Hell Divers II: Ghosts

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  “Pipe, you got contacts on your six!” Weaver shouted.

  “They’re everywhere!” Andrew replied. Gunfire sounded over the channel as he fired another burst. More Sirens crashed to the ground or rolled downhill. Piercing screeches, angry and desperate, filled the city.

  Andrew did not relent. His muzzle flashes backlit the tower as the beasts scrambled upward, forsaking the easier prey in the sky to deal with the threat on the ground.

  He’s going to sacrifice himself to save us, Weaver realized.

  A shot zipped toward Weaver, so close he could hear it rip through the air. In his peripheral vision, the round punched through the chest of a Siren swooping in with claws extended. It flapped backward into the sky, its wings buffeting the canopy with a gust of wind.

  Weaver checked the ground as he fought with the toggles. They were now a hundred feet from the road, passing over the twisted hull of a long vehicle with a strip of yellow paint still visible along the top. The sides were flayed open, and the jagged metal reached up like teeth at his boots.

  He steered away from the vehicle and brought his knees up to clear the wreckage, then prepared to flare his chute.

  “They’re almost on us!” Magnolia shouted. She fired off another shotgun blast. The recoil knocked them off course. Now they were headed straight toward the swarming Sirens.

  “God damn it!” Weaver yelled, jerking the left toggle.

  The creatures were nearing the top of the hill. Andrew was putting up a fight, but it was only a matter of time before he ran out of ammo.

  “Andrew, get the hell out of there!” Weaver ordered.

  The man on the tower lowered his rifle slightly at the request. As Weaver sailed closer, he saw that it wasn’t the thick frame of Andrew after all. The diver at the top was thin and scraggly.

  “Rodger, watch out!” Weaver shouted as he realized his mistake.

  Rodger turned just as a Siren crested the mound. The beast perched there as the others scrambled up to join it. Rodger stumbled, falling onto his back.

  The crack of Magnolia’s blaster sounded, masking Rodger’s screams. A moment later, the gunfire to the north stopped.

  The creatures had reached both Rodger and Andrew.

  Weaver’s heart thumped as he tried to form a strategy. They were still a good fifty feet off the ground, sailing through the canyon between walls of rubble. The Sirens were thirty feet or so behind them, flapping hard to catch up.

  Behind the mountains of rubble, an unknown number of the beasts were attacking Andrew. Rodger was fighting for his life atop the hill. The pop, pop of his sidearm sounded, but Weaver could see only Rodger’s helmet now as they continued to descend.

  Twenty thousand feet above them, the future of the Hive depended on what happened next. In the sky, Jordan gave the orders that ultimately decided whether humanity lived or died, but down here the burden was on Weaver’s shoulders. Sometimes it came down to the flip of a coin, but not today. Weaver knew exactly what he had to do.

  “Hold on to me, Mags,” he said. He steered the canopy toward a long panel of concrete that jutted from the side of the mound where Rodger was blasting away at the Sirens with his pistol.

  Weaver waited for Magnolia to wrap her other arm around him. The smoking blaster dangled from her hand in front of his chest. As they sailed toward the ledge, he prepared to flare for the trickiest pinpoint landing of his life. It was only about twenty feet long and six feet wide. On the right was a wall of twisted metal that could easily rip their suits, and to the left was open air. If he missed the mark, they would either be skewered by rebar or fall fifteen feet to the road below.

  “Oh, hell no!” Magnolia screamed when she realized what he was doing.

  “Unclip from me!” Weaver shouted back. “You’re going to drop on my three. One!”

  “NO!”

  They dipped lower, coming in at ten miles per hour.

  “Two!”

  “Weaver, no!”

  Just before the ledge and six feet above it, he hauled both toggles down to his knees, flaring the chute and stopping its forward momentum.

  “Three!”

  Magnolia let go and dropped to the near end of the ledge, where she made a textbook parachute landing fall.

  The sudden loss of Magnolia’s weight made Weaver swing farther forward than he planned, and he hit the concrete flat on his back, keeping his head up and slapping both arms down to absorb some of the shock. He had seen a rookie diver, after flaring too early, reach his hands back to break his fall, only to fracture his coccyx and break both wrists. This hurt like hell and rattled every bone, but he wasn’t concussed and nothing seemed broken. He was at the edge of the slab, lower legs dangling off the end.

  Ignoring the pain, he pushed to his feet, unslung his assault rifle, and looked for a target. Magnolia had rolled to a stop at his right, directly under a girder that ended in a jagged spike.

  Weaver lined up shots on the incoming Sirens. Four of the creatures had been less than a hundred feet behind them. All but one pulled their wings in to their sides and dropped into a nosedive, their eyeless faces rocketing toward Weaver and Magnolia.

  Crawling under the beam, Magnolia came up behind him and started plucking shotgun shells from his vest.

  “Help Rodger!” he said.

  “On it!”

  She grabbed a protruding piece of rebar and pulled herself up, then swung to another hunk of concrete and started climbing.

  Damn, she’s fast.

  Weaver continued to fire three-round bursts at the diving Sirens. The first two went wide, but he adjusted for windage and started hitting his targets, splitting open a shoulder of the creature on the left, blasting through the rib cage of the one flying point, and unhinging the monster on the right’s elbow. They crashed into the rubble, squawking and shrieking.

  The smallest of the three flopped onto the platform. As it thrashed on the ground, wings and arms flailing, Weaver stepped over and put a round through its temple.

  Another beast dropped to the concrete on all fours. Snarling, it ran at him but collapsed, bleeding from its ruined shoulder. It pushed itself back up and scrambled unevenly forward on three limbs.

  To conserve precious rounds, Weaver let the assault rifle hang from its sling and drew his sidearm. Thin lips opened across the beast’s bulbous head, revealing a row of barbed teeth. He fired a bullet into the open mouth and turned to a third creature that was struggling to climb the wall of rubble. A shot to its spine sent it tumbling away.

  The fourth Siren, still in flight, let out an angry screech and veered away, flapping back toward the scrapers. Weaver holstered his pistol and shoved a new magazine into the rifle as he looked for a way up the mound. Magnolia was already nearing the top. The slope below her was crawling with Sirens. At the top, Rodger was back on his feet, fending off the encroaching beasts, making each rifle shot count. Several corpses tumbled down the scree, leaving streaks of blood behind.

  “I can’t hold ’em!” Andrew yelled over the comms. “Where the hell are you guys?”

  “Hold on! We’re coming!” Weaver leaped off the platform and started climbing. Farther upslope, Magnolia fired at a Siren slinking up behind Rodger. The double-aught blast caught it in the side and sent it flopping and skidding down the hill. It caromed off a concrete boulder just above Weaver, and he ducked as the body cartwheeled over his head.

  Magnolia fired again, and a creature twisted away with a gaping hole in its chest. Three more Sirens turned their eyeless faces her way as she fumbled to reload the blaster.

  “Magnolia!” Rodger shouted. “Stay back!”

  Weaver shouldered his rifle, paused his breath, and nailed a head shot. The beast crumpled at Rodger’s side. Another leathery face tilted toward Weaver as he pulled the trigger, spattering Rodger’s armor with a geyser of skull fragments and brain matter
. Weaver’s back foot slid in gravel, and the next shot came dangerously close to hitting Rodger.

  More gunfire popped in the distance, followed by a loud crack. Andrew was firing both his sidearm and his blaster now. By the time they rescued Rodger, it might be too late for Andrew. This wasn’t the first time Weaver had had to decide who lived or died, and he knew that it wouldn’t be the last—maybe not even today.

  Magnolia snapped the break shut and brought the blaster up as the final creature loped down to her. The blast took off a leg, and its broken body somersaulted toward Weaver. He fired, and it skidded down the slope and stopped almost at his boots, where it raised its head as if to plead for mercy.

  Weaver stomped its skull on the concrete, then went for the monsters surrounding Rodger. There were five left, lunging and swiping at the diver. He dropped his empty pistol and smacked one in the mouth with his rifle butt.

  Weaver took out two of them but couldn’t get a clean shot on the others. The beast Rodger had hit was still on its feet, and howling in rage.

  “Commander!” he shouted as the beast bowled him over, going in for the kill.

  “Almost there!”

  He walked an I-beam to its end and leaped onto the mound of rubble, his boots crunching over broken glass and brick shards. Not far ahead, Magnolia was scrambling to save Rodger. The young diver was beating back the creature that straddled him, but the gaping mouth was inching ever closer to his chest.

  “Help!” he shouted.

  Weaver planted his boots, squared his shoulders, and got the monster’s face in his crosshairs. In the scope, he could see the thick spittle roped across the broken teeth.

  The bullet punched a neat hole in the creature’s smooth forehead. A blind cyclops gushing blood from its ruined socket. It went limp and collapsed onto Rodger.

  Weaver was climbing again before the empty cartridge case hit the ground. He labored up the steep incline, the sound of his own breathing nearly drowning out Andrew’s scream.

  The gunshots from the north suddenly stopped.

  “Hold on, Pipe! We’re coming!”

  At the top of the mound, Magnolia stabbed one of the beasts through the earhole. Yanking the blade free, she screamed to distract the final Siren, which whirled away from Rodger. Claws the size of her knife slashed through the air, but Magnolia jumped back.

  Weaver rested the carbine against the sweet spot on his armor and fired a three-round burst into the Siren’s ribs. Magnolia backed away, and it crashed to the ground, pouring blood onto her boots. It swiped at her one last time as she rushed over to Rodger, who was wiping gore from his visor.

  “Get him up,” Weaver said, searching frantically for Andrew. Now he saw why the gunfire had stopped. A small pack of the beasts had surrounded Andrew. The largest Siren Weaver had ever seen clamped its claws onto the diver’s trapezius muscle and started dragging him, thrashing and screaming, down the road.

  Weaver fired a shot that killed one of the beasts flanking Andrew. His next shot took out another, but he would never be able to kill them all.

  He centered his crosshairs on Andrew’s chest. Killing him now would be the merciful thing. It was what Weaver would want from his squad if he were in the same position. He lined up the shot, moved his finger to the trigger, and paused his breath on the exhalation …

  And couldn’t do it.

  Weaver lowered his rifle as the beasts pulled Andrew around the hill and out of sight.

  Rodger was on his feet now, his arm wrapped around Magnolia’s shoulder. She kept asking him if he was okay as she helped him walk down from the carnage on the hilltop. He was nodding slowly, but Weaver couldn’t tell whether he was injured or just shocked to see Magnolia.

  “Move your asses!” Weaver shouted. “We have to get to Pipe before they kill him.”

  As he started down the other side of the slope, following the trail of blood, he realized that the Sirens weren’t taking Andrew to a lair in the city. They were taking him to the Hilltop Bastion.

  It took them five minutes to get safely down off the rubble heap and reach the dirt hill. Weaver rounded it with his rifle out in front, ready to fire. But Andrew was already gone, with no sign of the monsters that had taken him.

  Weaver lowered his rifle and glanced up. The Hilltop Bastion was like a three-layer cake, with earth on the outside and concrete and metal on the inside. Metal shutters covered the structure above—a lookout, he supposed.

  At the bottom, a pair of massive steel doors pocked with rust sealed off the main entrance. Farther to the right, another door, about the size of a hatch on the Hive, stood open. The blood trail led through it.

  Weaver turned back to Rodger and Magnolia.

  “Looks like the mission has changed from a search and rescue for potential survivors to a search and rescue for Andrew,” he said.

  “How do you know there aren’t survivors here?” Magnolia asked.

  Weaver pointed at the open door. “I doubt humans have learned to cohabitate with Sirens over the years.”

  Rodger’s eyes were wide behind his visor.

  “Can you fight, Rodge?” Weaver asked.

  “I think so,” he whispered.

  Weaver wasn’t used to Rodger being quiet, and he checked to see that he wasn’t in shock. Part of his duty as a commander was to make sure every diver was focused and not a liability to the rest of the team. Rodger’s armor and layered suit were covered in gore. The only clean part was his visor. He looked as though he had taken a bath in blood, but otherwise, he seemed fine. Just a little dazed.

  Magnolia handed Weaver his blaster. “You can have this back. I found Pipe’s rifle.” She ejected the magazine to confirm that it was almost full. Slapping it back into its well, she said, “Let’s go find him.”

  “I’ll take point,” Weaver said.

  He walked up to the open door. Above it, a sign hung from one rivet. It was faded from countless years of exposure and pockmarked with bullet holes, but he could still make out the message: welcome to itc communal 13. offering salvation for those who seek it, and swift judgment for those who deserve it.

  TWELVE

  Michael held Captain Ash’s note back up to the light, then flicked it in frustration. Was there some hidden message that he was missing? He and Layla had read page ninety-four of The New World Order a dozen times, but he still couldn’t understand why they had been sent to find an ancient book about an extinct corporation.

  Layla set the hardcover book back on the table and brushed off the yellowed page. She read over the text for several minutes in silence, which gave Michael time to think about everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours. The quiet time wasn’t exactly a good thing. His thoughts jumped from the storm and the rudders to Captain Ash, to Magnolia’s fall, to the mission on the surface. Something was terribly wrong. He could feel it. Back in the launch bay, he had mused that the calm never lasted, but a chain of disasters like this hadn’t happened since the day X died over a decade ago.

  “What about this?” Layla asked. She pointed to a paragraph, and he leaned over to read.

  A growing number of scientists around the world continue to claim that the field of genetic engineering is key to the survival of our species. Others, however, argue that it will be our downfall. At the forefront are Industrial Tech Corporation and Raven Enterprises. Over the past five years, both companies have made breakthroughs in the field. Andy Robinson, the CEO of ITC, calls genetic engineering the most important part of his company’s mission to safeguard humanity against the threats to our species, while critics call it a threat to humanity itself. Dr. Rod Emanuel claims that ITC’s work, revealed in leaked documents earlier this year, “steps over a line mankind was never meant to cross.”

  Michael glanced up. “I didn’t know that ITC was involved with genetic engineering. Did you?”

  “Not at all,�
�� Layla said, fiddling nervously with the end of her braid. “What business did they have messing with that stuff, anyway?”

  Michael read on but found nothing to answer their questions. Why would Captain Ash have wanted him to read this book? Maybe she really was crazy in the end.

  The thought made Michael bow his head. He missed the captain terribly, but it seemed she wasn’t herself when she died. He didn’t want to remember her like that. He wanted to remember her as the strong, intelligent woman who had helped him become a man. But now he had to wonder. Had she hidden all this from him to protect him emotionally, or for another reason?

  “Are you done?” Layla asked. Michael nodded, and she carefully picked up the book and walked over to Jason’s desk.

  “Sir, I’d like you to look up the checkout history on this title.”

  “Certainly, Miss Brower.”

  Michael joined her and whispered, “What are you doing?”

  “Just wait,” Layla said quietly.

  Jason fired up his monitor and absently scratched his scalp. Like many of the older residents on the ship, he had lost most of his hair. All that remained on his wrinkled scalp were a few wispy strands.

  “Ah, here we go,” he said, peering at the screen. “Looks like … Hmm, that’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?” Layla said.

  He put a finger on his chin as if in deep thought. “My records don’t go back very far, Miss Brower, but it looks as if only two people checked this book out in the past three years—within two weeks of each other.”

  “Who?” Michael asked.

  “Janet Gardner and Maria Ash.”

  “That can’t be,” Michael said. He stepped behind the desk to confirm that the old man was seeing right, but sure enough, Maria Ash had checked the book out three years ago.

  “Something’s wrong with your records,” Michael said.

  Jason frowned and shook his head. “No, Commander, my records are always accurate.”