Hell Divers III_Deliverance

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  Something clanked below them, and they were falling into darkness. Les imagined them plummeting through the clouds, gaining speed with every passing second.

  “Good luck,” said Jordan’s voice over the comms. “Do not come back without my ship. The future of the human race depends on you.”

  “We dive so humanity survives,” Olah replied.

  Erin repeated the motto, but Jennifer and Les remained silent. He anxiously watched the altitude and speed on his HUD. It occurred to him that the top of his helmet nearly touched the roof of the small pod, and he tightened his straps to make sure a jolt didn’t earn him a broken skull.

  The comms crackled, and Lieutenant Hunt came online. “Entering the storm in ten seconds. Prepare for turbulence.” The transmission cut out, and Les wondered whether it was the last time he would ever hear from someone on the Hive. Death would be bad, but failure would be worse—Jordan might take it out on their families. He had no doubt that if the mission went sideways, he wouldn’t be coming home.

  Don’t think like that. You’re going to see your family again.

  He bit down on his mouth guard again. The distant rumble of thunder was muted by the pod’s walls, with their multiple layers of insulation against the lightning. But there was nothing the engineers could do about air pockets and turbulence.

  The pod rocketed through the first five thousand feet in no time at all. Then Les heard the most frightening sound he could imagine: the hiss of air leaking from one of the seals. He looked desperately around for the source.

  “What is that?” Jennifer called out.

  Les didn’t have time to reply before they entered the storm. A gust of wind slammed into the side of the pod, tossing it like a ball. The straps did their job, holding Les secure in the seat, but his long body jerked and his head rattled.

  A hundred and fifty miles per hour. Holy shit, we’re dropping fast.

  The first lightning bolt struck the metal cocoon a moment later. It sounded as if a blaster had gone off inside Les’ helmet. Jennifer screamed, and even Erin cried out as they were once again tossed through the sky. The hissing noise increased as air was sucked out of the pod. It had to be the porthole. The rest of the pod was basically an oblong canister of sheet metal welded to a steel frame.

  “Everyone, just breathe slow,” Erin said, her voice back to its normal self-possessed calm.

  Les tried to follow her example. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose. His destiny was no longer in his hands. Either they would survive the drop, or they would all die screaming.

  Cut it out, he thought, as images of Tom Price’s semiliquefied corpse flashed through his mind.

  Another bolt blasted the side of the pod and sent them rolling. The forces on his body warred with each other, trying to toss him this way and that, and his skin warmed like what he imagined a radiation burn felt like. Banging sounded on the outside of the shell, as if some flying monster were trying to get in, but it was the wind. It ripped the hatch completely off the window, giving them an upside-down view of the storm. It seemed the fins on the pod were too small to keep it upright.

  A brilliant blue light arced across the bowl of sky. The clouds had coalesced into a dense mass, with no margins to differentiate one from another. Overlaying the roar of blood in his ears and the buffeting of the wind, he heard an endless roll of thunder.

  Ten thousand feet and two hundred miles an hour.

  “We have to right the pod before we can deploy the chutes!” Erin yelled as she reached for a control panel above her head.

  Les watched the webwork of lightning outside. Another blast hit the pod, and the gear in the mesh net dumped onto the ceiling below them. Weapons, including several sheathed knives, clanked by his head. The next strike sent it all flying about the pod. A pack hit Les in the chest, and a rifle smacked Jennifer’s helmet. He heard the crack, followed by a yelp of pain.

  “Jennifer, are you okay?” Les shouted, fearing that her visor was cracked.

  She managed to raise a hand and nod. He looked over at the exposed glass porthole. Cracks spiderwebbed across the surface, but at least, the lightning had righted them—mostly.

  Still, Les knew that the chutes could be compromised if the pod didn’t rock back into a stable position. A diver wouldn’t deploy his chute with his back to the ground, for fear of being enshrouded. Doing so now with the pod’s chutes could tear even the strongest suspension lines.

  “Almost got it,” Erin said, straining to reach the button. “Brace yourselves!”

  An auxiliary chute fired on the outside of the pod and pulled them back into a stable position. Les breathed a sigh of relief that quickly turned to a gasp of shock.

  “My God,” he said.

  The storm swirled around them like a tornado, lightning slashing the darkness in every direction. Les glimpsed the other pod. It looked so small against the backdrop of the storm.

  “Three thousand feet, almost clear!” Erin shouted. She reached up, waiting for the right moment to punch the button for the main chutes.

  The numbers ticked across Les’ HUD. His eyes flitted from the display to the soldiers’ pod in the distance—just before a brilliant bolt enveloped it in a curtain of blue.

  A voice cracked over the radio as someone shouted, “Holy shit!”

  “The other pod just got hit!” Les said, pointing at the window.

  Erin’s helmet turned. “Dad …” she murmured. She strained for a better look, but the pod had been swept away beyond the narrow view from the porthole.

  “I’m sure they’re okay,” Les said.

  Erin waited another beat, then reached back up and punched two buttons in a row. “Hold on!” she yelled.

  The main chutes fired, jolting Les’ stomach down to his feet, or so it felt. He kept his eyes on the porthole. The noise of the air leak had dwindled from a teakettle shriek to a low hiss as their air pressure neared equilibrium with that outside.

  The first view of the Old World came into focus below: husks of scrapers backlit by a stroboscopic display.

  “Prepare for landing,” Erin said.

  Les looked up at his HUD. Only two hundred feet to the surface. They were almost home free.

  He saw the scraper leering up at them a moment too late. There was no time to warn anyone, and no way to avoid the crash. Holding in a breath, he grabbed his harness as the pod caromed off a steel girder.

  The chutes went taut, jerking them again, and the violent motion again made projectiles of the spilled gear. A cry rang out, and Les slammed his helmet on the ceiling. His vision went dark, and his entire brain ached.

  Another scream sounded, different from the first. It sounded like Erin, but he still couldn’t see much besides stars flitting across the darkness.

  The pod continued to fall, slowly leveling back out as the ruined city rose up to meet them. He bit down on the mouth guard, trying to lessen the pain in his head. His vision returned, and he got a blurry image of Erin reaching toward Jennifer, just before the pod hit something else, this time with a much more dampened impact. For a moment, Les didn’t know what they had hit, until Olah started shouting.

  “We’re sinking. We have to get out of here!”

  Les stared as the brown expanse outside the cracked porthole resolved into a lake of murky water. The faulty seal, instead of leaking air, was now letting the water in. He looked over at Jennifer, whose head was tilted at an odd angle, like a rag doll tossed carelessly on the floor. Erin was trying to wake her up, but she didn’t respond.

  “She’s gone!” Olah shouted. “Her damn neck’s broke. We have to leave her.”

  Les unbuckled his harness and crashed to the floor, hands slapping into a foot of brown water. Olah grabbed a rifle and a bag and splashed his way over to the hatch.

  “Hurry!” he yelled. Then he palmed a red button, blowing the ha
tch off its hinges. Water poured in, and Olah pulled himself out.

  “Come on!” Les yelled. He yanked Erin away from Jennifer’s body and pulled her into the water as it quickly flooded the pod.

  “No!” Erin shouted. “No, she’s still—”

  Les glimpsed Jennifer’s right hand twitching just as he pulled Erin out of the pod and into the choppy water. He chinned on his night-vision goggles and kicked upward toward the surface, breaking through a second later. Olah was already swimming toward shore. Les and Erin swam after him even though every instinct told Les to turn back and try to help Jennifer.

  She was still alive, damn it. Maybe hurt bad, but still moving.

  Olah reached a slab of concrete on the shore and crawled up. He turned to help Erin out of the water, then grabbed Les.

  “On your feet, Giraffe,” he said.

  Together, the divers stood on the concrete pad, watching the pod sink with most of their weapons and gear—and Jennifer.

  Les kept telling himself there wasn’t anything he could do for his friend, but it didn’t work. If he wanted, he could jump in and try to pull her out of the sinking vessel. Instead, he watched in silence—a coward abandoning his teammate in a hostile wasteland.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Michael awoke to darkness. He tried to sit up, but a hand pushed down on his chest. His muscles were tight across his back, and raw pain shot up his leg. He held back a groan and struggled against the hand holding him down.

  “Easy there, Tin. You’re safe.”

  Layla’s sweet voice soothed him, but he still had to grit his teeth against the pain as he lay back on the hard mattress.

  “Where is he?” Michael asked.

  “Who, X?” Layla said. “He’s outside with Rodge and Mags.” She turned on a lantern by the bed and smiled at him in the glow. He reached up to her freckled face with the back of his hand, running it over her soft skin. He had almost forgotten how beautiful she was without a helmet on.

  “I thought I was never going to see you again,” he whispered. He pulled his hand away and closed his eyes for a beat, trying to remember what had happened to him. The last thing he could recall was X jamming a needle into his leg. Everything after that was a dark blur.

  “You’ve had two close calls. I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”

  “A kiss would be a start.”

  She leaned in and pressed her lips against his, holding them there for a moment before sitting back in her chair. It figured that the first time they were alone together in ages, he was too banged up to do anything about it. He looked down at his bandaged leg to assess the damage, wondering whether he would even be able to walk.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said. “We got you all stitched up and we have you on a strong regimen of antibiotics. X also used something to neutralize the poison.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Twelve hours,” Layla said, looking at her watch. “Give or take.”

  “Has anyone contacted Timothy?”

  “Not yet. I was waiting for you to wake up. X strongly urged against sending any radio transmissions.”

  “Now that we’ve found X, we should get moving. Wait … Why did he say not to send any transmissions?”

  “I’ll let him tell you.” Layla frowned as he tried to sit up. “Seriously, stop moving. You need to rest.”

  “I’m fine. I need to get up and talk to X about—”

  A distant screech cut him off. A dog’s growl followed. Next came the zipping of a plastic curtain, and the creak of the bedroom door opening.

  “Layla, get out here,” Magnolia called out.

  Michael managed to press his back against the wall and use it as a brace. “What’s going on out there?” he said, trying to get a view.

  “Sirens—lots of them,” Magnolia said. “And the floaters.”

  “Floaters?” His eyes darted to Magnolia, then Layla. Noise came from the adjoining room and Rodger poked his head in the open door.

  “Hey, he’s awake!” he almost shouted.

  “Keep your voice down, idiot,” X growled, coming up behind the group.

  Michael had to chuckle, although it hurt. The angry old man in front of him was the same X he remembered from a decade ago.

  “Honestly, I expected you to be the blabbering idiot,” Michael said. He shook his head, smiling incredulously at the sight of the frail yet strong man in front of him. “I can’t believe you survived down here all these years.”

  X ran a hand over his short-cropped hair but didn’t return the smile. For a second, he simply studied Michael, as if trying to remember something. Then he walked over to his bedside and knelt down. He slowly reached out and flicked Michael’s shoulder-length hair like a dirty piece of laundry.

  “I’m still picturing you with your tin hat, kid. What’s this dog tail?”

  Yup, this was definitely the X that Michael remembered from his childhood. The man who was always busting his father’s chops and who could always be trusted to speak the brutal truth. The warrior who never stopped fighting. He had saved them out there on the street, and he had saved Michael from the envenomated bite wound on his leg.

  But X had paid dearly during the decade-long battle for survival. His voice sounded as if he had been smoking homemade cigarettes every day of his life, and scars covered his flesh like macabre tattoos.

  “Help me up,” Michael said. “Let’s go talk in the other room.”

  X grabbed Michael’s hand and squeezed it, then helped him to his feet. Before X could protest, Michael wrapped his arms around the legendary diver. In that moment, he felt less like a strong warrior and more like a feeble old man.

  Michael pulled back, scrutinizing X up close. Behind the ragged beard were hollow cheeks, and wrinkles and scars formed ravines across his forehead. He looked far older than his fifty-five years.

  They made their way into the living area outside the bedroom. Michael limped but managed to walk without support. He needed to prove to the others he was okay to leave this place. They had to get back to Deliverance.

  X took a seat in a chair, and Miles sat on his haunches beside him while the other divers sat around the metal table in the center of the room.

  “Where do we start?” Michael asked, sighing.

  “You can start by telling me why you’re here,” X said.

  “For you,” Michael said. “When we found out about your transmissions, we raced to find you. I’m so sorry, X. We didn’t know you were down here all this time.”

  X didn’t say a word—maybe because he didn’t believe him, maybe because he was waiting to hear more.

  “Captain Jordan knew about your transmissions but kept them a secret,” Michael continued.

  “Captain Jordan?” X asked. “What about …?”

  “Captain Ash passed away from throat cancer not long after you were left behind. If she had known you were alive, she would have rescued you. But Jordan …”

  X reached up to touch the scar on his neck.

  “Bastard,” Magnolia growled. “I’m going to kill him.”

  X lowered his hand from the scar and stroked his dog’s head calmly. Michael wasn’t sure what to expect, but the man seemed to be taking the news rather well.

  “If he got my messages, then why didn’t he send someone to find me?” X asked.

  Magnolia looked over at Michael, clearly eager to talk, but Michael had to be the one to tell X. It was his responsibility.

  “Katrina,” he said, locking eyes with X. “Jordan and she were together, and she’s pregnant with his child. I think he was still jealous of you.”

  X didn’t say anything, and Michael couldn’t read the expression on his weathered face. If the news shocked or upset him, he didn’t show it.

  Michael hurried to fill the dead air. “I also
believe he was relying on your messages to find places to raid. So in a way, you were still helping the Hive all these years.”

  The old diver’s lips tightened into a grimace, and his nostrils flared. After a moment, his features returned to normal, and X looked over at the black sheet covering the balcony.

  “Enemies in all directions,” he said. “The sky, the land, and the sea.” Silence filled the room until he cleared it with a sigh. “I’m not worried about that chickenshit Jordan or the Sirens. It’s the floaters that are the problem.”

  “What floaters?” Michael asked. He looked at Layla again, then Magnolia, and finally back to X. “What the hell aren’t you guys telling me?”

  “The men on the ship,” X said. “They come every six months to the lighthouses and trap Sirens and other creatures, then take them back out to sea. I’ve seen them carrying cargo away from the ITC facilities, too.”

  Michael shook his head in disbelief. He paused to think a moment before asking the obvious questions. “Are you telling me there are survivors down here? How is that possible? The Hive or one of the other airships would’ve detected them years ago.”

  X just shrugged.

  “That’s why the lighthouse was blinking,” Michael said, realization setting in. His gut sank at the implications. “We have to find them,” he said. “We have to figure out where they’re fr—”

  “No,” X said, cutting him off. His fingers reached up to the scar on his neck again.

  Magnolia broke the silence. “I saw a lighthouse at Charleston, too. Wondered why it was all lit up.”

  Again the room was silent, and everyone looked to the legendary Hell Diver for answers. He scratched at his beard and sighed.

  “I’m not sure who they are,” X said, “but they come from the sea, and they’re dangerous.” He went back to petting Miles as if this explanation were enough. The distant cry of a Siren rang out, and the dog’s hackles rose.

  “Maybe they have a home on an island or something, where the radiation isn’t bad,” Magnolia said.