Nicholas Smith - Ghosts

He took a step forward but halted when he saw movement. Miles saw it at the same time and took a few crouching steps forward, then let out a low growl.

The man’s eyes weren’t as good as the dog’s, and he had to squint. Rain slammed into him as he waited for light. Three beats passed before lightning arced overhead and backlit the city blocks. This time, he didn’t need to squint.

His finger moved instinctively to the trigger, and his dead heart flinched when he saw the creatures hunting them. He had been wrong earlier. The Sirens were stalking him all along—hundreds of them, skittering across the mounds of rubble.

Never in his life had he seen so many.

He tried to move, but his aching muscles were frozen. Maybe if they stood perfectly still, the monsters wouldn’t find them. After all, he didn’t have a battery pack or any other energy source that would draw the beasts to him.

Swallowing, he watched them stampede right for his position. He couldn’t outrun them, and he couldn’t fight them all. Hades had finally won. Surprisingly, the only sadness he felt about his impending death was for Miles. His dog’s death would be on him.

All at once, the glow of the bushes brightened, flashing from pink to a fiery red. The Sirens shrieked louder and hurried onward. The beasts were coming for the plants, not him.

Their high-pitched wails rose over the loud crack of thunder. The sound, no matter how many times he heard it, still turned his blood to ice.

Miles backpedaled, and the man snapped into motion. He ran, boots slogging through the mud. The dog lunged through a gap in the concrete, but the man had to stop and flatten his body. He lowered his rifle to squeeze through the narrow space. Rebar jutted out, but he ducked under it. He made it through without any more tears and kept running. He leaped over a grove of the glowing weeds. His boots hit the earth with a splash and sank into the toxic muck. He pulled free and continued onward.

Miles was waiting for him, sitting on his haunches.

Breathing heavily now, the man looked past the dog and focused on the tunnel exit. It opened onto a city street framed on both sides by sagging structures. This was one of many ITC campuses, and the buildings had been constructed to survive the apocalypse. Humans, however, were not.

The screeching rose into the familiar wail, like an emergency siren. He twisted to see the monsters entering the open tunnel. The bushes growing throughout swayed back and forth, tentacles groping for the eyeless beasts. He stopped for a moment to watch as the Sirens fed, ripping the stems off and jamming the tentacles into mouths rimmed with jagged teeth.

Heart pounding, he moved back as one of the monsters, still chewing on a glowing stick, turned its head toward him. The leathery, eyeless face locked onto him, and it spat out the stem it was munching on to release a high-pitched call.

Two dozen conical heads all seemed to home in on him at once. Thunder boomed overhead as if answering their wails.

“Run!” he yelled at the dog.

The man felt the trickle of fear but pushed it away. Planting his boots firmly, he squared his shoulders and fired off a volley into the beast that had first made his position. His aim was true, and the rounds punched through the thick skull. Blood darkened the mud as the Siren crashed to the ground. He fired another burst that took down two more of the beasts to his left. The rest fanned out, some taking to the sky, others darting for cover in the toxic rubble.

He wiped his visor clean and turned to run down the street after the dog. He could see the bunker’s domed entrance in the distance, but clusters of the poisonous bushes had grown along the path since he was here last. As Miles approached, their stems activated, blinking like warning lights.

“Watch out!” he shouted after the dog.

Miles navigated the minefield of plants with ease and galloped down the final block, then sat in front of the double doors leading to safety.

The man slung the rifle over his shoulder as he ran. He reached for the key in his vest pocket. Halfway down the street, he turned to fire at a Siren sailing through the sky. It swooped away from his gunfire and dropped into a nosedive, coming right at him. Holding in a breath, he squinted and fired a three-round burst into the creature’s jagged spine. It crashed to the ground like a missile, throwing dirt into the air.

Miles was barking now, which drew the creatures’ attention. Another Siren sailed toward the dog. Raising his rifle, the man fired two bursts that lanced through the creature’s leathery flesh. Then he leaped over another toxic bush with the grace of a much younger man as tentacles reached up for him. One grazed his boot, needles slashing the worn leather. The tip broke through, burning his skin, but he breathed through the pain and limped for the doors. He would survive a minor sting as long as he could apply ointment in time, but he would not survive the Sirens. They would dismember him on the spot and fight over his remains. He had seen it before, years ago.

A memory of an old friend tried to surface in his mind, but he pushed the traumatic scene away and ran from the monsters.

Miles was pacing outside the door, his gaze trained on his master. The man wiped rain from his visor as he bolted for the entrance. He knew the final route better than any other place in Hades. But even with it memorized, he hadn’t prepared for the wet asphalt. He hit a slick spot, slipped, and crashed to the concrete, losing the key in the fall. Pain swept across his battle-scarred body.

Miles barked and ran toward him, but the man yelled for the dog to get back.

He pushed himself up just as a network of lightning skewered a Siren in the sky, sending it windmilling to the ground. The smoking creature crashed into a cluster of the bushes. Tentacles clamped on, looping around it. The Siren wasn’t dead, and it thrashed violently amid the pulsating red stems. Blood splattered, steaming in the cold.

The key. Where the hell is the key?

The man scanned the ground as the Siren twisted in agony, tentacles plastered to its body like cords hooked up to some monstrous machine. The screeching was so loud, it made the blood in his ears sing.

Fifty more steps—that was all he had left to go. Get to Miles; get inside the bunker. But first, get the key. He focused on the ground, searching desperately.

There it was, a few feet away, between him and the dying monster. Tentacles shot out at him as he approached. He parried them with his rifle butt and then bent down to scoop up the key. Another tentacle whizzed past his arm, and a second came from his left and smacked the visor of his helmet, sticking to the glass. He pulled his machete from the sheath on his thigh and slashed through the stem. A geyser of green blood jetted into the air.

Miles continued barking, frantically now. The man checked the sky to make sure none of the monsters were headed for the dog’s position.

The trapped lightning-struck Siren stopped struggling and fell on its back, and the vines dragged it into the grasp of other vines, which pulled it into the heart of the thicket.

A final shriek followed the man as he turned to run.

Behind him, dozens of clawed, naked feet slapped the asphalt or slurped in the mud. Wailing Sirens filled the sky, and above the circling creatures there was something else: the beetlelike outline of an airship.

Raw memories washed over him like rain. Memories of a time before Miles, before this wretched hell. They filled his mind, and for a beat, Hades vanished, replaced by the brilliant sun. In the distance, the Hive was slowly flying away. Even as the balloon had pulled his body upward, his heart had pulled him toward the airship. He had drifted across the sky, hailing Captain Maria Ash over the comms as the helium in his balloon escaped and slowly lowered him back to the ruined surface. But his pleas for rescue had gone unanswered.