Ghosts

SIX

Magnolia held her toggles in a death grip as she hung from the suspension lines of her parachute. Her entire body was numb from the mix of adrenaline and raw fear. This was the fifth time she had come within spitting distance of death, and it never seemed to get easier. She could still see the blur of the turbofans trying to suck her into a vortex of whirring blades. A sudden gust had sent her cartwheeling. She had become disoriented in the fall, making it difficult to move into stable position.

I’m not afraid of dying, she’d told herself.

That didn’t mean she wanted to die. But she would gladly give her life to save her fellow divers, just as X had done for her many years ago. If she had to do it over again, she would have sawed right through the rope without blinking.

She wiped the rain from her visor for her first look at the postapocalyptic world below. From above, the terrain was split into squares, like the farms she had seen in the archives: corn, beans, wheat, all arranged like a giant game board across the land. There were also the great wooded areas of the Old World in those pictures. God, she wished she could have seen those endless fields and forests. The only vegetation she had ever seen was the toxic bushes that lit up like LEDs and ate anything that got too close. Everything else had either been incinerated in the blasts or killed in the radioactive fallout that followed.

Brilliant flashes of electricity filled the clouds to the east. The annoying chirp of the warning sensor continued to beep in her helmet, but she was too focused on the sky now to notice. The sprawling clouds looked… strange.

Different.

Unlike the typical storm clouds, these were wrinkly, like the leathery flesh of a Siren.

She tried to bump on her night-vision goggles, but the damn system was all screwed up from the electrical storm. The radio was still down, her electronics were malfunctioning, and her chute was pulling her toward the ruins of an ancient city.

Less than a half hour ago, when she was standing on top of the Hive, she had felt small and insignificant. But now, dangling over a radioactive wasteland, with no way of contacting the ship, she felt like a marble falling into a bottomless hole.

Captain Jordan would never send the ship to rescue her. The bastard hadn’t even been willing to shut down two of his precious turbofans to save her life. That said a lot about the man, but nothing she didn’t already know.

Lightning flashes split the darkness overhead, backlighting her canopy—and what looked like a tear in her chute.

“No,” she muttered, twisting in the harness. “Please, please don’t do this to me.”

Another flash illuminated the rip, near the upper right edge of the sail. It wasn’t from the turbofans, so what could have damaged her chute? It looked almost as if someone had deliberately cut the fabric, but that was crazy.

No one would sabotage a Hell Diver’s chute.

Would they?

She squirmed again for a better look. The tear hadn’t expanded much, but the air pressing on the sail would slowly open the rip. She thought back to the launch bay before she climbed the ladder. Ty had brought her gear, and she had no time to check the chute or the booster before the mission.

She looked hard at the tear. It was more of a slash, really, and it wouldn’t be long before the entire cell collapsed and sent her to earth way too fast. She was surprised it had held this long.

With her system down, she had no way of knowing how far up she was, but if she had to guess, there was still another three thousand feet between her boots and the surface. She scanned the skies one last time for her home, even though she knew it was gone. Michael and Layla and everyone else must think she was dead.

She was very much alive, although that could change in a few seconds.

She raised her arm and checked her wrist monitor. The data showed her heart rate revving… to an inhuman three hundred beats per minute.

“Seriously?” she yelled.

Even her wrist monitor was out of whack.

She was having one hell of a day. Her beautiful straight flush had ended up in a mess on the floor, she had been thrown from the ship and nearly pureed by the turbines, her chute had a rip from possible sabotage, and now her life-support system was malfunctioning.

If she somehow made it to the surface in one piece, she was going to have another problem. The radiation here could be astronomical. She didn’t see any craters from the bombs below, but something had devastated this place. Her battery pack wouldn’t keep her suit powered for long. Then it would be a toss-up to see what killed her: the radiation or the mutated beasts that thrived in it.

Lightning fractured the sky, casting its fleeting glow over a boneyard of flattened buildings. The city was one of the largest she had ever seen, and she wondered which of the great ancient metropolises it was. Atlanta, maybe? Whatever it had been, it was now just brown and gray and dead.

Magnolia pulled lightly on the right toggle, turning in a slow circle to scan the terrain. Roadways snaked through the decayed city, and the few buildings that still stood were nothing but skeletons held together by concrete and rebar. She had heard that the East Coast was hit hard, but this city was completely leveled. In her mind’s eye, she imagined the citizens crowding the streets, their hands shielding their eyes from the inferno that incinerated almost everything in its path.

Another jagged hand of electricity cast a flickering blue wave over the city. Something in the distance caught her eye. Despite all odds, a cluster of buildings had survived. To the east, the terrain formed a shallow depression that seemed to have protected some of the larger towers.

She had seen scrapers before on dives, though never any as tall as these.

She pulled the left toggle to steer away from the debris field and toward the structures, searching for a clear drop zone. The damaged canopy pulled her to the right, and she gave it more left toggle to hold her bearing. The storm was rolling over the city, providing just enough light to reveal the ground now looming up at her.

Ever since she was a kid, she had always seemed to get the short end of the stick. She couldn’t even remember her mom and dad. Both had died before she was old enough to talk. Since then, she had basically been on her own, passed from caretaker to caretaker until she landed in jail for stealing a scarf from the trading post. Diving had changed her life. The other Hell Divers were the only true family she had ever known. She had lost her only lover, Cruise, and X on that dive ten years ago, but without them, she would never have made it to the age of thirty. She was thankful for every minute she had spent with those men, with her fellow divers Michael and Layla, and even with Katrina. They were the closest thing to family she had ever known.

Now she was alone.

And that was what she had always feared most.

Her eyes went from the ground to her chute. She had done some lousy things in her life, but nothing to deserve this. Part of her wondered whether she even wanted to survive the landing. Then anger took over again.

“One time!” she yelled. “Give me some luck just one damn time!”

She chinned the pad in her helmet to open a channel to the Hive, but white noise hissed back. Next, she tried the NVGs again. On the third bump, a green-hued view of the city exploded across her field of vision. The electronics controlling her suit surged back to life.

Anger and frustration gave way to awe when she saw what lay beyond the outskirts of the dead metropolis. Those wrinkly clouds she thought she had seen earlier weren’t clouds at all, and that valley wasn’t a valley.

“My sweet Lord,” she whispered.

Waves. Endless waves stretched across the horizon. The ocean seemed to go on forever. She held a breath in her chest and blinked rapidly. Was it an optical illusion?

She let go of the toggles to check her wrist monitor and pull up a map from the archives. Digital text rolled across the screen.

Charleston, South Carolina. Year 2029. Population 330,903.

Lowering her wrist, she scrutinized the city and the ocean beyond. It was hard to believe that so many people had once lived here. Hell, it was hard to believe that so many people were ever alive in the first place. Magnolia had grown up surrounded by hundreds of people, but hundreds of thousands? How could that be possible?

Her eyes shifted from the network of rusted girders rushing up to meet her, to her HUD. Numbers ticked across the display as her velocity increased. The chute wasn’t catching enough air. The suspension lines twisted with her collapsing canopy. She grabbed the right cascade lines again and shook them, trying to coax the deflated cells open.

She couldn’t die this close to the ocean. She didn’t care that it was a toxic soup crawling with mutant monsters. Ever since she was a kid, she had longed to see the world as it once was, but she had fixated on two things that she wanted to behold more than anything else: the stars in the sky, and the vast sea.

It would take a change of luck, but she just might see one of them before she met her maker.

Or maybe not.

The rip had widened into a gaping wedge in the far right cell of her canopy, and the sail was sagging badly. At this rate, she would hit the ground way too fast. She had to land on top of a high building before her chute turned into a wad of garbage.

She scanned desperately for a place to land. There to the east was the enclave of towers she had spotted earlier. She was close enough to see the guts of the buildings. Staircases and sagging floors filled her view. Steel girders bore the structures up despite gravity’s best efforts to bring them crashing down.

Rooms where people had worked or lived came into focus. She switched off her NVGs, hoping that maybe some of those wonderful twenty-first-century colors remained, but she saw the same brown and gray as always. Every other hue had been lost to time.

She toggled left, toward the first tower. Her altitude was two thousand feet, but she was dropping at an alarming rate. Even if she managed to put down on the rooftop, at this speed she wouldn’t be walking away from the landing.

Magnolia shifted her gaze from the towers to her canopy. The tear was spreading, opening a gaping hole in the chute. She wasn’t going to make it.

Yes, you’re going to make it. You’re going to run on the beach and dip your feet in the ocean, just like you dreamed of doing when you were a dumb little kid.

She almost laughed at how insane that sounded as she flew over the edge of the valley, catching a glimpse of the sea beyond the scrapers.

A suspension line suddenly snapped, and the canopy slowly folded in two. Helpless, she sailed toward the first tower with only three lines attached to her disabled canopy. The lines twisted, and she twisted with them, her vision a blur of gray and brown as she spun.

She was falling with hardly any resistance, and although she couldn’t determine her speed, this was not looking like a survivable landing.

Magnolia chuckled—a squeaky little sound that surprised her. Her whole life had been one shitty turn of luck after another, but today had been the absolute worst. It was enough to make her laugh. She wasn’t going to spend the last seconds of this sorry existence screaming in fear.

“Fuck you!” she shouted.

The spinning made her queasy, and she caught the taste of bile and shine and greasy potato. She was coming in fast toward the roof of the tower. Bending her knees slightly, she pulled both toggles all the way down to flare what was left of her canopy and lessen the impact.

As she stopped spinning, she caught another glimpse of the tower. She had to move left, away from the top. Swallowing, she said her first prayer in years. She vaguely remembered the words that Weaver had repeated during an epic dive into an orange zone.

Lord, I am not worthy of your mercy, but I ask that you please grant me…

Her eyes fixed on the horizon. At least she had seen the ocean before she died.

A hard jolt rocked her as her canopy and lines caught on something and then snapped free, and she swung forward as if she had been shot from a giant slingshot back into the sky. It wasn’t until her left arm scraped against steel that she realized she was actually inside one of the buildings. She had sailed right into one of the open floors, and something had snagged the mess of lines and canopy. But it wasn’t enough to slow her down completely.

Her right boot hit a piece of rebar. The pain was instant, lancing up her thigh and hip. It felt as if her damn foot had come off, too.

She continued swinging upward until the risers and shroud lines caught and held. The force pulled her violently backward.

Something snapped. A bone, maybe, or a ligament? The burning pain was intense, and red encroached on her vision until she could see nothing but a bloody haze.

Magnolia struggled to take several deep breaths. Blood rushed in her ears, singing like an emergency siren. The extra oxygen entered her body, and the curtain of red slowly retreated. She fought the pain by biting down on her lip. Nothing like more pain to make you forget about other pain.

She could feel her feet again, and they weren’t touching anything solid. She was hanging from a beam on one of the top floors of a scraper, and ten city blocks away was the most beautiful sight she had ever beheld. Massive waves ate at the shoreline, crashing on the beach before receding back out to sea. This close, the ocean was even more beautiful than she had imagined.

Maybe it wasn’t luck she needed at all, she mused. Maybe what she needed was a little faith.

She hung from the beam, staring for so long she lost track of time. The rusted carcass of a boat lay on the beach. It wasn’t nearly the size of the Hive, and its sailing days were clearly over, judging by the massive hole in the starboard side of the hull.

Past the wreck, a columnar tower jutted up from a rocky promontory. She had seen a building like it in one of the picture books in the Hive’s library. It was a lighthouse, built to warn ships away from the shore.

A flash arced overhead, backlighting the red dome of the tower. In this drab landscape, it stood out like a flame in the night.

Magnolia realized that being all alone might have an upside. With no captain or commander to tell her what to do, she was free to make her own choices. Her heart thudded with excitement. She was going to visit the lighthouse—right after she dipped her feet in the ocean.

A clatter and creak from the street below pulled her back to reality.

She held the air in her lungs and slowly twisted in the mess of lines to look for the source of the noise. Old-world vehicles littered the road. None had moved for a long time. She had to wait several moments before the sound came again. A flash of motion darted for a tunnel in the debris field.

Something was down there.

Maybe she wasn’t alone after all.