Hell Divers II: Ghosts

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  He held his hand out, and Andrew handed it over. He raised the rifle toward the bulkhead. On the last dive, his shots had been ever so slightly wide left. He twisted the knob and handed the rifle back to Andrew.

  “You see Sirens, you run. You got it?”

  Andrew gave a toothy yellow grin. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring your gun back, Mikey.”

  “And Magnolia,” Layla said. “Bring her back, too.”

  An enthusiastic voice called from the crowd of technicians and divers. “Hey, wait for me!”

  It was Rodger Mintel, carrying his helmet.

  “Whoa! What the hell are you doing, man?” Michael asked.

  “What it looks like.” Rodger stopped at his launch tube. “I’m going with them.”

  Andrew stepped in. “Cap said only Weaver and me get to go.”

  “Captain Jordan changed his mind.” Katrina was standing behind them, her arms crossed firmly over her chest. The tattooed head of a raptor showed on her forearm.

  Layla took a step toward Katrina. “If he’s going, then so am I!”

  “We’ve authorized a third diver and selected Rodger,” she said. “We need his engineering experience.”

  Rodger tucked something into his vest pocket so quickly that Michael couldn’t see what it was. He didn’t have to guess why Rodger had volunteered to dive. If Layla were stranded on the surface, nothing short of death would keep Michael from diving. He and some of the other divers had a pool going about when Rodger and Magnolia would finally get together.

  He turned his attention back to Katrina. “And what about my experience?”

  “Don’t worry, Commander.” Rodger flashed a nervous smile. “I got this.”

  “I hold rank,” Michael said, “and I’m respectfully requesting you send me instead.”

  Katrina’s sharp gaze fell on him, but he wasn’t intimidated by her tattoos or her reputation. Or the fact that she was the captain’s mistress.

  “Captain Jordan has made his decision, Commander.”

  “Come on, LT,” Michael said. “We all know you have special powers of persuasion when it comes to the captain.”

  “Excuse me?” Katrina said. She put her hands on her hips. “You’re way out of line, Commander.”

  Layla squeezed his hand. “Don’t,” she whispered.

  Biting the inside of his lip, he held Katrina’s gaze for a few seconds before finally backing down.

  Katrina nodded. “That’s what I thought.” She turned away from the divers and cupped her hands over her mouth. “Everyone out! We’re clear for launch!”

  The technicians finished their final checks on the three launch tubes while Rodger, Weaver, and Andrew fastened their helmets.

  Michael patted Rodger on the back as he stared wistfully at his usual launch tube. This was utter bullshit, but there was nothing he could do about it. They left the room with everyone else and piled into the dark hallway. Michael could hardly see the grimy faces of the lower-deckers in the dim light. Bodies that hadn’t been washed in weeks pressed up against him as he and Layla walked away from the launch bay.

  “Where are they diving?” one man asked.

  “Why aren’t you going, Commander?” asked another.

  Michael turned back to the bay just as the militia guards pulled on the massive doors to seal them shut. Through the narrowing gap, he saw Rodger climb into his tube and throw him a thumbs-up.

  Knowing that Rodger cared for Magnolia was reassuring. Perhaps a little bit of love was exactly what this mission needed. That and a miracle.

  * * * * *

  Rodger stood in his drop tube, listening to the countdown. This was his tenth dive—five short of the magic number. The average was fifteen dives before ending up as a splat on the surface, or a lightning fritter on the Hell Diver highway. Of course, X’s legendary ninety-seven dives had thrown the curve way off. A lot of men and women had to get dead their first dive to balance out his record.

  But Rodger didn’t plan on being one of those. Nope, he had two missions right now. One: locate a special section inside the Hilltop Bastion that Jordan wanted him to search. Two: rescue Magnolia and sweep her off her steel-toed boots, if possible. The wood carving inside his vest pocket was supposed to help with the second objective. The piece fit nicely next to the ITC access card Jordan had given him.

  In the tubes on either side of his, Andrew and Weaver were likely feeling what Hell Divers described as “the rush.” The other divers were all addicted to it, to varying degrees, but Rodger had never experienced the heady blend of fear and adrenaline. The fear was too strong. Today, though, he felt different as he waited for the glass doors to whisper open and drop him into the hell below. Because today Magnolia was down there, and he was going to bring her home or die trying.

  “Thirty seconds,” Ty announced over the channel.

  “Copy that,” Weaver replied. “Ready to dive.”

  Rodger tried to hold in a belch. He was hungover—or, more accurately, still a little drunk—after last night. The stimulant he had taken this morning was keeping him awake, but it had soured his stomach.

  Captain Jordan hadn’t seemed to care, or even notice, when giving Rodger the mission to find the room that housed cryogenic chambers. Jordan hadn’t been forthcoming about what he expected him to find there, but the captain had insisted that he tell no one of the mission until he was on the surface.

  Rodger let the belch escape as he contemplated whether being privy to secret information was a good or a bad thing. While he didn’t like Jordan, it was nice to be entrusted with a quest. Never in his life had he been in charge of anything like this. He wouldn’t let the captain down. Nope, he would find this bunker and whatever prizes it held. But first, he would rescue Magnolia.

  The red glow swirling in his tube shifted to a cool blue. Klaxons faded in the background. Rodger clamped down on his mouth guard and checked the Velcro flap of the pocket containing Magnolia’s present. His vest was stuffed with magazines for his rifle, flares and shotgun shells for his blaster, and his engineering gear. He wore a duty belt containing everything he would need on the surface.

  The voice of Captain Jordan fired over the channel. “Good luck, divers. Remember your objectives and complete the primary mission first.”

  Yeah, yeah, Captain. No scavenging for lumber and no searching for lost girls. Asshole!

  “We dive so humanity survives,” Weaver said.

  Andrew and Rodger both muttered the words along with him.

  Rodger’s thoughts turned to his parents, as they always did before a drop. They had hugged him goodbye, but they hadn’t said the actual word. They never said goodbye; they always said, “Catch ya later.”

  He smiled. Pop’s birthday was coming up soon. Maybe Rodger would bring him back something from the surface. In his heart, he was hoping to bring back his future bride, but it was too early even to voice such hopes. Still, he hoped that someday soon he would be able to introduce Magnolia to his folks. He was sure they would love her as much as …

  “Prepare for launch,” said Ty’s voice.

  Rodger wrapped his arms around his chest as the final warning beeped. The glass floor opened just as he locked his gloved fingers together. It was an effort to keep from flailing at the sides of the tube as he fell—something he had done the first six dives.

  He felt a moment of numbness as the sky opened up below him. He clenched his muscles—a reflex the other divers had tried to train out of him. No matter how many times they told him to dive loose, he tensed up like a wound clock spring.

  As he fell, he arched and positioned his body on the mattress of air so he could see the Hive. The turtle-like hulk seemed to float effortlessly. He scanned the turbofans, almost afraid to look, but they whirred too fast for him to spot any blood on them. An instant later, crosswinds sent him tumbling away from the view.


  To the east, lightning cut through the darkness. It was hard to gauge how far away the storm was, but the bolts were impressive. Long ago, when he was in school, he had read that lightning could be hotter than the surface of the sun. He hadn’t believed it until he saw his childhood friend Hal struck on a dive. The blast had raced through his body, blowing out his fingers and the bottoms of his feet and taking off the top of his skull.

  Rodger blinked away the memory of Hal’s smoldering remains and craned his neck one last time to see the airship.

  “Catch ya later, Mom and Pop,” Rodger whispered as the ship vanished.

  He shifted his attention to his HUD. The readings were all normal. They were at eighteen thousand feet and falling through clear skies.

  Weaver and Andrew had fanned out in intervals of a thousand feet. Rodger saw the glow of Weaver’s battery unit to the west. They all were diving in the stable falling position that divers used in fair weather: arms loosely out, elbows and knees bent at right angles. As Rodger blasted through the clouds, he caught a glimpse of lightning below. The wall of black clouds disguised the strike, and the visible bolt quickly waned, leaving a residue of blue light.

  On his HUD, the altitude ticked down. They were already down to fifteen thousand feet, and he was falling at just under a hundred miles an hour.

  Static crackled over the open channel. “Rodger Dodger, Pipe, be ready to nosedive. Looks like a layer of electrical activity pushing in below.”

  The dark clouds were deceiving, like a clean bandage hiding an infected wound. Sometimes, it was hard to tell exactly what you were falling toward, until it was too late.

  Another pocket of crosswinds took Rodger, sending him spinning toward Weaver.

  “Watch it!” The words were difficult to make out over the crackling static.

  Rodger brought his arms to his sides, kicked his boots together, and speared through the sky in a headfirst dive, veering away from Weaver, who was still getting head-down.

  As Rodger looked down, the floor of clouds lit up with bright strikes. His electronics suddenly turned to gibberish. His HUD winked on and off.

  Shit. NOT good!

  A wave of nausea boiled up from his guts. He could taste the bile. It was almost as nasty as the herbal slime his mom forced him to drink whenever he was sick. The comm channel broke into a jumble of words and static. Whatever Weaver was trying to say, Rodger couldn’t hear him. He focused on trying not to puke as he cut through the clouds like Superman.

  “We dive so humanity survives!” he cried. “I’m coming, Magnolia!”

  NINE

  Magnolia hung from the tangle of canopy and shroud lines, hardly daring to move. She wanted to look at her left arm, but she was too afraid—if the girder had cut through her suit, she wouldn’t last the day.

  She had heard noises in the street below. Whatever had made them was gone now, but she could see shadows moving around down there.

  They moved with stealth, as if they were hunting.

  If this were a normal dive, she would have had weapons and supplies. She would also have had her Hell Diver brothers and sisters for support. Instead, she had a ripped chute and a mean headache.

  Another shadow below snaked around the shells of vehicles. She looked closer, but it melted away. She activated her NVGs with a bump of her chin. The vivid green bones of the building filled her visor, but she still couldn’t get a lock on the moving shapes.

  She tried to open a line to the Hive by tapping the comm link. White noise filled her helmet.

  “Command, this is Raptor Three,” she said as loudly as she dared. “Does anyone copy?”

  More static hissed from the speakers.

  The storm was still blocking out her signal, or else the Hive was too far out of range to pick it up. Another flash from the dark clouds filled the street with even more slinking shadows, which began to fan out like a cloud breaking apart in the sky.

  She felt for her tactical knife and remembered that she had lost it in the fall. Leaning down, she stretched to grab the spare tucked inside her boot. Her fingers gripped the handle but slipped off. She breathed out to make her belly smaller and stretched again. This time, she pulled the blade free.

  The girder holding her tangled chute and lines groaned in the wind as a flurry of dust and soot came swirling through the scraper’s skeletal remains.

  Magnolia froze, holding the blade to her chest, eyes combing the terrain. A shadow darted across the asphalt below. Another shifted on the sidewalk. She leaned forward, straining to identify what was down there.

  In the green hue of the night vision, she saw that the shadows weren’t Sirens or some other mutated monsters after all. They were just … ghosts. Optical illusions caused by the flashes of lightning.

  She checked the layout for an exit route. This place looked as if it had been through hell and never left. Deep burns marred the structural steel, and a carpet of ash and grime covered the floor. Concrete columns, black and heat-chipped, supported the upper floors, but she couldn’t fathom how they were still standing. The tower’s foundation had settled to the point that the floor sloped at a ten-degree angle. Once she cut herself free, she would have to be careful not to slide down it and out into thin air.

  Her exit was an enclosed stairwell a hundred feet away, past one of the pillars. From there, she would make her way down to the street and try to find cover to run a diagnostic test and check the integrity of her suit. Perhaps, on the way, she would find some sort of weapon more substantial than her dinky little knife.

  She used the blade to cut her lines one at a time, leaving the left-rear suspension line for last. Then she bent her knees to prepare for the three-foot drop. This was going to make some noise.

  She touched the knife to the weighted line, and it parted with alarming ease. Even favoring the injured ankle, the impact with the floor sent a painful jolt up her leg. She didn’t let the pain keep her from moving, though. She ran for the stairway, aware that she was leaving tracks behind her in the ash. Vivid green snags of rebar reached down like tree branches from the ceiling. She ducked them as she ran, trying to balance speed with stealth, supremely aware that a single misstep could put another tear in her suit. Approaching the stairwell entrance, she held the knife loosely, ready to slash and stab.

  She scanned the passage leading down to the next floor. Cracks ran everywhere across the floor and walls. At some point in the past 260 years, the stairs had shifted out of true. The top two treads sagged, and the third was broken in two. She leaped to the fourth step and stopped to listen.

  The whistling of the wind and the distant crack of thunder echoed through the dead city. It was an eerie and beautiful sound, a change from the everyday noises aboard the airship. This was the real world. This was where humanity was meant to live.

  For Magnolia, the greatest wonder of the surface world had been all the different colors to be found. On the ship, almost everything was gray, black, or brown, just like the desolate city outside this scraper. But once, there had been more colors than one could even name. That was what kept her scanning the archives on the ship each night into the morning hours. Whenever she was exploring the surface on a dive, she searched for pastels in particular. Those were her favorites: pink, baby blue, lavender. Those shades soothed and fascinated her, but she was drawn to any scrap or fragment of color. She couldn’t wait to see what she would find in the lighthouse, with its fiery red dome.

  Another distant crash rolled across the city, echoing through the tower. It was powerful enough to rattle her visor. Though she couldn’t see it, she knew that the storm was rolling east over the city.

  She continued down the staircase, carefully navigating the skewed and broken steps, knife at the ready. The walls seemed to narrow as she proceeded. Or was that just a trick of the light? She couldn’t be sure.

  At the first landing, she finally stopped
to check herself. A quick glance revealed what she had feared all along: the girder’s corner had scraped her armor—and torn her suit. She craned her neck to assess the damage. It had sliced through the layer that insulated her from lightning. Beyond that, she couldn’t see whether the secondary layer, the radiation shield, was compromised. At least, the alarm sensors had stopped beeping, although that didn’t mean she was in the clear.

  She tapped at the screen of her wrist monitor and brought up the control panel. A diagnostic should tell her the status of the suit’s radiation shield. Digital telemetry scrolled across the screen. The battery unit was at 50 percent—only about twelve hours of juice. She scrolled through the data, heart rate increasing with each swipe of her finger.

  A clatter and snapping from deep in the building distracted her. She lowered her wrist and raised the knife in her other hand.

  The sound faded, and silence reclaimed the space. Magnolia waited in the safety of the enclosed stairwell, where the wind couldn’t reach her. Listening for the barest creak or rustle, she raised her wrist monitor and continued swiping through the data. The radiation level here was in the red—high enough that Sirens might nest here. The divers still weren’t any closer to understanding the monsters’ habits or biology. Hell, they didn’t even know what the things were or where they had come from. Maybe they were mutant animals, changed by radioactive fallout after the war, though they didn’t look much like any of the creatures she had studied in the archives. They couldn’t very well bring a specimen back to the Hive to examine, either. The ordinary people aboard the ship had no idea what was down here, and it was probably best left that way.

  She finally brought up the diagnostic controls for her suit. Across the screen rolled the first good news she had gotten all day:

  Suit integrity, 100 percent.

  “Thank—”

  A clatter like dishes falling on the floor cut her off. A creaking and snapping joined the sound, followed by a crack and a thud.

  Something alive was inside the building.

  By now, her nervous tension was rising at roughly the same rate the thing below was climbing the stairs.