Nicholas Sansbury Smith
HELL DIVERS II: GHOSTS
For Maria… You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.
The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
PROLOGUE
The last man on Earth knew that monsters were hunting him. It didn’t matter that he was already dead and condemned to hell; the beasts would never quit.
Lightning guided him and the dog through the ruins of the city. They moved through the darkness with calculated precision, his radiation suit snug around his lean muscles and scarred flesh. His Siberian husky, Miles, wore a similar suit to protect him.
The dog turned to check out a noise coming from a heap of rubble. A bottle rolled down the side, bounced, and shattered at the bottom. The wind whipped over the crest of the mound, picking up a tin can and whirling it away in the draft.
The man swept his assault rifle back and forth for contacts. He couldn’t see the creatures, but he could sense them out there.
Miles trotted on, uninterested.
The ground ahead was clear for now, but the path ahead was treacherous. Taking cautious strides over the debris field, the man melted into a passage through the crumbled ruins of a city block. Blackened metal bruised with rust littered his path. The jagged ends could rip his suit open with ease.
He stopped and signaled Miles to halt. The dog sat on his hind legs, and they waited for a flash of lightning to illuminate the path forward. The man knew this route well and had memorized where the main hazards lay, but even so, every step was fraught with danger.
A sinkhole fifteen steps ahead had nearly swallowed him and Miles a few months back. Twenty more steps beyond the pit was a wall of sharp rebar that had ripped his suit twice before. But the biggest danger aside from the monsters were the clusters of poisonous weeds growing here. No matter how many times he cut them down with his machete, they would grow back even thicker. Their sting would maim him, but it could kill a dog.
A flash of lightning spread its blue glow over the flayed iron ribs of an old building. The man didn’t waste the light. He never wasted the light. He made a quick sweep for hostiles with his rifle muzzle, checked for the lethal weeds, then plodded forward into the belly of the building.
Thunder boomed overhead, like a war drum urging him forward. He listened for other sounds: the skittering of clawed feet, or, worst of all, the otherworldly wailing of the Sirens.
But tonight, he did not hear them. Whatever hunted them was a different kind of monster.
He and Miles moved silently through the gutted corpse of an old-world building. Steel girders rose above them like the bones of a gigantic beast. When he first discovered this place, it had reminded him of the fossils of dinosaurs he had seen in books, growing up.
Another flash of lightning lit up a pair of real fossils. The remains of two souls rested in the dirt ahead, curled up in the fetal position. The larger skeleton hugged the smaller one—a mother protecting her child from the blast that had leveled the city hundreds of years ago.
The man tried to feel something at the sight. Memories flooded his mind, but he pushed them away as he always did. Damned men had no right to feel.
His old life seemed far away now, and he wasn’t sure what he had done to deserve such a horrible punishment. Part of him wished he had just died in the sky two years ago, fried by lightning or snatched by the winged hunters. But he had Miles. A dog and a dream—that was all he had.
They pushed on through the waste, toward the one thing that kept him venturing out into the darkness. Today was the last time he would check the radio transmissions. If there was no response to his SOS, he would finally leave Hades.
For two years he had waited to hear something from the people in the sky. For two years he had scavenged the wastes with Miles, in search of food and supplies to keep them going until help arrived. They had evaded the monsters and fought them when they couldn’t run anymore.
Time was hard to measure, especially when he had no idea whether it was night or day. He lived his life in the darkness, and he had given up marking the wall of his shelter over a year ago. As the days turned into months, and the months into years, he had realized that in hell there was no salvation—and no escape. If he tried to leave now, he would have to abandon their supplies, food, and only source of water. Trekking to the wastes beyond Hades would likely mean death for them both.
Time was everything, and time was nothing. And as it slowly passed, details of his earlier life eroded away like bones turning to dust. The faces and voices of people he had lost became harder to remember.
That was how he knew he was dead. His body might still be alive, but the loneliness and isolation had killed whatever remained of his soul.
And yet, there was still a seed of something human inside the man. Perhaps it was his affection for Miles. He wanted to protect the dog, as he had once protected people.
Something else pushed him on through the merciless world that humans had once called home. The man had a strong desire to fight. It was something deep in the marrow of his bones, like a cancer that he couldn’t kill.
Miles stopped before a pocket of glowing bushes. Tentacles with needle-lined suction cups reached out for the dog, and the man motioned him back.
The wind swayed the stems dangerously close, and he took another step back. A year ago, he had almost died when one stung his leg. He still had the suction-cup scar—yet another badge on his tormented flesh.
Raising the rifle, he checked his surroundings again. Awareness was the key to survival. Miles provided keener ears and eyes, but his sense of smell was handicapped by the mask he wore.
The man listened, scanned, listened again, then directed the dog onward. The Industrial Tech Corporation bunker wasn’t far now, but it was buried deep in the guts of the city.
The lightning continued to guide him through the skeletal remains of the building. He pulled out his machete and hacked through a bush in their path. The limbs plopped to the ground, wriggling like decapitated snakes.
He wiped the gooey sap off carefully on the ground and resheathed the blade. They took a slight detour around the next clump of weeds. The stems, activated by their presence, blinked alive with a dull pink glow. Like most life-forms on the surface, this one was carnivorous.
The sky boomed and he glanced up at the swirling soup of clouds and static electricity. The storm was growing.
A single raindrop splashed across his visor. One beat later, the clouds erupted, pouring sheets of radioactive acid rain over the city. Miles, scared by the sound of thunder, brushed up against his leg.
The man considered turning back to his shelter but decided to brave the storm. He was almost to the place where he had discovered Miles a year ago. They pressed on, the dog trotting closely alongside as they navigated the final stretch of flashing bushes. The glow pulsing over the path was eerie yet beautiful. The sign of life offered a slim hope that maybe, someday, the surface would thrive again.
Perhaps hell wasn’t for eternity.
A shotgun blast of lightning snapped him back from his thoughts. It arced into a debris pile three stories high on the western edge of the open tunnel. Sparks rained down over hunks of brick and spikes of rebar.
He took a step forward but halted when he saw movement. Miles saw it at the same time and took a few crouching steps forward, then let out a low growl.
The man’s eyes weren’t as good as the dog’s, and he had to squint. Rain slammed into him as he waited for light. Three beats passed before lightning arced overhead and backlit the city blocks. This time, he didn’t need to squint.