Hell Divers

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  When he looked back at the trading post, Alex, Brad, and Ren had vanished into the thinning crowd. They were headed to the booth that Ren’s family ran. For years, they had sold odds and ends to both lower- and upper-deckers. Nuts and bolts, scrap metal, and glass—stuff that was always in short supply. It was the perfect place to hide the weapon that would change the fortunes of those suffering in the lower reaches of the Hive.

  The Militia never searched the shops. In one of her failed attempts to keep the lower-deckers happy, Captain Ash had doomed her command. She just didn’t know it yet.

  A few minutes later, Alex strode out of the crowd with his right hand pressed against the side of his long coat. He hurried out of the trading post and joined Travis at the wall. Ren and Brad hung back, ready to provide a distraction if any Militia gave them trouble.

  “You got it?” Travis asked.

  Alex nodded, patting the side of his coat.

  Travis exchanged a look with Ren and Brad, and the four men walked together toward their assigned shelter.

  * * * * *

  X climbed to the top of the ship and grabbed a rope attached to the roof. He steadied himself against the crosswind. He planted his boots and battled the gust until it passed. Then he bent down and helped the other divers onto the shell.

  “Hold on to the rope until we dive!” X shouted. Even with the helmets’ comm system, it was hard to hear over the buffeting wind.

  He allowed them a few moments to take in their surroundings. The clouds up here were thin and translucent, unlike the dense cover a couple of miles below. X raised a hand, and his fingers slashed through the haze, which bent around his body like water flowing.

  “Is it safe up here?” Magnolia shouted over the comm.

  “As long as you don’t let go of that rope,” X yelled back.

  “It’s so dark,” she said, her voice melting into a whisper over the channel.

  X tilted his helmet and scanned the sky again for any sign of the sun. Being out here, beyond the confines of the Hive, made him tingle all over. It was wild and dangerous and free, and X loved every second of it. Even now, with the sun shrouded by clouds, it was still breathtaking.

  He turned to check on his team and saw something that dialed his enthusiasm down a notch. The sky to the west looked like a mountain range with jagged peaks reaching toward the heavens. Lightning flashed through the towering cumulus, illuminating the darkness with shades of sapphire and purple.

  “It’s beautiful,” Murph said.

  Sam grunted. “Wait till you get to the surface. ‘Beautiful’ won’t even be in your vocabulary.”

  “That’s Hades?” Magnolia asked.

  X nodded and waved everyone forward. Every second they wasted was one less they had to complete the mission. He led the team down the back of the ship. The wind whipped over his suit, pushing and tugging him by turns. He worked his way forward, holding the rope. They were far enough from the sides that the wind wasn’t a serious problem, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. What concerned him more was the monster storm. He couldn’t keep his eyes off it.

  Three minutes later, they were standing on the stern of the ship, peering over the side. X faced his team and said, “I’ll lead the formation. Stay three hundred feet apart. Keep your eyes on your HUDs, and follow me. Got it?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Then let’s move.” X took three steps backward, let go of the rope, and broke into a run. Reaching the edge of the ship, he took a final bound, leaped, and was gone. In an eyeblink, the void had swallowed him.

  The wind took him, and he embraced it. After he had maneuvered into stable position, he glanced around to check on his team. Sam’s and Murph’s blue battery units pulsated to the right, but Magnolia was nowhere in sight.

  His eyes flitted to his HUD. Her beacon was still idle. She hadn’t jumped off the ship yet.

  “Magnolia, what the hell are you doing?” he yelled.

  It was hard to hear anything over the roaring wind, but her faint response came through the comm.

  “Don’t get all worked up. Just admiring the view.”

  A second later, her beacon was moving.

  “You stay with the team,” X growled. “That’s how this works.”

  He relaxed on the mattress of air and watched his HUD. Magnolia’s beacon was moving fast, gaining speed, closing in on the others. Was she in a nosedive?

  X risked a backward glance. Sure enough, she was blasting through the sky like a falling arrow. When she was a few hundred feet away, she maneuvered into stable position, arms and legs spread out gracefully with her back to the Hive.

  Relieved, he checked his HUD again. Ice crystals grew around the edge of his visor. At fifteen thousand feet, it was negative forty degrees Fahrenheit.

  X was first to sail through the ten thousand mark. The scalloped black floor of the clouds was rising fast toward them. They were halfway down. He could see the slight change in the darkness where the clouds began to thin.

  When he craned his neck to check on the others, a crosswind sent him tumbling out of control. Experience took over, and he threw his limbs out straight and went into a hard arch, which set him belly down again. From there, he pulled arms and legs loosely in and was back in stable position.

  “Crosswinds coming!” he shouted.

  A sidelong glance gave him a view of the other three divers just as they hit the turbulence. Sam and Magnolia held steady, but Murph tumbled like a leaf in a whirlwind.

  “Shit,” X muttered. “Murph, hard arch!”

  “I can’t!” Murph shouted. “Can’t get control …” His voice was lost in the crackle of static.

  X looked up to see him spinning like a boomerang.

  “Stretch your arms and legs out!” Magnolia said. “Arch your back as far as you can!”

  With the surface racing up toward them, Murph needed to stabilize. He tumbled through the darkness, his screams muffled by the wind. X cursed and watched helplessly. Losing their engineer now wouldn’t be just bad luck; it could doom their mission before it really started.

  Come on damn it, Murph …

  At five thousand feet, Murph finally stopped screaming. He flipped several more times before leveling out. Arching his back and spreading his arms and legs, he did another lazy somersault before settling back into a stable position. His labored breathing swelled over the channel.

  X thanked all the gods he didn’t believe in. He just might get his team safely to the ground.

  “Prepare to activate your night vision and pull your pilot chutes,” he said. “The moment we’re through the cloud cover, do it.”

  The clouds vanished at four thousand feet, and the ground rushed into view. He bumped on his optics and scanned for a landing zone. The surface came into focus, but the ground wasn’t exactly level. They were falling over the biggest sinkhole he had ever seen.

  At first, he had figured it was just another place where the earth had eroded from below and caved in on itself, but this was different. This wasn’t the work of nature; this was man’s doing. They were falling toward a crater produced by one of the mega bombs dropped hundreds of years ago.

  X pulled his pilot chute, held it a moment, and let it go. Feeling the rig inflate, he reached up and grabbed the toggles and steered away from the hole, gliding west toward whatever was left of the city.

  The frozen landscape was flattened for miles around the blast zone. Nothing but rubble with a crust of snow. At least, he didn’t have to worry about crashing into a tower.

  “What the hell is that?” Magnolia asked.

  “What it looks like,” X replied. “A big-ass hole in the ground. Follow me to a new DZ.”

  Murph’s voice crackled over the comm. “Sir!”

  “Hold on, I’m looking for a place to put down.”

  “But, sir!” Mur
ph insisted.

  “What? What’s wrong?” X asked.

  When he checked his subscreen for his altitude, he saw the radiation level. The readings were off the charts. The entire drop zone was one massive radioactive night-light.

  X looked up just in time to see Murph ghosting toward him.

  “Watch out!” X shouted, toggling hard way from the encroaching canopy.

  “Sorry, sir!” Murph yelled back.

  X swooped toward the drop zone, his heart pounding. A collision with another diver, collapsing both their chutes, was a nightmare he could do without.

  Bending his knees, X performed his usual two-stage flare. When his boots hit the ground, he ran out the momentum across the compact snow, ground to a stop a few minutes later, and pulled one capewell, collapsing his chute. It rippled in the wind as he pawed through it to look for the other divers. Murph was sprawled on the ground a hundred feet away. Sam and Magnolia glided down to the east, both of them landing gracefully in the snow a few seconds later.

  As soon as their feet touched down, X was running toward them. Every second in this radioactive pit was borrowed time.

  FOURTEEN

  Weaver couldn’t feel his hands or feet. Even so, his body seemed heavy, as if his bones were made of lead. He slogged through the snowy streets. The shrieks of the Sirens and the roar of the wind had ceased—either that, or his helmet speakers had frozen.

  He was so cold, he could hardly think, hardly move. His legs moved by instinct, and his thoughts seemed to float disconnected from his body. A gust of snow beat him several steps backward. A second blast hit him in the back, knocking him to his knees. Pushing at the ground with hands that felt like bricks, he rose to his feet.

  For the past several days, he had thought a lot about death. He had long since given up on the idea of a hereafter, knowing there was nothing but the rot that followed. But when he perished in this icy wasteland, he would be stuck here for eternity, his body a frozen fossil—unless those screaming beasts got to it first.

  His mind drifted as he trudged ahead. The haunting images of Jennifer’s, Cassie’s, and Kayla’s burning bodies tormented his flagging awareness. The memories of better times were gone now. He saw only their melting faces.

  Weaver tripped over a chunk of stone and went facedown in the snow. He caught the metallic taste of blood.

  For a moment, he lay there, eyes searching the desolate landscape for the Ares wreckage. He didn’t want to give up, but he was so cold. An intense wave of despair took hold. In that moment, everything came clear. He felt vividly what it meant to be the last human on the planet. And he understood, perhaps for the first time, what the word “forever” meant.

  The word prompted a fear unlike any he had ever experienced.

  Defeated and alone, he rested his helmet in the snow. He needed to close his eyes and rest. Just for a few minutes …

  He sobbed at the thought of his wife and his daughters and all the other passengers aboard Ares. Tears cascaded down his frozen face, growing cold on their way down his chin. “God, oh God,” Weaver whispered, drowsy now. “I have to get to my girls.”

  He crawled a few feet, blinked away the tears, and squinted. Something was moving at the far end of the street, where the snow had drifted to form a low barricade. An apparition danced across the snow. A green cape flapped in the wind.

  He clawed toward it, dragging his heavy legs. He made it four feet before collapsing onto his stomach. The fierce pain of his frozen body paralyzed him, and he contorted into a fetal position, shaking violently. He sucked in frozen shards of air that cut his lungs. Tilting his ice-crazed visor, he stared at the sky—the vast empty space where he had spent most of his life. He watched the lightning in awe.

  Get up, a voice boomed in his mind. You have to get up.

  The words were so distant, yet he recognized the voice at once. It was Jennifer’s.

  You still have a mission to complete, she said. You promised us you’d come home, Rick.

  His body was shutting down. He was dying. His brain would be the last to go, but reality was already slipping from his grasp.

  Using every ounce of energy, he rolled on his side and saw the flapping apparition. No, a parachute. It wasn’t far, and with any luck, the body of a diver would be attached to it. A diver with a battery.

  He struggled upward, balanced for a moment, and dragged one foot forward … then the other, toward the canopy. His feet were frozen anchors, but somehow, he willed them forward. He was light-headed, and his vision was fading, but he continued because he had no choice—he couldn’t break his promise.

  After a struggle, he reached the chute and pulled it out of his way, following the cords to a hump in the snow. He dropped to his knees and wiped off a layer of drifted powder with his arm. He heard the faint sound of metal on metal. A second swipe exposed a helmet with a tiny red heart painted just above the visor.

  “Sarah,” he murmured. He rotated her helmet carefully until it unlocked. Then he slowly pulled it away, grimacing as her frozen head slid out onto the snow. Her brown eyes were still open, the eyelashes covered in ice.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He set the helmet down with shaking hands and took her water bottle from inside the lip of her armor. Then he pulled out her food pouch. Both were frozen solid. He laid them on the snow and cleared the snow from her chest armor. His fingers shook as he dislodged his battery and exchanged it for hers.

  He punched his minicomputer with wooden fingers and turned his heaters back on. The small devices bit his freezing skin, like bees stinging all across his body. He gradually felt the prickle of blood flowing to his extremities. The burn started at his feet and hands and worked its way up his legs and arms. His skin itched and tingled, and he sobbed again from the excruciating pain of his body slowly warming. He had been so cold. Now he was on fire.

  When the pain subsided, he unlatched the locks on his armor, pulled the front plate up, and inserted Sarah’s water bottle and food pouch.

  He secured the armor with a click, then searched Sarah’s corpse. A blaster was frozen against her leg. He grabbed it and yanked the grip, and the weapon broke free, sending him sprawling on his backside. He gripped the stock and gazed up at the sky, wondering what, as the last human being on Earth, he ought to do now. He heard his wife’s voice again. It sounded clearer now.

  Live, Rick.

  * * * * *

  X reached down and offered his hand to Murph, who lay on his back, his mirrored visor looking up at the sky.

  “How many dives did you say you’ve done?” X asked.

  Murph grabbed his hand and groaned as he pulled himself upright. “Not enough.”

  “Holy shit,” Magnolia said. She stood beside Sam, facing west. “Is that … ?”

  “Hades,” Sam said.

  “Regroup,” X said. “We don’t have time for sightseeing.”

  The team circled around him. Flakes of toxic snow fluttered from the sky. Magnolia held out her hand and caught a flake on her palm. X shook his head. She had no idea of the danger they were in.

  “Sam, you’re our eyes. Take point. Murph, plot us a course to the target and the supply crate the Hive dropped. Magnolia … just stay close to me.”

  “I’ve never seen rads this high,” Murph said.

  X checked his monitor for the third time since landing. “Me, neither. We need to double-time it to get to this facility.” The Hell Divers lived by the law of the clock, and they were running out of time. They had an hour and fifty-seven minutes to return to the Hive with cells and valves.

  Looking past the data, X scanned the wasteland to the west. For miles, nothing stood as high as a man. The landscape to the east was much the same. Foundations of buildings peppered the terrain, but only a few structures rose even to one story. X pulled his binos and dialed in on a bridge that stuck out of the
snow like the dorsal fin of some monstrous fish. Beneath the snow, a network of highways and roads had connected the Old World. X had traveled on many of them on other dives.

  He zoomed in on a cluster of towers beyond the bridge. Even from a distance, he could see that the skeletal buildings were badly damaged. Some were nothing more than husks. He had his doubts that anything inside could remain intact, especially after the blasts. But they had to try.

  “I’ve mapped us a route to the supply crate,” Murph said. “Uploading to your minicomputers … now.”

  X tapped his computer and looked at the map on his HUD. The crosswind had knocked them off course. They were a mile from the supply crate, and two miles from the main objective. He set his nav markers on both targets.

  “All right, Raptor, let’s move out,” he said.

  Sam pulled his blaster and took off at a lope. The wind had cleared the snow ahead, exposing a road that X hadn’t seen earlier. A network of fissures, where the earth had opened and swallowed portions of the road, stretched across their path. Sam leaped over the cracks, stopping at each one to make sure X and the others got across.

  X turned to watch Magnolia. She nodded back at him and jumped over a crevasse. A few minutes later, they reached the edge of a parking lot littered with rows of rusted vehicles.

  “Keep sharp,” X said, pulling his blaster and working his way forward. The metal graveyard was the perfect place for an ambush, although he doubted that even the Sirens would frequent this place.

  “Bombs did this?” Magnolia whispered.

  X pointed at the crater to the north. “Bombs dropped from airships just like the Hive.”

  “No way.”

  “You didn’t know that?” Sam asked.

  “The bombs that poisoned the world also caused the electrical storms,” X said. He wasn’t terribly shocked that Magnolia didn’t know. Most people didn’t talk much about why things were the way they were now.

  “Wh-why?” she said. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” X said. “Keep moving.”