“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.