Curiosity once again getting the best of her, she reached back for another flare.
“Weaver’s waiting on us,” Rodger protested.
“This’ll only take a second.”
He scooted up closer and tried to see past her, but Magnolia just moved her fingers, signaling for the flare.
“Fine,” he huffed.
She grabbed it, struck the surface, and flung it out as far as she could. This time, the red glow bloomed over something that took her breath away.
“Come on, Mags. Tell me what you see.”
She waited just to be sure, but the familiar beetle shape sitting on raised platforms across the room wasn’t a figment of her imagination.
“Hey, Rodge, do you remember Timothy saying anything about an airship down here?”
She moved aside to let him see.
“Holy shit,” he murmured. “Is that really a ship?”
Magnolia smirked. “Think you can figure out how to fly it?”
Sweat rolled down Weaver’s forehead even as his armor shed the water from the treatment plant. He couldn’t see much without his night vision, and the quiet darkness was starting to unnerve him.
The optics weren’t all that had malfunctioned after his swim. His battery charge had dropped from 70 to 20 percent, and the glow from the dying unit penetrated only a few feet around him. If the heart of his suit gave out, his worst fear would come to pass and he would die in this tomb, blind and deaf.
But Weaver refused to die alone, in the darkness underground. He had lived his whole life in the sky, and he couldn’t bear the thought of spending his last moments trapped down here. He wouldn’t go out like Andrew, especially at the hands of the Sirens.
Blaster in one hand and broken femur in the other, he continued up the steps. He had discarded the wet shells, and though the ones on the outside of his vest were just as wet, he had found a couple of homemade buckshot rounds, which he kept in a pouch. The two shells weren’t going to save him if he encountered the Sirens again, but the ammunition made him feel a little less helpless.
A rattling around the next corner signaled a new threat approaching. He set the thighbone down and placed his palm over his headlamp before switching it on. He took his hand away for an instant before covering the lamp again. In the single moment of light, he glimpsed something unexpected in the stairwell above.
Tubes webbed across the walls at the next landing. He pulled the cup of his hand away from the headlamp and ran the light over them. Pores dotted the rubbery black skin, and every few feet, a halo of spiky growths surrounded bulbous black openings like lashes protecting an eyeball. The walls that the tubes ran across were not equidistant here. They appeared bent inward, and Weaver quickly saw why. The tubes fed into wider holes in the concrete, leaving gaps that exposed the earth. Feathers and white grit had piled on the floor.
This wasn’t another nesting area of the Sirens—it was the home of the cyclopean camouflaged beasts he had encountered outside the treatment plant. The tubes appeared to be some sort of passage or burrow to move from the facility through the earth, and perhaps back to the surface. The openings appeared to be doors of some sort.
Vultures, he mused. These mutants looked something like the carrion birds from the archives. But the camouflage made them even better scavengers.
Not good.
Weaver was sandwiched between the nesting grounds of a new type of mutant, and the home of the Sirens ten floors below. This place, unlike the other ITC facilities he had raided on past dives, seemed to be home to a variety of monsters.
As he picked the femur back up, he considered the barrier in the stairwell. For some reason, the Sirens didn’t seem to venture up this way, which meant these emaciated vultures must be more dangerous than they looked.
Holding his weapons loosely in his gloved hands, he continued up the landing. There was only one logical way out of this monster-infested facility, and that was up. He would take his chances with the one-eyed, one-armed scavengers over the eyeless beasts below.
On three, you’re going to stop this lollygagging around and run like a man.
He bolted up the stairs on the count of two. The ceiling and walls had shifted as if an earthquake had hit the stairwell. Wide cracks spiderwebbed across the concrete. Navigating around the barbed spikes that lined the holes, Weaver brushed up against one of them, and the lash-like growths scraped his armor. But they weren’t hard like teeth after all; they reminded him more of stems from the glowing bushes he had encountered on other dives.
He leaped over a tube crossing the stairs and ducked under another hanging from the ceiling as he approached the next landing. All the while, he heard a low, insistent hissing sound, like air escaping from a ruptured pressure suit.
Weaver kept running, but the sound seemed to surround him from all sides. Motion flickered from an opening in a tube above him, and the spiky eyelashes fluttered. All at once, eyeballs on stems popped out like periscopes to peer at him. A vulture pulled itself out of the tube overhead and plopped onto the landing.
Weaver swung the femur. The bone connected, and splattered the eye with a loud pop. Milky fluid peppered his armor as he ran past the beast. It crashed into the wall, clawing at its ruined eye.
He rounded the corner and halted before running up the steps. The rubbery surfaces of the burrows bulged as vultures crawled through them. Spiky lashes opened like the mouths of Venus flytraps, disgorging a dozen of the feathery beasts into the passage. And those were just the ones he could see with his lamp. Others, fully camouflaged, skittered across the walls.
This must be why the Sirens didn’t venture up here, he thought grimly.
The gray creatures snapped their hooked beaks at him as he ran. Those that ventured too close on the right, he batted away with the femur; those to his left, he smacked with the barrel of the blaster.
He fought for every step, swinging, stabbing, and bulldozing his way through the small army of mutant creatures. But it wasn’t the beasts he could see that were the problem. How many more were hiding in the shadows?
The tubes around him continued to bulge with reinforcements. He considered firing his blaster, but the two shots were too valuable to squander on beasts the size of a dog. Their curved beaks and claws were sharp, but they weren’t as strong or as fast as the alpha-predator Sirens.
He batted three of them out of the way and rounded another corner, followed by the squawking din. Creatures he couldn’t see grabbed at him with their single arms and pecked at his armor with their beaks. A sharp pain stabbed his right shoulder. Claws slashed his ankle, drawing a cry of pain as he dropped to one knee. He swung both weapons in a wide arc, sending several of the creatures crashing into the wall.
Something moved above him, and only then did he realize how badly he had underestimated the little monsters. If there were enough of them, they didn’t need to be strong or fast to take him down and pick his bones clean.
By the time he looked up, the beast was already on him. It landed on his booster with such force that he hit the stairs with a grunt. The hiss that followed wasn’t from the vultures; it was from the escaping helium. Worse, a crack now rickracked across his broken visor, letting in the toxic air.
Through the cracked visor, he could just make out a door at the top of the stairs. He was almost to the operations room. The rusted door was at the landing not ten steps above him, but with his suit and visor compromised, he wouldn’t survive long even if he made it there.
In a fit of rage, Weaver bucked the vulture off him. He stabbed another beast through the chest with the ragged end of the thighbone and swung the barrel of his blaster into a pair on his left. Then, lowering his helmet, he bolted up the last stairs, spearing through the remaining vultures as they snapped and pecked at him with their beaks.