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“Warning, warning! Losing helium.”
X stared at the sun for another long moment before a coughing fit snapped him out of his trance. Blood flecked the inside of his visor. His eyes looked above the speckles to the sensor reading on his HUD.
For the past few hours, he had hung in the harness of his booster, coming to grips with his fate. Accepting that he had sacrificed his life to save Team Raptor, Commander Rick Weaver from Ares, and everyone living on the Hive—the last bastion of humanity.
Tin was up there, and Captain Ash—everyone X cared deeply for. Now they would have another chance at survival. Maybe for just another week, a month, or maybe a year. But it was better than nothing. It was more than X had.
He clutched the aching wound in his belly. The blood had crusted over the gash from a Siren’s claw. The pain, mercifully, had numbed on the outside, though it hurt like hell when he moved.
He groaned as he raised his wrist to check the computer. According to the reading, he was at twenty-five thousand feet, far above the electrical storms. Even in the bright sunlight, the temperature was −31°F.
The heating pads in his suit would keep out the chill, but only for a time. His battery unit was at 40 percent. When that ran out, he would freeze to death, whether here or back on the surface of Hades.
Either way, with the helium draining from his balloon, he was in a world of trouble.
X glanced down at the storm clouds flashing beneath his boots. First, he would fall through those. If the lightning didn’t kill him, then he would plummet to the surface, which would turn his already battered body into a loose bag of pulp.
Unless, by some sliver of chance, he could find a pocket in the storm that would allow him to do a controlled descent by releasing helium.
A glance at the altimeter on his wrist computer told him he was losing altitude.
“Son of a . . .” X searched for a break in the storm he had risen through just a few minutes ago. Lighting flashed across the black, scalloped floor, splitting outward before vanishing. X felt the clap of thunder against his chest.
He coughed. It felt like being kicked in the ribs. He knew that even if he did manage to get back to the ground without being fried, he was going to need more than the medical pack in the supply crate down there. He needed a safe place to patch himself up, hydrate, and eat something.
Where could he find a place safe from beasts and radiation? The ITC building was blown to smithereens, and the rest of the facility was crawling
with the eyeless winged monstrosities.
It was as bleak a situation as he could recall.
And yet X fought on, because that was all he knew.
Maybe the airship would come back, maybe it would drop supplies down, or maybe another team . . .
But no, Captain Ash would never do that. It was a waste of resources when everyone thought he was dead.
He felt the dread starting to sink in; then the warning sensors snapped him back to reality. He was going down whether he wanted to or not.
Dazzled by the blazing sun, he twisted around in the harness to look behind him. Wherever he turned, he saw the same swollen black mattress of clouds seething with flashes of lightning.
The balloon was losing helium faster now. The altitude on his wrist computer ticked down to twenty-three thousand feet. The battery unit was holding its charge, though, which meant that if he got back down, he might make it to the supply crate, and then he could find somewhere safe to shelter and dress his wounds.
Somewhere safe, he thought with a dry laugh. He had no weapons besides his knife, and Hades was crawling with Sirens.
Even if he could get to the crate for the medical pack and weapons, he would have to fight off any beasts, while injured, with nothing but the blade.
He had long since used up his nine lives—or ninety-plus lives, considering all the dives he had survived. Getting down without being fried would be a miracle. Getting to the crate alive would be damn near impossible.
Finding all that he needed to survive, while not getting eaten in the process, would require nothing short of divine intervention.
“I don’t deserve it anyway,” X growled, glancing up. “Do what you want with me. Send whatever you’ve got. Rip me apart and scatter my bones.”
As if in answer, a brilliant white lightning flash enveloped him; then a blast like a cannon shot seemed to stop the world.
The storm reached up to meet his boots, lightning forking in all directions. Again the booming thunder rattled his bones. Steeling himself, he entered the storm. In an instant, the sun vanished as the black clouds seemed to suck him in.
X checked his altitude again. He was just above twenty thousand feet now—a long way to go before he set foot on solid ground again. On dives,
when he needed to get down to the surface faster, he would turn his body head-down and plummet like a spear. A suicide dive, they called it.
Now, without a chute, that wasn’t an option. But he could let the helium escape faster. He reached behind his helmet and felt for the knob on the booster pack.
As the static charge around him grew, he felt the hair on his neck stand up. He needed to get out of here. Without wasting another second, he twisted the knob.
The helium hissed out, and the balloon dipped. He closed his eyes, memories of his past flashing through his mind. First came an image of his deceased wife, Rhonda. They never had the best relationship, but he had loved her, and she had loved him. X wished he had been a better husband. Maybe they could have had children. It would have been something they could leave behind that they had made together.
But life on the Hive was cruel. Cancer took her, and X lost himself in bottle after bottle of shine. He would love some right now.
Accept your past without regret . . .
X thought of the fortune cookie that Tin had given him before this mission. He could picture the kid’s innocent face. His laugh. His intelligence. Michael Everhart was the best of humanity, just as his dad had been.
A pistol shot of thunder in his ear accompanied the blue hue of waning lightning. Another flash struck to his right. Floating through the three-dimensional minefield, he braced himself for the strike that would end his life.
Handle your present with confidence . . .
X pictured the bravest man he had ever known: Michael’s father, Aaron Everhart. He was tough, but also the nicest guy in the room. And he always had a joke and a smile, no matter who you were. Aaron was so unlike X, who knew how to joke but rarely cracked a grin.
He thought about days of training with Team Raptor in the launch bay on the Hive. Teasing each other and breaking each other’s balls as they tried to forget that they were preparing for what would likely be the end for some of them.
Then he thought of the dive that had taken them all: Rodney, Will, and Aaron.
A faulty weather sensor had doomed their mission from the start. Acting on bad
information, Captain Maria Ash had dumped Raptor into an electrical storm far more severe even than this one.
X felt the hair on his forearms prickle again, and again he opened his eyes.
The storm swirled around him, the lightning reminding him of how it all had gone to shit that day. One by one, he had watched the other divers’ sensors blink off until only his and Aaron’s remained.
X looked down as the shelf of clouds lightened under him. Somehow, it seemed he was doing it again. Against all odds, he had made it through the gauntlet unscathed.
The leaning skeletons of ancient scrapers rose out of the ground below him like crooked, broken teeth. Deserted roadways gridded the white terrain, littered here and there with the debris of a collapsed bridge.
He looked east, trying to get his bearings. A few miles away, smoke billowed into the air where the divers had blown up the ITC building. The winged abominations still circled like vultures. That was where the second team had died. Sam, Cruise, Murph . . . Hades had chewed up and spat out so many divers in such a short time.
As he floated ever closer to the barren ground, X visualized his plan. He would land, then sneak over to the supply crate to grab a weapon and the med pack. Then he would find a way into the old facilities, which had been designed to withstand nuclear Armageddon. There, deep beneath the surface, he would search for food and water.
But there would also be monsters.
Face your future without fear . . .
He watched the beasts in the sky. The closer he got to landing, the greater his chances of being detected. But he had to get down there. It was his only shot.
The snowy ground rose up to meet his boots. X braced for impact. The gut wound seemed to pull apart as he hit the frozen ground. He let out an involuntary cry of pain.
Going down on one knee, he threw up in his mouth and forced it back down. The acid burned his raw throat as he scanned the terrain with his night-vision optics.
He had landed on the edge of the ITC campus. Nothing seemed to be moving among the conical mounds of debris covered in fresh snow. Still, he checked for tracks. Then he set about patching up the tear in
his suit. At least that would keep out the radiation until he could get to the actual wound.
With his suit sealed off, he set out toward the column of smoke rising toward the clouds. His first step told him he had sprained his right ankle when he hit the ground, adrenaline masking the pain until now.
X gripped the knife, staggering slightly as a wave of dizziness passed over him. He had lost a lot of blood, and his body had undergone much trauma. But he was Commander Xavier Rodriguez, damn it, and he wasn’t dead yet.
He trekked into the snow, shifting his weight and navigating the icy piles of rubble around decaying buildings. Listening for the electronic shriek of the Sirens, he heard nothing over the wind and sporadic thunder.
X stopped to rest, clutching his wound and gasping at the pain, which was getting worse.
The billowing smoke was close, though. Just a few more hills to get over or around. He pushed onward as lightning split the horizon, forking out like the spokes of a wheel.
The glow spread over the bare and rusting girders of a collapsed building. He carefully worked his way up onto the wreckage for a view of the field where the supply crate awaited. He could make out three of the sightless winged monsters circling the smoke.
Thunder clapped as he climbed the destroyed structure. In the following silence, he heard a noise that made him halt.
The ethereal wail of a Siren rang out. He counted the beasts: five on the ground, three in the air. Not good odds to face with only a knife. If he could get to the crate, maybe then he would have a chance.
Scanning for it with his NVGs, he saw a dozen inert mutant forms sprawled in the snow where they had fallen in the recent battle. And there among them, he saw the open lid of the supply crate. A thousand feet away, maybe.
He wondered how close he could get before the beasts homed in on his battery unit. But if he disconnected it, the cold would soon render him all but helpless in the fight.
He could wait the monsters out, hoping they would flee.
Or he could walk out there and kill them.
Standing there, X forgot about the past, drew in a breath of confidence, and faced his monsters without fear.
He pried a foot-long hunk of rebar from the weathered concrete. With the bar in
one hand and his knife in the other, he did a standing glissade down an icy bank of snow to the ground.
X made it five hundred feet before the first eyeless face jerked in his direction.
The creature bounded toward him, snarling like a dog. Six feet from him, it leaped. X ducked under the claws, bringing his knife up and slicing through flesh. The beast landed on all fours, agile until its entrails slopped out of the gash X had left in its belly. It flopped over, screeching.
The three airborne beasts had half his attention now, and the four on the ground occupied the other half. He managed a sort of limping run, doing his best to ignore the pain in his abdomen and ankle. He covered two hundred feet, three hundred.
Across the field, a Siren was closing in. It sprang past the crate on all fours, picking up speed, only fifty feet away from X.
He pushed forward, groaning in pain as he tried to anticipate its moves. Unlike the first creature, this one didn’t spring into the air. It put its armored head down and barreled straight at him. He swung the rebar, striking the deformed dome with a crack that knocked it off kilter. The creature slid in the snow, shrieking. X went down, too, falling just feet away from the crate.
He got to his feet again and immediately ducked under the claws of a flying monster, which pulled up and flapped back into the sky. He reached into the crate and hauled out the first weapon he could find: a pump-action shotgun with shells in a bandolier strap.
X put the buttstock on his thigh and began loading shells. The creature with the cracked head seemed to be regaining its bearings. He pumped a shell in and brought up the buttstock to his shoulder as it came at him. The round blasted off half its face, the recoil knocking X back against the crate.
Using the hard case of the crate for cover, he pumped in another shell. Then he sighted up a beast that was flanking him from behind. The next blast opened a gaping wound in its ribs.
X glanced up at a creature diving from the sky. He raised the shotgun and, clenching his jaw to keep from crying out in pain, aimed and pulled the trigger. The double-aught buckshot blew off a wing, sending the
monster spiraling into the ground.
Another mutant creature jumped over the crate. Landing in front of X, it snapped at the gun’s muzzle just as he fired another shell. The buckshot sent it flying backward into the snow, half its head gone.
He aimed at the Siren with the injured wing as it tried to scramble over to him. The blast ended its oscillating cry. A new shriek answered.
This one was different. Two more of the monsters chimed in.
X looked around him, lightheaded but alert enough to see the other creatures fleeing. He held the shotgun in his right hand as if it were a pistol while pressing the left against his throbbing abdominal wound.
“That’s right, you ugly fucks,” he grunted. “I got lots more where that came from!”
He fell on his rear and slumped with his back to the crate, chuckling at the realization that he was somehow, against all odds, still alive.
But he also knew that Hades wasn’t done with him yet.
DAY 2
The alarm’s relentless beeping dragged X from his slumbers. He opened his eyes to the green hue of his HUD, where the words battery low snapped him alert. The battery unit powering his life-support systems had fallen to just 9 percent.
But how was that possible?
He fought the wave of fatigue that weighed down on his eyelids. Forcing them open, he looked out through his cracked visor. All he could see was darkness, and all he could feel was pain. In his head. His limbs, his chest, and, Oh God, the pain in his stomach took his breath away as he reached up to turn on his helmet light.
“Ughh,” he moaned.
The beam cut through the darkness, hitting stained concrete walls in all directions. At first, he had no recollection of where he was. He followed the bright glow of his lights over a tunnel opening with a rusted sign that looked like a municipal logo. He was sitting with his back against the wall of a chamber with what appeared to be an intake and an outtake hole. Both grates had long since decayed and broken off.
A foggy memory entered his brain. He shined the light on the ladder he had used to climb down from a manhole above. He also remembered how he had torn his wound when lifting off the manhole cover.
X lowered the
beams on his helmet to his chest rig. A shoddy patch job had stopped the bleeding, but he had yet to properly dress the wound.
Arrayed beside him were his shotgun, an assault rifle, a medical bag, and a backpack with extra ammunition. A glance at his mission clock told him he had been down here eight hours after reaching the supply crate. Now it made sense why his battery was so low.
He gritted his teeth as he moved to check out the bandage over his wound. He vaguely recalled patching up his suit and adding the bandage. He must have passed out from the pain.
That couldn’t happen again. He had to stay awake. He had to treat his wounds.
He raised his wrist computer to check the radiation levels. The meter rose up to the red level, indicating it wasn’t safe here without a rad suit. Unfortunately, he had no choice. If he wanted to survive, he must take the suit off to treat his injuries.
Do it fast. Gotta do this fast, old man.
X unlocked the straps on his chest rig and removed the side plates. Next, he carefully peeled the patch off his torn suit. The gash was an angry red—infected and also in need of stitches.
He moaned again as he pulled out a sterile pad to clean the wound, topical antibiotic to disinfect the wound, and a tube of glue to seal it off.
X worked quickly, fighting the agony and forcing himself to stay awake. Every few seconds, he scanned the two dark holes in the wall for hostiles. He could almost picture the wrinkled, eyeless face of a Siren peering out of the open tunnel that dumped into the chamber.
The longest and by far the most painful part was cleaning the wound. Once that was finished, he carefully applied the antibiotic powder, then glued it shut. The glue smarted at first, like the sting of an insect. It grew more intense, almost as if his skin had caught fire. The pain was astonishing but also good. It meant he was in better shape than he had thought.
Now he could move to his next objective: finding a better shelter. After that, he could start searching for a long-range radio to call for evac, a battery charger, ammo, food, and water.
He secured his aFor a fleeting moment, ...rmor, then stuffed the medical kit back in the rucksack. The movement made him dizzy. Using the wall for support, he stood. His ankle felt better already. That was good. Maybe it wasn’t a sprain after all. A small victory if he could move better. Moving meant living.
He slung the assault rifle over his shoulder, but he decided to carry the shotgun.
