These aren’t supplies, this is intel—something I trust only you with. Good luck.”

  Kade scarcely had time to consider what the captain was asking or why he had kept it a secret until now.

  The glass floor opened beneath his boots, and Kade slipped through the thick clouds.

  Plummeting toward the earth always felt odd for that first moment, as if he had just jumped up off the moon’s surface and was floating back down to the ground. But the ground was still twenty thousand feet below.

  He pulled his limbs into stable falling position and looked around him. No flashes or thunderclaps.

  To his right, Johnny fell in stable position, arms and legs out, chest battery glowing blue over his dented armor and boots.

  They came closer together, suits whipping in the wind. At fifteen thousand feet, Kade checked his HUD. The upload was complete with the new coordinates.

  “Follow me to a new DZ,” Kade said over the comms.

  “Say again?” Johnny replied.

  “Just meet me on the ground. I know as much as you do.”

  They turned away from the edge of a small city tucked against what was once called the Black Hills. The next thirty seconds passed without any issues. No lightning or turbulence.

  At five thousand feet, he got his first glimpse of the hills. They sure as hell weren’t black anymore.

  Thick mutant trees grew out of the poisoned soil, their red and purple needles carpeting the hilly terrain. One crag looked different from the others.

  “Bloody bastard,” Johnny said over the comm. “That’s Mount President or some shit.”

  “Mount Rushmore,” Kade corrected. He had read about this place when he was a kid. It was some sort of monument to former leaders of the United States. Five men and one woman, all long since dead, had their faces chiseled into the rock.

  Kade reached down to the pocket on his right thigh, pulled his pilot chute, and let it go. The canopy deployed, and he hung from the sky, using his toggles to steer over to the strangely altered mountain.

  He studied the ancient faces. He couldn’t begin to imagine what their lives were like. These had been some of the most powerful people of their times. But even that power wasn’t enough to prevent the fall of civilization. In the end, human society had crumbled like the broken faces chiseled into the rock.

  Kade circled the drop zone, a cracked parking lot covered in spiky weeds and bushes. A pair of buses stood half buried in the rubble of a collapsed building.

  At about six feet, he flared over the parking lot, then stepped lightly down onto the dirt at the edge, careful to avoid brushing against any weeds.

  Johnny was already down and packing his chute into his bag. He hurried over.

  “Shit on a stick, Commander!” he said. “Never thought I’d see this place.”

  They both looked up as their HUDs blinked. An IR tag came online—the red box dropping from the sky. It was the supply crate, descending under canopy about a mile away.

  “Let’s go,” Kade said.

  He hated the first hour on the surface when they were armed with only a pistol or a blaster. The weapons could kill mutant beasts, but he still felt naked without an automatic rifle from the supply crate.

  They made their way toward a building that once welcomed tourists to the monument. The windows were
gone and the roof caved in, but this wasn’t their target. The coordinates for the supply crate seemed to point to the base of the mountain.

  Kade skirted around the building and halted at the edge of the mutant forest.

  “Where’s the path?” Johnny asked.

  “Gone. We’re going to have to make one.”

  Reaching down, Kade pulled out a two-piece machete and clicked it together. Leading the way, he hacked through venomous flora with spiked limbs and barbs.

  Purple goo spattered the dirt.

  Johnny used a hatchet to hack through dead branches that crumbled like ashes.

  The divers pushed on, toward a stand of thick, short trees. These were very much alive, with purple needles covering their limbs.

  “Careful,” Kade said.

  He had encountered such trees before. Brushing against a low bough, he had been stung in the leg and spent two painful, fevered days recovering.

  They crept through the forest, closing in on the supply box. It had fallen in a clearing that Kade could see through the gaps in the trees.

  Hearing a chirp from his HUD, he held up his fist. The bioscanner picked up something 110 meters away—only five meters from the supply crate containing their rifles and gear bags.

  Kade and Johnny crouched behind trees, with their weapons at the ready. The life scanner detected a heartbeat, then two.

  Peering around the tree, Kade saw something that his brain had trouble comprehending.

  A four-legged beast with brown fur stood in the field of boulders overgrown with yellow weeds. Its massive antlers lowered as it examined the crate.

  “What in the wastes is that thing?” Johnny asked.

  Kade had seen something similar in books. They were called elk. But this one was different. It suddenly turned toward them, ears perked, three eyes staring.

  “Strike a light,” Johnny whispered.

  All at once, a dozen more heads popped up above the weeds. The boulders weren’t boulders after all, but a herd of mutant elk.

  Kade slipped back behind the tree.

  “We’re going to have to move without the rifles,” he said.

  “What? Don’t be a wanker,” Johnny said. “No offense, commander, but that’s suicide. I say we use our boosters and get back to the ship, and come back later.”