The dog trotted up to greet him, but the man pointed and yelled, “Inside!” He unlocked the door, and Miles darted through the opening.
In a fluid sequence of movements, the man shouldered his rifle again, turned, and squeezed off shots at the encroaching monsters. The flare was still coughing fire into the street, but there wasn’t much light left, and he didn’t waste it.
He fired a burst into a creature making a run for the door. Rounds punched through its skull, making two neat holes where the eyes should be. Another Siren took its place, and he sent it spinning away with three quick shots to the torso. He leaned into the recoil, picking targets in the waning light. Blood pooled on the ground, and fallen bodies formed a perimeter around the ITC bunker entrance. Behind them, the tentacular arms of the bushes swayed back and forth like the dancing flames of candles.
Barking filled the passage behind him as he fired round after round.
“Hold on, Miles! I’m on my way!”
The bolt locked open on the carbine’s empty chamber. He was reaching for another magazine when a torrent of lightning connected with the steel girders down the street. Dozens of skeletal, leathery bodies moved in the flickering downpour of sparks.
There were too many to fight. It was time to flee.
Lowering the carbine, he shouldered the door shut and barred it from inside. He flicked on his precious tactical light, shined it down the staircase, and loped down to a hallway below.
“Behind me,” he said to Miles.
The dog trotted after him along the narrow passage that stretched under the ITC campus. These derelict arteries connected the basements of buildings designed to survive the apocalypse, though many had since caved in.
The man rounded a corner with weapon raised, but the beam from his light revealed an empty hallway. He knew this passage better than any other. The five doors all led to different rooms. In the first was a space that had been airtight until he opened it to discover food, water, and medical supplies designed to last five hundred years. When he first found this place, he had been dying from blood loss and radiation poisoning. The discovery had saved him, to the extent a dead man could be saved.
The second door opened onto an armory containing guns of all kinds, ammunition, equipment, and radiation suits for adults as well as children. One of the smaller suits, with a bit of alteration, had fit Miles well enough.
He passed the third door at a jog. It was a vault containing every seed that humans would have needed to start again on the surface. The man had spent many hours reading the information on each strain. He carried several of the sealed packets with him, though he wasn’t sure why. Fruit trees couldn’t grow without the sun.
The fourth door, marked by a sign that read cryogenics, was sealed. This was where he had found Miles a year ago, in suspended animation inside one of the chambers.
When the man first came upon the space, he hadn’t known what “cryogenics” meant, but when he took the elevator down and saw the silo of chambers, he understood. Humans, as well as animals unlike any he had ever seen, filled the capsules. Thousands upon thousands of them were hooked up to the backup power that would last another 250 years, but not all of them were preserved. An entire section of chambers was open, and several other sections had been destroyed. Whatever had broken into or out of the chambers was long gone by the time he arrived.
The man was not a god, however, and no matter how lonely he got, he never unfroze any of the other humans. But when he saw Miles suspended in cryo-sleep, he couldn’t resist unfreezing him. He was a Siberian husky, like the dogs on the airship the man had once called home, but the man had quickly realized that Miles was different from those dogs. It was as if he had been designed to survive in hostile conditions. He could tolerate high doses of radiation, and his sharp senses had saved them from the monsters more times than he could count.
Miles ran ahead toward a blast door at the end of the hallway. By the time the man got there, the Sirens had found the door at the street above. The beasts pounded on the steel with their leathery fists. It wouldn’t hold long, but the blast door would buy some extra time. It would also seal them in, and the only other exit was a highly radioactive crawl space. If their suits were uncompromised, they would live; if there was even the smallest tear, they would die.
He fumbled in his pocket for the other key and inserted it in the door, then used all his strength to push it open. Miles hurried inside.
Raising his gun, the man ran the light over a room furnished with metal tables and desks. Radio equipment and flat-screen monitors that no longer worked awaited users who would never arrive. He closed the door with a grunt, locked it, and hurried over to the only working radio.
The man leaned down and turned the knob. Static crackled from the ancient speakers as he scanned the channel for transmissions. But just as in all the other attempts, he heard nothing but static. No voices. No hint that there might be another human soul out there.
A high screech sounded from the hallway, and Miles let out a low growl. The monsters were here. They had never made it inside before. He didn’t have much time.
He turned the knob slowly, straining his ears for any sound of survivors. A chorus of wailing Sirens drowned out the white noise, and he leaned closer to the speakers.
No one had responded to his SOS. He bowed his head, feeling defeated. For two years, he had sent his message out over every frequency, and for two years he had listened to silence. Help wasn’t coming. There was nothing left for him here. Leaving meant abandoning the supplies that had kept him alive, but staying meant he would never see another human again.
Any conflict in his icy heart fell away.
It was finally time to leave this cursed place—finally time to leave hell. He had always wanted to see the ocean. Maybe, in a few more years, he would make it there.
“Come on, boy,” he said to Miles. The dog whined as if he understood, and tried to wag his tail, but the ill-fitting radiation suit hampered his movement.
The Sirens slammed into the blast door, their electronic whines echoing through the space as he recorded his final dispatch from hell.
“If anyone’s out there, this is Commander Xavier Rodriguez. I’m leaving Hades and heading east toward the coast.”
ONE
Captain Leon Jordan jerked awake from a recurring nightmare. He sat up slowly to avoid the aluminum bulkhead that curved over his bed. Sweat traced the scar from his last run-in with it.
The nightmare was almost always the same. In it, X would somehow be in Jordan’s quarters, hovering over his bed with a combat knife in hand. What came next changed from dream to dream. Sometimes, X got his revenge slowly. Other times, he would kill Jordan with a quick slash across his throat. But every time, he would first ask Jordan one simple question: Why?
Jordan massaged his neck and shook off the fog of sleep. The buzz of an incoming transmission combined with the beeping of the alarm clock reminded him that he was already behind schedule.
He reached over Katrina DaVita, who lay sleeping beside him, to shut off the alarm.
“What time is it?” she murmured.
“Time to go over the night logs,” he said, yawning.
“And time for me to go back to sleep.” She patted the pillow and stuffed it back under her head.
Jordan studied her features in the faint glow of the computer screen across the small room. The rules on the Hive were clear—officers weren’t supposed to sleep together. But he couldn’t stop himself any more than he could stop himself now from staring at the beauty lying beside him. His eyes flitted down to the defined curves of her long, muscular legs. She was easily the most beautiful woman on the ship, and she was all his.