“We need to get moving,” he said. “Radiation’s off the graph here.”
Jones nodded his acknowledgment and jogged ahead, his boots crunching over the snow. The greenish-black of his suit’s exoskeleton looked alien against the stark white landscape, the blue glow from the circular battery unit the only sign of life in a place where there was only death.
Weaver pulled the duct-taped handle of his revolver from his holster and gripped the gun in his gloved hand. He would have preferred the blaster, but he had lost it on the dive. They would need to keep moving fast if they wanted to reach their objective without attracting the attention of whatever lived in this frozen waste.
No one had ever returned from Hades to describe what was down here, and with the loss of Team Gold, Weaver’s mind ran wild with images of mutant creatures prowling the city—monsters he didn’t want to encounter without a bigger team and heavy weapons. He imagined the beasts he had seen on other dives: lizards the size of a half-grown child, and one-eyed birds with scaly wings. There were also the massive “stone beasts” he had seen on a salvage dive in the desert city of Las Vegas. The rocky abominations moved like Turtles, but his friend Ned Rico had stumbled into a building where the monsters sat camouflaged, looking like the work of a deranged sculptor. One of them had chomped Rico in half with its massive crocodilian jaws.
The wind howled like a wild animal in the distance. This was Hades—whatever awaited them out there was going to be a lot worse than some mutated little reptile or bird.
“Think we can get across that?” Jones asked, pointing to a bridge over an ice-covered waterway. The structure had partly collapsed, but the right side was intact. Barely four feet wide, but it would have to do; they didn’t have time to backtrack or find another way across the ice.
“Follow me,” Weaver ordered. He tested the ground with one foot and cautiously made his way across. When they reached the other side, he took off at a brisk trot.
His helmet bobbed up and down as he ran, making it a little harder to scan the windowless buildings that lined both sides of the road as they entered the city’s outskirts. Countless decades of accumulating snow had buried much of the Old World, perhaps hiding pitfalls while leaving only the tallest structures visible.
An arctic blast bulldozed into him, making him stagger sideways. Planting his boots against the blustering wind, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.
Stay focused, Rick. Pay attention to what’s real.
His eyes went to his HUD again. It was hard to believe that anything could survive out here for long. The sensor readings put the temperature at negative twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, though he was warm enough inside the layered suit. Indeed, his skin felt slimy from the heat. He blinked away a drop of sweat and relaxed into a loping run, keeping Jones’ blue silhouette in his peripheral vision. Jones maneuvered around jagged obstacles with a grace that reminded Weaver that he was twice Jones’ age. He was having a hard time keeping up with the younger man.
“Stay close,” he ordered.
Towers framed his view to the west, blocking his view of the industrial zone. They were in the heart of the city now, surrounded by ruins and tilted or broken skyscrapers. He continued to scan the area for signs of life, but the shifting snow was covering their tracks almost as they made them.
“Hold up,” Weaver said. He stopped and crouched. “We gotta get off this road. We’re too exposed here.”
He spied an off-ramp that led northwest. They were getting close to the first crate. Only a quarter mile now. The thought put an extra spring in his step as they pushed their way down the street.
“Up there,” Weaver said, pointing toward a steep snowbank that rose up from the roadside.
He leaped onto the pile and pulled his way up on all fours. At the top, he dropped to his belly, pulled the binos from his tactical vest, and glassed the area, searching for the crate.
Jones dropped down beside him and pulled out his binos.
“Looks like we have to find a way around that,” Weaver said, pointing to a massive sinkhole that had swallowed an entire city block to the northwest.
Jones checked his minicomputer, then looked back over the landscape.
“You sure?” he said. “The map shows the crate’s beacon somewhere between here and that hole.”
Weaver brushed off the layer of snow that had stuck to his visor. Jones was right. They were damn close to the supply box.
“Let’s move,” Weaver said. He scrambled to his feet and took off in a rolling trot toward the sinkhole. His eyes darted from the nav marker on his HUD to the cavernous pit in front of him. He panted as he worked his way through the thick snow, every stride more exhausting than the last.
“Wait up!” Jones called after him.
“Keep up!” Weaver shouted back. He clambered over hunks of icy metal and courses of brick protruding from the ground. Reaching the edge, he dug his boots into the snow and pivoted to brace against the gusting wind. The crate’s beacon blinked on his HUD. They were right on top of it. Their supplies, weapons, and extra boosters—it all was supposed to be right there. A blast of ice and grit whistled past him, nudging him closer to the edge.
Jones arrived a second later, gasping for air, his hands on his armor-plated knees. “It’s got… It’s got to be down there.”
“Hold my armor,” Weaver said.
Jones slipped his fingers under Weaver’s back plate, and Weaver leaned closer to the side for a better look. The pit was too dark for his night-vision optics to penetrate, so he snatched a flare from his vest, tore off the end, and rubbed it against the coarse striking surface. Red flame shot out the end. He held the crackling flare over the edge, and fuzzy outlines of rubble came into view. And there in the center of it all, canted at a steep angle on a pile of concrete and rebar, was the supply crate.
Weaver cursed the technicians. They never managed to drop the crates close to the DZ, and this time, they had dropped it straight into the only sinkhole within a mile of the target zone.
“It’s here,” Weaver said. “We’ve gotta find a way down.”
He waved the flare left and then right. The red glow spread across the bottom of the hole. There was something else down there. Where there should be only snow, he could see a half-dozen lumps the size of massive pumpkins, covered in some sort of spikes or thorns. Jones held on tighter as another gust of wind slammed into them. Scrambling to keep his balance, Weaver dropped the flare and watched it tumble lazily to the bottom. It hissed, and a halo of red blossomed out to light the enclosed space.
“Shit,” Weaver said. He was reaching for his binos, when the floor of the pit came strangely alive. A tremor rippled across the snow, and the thorny bulges dotting the ground began to move.
Weaver stared, dumbfounded. It had to be some sort of illusion.
“Jones, I… I see something,” he whispered.
To his astonishment, one of the lumps shook itself and slowly rose up on what looked like two long, gangly legs.
“There’s something else down there?” Jones asked.
Weaver took a full step back and tried to say something, but a croak was all he could muster. He didn’t need his binos to see that the thing was some sort of humanoid creature. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if it was a Hell Diver who had somehow managed to survive.
He leaned back for a better look, flinching when the beast dropped to all fours and shambled toward the flare. It crouched next to it, tilting a face Weaver couldn’t see, and pawed at the fire streaking across the snow. With a shriek of agony, it snapped its hand away from the brilliant glowing heat and darted away, still yowling. In a matter of seconds, similar creatures had arisen from the other strange lumps on the sinkhole floor, and they, too, were shrieking. The wails reverberated out of the hole and morphed into a high-pitched noise that hurt his ears.