Hell Divers Series | Book 8 | King of the Wastes

by Smith, Nicholas Sansbury

  “Never thought I’d be back here again,” Steve said. “I spent a few months here when I was your age.”

  “Why?”

  Steve shrugged. “I guess someone didn’t like the sword I made them, because it broke in half during a battle.” He laughed as he seemed to recall. “The bastard was a prick anyway—got what was coming to him in the Sky Arena. I ended up serving some time that made me more thankful for my freedom after, and much better at my job.”

  “I can relate to that in a way.”

  A lightning bolt flashed its dazzling rickrack across the sky. The thunder sounded like a pistol shot.

  Michael pulled up to the exterior docks and tethered the boat with Steve while Victor and Ton went ahead. In the glow of their flashlights, the former prison and munitions factory looked like a relic from a world war.

  With the boat moored, they took the dry dock to the double doors that were the main entrance. They were unlocked, and Victor swung the left one open to let them inside the silo-shaped rig.

  Ten levels curved above them, still built out in the former cells of inmates the Cazadores had kept here. At the very top was the warehouse where they once built bombs and made bullets.

  Michael started up the stairs, through the central guard tower that overlooked the cells. On the tenth floor, he took a ladder to a landing with a hatch.

  Fishing out the key, he paused, then inserted it in the lock and twisted. Click. Michael turned the handle and opened the door to a vast space.

  Lightning flashed outside the barred windows, illuminating the room where prisoners once labored away. The workstations were gone, and the buckets that once contained empty cartridge casings were piled in a corner.

  In place of the buckets for spent brass were barrels. Hundreds of barrels.

  Michael shined his light around.

  “What are they?” Steve asked.

  “I don’t know,” Michael said.

  Walking over to the closest barrel, he blew the dust off the lid. It bore the logo of the ITC Ranger. Michael hadn’t seen these when they boarded and searched the supercarrier, but then, he hadn’t been on all the searches, either.

  “Let’s open one,” he said.

  Working together, they pulled back the locking lever and popped the lid off a fifty-five-gallon drum.

  “I’ll be damned,” Michael said. “It’s the backup plan!”

  He angled his flashlight down at stacks of vacuum-sealed high-calorie protein bars. A thousand were in this crate alone.

  “There’s got to be months’ worth of food here for everyone,” Steve said. “But why hide it?”

  “I think I know why.” Michael pulled out the note and read it to himself.

  The first key is for if I don’t come back. It opens a door near the watery grave of our enemies. What you will find there is not for immediate use, no matter how bad things get. This is a backup plan if the Vanguard Islands become uninhabitable, as el Pulpo feared.

  The second key will show you the way.

  Everything that we do from here on out will determine our future. We can afford no mistakes. We must not fail to act. We must never forget.

  Handle your present with confidence. Face your future without fear.

  Michael folded the note and slipped it back in his pocket. He had a feeling that he knew what the second key was for now.

  “Sir,” Victor said. “Come. Come quick.”

  Michael hurried over to a window, where the guard stood looking out the glass. In the darkness, a pair of lights flitted over the water.

  Then a second pair.

  But these were too small to be boats.

  “Jet Skis,” Michael said. “What are they doing out there?”

  “They must have followed us,” Steve said.

  Michael looked back at the crates of food. He turned off his light and had the others do the same.

  The Jet Skis stopped, their lights bobbing up and down in the distance. He counted six of them and remembered the squad known as the Wave Riders, led by Sergeant Jamal, Gran Jefe’s cousin.

  “They are watching us,” Steve said.

  “You think they saw us?” Michael asked.

  “They saw our boat, for sure.”

  A chill ran up Michael’s spine at the implications. If word of this place got out, there would be hell to pay for hiding the reserves from an already hungry populace.

  “Steve, you can’t tell anyone about this,” Michael said.

  “You have my word, Chief, and that’s as good as my life.”

  Michael nodded. He knew he didn’t need to ask Ton and Victor to swear an oath, but there was something else he had to ask of them.

  “Victor, Ton,” Michael said. “I need you to stay here, guard this place until X comes back. There is water and food, and I will resupply you as needed.”

  “But, sir,” Victor protested, “X said to guard you with our lives.”

  Ton made a clicking sound with his mouth.

  “This is more important,” Michael said. “We have to protect it and keep it a secret.”

  “Why not move it?” Steve asked.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Exactly, we have nowhere to move it to.”

  Michael looked back out the window as the Jet Skis finally raced away. He checked his watch. It was midmorning. The army and the Hell Divers would be arriving in Panama soon, ready for a battle.

  If all went to plan, they wouldn’t need this food, but the day they did, it would be here, and Michael was going to make sure it was safe.

  Much was riding on the mission to Panama. If it should fail . . .

  But X wouldn’t fail. X never failed.

  Twenty-Eight

  “Prepare to beach!” X yelled.

  His voice carried over the engine noise from the supercarrier’s landing craft. Water slopped over the sides as the craft made its run for the shore. Three more just like it carried vehicles and soldiers out of the canal and into Panama Bay.

  The Immortal and Raven’s Claw kept firing on the industrial zone in an attempt to draw the monsters out of their lairs and destroy them. All the recon and drone data showed the beasts centered in a single area high in radiation.

  The Octopus followed the four landing craft into the bay for support, just in case.

  X stood in the turret of a tank with Miles underneath him in the machine’s back troop hold. At the wheel in the cockpit was Martin, a forty-year-old militia soldier who had served under Sloan. Manning the cannon was Sergeant Slayer, who was still recovering from injuries received during the storm, but trying not to show it.

  Bromista was also down there, judging from the sounds of laughter.

  X looked back across the bay to the supercarrier. Even from here, he could see the scars inflicted by the monster whales that had cost him the Ocean Bull. Now they would need to find another way to clear the canal of debris in the coming days.

  But first, they needed to clear the monsters.

  Another drone raced over the water and shoreline, vanishing over the city. The four landing craft motored through Panama Bay, toward the black beaches on the southern tip of Panama City.

  The resorts in the area were long since washed away, and from what he could see, the beaches were more dirt than sand.

  General Forge sat in the turret of the second tank to the right. His red-feathered helmet pointed stoically ahead as the first report about the chitinous monsters came over the comms.

  “King Xavier, we are detecting five of the breeders and over a thousand of the young,” Timothy said over the command channel.

  “Come again,” X said. “I thought you said one thousand.”

  “Affirmative, sir, and they are all concentrated in the area we expected.”

  Forge nodded a
t X, acknowledging the intel.

  It sounded like a lot, but they had faced tough odds before.

  “Any Sirens?” X asked.

  “Negative,” Timothy replied. “If they are out there, they are hiding.”

  X looked to the six APCs and four troop transport trucks on the three other landing craft around them. Standing outside the vehicles were over two hundred soldiers dressed in bulky armored suits. He would never forget seeing his first Cazador warrior, in the wastes back in Florida, when these strange men and women had captured him.

  Now they served him and the Vanguard Islands.

  And they all were ready to fight.

  He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  He hoped that the tanks and artillery would be able to take out the largest monsters and dramatically reduce their legion of spawn.

  But X also knew that the wastes had a way of destroying even the best-laid plans and that strategy was something often made on the fly upon setting foot in the radioactive terrain.

  A prime example of that was what just happened with Ada. It was partly his fault, giving her the device to locate Jo-Jo. Now he was without Cricket 2.0, and Team Wrangler was underground in the most hostile zone X had seen in over a year.

  He didn’t like it, but he would have done the same to find Miles.

  Bumping his comm pad, he tried to reach the Hell Divers, but static crackled over the line. They were too far out of range.

  “Get ready!” General Forge shouted.

  Lightning split the horizon, giving X his first unaided view of the old resort zone. Not much remained of the structures that once stood side by side, thousands of balconies overlooking the ocean.

  While there was still some sign of the former civilization, nature had overtaken much of the terrain beyond the shoreline. Mutant trees grew out of the concrete blocks, forming a dense jungle.

  X turned on his night vision and grabbed the .50-caliber machine gun mounted to the tank.

  This was it. The very future of the Vanguard Islands depended on what happened here over the next few hours.

  The landing craft hit the surf and thumped up onto the beach with a jolt. The gate dropped onto the sand and mud.

  “Move out!” X yelled, waving them forward with his metal fist.

  The lightweight tanks lurched ahead, the tracks churning through the radioactive mud and up the beach. X tried to imagine how this place once looked.

  Tsunamis had ensured that nothing much was left behind. Rubble from old eateries and bars that served sunbathers protruded out of the dirt. Beer cans and trash had washed up—the last remaining evidence of the fancy cocktail bars and eateries that once served tourists here.

  X looked over his shoulder at the other vehicles. The APCs powered over the mud, but a troop transport full of Cazador soldiers was already stuck, its rear wheels spinning and kicking up dirt.

  Soldiers hopped out the back and pushed until the truck finally broke free.

  The convoy drove across a mostly washed-out road, the tracks and tires rolling over the broken slabs of pavement. A bent pole stuck up out of the ground, its rusted sign beyond any hope of reading.

  Below, X could hear laughing again between Slayer and Bromista.

  “What’s he saying?” Martin asked.

  “He said you drive like his grandma,” Slayer said.

  “All right, cut the shit,” X said.

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Slayer replied.

  X trained the .50-caliber machine gun on the ruins ahead. Mounds of debris rose over three and four stories, blocking their view of the monsters. He scanned for animal life, but there didn’t seem to be anything out here.

  The convoy moved on slowly but steadily, freeing the trucks when they got stuck. Finally, they made it to the mounds of rubble that had once been resorts and luxury hotels.

  “Halt!” Forge shouted.

  X hopped down off the tank and opened the back hatch to let Miles out. The dog jumped down, tail wagging under his suit. Next came Slayer and Bromista.

  General Forge and a squad of soldiers in bulky armored suits started the trek up the mound for a look out over the battlefield. Slayer joined them, limping slightly as he slogged his way up with a pair of infrared binos. Bromista wasn’t far behind, clutching his crossbow.

  “Here, King Xavier,” Forge said.

  X brought his binos up to his visor. Beyond the city, the long stretch of land between them and the canal was peppered with craters. Smoke still drifted in pockets where the artillery shells had struck.

  On his HUD, he watched the view from one of the drones hovering over one of the mammoth creatures. The huge tortoise head looked up, and a pincer flailed at the drone.

  It flew higher as the monster shook its shell, releasing hundreds of the smaller beasts—although X hardly considered them small. The young were easily the size of Gran Jefe, with claws that could cut an armored warrior in half. But if all went according to plan, the beasts wouldn’t get close enough to use them.

  X moved his binos back over the neighborhood that the monsters were moving toward.

  About four hundred meters away, an earthquake had opened a ravine so wide that buildings had fallen into it.

  That was where he would strike the monsters. As soon as they reached the ravine, the Cazador ships’ guns would start a barrage, forcing them into the crack in the earth, just as ancient old-world hunters once drove their quarry off cliffs.

  He ran the plan by Forge, who glassed the area with his binos. The red-plumed helmet nodded, then he turned to give the orders.

  “Sí, blow them away—al infierno,” Bromista said.

  Soldiers piled out of the trucks, moving into the surrounding structures.

  The sniper teams took to the higher areas to set up. Next, the three platoons of infantry moved into firing positions on various levels of any buildings still standing. Finally, two teams equipped with flamethrowers moved to the front line to clear any holes or tunnels, to prevent beasts from flanking their positions. They had the routine down. In less than thirty minutes, everyone was hunkered down and awaiting orders.

  This wasn’t their first dance in the wastes.

  Side by side, X and General Forge looked out over the ruins, watching as the mutant beasts advanced toward them, wailing and shrieking in their bizarre ethereal language.

  “Keep coming,” X whispered.

  As the tide of beasts surged into the resort zone, another round of flares punched into the sky, illuminating the thousand-plus abominations of nature teeming below. Shelled bodies chittered across the rubble, jaws and claws clicking and clacking. Now that they were aboveground, they were coming toward the bright flares like moths to a flame.

  “Get ready!” X shouted. “Let’s finish what we came here to do!”

  Over the command line, General Forge gave more orders as X took Miles back to the tank with Slayer and Bromista. X climbed into the turret and grabbed the .50-caliber machine gun. After checking the belt and the first round, he glanced down to Miles.

  “It’s going to get loud, boy,” X said.

  For once, he was grateful that the dog had lost some of his hearing.

  “Six hundred meters out,” Timothy reported over the command channel.

  X looked to the sky. The airship Vanguard was up there somewhere, hovering in the clouds. The beacons of all the divers were online, including Jo-Jo’s, and X could see Team Wrangler closing in on the animal.

  In the Panama Canal, the Immortal and Raven’s Claw had the area bracketed from about two miles away. The Octopus had taken up position in Panama Bay, ready to help if the army on the ground ran into trouble.

  Everything was going to plan. It was the calm before the storm.

  Another round of flares went up, illuminating entire city blocks of ruined structures. In the glow, the e
rased lives of thousands came into view. Furniture, boxes, picture frames—all the usual items one would stumble upon in the wastes, were out there with the skeletal remains of their former owners.

  X put the iron sights on the first of the breeders. The creature climbed over the mountains of rubble as its offspring swarmed toward the ravine that separated them from the Vanguard army.

  “Hold your fire,” X said over the open channel.

  He took a second to look away from the barrel at those entrenched around him, and in that split second the first roar of the monsters echoed over the city.

  A gigantic breeder hauled itself up onto a two-story building, crushing the structure under its weight. A cloud of dust and grit exploded into the air.

  Another flare went up, bursting above the monster. Red light illuminated the tide of mutant spawn rushing through the dissipating cloud.

  Two more of the breeders climbed into view and skittered surprisingly fast over the mounds of rubble.

  “Hold,” X said over the comm. “Hold.”

  As soon as the fourth and fifth breeders showed up, he gave General Forge a nod. Over the team line, he gave orders to the artillery squads.

  The crump of artillery fire filled the night, rising over the wails of the monsters. The shells burst behind the breeders at the end of the sea of armored bodies, blowing concrete and steel into the air.

  More shells banged away, slamming in just behind the breeder at the very rear of the army. It roared and went up on four legs, flailing the air with its front claws.

  A projectile hit it in the face, exploding on impact and sending hunks of pink flesh and yellow shell up into the sky. They rained back down as the headless creature collapsed in the dirt.

  The smaller beasts scuttled over the ground, right for the ravine. As they closed in, X held his breath.

  Rockets and shells pounded the position behind the beasts, blowing up dozens of the young and sending body parts into the air.

  Parachute flares drifted down, providing a brilliant view of the battle.

  It quickly became apparent that this wasn’t a battle. It was a slaughter.