Ghosts

ELEVEN

Rodger followed Andrew through the rubble. He swept his rifle over the terrain, searching for contacts. Though he didn’t look it, he was one of the best shots of all the Hell Divers. That didn’t mean he enjoyed killing.

He gripped the wooden stock with one hand and raised the other to check the rad readings on his monitor. There was a joke somewhere in his mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to crack it. Today, he was all business. No jokes, no farts, no laughs. This wasn’t some green dive. His life and the lives of his fellow divers depended on him.

Magnolia’s life depended on him.

“You think she’s okay?” he asked.

Andrew turned slightly. His big shoulders cast a wide shadow on the path.

“Shit, Mags is tougher than you think.” Andrew stood there a moment and then laughed. “You really dig her, don’t you?”

Rodger felt his cheeks warm. Was it that obvious?

He kept walking, eyes on the sky. The gift he had been making for her wasn’t finished, but he had brought it with him anyway. Tomorrow was never a guarantee, and a mostly finished present was better than nothing.

The sharp crack of thunder made Rodger flinch. A few hundred feet to the left, and the strike would have ended him. But the lightning arced into a pile of broken rock and concrete instead.

Thirty minutes had passed since Weaver’s last transmission, and Rodger was growing anxious.

“We need to find that crate,” Andrew said. “It’s gotta be close.”

Rodger nodded. According to the minimap on his wrist monitor, they were almost on top of the supply box that their shipboard team had dropped. The nav marker he had set blinked.

“After you, Mr. Pipe,” he said, bowing.

Andrew shook his head, shouldered his assault rifle, and took point on a path lined on both sides by ten feet of debris. The nearby buildings had been reduced to rubble. In the distance, a hill rose above the destruction. On top of it stood an almost cubical concrete structure with a domed roof.

That was their target.

But first, they needed supplies.

Rodger raised the scope to his visor and zoomed in on the charred slope of the hill. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the trees that had once shaded the dirt. He had seen pictures of trees in the archives, from spindly saplings to forests of giant ponderosas. Why couldn’t he have been born three hundred years earlier? He would have built himself a nice little cabin away from everyone, a place on a lake with a good view of the mountains.

It was a pipe dream. In this devastated world, his greatest ambition was that someday he would see a real tree.

They skirted an immense crater. This wasn’t from a bomb. Rodger could tell by the radiation readings. They were high, but not that high. The hole was probably once a man-made lake. A place where people picnicked. Now it was just poisoned dirt.

He took a second to scan the sky, searching again for Weaver and Magnolia. “Those rads are increasing,” Andrew warned.

Rodger checked his wrist monitor. They were already in deadly territory. Without their suits, they would have been dead after a few hours. The numbers didn’t inspire confidence of finding any survivors—at least, not aboveground.

The mountains of rubble continued after they passed the crater. Andrew stopped in the center of the road to look at the one on his left, then his right.

“Damn,” he muttered. “I bet the crate landed on one of those.”

Rodger followed Andrew’s finger to the top of the four-story pile on the right. It wasn’t the first time their supply crates had been dropped somewhere inconvenient. Sometimes, he thought the support crew did it on purpose.

“Better start climbing,” Andrew said.

“Why me?” Rodger cradled his gun across his chest and glanced up the pile of concrete, glass, girders, and plastic.

“’Cause I hold rank. Stop wasting time and get your skinny ass up there.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Pipe, sir,” Rodger said. He laughed and looked for a route up. Hunks of concrete sidewalk stuck out from the pile. They looked sturdy enough. He would use them as makeshift steps. He threw the strap of his rifle over his shoulder and climbed up the first two with ease. Then he jumped onto the loose rubble. The loose grains slid under his boots. He took another step, packing it down, but still it felt unstable. He grabbed a piece of rebar sticking out of the mess and used it for balance.

Glass crunched under his boots. There was a little bit of everything out here, like a giant scrap yard of shit from the Old World: plastic, sheet metal, concrete, brick, and even some preserved wood. He was always on the lookout for it. But rarely did he find anything he could use in his shop. Most of the time, he didn’t have lift capacity in the crate to get any noncritical items back anyway.

He stopped halfway up the pile to check the sky again. The higher vantage point gave him a good view of the scrapers near the ocean. The flashing glow in his night-vision optics seemed weaker. Each green pulse illuminated the skyline, and by its light he saw a flurry of motion.

“I think I see them,” Rodger said. He took another step and stopped to focus on the spot where he had seen movement. He shut off his optics, expecting to see the blue glow of battery packs, but there was only darkness.

“What the hell?” he whispered.

He bumped the optics back on. There to the east, just over the scrapers, something was moving just below the clouds. Rodger reached for his rifle and pushed the scope to his visor.

A transmission fired over the open channel as he zoomed in.

“Apollo One, this is Angel One. Do you copy?

“Roger, Angel One,” Andrew replied.

“Have you found the crate yet?” Weaver asked.

“Negative. We’re still looking.”

Weaver’s voice cracked, and not from static. “Find shelter immediately, Apollo One. I repeat, find shelter!”

Rodger bumped off his NVGs again and zoomed in on the dots he had mistaken for Weaver and Magnolia. He flinched as the red light of the towers backlit a sky full of winged creatures.

The otherworldly wail of Sirens sounded in the distance.

Rodger lost his footing, and his boots slid.

“No, no, no,” he moaned. After regaining his balance, he pushed the scope back to his eye and saw just one sparkling blue dot.

His heart stuttered at the sight. Where was…?

He zoomed in again on Magnolia and Weaver, sailing away from the beasts flapping after them. Now he knew why the commander had asked for the supply crate. They were going to need heavier weapons.

“Move your skinny buns, Rodger Dodger!” Andrew shouted. He looked up at Rodger from the street. “We need to find a place to hide.”

“No, we have to help them!”

Rodger turned and loped down the hillside. The grit gave way under his boots, but he broke the slide with his heels. He leaped onto a hunk of concrete, then onto another. He jumped down onto the street and ran out his momentum. Halfway down the street, Andrew was already rounding the first corner of debris.

“Get back here!” Rodger shouted. “We have to help!”

Andrew yelled something in reply that was more profanity than anything else.

Rodger chambered a round in his hunting rifle and swung it up to the skyline.

“Don’t worry, Mags, Rodger Dodger’s got you.”

He got the creatures in his scope. They were about a quarter-mile behind Magnolia and Weaver. It was a near-impossible shot from here, and Rodger knew better than to waste precious ammunition.

But Andrew must have had other plans. The crack of his gun sounded, and Rodger turned just as Andrew opened fire. He wasn’t aiming at the sky.

Andrew shouldered his rifle and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashes silhouetted his broad shoulders as he fired at targets coming from the opposite direction.

Another round of swearing came over the channel. Andrew was calling for help, but Rodger needed to protect Magnolia and Weaver. Bringing the scope back up to his visor, he followed their progress. The chute was lowering them toward the city streets. Sirens, with their eerie high-pitched wails, were sailing in a V formation. And they were closing the gap.

“Rodger!” Andrew shouted. Through the incoherent streak of curse words that followed, Rodger heard a sentence that chilled him to the core.

“We’re being flanked on all sides!”

The experience from eighty-nine dives kicked in as soon as Weaver heard the monsters’ electronic discords. The alien shrieks echoed over the devastated city like an emergency siren on an airship. The sound of the alarms had paralyzed him as a child, but now it forced him to action.

“Hang on tight, Mags!” he shouted.

Sirens—at least a dozen, judging by the racket—were trailing him and Magnolia. The creatures were gaining on them, but Weaver didn’t risk a glance to see just how much trouble they were in. He could already hear their leathery wings beating the air.

To the north, a road twisted like a river through a canyon of debris. Trash and blackened metal formed a skirt at the bottom of the heaps of destroyed buildings. The shells of old-world vehicles protruded out of the scrap yard.

At the end of the path was salvation. The Hilltop Bastion, now nothing more than a concrete bunker at the top of a dirt hill, enticed Weaver with its promise of safety.

About halfway there, standing on top of a mountain of rubble, was a lone figure. Weaver saw the muzzle flash, then heard the gunshot ring out half a second later. An enraged shriek followed as one of the beasts plummeted to the street below.

Farther north, behind the domes of rubble, came a flurry of gunshots. Weaver couldn’t see who was who down there, but judging by the high rate of fire, it was Rodger. He never conserved the precious bullets.

Another flash from the crest of the eastward mound, and a second Siren spun down. The shrieks of rage rose into a cacophony that pricked up the hair on Weaver’s neck. He turned his head to look at the beasts, but he couldn’t see past Magnolia’s helmet.

“How many are there? And how close?”

“Ten!” she yelled. “They’re closing in!”

“Well, make yourself useful, princess,” Weaver said.

“How? I don’t have a gun!” she shouted into her mike.

Her voice hurt Weaver’s ears almost as much as the screech of the monsters.

“Use my blaster. And don’t hit the shroud lines!”

Weaver felt the gun being pulled from the holster on his thigh. Magnolia had clipped her locking carabiner to Weaver’s armor, allowing her to let go of him with one arm and turn to fire. He pulled on his left toggle and steered the canopy toward the road curving between the mountains of destruction.

He heard the blast, and the recoil from the gun sent the canopy banking right. The blaster’s barrel hit Weaver in the shoulder.

“Son of a…”

“I got one!” she yelled.

“Great. Now kill the other nine!”

Three rounds in rapid succession came from the pile of scree below. The flashes lit up the slope, and in their light Weaver saw skeletal figures scaling the sides toward the diver at the top.

“Pipe, you got contacts on your six!” Weaver shouted.

“They’re everywhere!” Andrew replied. Gunfire sounded over the channel as he fired another burst. More Sirens crashed to the ground or rolled downhill. Piercing screeches, angry and desperate, filled the city.

Andrew did not relent. His muzzle flashes backlit the tower as the beasts scrambled upward, forsaking the easier prey in the sky to deal with the threat on the ground.

He’s going to sacrifice himself to save us, Weaver realized.

A shot zipped toward Weaver, so close he could hear it rip through the air. In his peripheral vision, the round punched through the chest of a Siren swooping in with claws extended. It flapped backward into the sky, its wings buffeting the canopy with a gust of wind.

Weaver checked the ground as he fought with the toggles. They were now a hundred feet from the road, passing over the twisted hull of a long vehicle with a strip of yellow paint still visible along the top. The sides were flayed open, and the jagged metal reached up like teeth at his boots.

He steered away from the vehicle and brought his knees up to clear the wreckage, then prepared to flare his chute.

“They’re almost on us!” Magnolia shouted. She fired off another shotgun blast. The recoil knocked them off course. Now they were headed straight toward the swarming Sirens.

“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.

“Help!” he shouted.

Weaver planted his boots, squared his shoulders, and got the monster’s face in his crosshairs. In the scope, he could see the thick spittle roped across the broken teeth.

The bullet punched a neat hole in the creature’s smooth forehead. A blind cyclops gushing blood from its ruined socket. It went limp and collapsed onto Rodger.

Weaver was climbing again before the empty cartridge case hit the ground. He labored up the steep incline, the sound of his own breathing nearly drowning out Andrew’s scream.

The gunshots from the north suddenly stopped.

“Hold on, Pipe! We’re coming!”

At the top of the mound, Magnolia stabbed one of the beasts through the earhole. Yanking the blade free, she screamed to distract the final Siren, which whirled away from Rodger. Claws the size of her knife slashed through the air, but Magnolia jumped back.

Weaver rested the carbine against the sweet spot on his armor and fired a three-round burst into the Siren’s ribs. Magnolia backed away, and it crashed to the ground, pouring blood onto her boots. It swiped at her one last time as she rushed over to Rodger, who was wiping gore from his visor.

“Get him up,” Weaver said, searching frantically for Andrew. Now he saw why the gunfire had stopped. A small pack of the beasts had surrounded Andrew. The largest Siren Weaver had ever seen clamped its claws onto the diver’s trapezius muscle and started dragging him, thrashing and screaming, down the road.

Weaver fired a shot that killed one of the beasts flanking Andrew. His next shot took out another, but he would never be able to kill them all.

He centered his crosshairs on Andrew’s chest. Killing him now would be the merciful thing. It was what Weaver would want from his squad if he were in the same position. He lined up the shot, moved his finger to the trigger, and paused his breath on the exhalation…

And couldn’t do it.

Weaver lowered his rifle as the beasts pulled Andrew around the hill and out of sight.

Rodger was on his feet now, his arm wrapped around Magnolia’s shoulder. She kept asking him if he was okay as she helped him walk down from the carnage on the hilltop. He was nodding slowly, but Weaver couldn’t tell whether he was injured or just shocked to see Magnolia.

“Move your asses!” Weaver shouted. “We have to get to Pipe before they kill him.”

As he started down the other side of the slope, following the trail of blood, he realized that the Sirens weren’t taking Andrew to a lair in the city. They were taking him to the Hilltop Bastion.

It took them five minutes to get safely down off the rubble heap and reach the dirt hill. Weaver rounded it with his rifle out in front, ready to fire. But Andrew was already gone, with no sign of the monsters that had taken him.

Weaver lowered his rifle and glanced up. The Hilltop Bastion was like a three-layer cake, with earth on the outside and concrete and metal on the inside. Metal shutters covered the structure above—a lookout, he supposed.

At the bottom, a pair of massive steel doors pocked with rust sealed off the main entrance. Farther to the right, another door, about the size of a hatch on the Hive, stood open. The blood trail led through it.

Weaver turned back to Rodger and Magnolia.

“Looks like the mission has changed from a search and rescue for potential survivors to a search and rescue for Andrew,” he said.

“How do you know there aren’t survivors here?” Magnolia asked.

Weaver pointed at the open door. “I doubt humans have learned to cohabitate with Sirens over the years.”

Rodger’s eyes were wide behind his visor.

“Can you fight, Rodge?” Weaver asked.

“I think so,” he whispered.

Weaver wasn’t used to Rodger being quiet, and he checked to see that he wasn’t in shock. Part of his duty as a commander was to make sure every diver was focused and not a liability to the rest of the team. Rodger’s armor and layered suit were covered in gore. The only clean part was his visor. He looked as though he had taken a bath in blood, but otherwise, he seemed fine. Just a little dazed.

Magnolia handed Weaver his blaster. “You can have this back. I found Pipe’s rifle.” She ejected the magazine to confirm that it was almost full. Slapping it back into its well, she said, “Let’s go find him.”

“I’ll take point,” Weaver said.

He walked up to the open door. Above it, a sign hung from one rivet. It was faded from countless years of exposure and pockmarked with bullet holes, but he could still make out the message:

WELCOME TO ITC COMMUNAL 13. OFFERING SALVATION FOR THOSE WHO SEEK IT, AND SWIFT JUDGMENT FOR THOSE WHO DESERVE IT.