Nicholas Smith - Ghosts

“There it is,” he said. “Stay here while I check it out.”

She raised a hand to protest, but Michael was already moving. Keeping low, he crept up the slope. He dug boots in, dislodging a piece of concrete. It slid down and over the side of the metal overhang below. The chunk tumbled the rest of the way down the pile, clanking and clattering all the way to the street.

“ Shit ,” Michael whispered as a high wail answered the sound.

Layla looked up from her position, frozen in place while Michael unslung his rifle. In the green hue of his night-vision optics, he searched the street. The wind seemed to carry the screeches to them from all sides.

He angled the muzzle down at the street, where the bases of the fallen structures lay in shadow. In the residue of lightning flashes, the shadows seemed to stretch outward and recede like the surf on a beach.

Another wail joined the first, then another. Michael swept the gun back and forth, searching for a target, but the beasts remained hidden.

Over the wind and screeches came another sound: the whoosh of what could have been turbofans on the Hive . Michael felt a moment of confusion, followed by a spike of adrenaline as he realized his mistake.

Before he could warn Layla, a beast flapped around the side of the tower and grabbed at her.

“Layla!” Michael shouted.

He aimed his rifle at the abomination’s right wing and squeezed off three shots, cutting through the wing. Despite the injuries, the beast continued to climb.

“Help!” Layla screamed.

Michael aimed at the other wing, firing three gaping holes into the leathery hide. That did the trick, and the creature spun down into the rubble, where he delivered the kill shot to the head.

Layla slid nearly ten feet down the incline, letting out a yelp of pain as her boots hit the ground.

“To me!” he shouted.

She pushed herself up and limped toward him as he fired on another Siren swooping in from the cloud cover. A round cut through its body and it flapped away, shrieking in its otherworldly voice.

Michael turned toward the heart of the city, holding the scope just shy of his visor. In the small circular view, he saw a swarm of what looked like bats flapping away from the girders. He slowly moved his crosshairs across the city, watching in horror as streams of the monsters lifted off and rose from the husks of gutted scrapers. The first two had been just a recon party. Now the main force was on the way.

Layla squeezed between the pair of beams and scrambled up to Michael. He reached out and grabbed her hand. Although they needed to move, he couldn’t help but hug her tight.

“I thought I had lost you!” He pulled away to look her up and down. “Are you hurt?”

“I hurt my ankle and I’m going to have a bad burn from the dive, but I’ll live,” she said, trying to smile through the pain. “Good shooting.”

Michael looked over her shoulder to the hilltop in the distance. They were nearly half a mile away now, not counting the time it would take to pick their way back down to the street and then climb the hill to the bastion. By the time they reached the street, the monsters would be on them. If they were to survive the next fifteen minutes, they couldn’t make a single mistake.

Movement near the bus where they had sheltered revealed another threat. The Sirens weren’t just in the air—another pack was darting across the street. Loping on all four limbs, they skittered toward the tower of debris.

“We’re being surrounded,” Michael said, pointing. “Hold back that bunch.”

Layla scanned the sky and then the ground, where she picked out a target. Her first shot cut through a finned back, severing the spine. The Siren flopped like a landed fish. The others fanned out around the dying creature and charged forward, undeterred. She wouldn’t be able to keep the creatures off their position for long.

He punched his four-digit code into the panel on the supply crate. It beeped and flashed red as Layla fired off another three shots. Steadying his shaky fingers, he entered his code a second time. The lid popped open, and he began stuffing supplies into his pack. Inside went a helmet, pistol, and three boosters. Then he grabbed a parachute.

The screeching armada of monsters reminded him that they were running out of time. Layla continued firing on the beasts below. They had reached the hill of rubble and were already scrambling up the side.

“Put this on,” he said, handing her the backpack. He swung his rifle up and fired several shots while she slung the straps over her armor. In the sky, the beasts had formed a V beneath the floor of the storm clouds. In the lead was a meaty creature with a spiked and ridged back that reminded Michael of something prehistoric.

He bumped his comm pad. “Weaver, how are you coming with those windows?”

Back to back, Michael and Layla fired at the monsters closing in around them. He squeezed off several bursts at the formation, but without tracers it was nearly impossible to hit anything at this range.

“Windows are all jammed and too heavy to raise manually,” Weaver reported. “But I’m working on it.”

“We have to get out of here,” Layla said.

“Grab on!” Michael shouted.

As soon as she wrapped her arms around his waist, he reached back and punched his booster. The canister fired, launching a balloon into the sky. Next, he punched her booster. The two balloons yanked them off their feet. He grabbed his toggles and directed them toward the Hilltop Bastion. Below, the creatures had summited the hill and were batting at the sky with their claws. Several others hunched down to spread their wings, preparing to leap. By the time they took to the sky, Michael and Layla were already two hundred feet above them and drifting west with the wind at their back.

Layla gave a snort of laughter. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

“I learned it from X. Now, clip your locking biner to my armor.”

“I hope he taught you how to multitask, because those things are gaining on us!”

Michael didn’t even try to glance over his shoulder. “You have to be my eyes, Layla.”

She tightened her grip around him and turned. “Three Sirens about five hundred feet to the east. The larger formation is another thousand feet behind them.”

Michael kept his gaze on his HUD, watching their altitude. To make this work, he must time it perfectly. Every decision, every movement, had to be precise.

At four hundred feet, the wind picked up, and he used his toggles to position them directly in the air current, giving them more speed.

The screeches grew louder as they rose higher in the sky. More lighting arced through the clouds. Michael squinted at the bunker. They were coming in fast, but fast enough?

“Whatever you plan on doing, you better do it soon!” Layla shouted.

Michael worked the toggles as they ascended higher. Even aided by the wind, they weren’t going to outrun their pursuers. The Sirens were closing in. He could hear their wings slapping at the air. At eight hundred feet, he let go of the left toggle and grabbed his blade.

“What are you doing?” Layla shouted.

“Going with plan B. Hold on!”

“What do you think I’m doing now?” she said, but she squeezed him so hard his armor pressed in on his rib cage.

He grabbed the toggle again, blade in hand, and watched the number on his HUD tick upward. The wailing was so loud now, it sounded like standing beneath a klaxon on the Hive.

Michael’s heart was fluttering, but he remained calm, remembering the fortune he had handed X all those years ago : Handle your present with confidence. Face your future without fear.

At 850 feet, he cut through the lines attached to their balloons. Layla screamed, and Michael didn’t have the breath to reassure her. He watched the towers rising up to meet his boots as the Sirens screeched in confusion directly overhead. He didn’t need to look up to see they were seconds from being snatched away by those talons and torn apart in midair.