Nicholas Smith - Deliverance

Don’t think like that. You’re going to see your family again.

He bit down on his mouth guard again. The distant rumble of thunder was muted by the pod’s walls, with their multiple layers of insulation against the lightning. But there was nothing the engineers could do about air pockets and turbulence.

The pod rocketed through the first five thousand feet in no time at all. Then Les heard the most frightening sound he could imagine: the hiss of air leaking from one of the seals. He looked desperately around for the source.

“What is that?” Jennifer called out.

Les didn’t have time to reply before they entered the storm. A gust of wind slammed into the side of the pod, tossing it like a ball. The straps did their job, holding Les secure in the seat, but his long body jerked and his head rattled.

A hundred and fifty miles per hour. Holy shit, we’re dropping fast.

The first lightning bolt struck the metal cocoon a moment later. It sounded as if a blaster had gone off inside Les’ helmet. Jennifer screamed, and even Erin cried out as they were once again tossed through the sky. The hissing noise increased as air was sucked out of the pod. It had to be the porthole. The rest of the pod was basically an oblong canister of sheet metal welded to a steel frame.

“Everyone, just breathe slow,” Erin said, her voice back to its normal self-possessed calm.

Les tried to follow her example. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose. His destiny was no longer in his hands. Either they would survive the drop, or they would all die screaming.

Cut it out , he thought, as images of Tom Price’s semiliquefied corpse flashed through his mind.

Another bolt blasted the side of the pod and sent them rolling. The forces on his body warred with each other, trying to toss him this way and that, and his skin warmed like what he imagined a radiation burn felt like. Banging sounded on the outside of the shell, as if some flying monster were trying to get in, but it was the wind. It ripped the hatch completely off the window, giving them an upside-down view of the storm. It seemed the fins on the pod were too small to keep it upright.

A brilliant blue light arced across the bowl of sky. The clouds had coalesced into a dense mass, with no margins to differentiate one from another. Overlaying the roar of blood in his ears and the buffeting of the wind, he heard an endless roll of thunder.

Ten thousand feet and two hundred miles an hour.

“We have to right the pod before we can deploy the chutes!” Erin yelled as she reached for a control panel above her head.

Les watched the webwork of lightning outside. Another blast hit the pod, and the gear in the mesh net dumped onto the ceiling below them. Weapons, including several sheathed knives, clanked by his head. The next strike sent it all flying about the pod. A pack hit Les in the chest, and a rifle smacked Jennifer’s helmet. He heard the crack, followed by a yelp of pain.

“Jennifer, are you okay?” Les shouted, fearing that her visor was cracked.

She managed to raise a hand and nod. He looked over at the exposed glass porthole. Cracks spiderwebbed across the surface, but at least, the lightning had righted them—mostly.

Still, Les knew that the chutes could be compromised if the pod didn’t rock back into a stable position. A diver wouldn’t deploy his chute with his back to the ground, for fear of being enshrouded. Doing so now with the pod’s chutes could tear even the strongest suspension lines.

“Almost got it,” Erin said, straining to reach the button. “Brace yourselves!”

An auxiliary chute fired on the outside of the pod and pulled them back into a stable position. Les breathed a sigh of relief that quickly turned to a gasp of shock.

“My God,” he said.

The storm swirled around them like a tornado, lightning slashing the darkness in every direction. Les glimpsed the other pod. It looked so small against the backdrop of the storm.

“Three thousand feet, almost clear!” Erin shouted. She reached up, waiting for the right moment to punch the button for the main chutes.

The numbers ticked across Les’ HUD. His eyes flitted from the display to the soldiers’ pod in the distance—just before a brilliant bolt enveloped it in a curtain of blue.

A voice cracked over the radio as someone shouted, “Holy shit!”

“The other pod just got hit!” Les said, pointing at the window.

Erin’s helmet turned. “Dad…” she murmured. She strained for a better look, but the pod had been swept away beyond the narrow view from the porthole.

“I’m sure they’re okay,” Les said.

Erin waited another beat, then reached back up and punched two buttons in a row. “Hold on!” she yelled.

The main chutes fired, jolting Les’ stomach down to his feet, or so it felt. He kept his eyes on the porthole. The noise of the air leak had dwindled from a teakettle shriek to a low hiss as their air pressure neared equilibrium with that outside.

The first view of the Old World came into focus below: husks of scrapers backlit by a stroboscopic display.

“Prepare for landing,” Erin said.

Les looked up at his HUD. Only two hundred feet to the surface. They were almost home free.

He saw the scraper leering up at them a moment too late. There was no time to warn anyone, and no way to avoid the crash. Holding in a breath, he grabbed his harness as the pod caromed off a steel girder.

The chutes went taut, jerking them again, and the violent motion again made projectiles of the spilled gear. A cry rang out, and Les slammed his helmet on the ceiling. His vision went dark, and his entire brain ached.

Another scream sounded, different from the first. It sounded like Erin, but he still couldn’t see much besides stars flitting across the darkness.

The pod continued to fall, slowly leveling back out as the ruined city rose up to meet them. He bit down on the mouth guard, trying to lessen the pain in his head. His vision returned, and he got a blurry image of Erin reaching toward Jennifer, just before the pod hit something else, this time with a much more dampened impact. For a moment, Les didn’t know what they had hit, until Olah started shouting.

“We’re sinking. We have to get out of here!”

Les stared as the brown expanse outside the cracked porthole resolved into a lake of murky water. The faulty seal, instead of leaking air, was now letting the water in. He looked over at Jennifer, whose head was tilted at an odd angle, like a rag doll tossed carelessly on the floor. Erin was trying to wake her up, but she didn’t respond.

“She’s gone!” Olah shouted. “Her damn neck’s broke. We have to leave her.”

Les unbuckled his harness and crashed to the floor, hands slapping into a foot of brown water. Olah grabbed a rifle and a bag and splashed his way over to the hatch.

“Hurry!” he yelled. Then he palmed a red button, blowing the hatch off its hinges. Water poured in, and Olah pulled himself out.

“Come on!” Les yelled. He yanked Erin away from Jennifer’s body and pulled her into the water as it quickly flooded the pod.

“No!” Erin shouted. “No, she’s still—”

Les glimpsed Jennifer’s right hand twitching just as he pulled Erin out of the pod and into the choppy water. He chinned on his night-vision goggles and kicked upward toward the surface, breaking through a second later. Olah was already swimming toward shore. Les and Erin swam after him even though every instinct told Les to turn back and try to help Jennifer.

She was still alive, damn it. Maybe hurt bad, but still moving.

Olah reached a slab of concrete on the shore and crawled up. He turned to help Erin out of the water, then grabbed Les.