She looked over to see Tia reaching for Cricket.
The screen had activated, and on it a beacon pulsed.
Jo-Jo was alive!
Ada held up the device and checked the location. Her heavy heart skipped when she saw the coordinates: right in the middle of the bombardment.
“No, no, no,” Ada moaned.
She switched on the private channel to X. “Stop the bombing! Jo-Jo’s down there!”
There was no response but static crackling from the electrical storm. She lost sight of the surface as the airship rose higher into the clouds.
Ada didn’t waste a second. She tapped the launch-bay door, reopening it.
“Ada, what are you doing!” Magnolia shouted.
“Finding Jo-Jo!” Ada yelled back.
She heard footsteps behind her as people ran to stop her from jumping. The doors slowly opened, and the ramp extended.
“Ada!” Edgar screamed. “Ada, wait!”
Ada stepped through the opening and out into the black. As she fell, she did half a barrel roll and looked up at the ship. Divers weren’t just running to stop her.
Tia jumped out next, and then came a third figure.
Kade . . .
She completed the barrel roll and fell facedown, in stable position.
A few seconds into the dive, she blew through the cloud cover.
Shells continued to burst across the terrain below her, appearing as tiny sparks on the ground, followed by a little puff of smoke and debris. They were focused on the same general area where the divers had landed on the last visit here.
And according to Ada’s HUD, Jo-Jo was right in the middle. She eyed the beacon and then pulled her limbs into a suicide dive.
“I’m coming, Jo-Jo!”
Her slender body speared through the air, picking up speed, hitting 115, then 130 miles per hour.
Falling head-down, she quickly ate up the altitude, and thirty seconds later she maneuvered back into a stable fall.
At a thousand feet, she pulled her pilot chute. The canopy bloomed above her, and she toggled toward Jo-Jo’s beacon.
The other divers were ten seconds behind her and would have pulled their chutes by now. Ada flared and stepped down between two deep craters blown up by the warships’ artillery shells. The firing had stopped, but she could still feel quakes. Here, another rumble. That wasn’t right . . .
“Oh, shit,” she said, reaching for her rifle.
A mound of dirt rose between the canal and where she now stood. The top ruptured, throwing up a geyser of dirt and rock that then showered back down.
Ada took a step back and aimed her rifle at the orange pincer that shuffled up out of the dirt. Another claw joined it, and together they pressed down against the ground and pushed up a shell the size of a small airship. A tortoise head on an armored neck looked down at her.
Tia came in a little bit crosswind, flared, and tumbled on the ground. Kade landed next and ran over to free her from her chute.
Ada bent down to help, keeping one eye on the monster that was still climbing out of the shaft. It opened its jaws and gave a loud, whistling hiss as it shook dirt off its shell.
Kade helped Tia out of her chute, but with no time to stow it, they just left it flapping in the wind.
“If you want to live, stay close to me,” he said.
Another canopy ghosted over them. Ada followed it to the ground. The fourth diver landed on both feet and ran out the momentum. His massive size gave away his identity.
Gran Jefe was the last person Ada expected to see.
Carrying a grenade launcher, he followed Kade behind a container, to hide from the beast.
“Gran Jefe,” Ada said. “I didn’t expect—”
“¿Por qué?” he said. “You didn’t think I’d let you have all the fun, did you, amiga?”
Twenty-Seven
Magnolia cursed. She should have known that something like this was going to happen, but there was nothing she could do about it. Team Wrangler was on its own. She had her own mission to complete—a mission that could potentially secure the future of the Vanguard Islands.
Turning, she looked to their potential salvation. Fifteen-year-old Yejun was wearing the suit they had found him in, and carrying the bird helmet under his arm.
Behind him stood Sofia, Edgar, and Arlo, all armed with laser rifles and ready to dive.
The hologram of Timothy emerged on the deck in front of the divers and explained the plan one last time to Yejun in his native tongue. It was simple. Yejun and Magnolia would tandem dive to his ship, find his map, and then deploy back into the sky while the beasts on the surface were preoccupied with the Cazador military.
Yejun secured his helmet, then stepped over to Magnolia and raised his arms. Edgar clipped their harnesses together in front of the exit hatch—now closed—that Ada had just jumped through.
Magnolia tapped her wrist computer, using the translation software that Timothy had installed for them to use on the surface.
“Speak in Korean,” she said.
The device chirped, and a monotone voice replied, “hangugeoro malhasipsio.” The computer would come in handy, that was for sure.
“Good, I’m glad it works,” Timothy said. He smiled at Magnolia. “Good luck, Commander Katib.”
“Thanks, T.”
Magnolia thought about all their adventures as she stood there waiting for the green light to dive. Timothy had served the sky people heroically since the day they met him. He wasn’t human anymore, but the awareness he once had in life had remained in all the different iterations of his operating system.
A warning light flashed in the launch bay, and his hologram began to fade. He held up a hand and smiled again at Magnolia.
“You dive so humanity survives,” he said.
Her headset crackled with the voice of Captain Rolo.
“We’re directly above the drop zone,” he said. “Good luck, Team Raptor.”
An alarm wailed—the final warning to clear the room before the hatches opened. Wind rushed in, dropping the room temperature by thirty degrees.
The doors whisked open to reveal dense clouds.
Magnolia positioned herself and Yejun in front of the ramp. “Okay, let’s get this done, Team Raptor,” she said. “Fast, easy, and safe.”
Edgar, Arlo, and Sofia all nodded back.
Magnolia was first onto the ramp. The kid didn’t seem scared, but this was the moment of truth. Edgar was first out.
“Okay, kid,” Magnolia said. With Yejun clipped to her chest by locking carabiners, she jumped in a hard arch. He did the same, just as they had instructed him.
Turning like a leaf in the wind, she saw the airship and the other divers leaping out of the brightly lit launch bay. Then she and Yejun completed their somersault, and she lost sight of them.
The low-altitude drop gave them only thirty seconds of free fall before opening—still plenty of time for a look at what awaited them on the surface.
Breaking through the clouds gave Magnolia a wide view of the canal, the industrial zone on both sides, and Panama City.
She couldn’t see the Vanguard warships, but she could see the monsters that the military would soon face.
Two of the tortoise-shelled monster adults had burst out of the ground, and hundreds of their human-size young surged over the radioactive terrain. They were all heading toward the warships, just as X had planned, leaving the industrial zone clear.
Magnolia diverted her attention to the DZ. She was already within view of the ship that had brought Yejun and his family here. Edgar was almost to the ground.
She reached down and pulled her pilot chute.
She felt the opening shock, then steered over the deck of the ship, right where Yejun had captured her a few weeks earlier.
Edgar
was already free of his chute, with his rifle shouldered, by the time she did a two-stage flare. She landed ten feet away and crashed inelegantly to the deck with Yejun.
Arlo and Sofia came next.
Two minutes later, Team Raptor had its gear stowed and weapons up. During a brief respite in the gusting breeze, a high-pitched shriek blasted across the wastes—the angry wail of one of the two monstrous parents.
Yejun motioned for the team to follow. Magnolia stayed close behind, keeping low, running a life-form scan on her wrist computer.
The screen pulsated as the scan moved out, but nothing came back on the heartbeat monitor. She then checked her HUD for Team Wrangler. The other divers were almost three miles away and moving closer to Jo-Jo.
The trip had made a rocky start: first the sea monsters, then Ada jumping prematurely. But things were starting to look better.
Magnolia stuck next to Yejun as they went down a ladder into the ship. He took them down three decks, through a passageway of private quarters. Next, they passed the engine compartment.
Memories of her captivity surfaced, but Magnolia buried them, trying to trust that Yejun was leading them to the promised map.
He took them through the rusted passageways, under snaking electrical wires and over fallen pieces of overhead. The farther they pushed into this section of the ship, the more evidence of a battle emerged.
Empty shell casings littered the deck, and bullet holes speckled the bulkheads. But she was heartened to see no claw marks anywhere.
Yejun approached an open hatch and angled his light into a long space. He turned to Magnolia and said something. She listened to her wrist computer.
“This is where we made our last stand.”
He stepped inside the mess hall. A snaking brown streak ran from an upended table to a doorway. Chairs lay strewn about, most of them on their sides. A fort of tables had been thrown up across the room, barricading off the kitchen.
Yejun directed his flashlight toward them and started leading the way.
“What the hell happened here?” Arlo said quietly. “Who were they fighting?”
“Each other, I think,” Magnolia said.
Sofia turned her helmet toward Magnolia, and even though she was concealed behind the visor, Magnolia knew what she was thinking: that maybe, Yejun was leading them into a trap.
No, Magnolia thought.
She didn’t fully trust the kid, but she didn’t get the vibe that he had brought Team Raptor here to kill them. The life scans were coming back negative.
Yejun pointed at a gap between the tables blocking off the kitchen. Edgar squeezed through and aimed his light at the freezer hatches. One was already open. Magnolia shined her helmet beam into the small space, illuminating a few kids’ toys and blankets stained with blood.
It didn’t take much investigating to determine what had happened here.
Yejun looked in her direction but didn’t follow. He must know what was inside. Perhaps, one of the toys had belonged to him as a kid, Magnolia thought to herself.
“This it?” Edgar asked.
He stood in front of the spin wheel on the second freezer.
Yejun pointed at it, nodding.
Edgar grabbed the wheel and tried to twist it, to no avail.
Magnolia motioned for Arlo and Sofia to stay with Yejun while she went to help. Rust flaked off the ancient wheel when she touched it.
She looked around for a lever, but Yejun beat them to it. He picked up a steel bar, only to have Arlo reach out and snatch it from his hand.
Yejun held up both palms in surrender.
“Give me that,” Edgar said.
Arlo handed the bar over, and Edgar wedged it between the wall and a spoke of the spin wheel.
Grunting, he began to push the bar down. The wheel creaked, then moved a few inches with an alarmingly loud groan. A distant shriek echoed through the ship.
Magnolia checked her HUD as she waited.
Team Wrangler had gone to ground, their beacons unmoving on the minimap. The military wasn’t moving yet, either, but they would be soon.
“Almost got it,” Edgar said.
Magnolia aimed her laser rifle at the hatch and fired a bolt. The hatch popped open, dripping molten metal onto the deck.
She stepped into the freezer and found that it had been cut open. Jagged metal framed a doorway that the former occupants had used to escape into a chamber.
Edgar came in with her. Taking the right side, he swept his beam over the deck and bulkheads. Pipes blocked off much of the view.
“Clear,” Magnolia said over the comm.
Sofia and Arlo brought Yejun in next, and he started across the space, moving right toward an office. Halfway across the room, he stopped and stared down at the deck.
Tracks disturbed the coating of fine dust—something Magnolia hadn’t seen earlier. She bent down and took a pinch. Rubbing her fingertips together, she decided it was probably ash. But from what?
She stood and did another life scan. This time, the pulse got a hit at three hundred meters out.
Something was out there.
“We have a contact,” she said quietly.
Edgar looked over, then shouldered his rifle. “I’ll go check it out.”
“You go, too, Sofia,” Magnolia said.
“Contact?” Arlo said. “What’s that mean—like, another human?”
Magnolia couldn’t tell from the pulse. It was too far out to get a good reading—only that there was a heartbeat. Yejun didn’t seem to understand and started into the chamber, playing his light over the pipes.
Magnolia watched her bioscanner. Whatever was out there was coming closer.
Yejun stopped at a pipe the thickness of his leg and used a finger to wipe something off it. He brought it under his light, then shined the beam over the deck and the ash tracks.
He suddenly backed up, hitting the pipe with a thud.
“Quiet,” Arlo said.
Yejun turned and twisted the cap off the end of the pipe. Then he shined his light inside and reached into the pipe.
Magnolia walked over as he fished inside for what had to be the map. But after a few seconds, he pulled his hand out and started talking rapidly.
He grabbed Magnolia, repeating the same word over and over.
“Gajog,” or something that sounded like it.
“What’s he saying?” Arlo said.
Magnolia pulled free and brought up her wrist computer. “Family.”
“What?” Arlo asked. “His family?”
They both looked at Yejun, who was growing more frantic.
“His family is still alive?” Arlo asked.
“I don’t know—”
Sofia cut her off. “We have to get out of here!” she shouted, running back into the room. Somewhere behind her, someone fired two sizzling bolts from a laser rifle.
“What!” Magnolia gasped. “What’s out there?” She watched the Geiger counter on her wrist computer spike as the contacts came closer.
What in the . . .
Edgar burst through the open hatch, closed it, and put his back against it.
“We need to move. Now!” He let his rifle sag and pulled out a grenade, which indicated to Magnolia that whatever lurked out there was big and hard to kill.
“What the hell is going on?” Arlo asked. “You guys are freaking me out!”
He started to walk over, when Magnolia realized Yejun wasn’t with him. She turned to see the young man outside the freezer hatch they had entered the room through. He turned his beaked helmet toward them for a split second, as if debating what to do.
“no!” Magnolia shouted.
She ran over and grabbed the handle just as it clicked on the other side, sealing them in.
Edgar stepped away from the hatch he had his
back to.
“We’re trapped,” Sofia said.
The radiation gauge continued to spike, the source drawing closer by the second. Magnolia raised her rifle and aimed it at the opposite hatch.
Shuffling sounded outside, and then scratching. From under the gap in the metal came an incandescent glow, followed by a long, eerie moan that almost sounded human.
* * * * *
“You sure you know where this goes?” Michael asked.
“Positive,” Steve replied.
“Okay, let’s go, then.” He waved at Victor. “Make sure no one follows us.”
“You got it, Chief.”
They were still on the Sea Wolf, cruising past the damaged rigs. Michael held the key in his hand. It was time to see what X had left him, and he had decided to entrust Steve with whatever it unlocked.
The master bladesmith had spent his life forging weapons for Cazador soldiers and training apprentices. Now they needed his skills and vision to rebuild and prepare for future storms. What better person to do it than a man who had spent his life preparing for war? If anyone could help Michael rebuild this place, it was Steve.
“So what’s your take on Charmer?” Michael asked.
Steve flashed a toothy smile. “I think they should call him ‘Snake.’ ”
Michael laughed. “Yeah.”
“You know, when your people came, I had mixed feelings.” Steve took off his sunglasses and blew on the lenses before wiping them on his shirt. “I was glad they killed el Pulpo and some of the cannibal leaders, but I worried about the strain on resources. We lost many souls over the past two years, but now we’re going to see the biggest squeeze on our food and supplies ever.”
“I know,” said Michael. “That’s why X is—”
“A supply chain won’t bring us food, though,” Steve said. “And I dread the day when some of us resort to our old ways. And not just us—I fear what these other sky people might do.”
“Going from hell to heaven and then being threatened with hell again is enough to make anyone violent. I know from experience.”
“Things will work out, Chief. Don’t worry too much.”
They rode in silence until the dark horizon of the barrier between paradise and the wastes came into focus. An hour later, they saw the rusted shape of the prison rig.
Hell Divers Series | Book 8 | King of the Wastes Page 36