Nicholas Smith - Deliverance

X had never seen one of these before. Not wanting to waste precious bullets, he studied the beast for weak spots. It stood on all fours, its arched back lined with ridges and several fins. At its throat, a collar of thicker armor opened and closed like a vent as the beast breathed.

Miles growled a warning, and X aimed at the gill-like feature. The creature tilted its head toward him just as he pulled the trigger. The round lanced into the soft flesh in the opening of the collar, blowing out gore that painted the rain-soaked ground. The blood looked green, but then, so did everything else in the view of his NVGs.

Unable to cry out, the creature flopped silently on the ground as it choked on its own blood. X lowered the rifle and pulled his knife. By the time he reached the body, the abomination was dead.

He looked toward his dog. “You think it tastes good?”

Miles trotted over, sniffed the body through the breathing filter around his muzzle, and walked away, uninterested.

“Yeah, me neither,” X said. He pushed the carcass back into the hole and pointed the rifle barrel into the green-hued darkness. The lizard-like monster hit the bottom a few seconds later, the thump and crunch echoing up from the hole. The sound faded away, leaving the man and the dog once again alone in the downpour.

X lowered his gun and walked over to the shelter of the bluff, where he took off his rucksack and rested it on the ground. He checked his rad meter again, and seeing that the area was still a green zone, he took off his helmet. Then he bent down and removed Miles’ helmet for him. Next, he pulled out three foot-long stakes attached to the side of his backpack and handed one of them to the dog.

Miles gripped the stake in his mouth and trotted off into the pouring rain. X followed with the other two stakes. Working together, they stuck the poles into the dirt at three different locations, forming a triangle around their camp. When they finished, X raised his wrist computer and activated the network. If anything tried to sneak into the area, a warning alarm would sound on his HUD, beeping in his helmet.

He checked the data on his wrist monitor, and seeing that everything looked good, he returned to his pack and pulled out his metal pot. Next, he put his ministove on the ground and ignited the flame powered by a long-lasting fuel cell.

X walked out from beneath the overhang and put the pot on the ground, then shook open the telescoping catchment funnel and set it over the pot. Rain began to trickle down the broad conical structure and in minutes the pot was full. He brought it back to the stove and set it on the burner. Then he dropped in a pill that would purify the water of radiation and kill any toxins that weren’t boiled away. He was running low on the precious pills, but he and Miles had to eat.

Finally, he pulled out a block of synthetic food from his pack. Using his knife, he lopped off a chunk of the bar and dropped it into the water. The brown block expanded into something that looked like a nest of snakes. A few minutes later, they had a pot of noodles and broth.

X sat his aching bones down on a smooth boulder. He waited for the contents of the pot to cool, then reached inside with his gloved fingers. He pulled out a strand and handed it to Miles, who wolfed it down without bothering to chew.

With the dog’s blue eyes locked on his, X raised another noodle to his lips and sucked it down. A memory flashed through his mind. He was in his old quarters on the airship he had once called home, sharing a meal with a boy wearing a tinfoil hat. The son of his best friend. Aaron, he remembered. Aaron Everhart and his son, Michael Everhart.

In the memory, X had watched Michael, who went by “Tin,” slurping down a plate of food. But as with most of the memories, the boy’s features were blurry, like a broken video screen.

X pulled out his journal and jotted down the memory anyway. It quickly faded in his mind, like all the others, but this time he was able to capture it on the page.

A new memory emerged as he finished writing the first one down. It was the moment Tin had handed him a piece of paper, just before that last dive stranded X on the surface.

Face your future …

X winced. The scars on his body stretched over his tired muscles.

“Without fear,” he said with an exhale, finishing the quote as he wrote it into his journal.

Times like this, when he could remember what someone had said, or the words scrawled on a piece of paper, were rare. So rare that he couldn’t recall the last time he’d had such a vivid memory.

Lightning webbed across the sky in the distance, and a third memory surfaced. This one he had no trouble recalling, for it haunted him often as he tried to fall asleep in this blasted wasteland. He felt himself falling through the clouds, a Siren’s leathery wings wrapped around him. He saw blue battery units—the beating heart of a Hell Diver. Three featureless faces looking down at him—fellow divers, one of them the woman he once loved—as they ascended toward the Hive and he fell back toward hell.

It wasn’t a memory he wanted to put in his journal.

X growled as the memories faded away like the afterimage of the lightning. He put his book back into its sleeve and finished his dinner. Then he rolled out the blanket attached to the bottom of his backpack, and Miles curled up beside him.

“Good night, boy,” X said. He reached for his helmet and brought it over by the blanket, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the mirrored visor. The flickering fire illuminated a haggard face he almost didn’t recognize.

A stranger, a ghost.

X brought his gloved fingers up to the thick, graying beard over a square jawline. With his finger, he traced over a scar forming a ravine up his right cheek and through his eyebrow. Dark eyes framed by crow’s-feet stared back at him, the irises almost lost to the fathomless black pupils.

He set the helmet down, unable to look at himself anymore. Bones aching, he grunted as he rested his head on the blanket. The glow of the fire filled the cracks in the stone overhang. Rain pattered down outside their shelter. The sound was calming, and he didn’t fight the wave of fatigue sweeping over him.

Minutes later, he was asleep, dreaming of events and people from his past. But not even in his dreams could he remember faces or voices. The dreams, like reality, were mostly just fragments.

A beeping sound entered his dream. His eyes sprang open to darkness as the chirp of the alarm snapped him awake. He saw a silhouette to his left. Miles stood growling and staring out beyond the perimeter.

X fumbled for his helmet, cursing his stupidity. He had forgotten to put it back on before drifting off to sleep. As soon as he slipped it over his head, he saw several contacts on the minimap in the upper-right corner. They were what had set off the alarm.

Cursing, he grabbed his rifle and angled it out toward the abandoned settlement, scanning for targets. His eyes flitted from the map on his HUD to the green hue of the terrain, but nothing moved in the sheets of rain.

What the hell?

Miles growled behind X, but the dog wasn’t looking at the settlement. He was glaring, teeth bared, at the wall behind them.

X slowly raised his rifle at the tower of stone, half expecting a Siren or some other beast to come skittering down the side.

“What is it, boy?” he whispered. He checked his HUD again. The contacts were coming from the right. Miles continued growling at the rock, and X moved slowly, rifle shouldered, over to examine the sloped wall.

A crunching sounded, and a cascade of rocks crumbled down the side. He gasped as a pair of massive eyeballs blinked from inside what appeared to be a solid wall. A limb the size of a man reached directly out of the rock. Then a chest emerged, followed by the rest of the body.