Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

X hurried after her, passing more injured patients. His gut tightened when he saw Tin with a bandage wrapped around his head. He was hunched over an old man’s bedside, hands clamped down over the patient’s thigh.

“Are you hurt?” X said, rushing over.

Tin shook his head and glanced back down at the man. He pushed harder, eliciting a groan of agony.

“Shit,” X said. “Let me.” Brushing Tin’s hands aside, he saw the deep gash and quickly applied pressure. Blood seeped around his palms, staining everything red.

“He’s bleeding out,” X said. “Where the hell are the nurses and docs?”

His words fell on deaf ears. The few medical workers were doing triage—busy saving people they could actually save, and leaving the old, weak, and mortally wounded to die. He knew because in their shoes he would do the same thing. It was the reality of working with limited resources. Life-and-death decisions were made on the fly, and efficient triage meant that some people just weren’t going to make it.

Realizing now that his efforts were futile, X let up on the gushing wound. The man stared at the ceiling with blank eyes. His chest moved up and down twice more before his gasps for air weakened to nothing.

X wiped his blood-soaked hands on his red uniform, looked at Tin, and frowned. “Sorry, kid.”

The boy didn’t reply. He bent over and grabbed something from below the bed that X couldn’t see.

“Commander!” a voice boomed above the confusion.

He turned to see a Militia soldier in gray fatigues, running down the hallway. The mirrored visor on his riot helmet was flipped up, and X saw the urgency in his eyes.

“Commander, Captain Ash has requested all Hell Divers meet on the bridge immediately.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Sir, my orders are to escort you to—”

“I said I’ll be there,” X snarled.

The soldier nodded and hurried away. Looking down at Tin, X missed his best friend more than ever. The boy had removed his bandage and replaced it with the tinfoil hat.

“You sure you’re okay?” X asked, looking into his eyes, checking the pupils.

Tin nodded and straightened his hat. But his eyes couldn’t hide the truth: that he had just seen someone die and that he wasn’t okay. After everything the kid had been through, X wasn’t sure he would ever be okay again.

“You stay with Layla and her family until I get back, okay?”

Tin nodded again.

X imagined Rhonda’s disapproving frown as he patted the boy on the shoulder and turned to double-time it back to the bridge. She never did understand the oath he had sworn to the Hive . Or, perhaps selfishly, she didn’t want to. Aaron would have understood, though. For a Hell Diver, duty to the ship came before everything else.

If not for the mission clock on his HUD, Weaver wouldn’t have known that night had fallen. He sat with his legs hanging off a pile of rubble, watching Ares burn in the distance. Tendrils of flames reached toward the sky.

His body felt numb—whether from the fatigue, the cold, or the emotions swirling through him, he couldn’t say. He remembered wondering what it would be like to be the last man on earth. Now he knew. Even if the Hive was still out there, he was the only man on the surface.

The cries of the Sirens reverberated through the city, but he paid them little attention. If they came now, he wouldn’t run. There was no reason to carry on. Everything had changed when Ares came crashing down to earth. His wife and kids were gone, along with every human he had ever known.

Before this dive, he had been thinking about asking for a transfer to the Militia so he could spend more time with his family. Usually, Hell Divers kept jumping until their luck finally ran out. But if Weaver were to die, his experience would die with him. He had done this his entire life. He had put his time in, fulfilled his duty. That would have been his pitch to Captain Willis.

An explosion ripped through the burning debris—a painful reminder that none of that mattered now. The glare dazzled him momentarily, and he closed his eyes to block out the nightmare for a few seconds—only to have a memory of his family reassemble in his mind.

He could see Kayla and Cassie vividly. Both girls sat on the living room floor of his cramped apartment, their freckled faces bright in the glow of candles from Jennifer’s birthday cake.

Another blast roared in the distance, but Weaver kept his eyes closed, trying to stay back in the sky with his family as long as he could. After a few minutes, he was only vaguely aware of the burning ship.

“Happy birthday, beautiful.” Weaver heard his own voice in his head and saw his wife turn and smile that same perfect smile he had fallen in love with twenty years ago.

“Come over and help me blow out these candles!” he remembered her saying.

In the memory, Weaver walked to the table and put his arms around his daughters. Jennifer blew out a weak breath and frowned, looking to Kayla and Cassie.

“Can you girls help me?” she said.

His daughters leaned in and blew with every bit of breath in their lungs. Weaver recalled his own smile, and how odd it had felt at the time.

Kayla and Cassie had laughed and looked up at him. But something was different now. There was something wrong with the cake in his memory. The candles were burning out of control, the wax leaking onto the vanilla frosting. He could see Jennifer’s smile relax with the rest of her features, and then her cheeks contorted, her skin melting and falling away from her jaw.

The once-happy memory now a nightmare, Weaver wanted to open his eyes, wanted to make it stop. But if he did, he would open them to the real nightmare of his home and family gone. There was no escaping it.

Tears rolled down his dry skin, and he watched in horror as his daughters’ faces softened and peeled away from their bones. Their clothes caught fire, and they slumped to the ground. The shriek of a Siren ripped their burning bodies away from his mind, and his eyes finally snapped open.

“No!” Weaver shouted. “No!”

He gasped for air, clutching at the armor over his chest with one hand and pushing at the ground with the other. Rising to his feet, he looked out over the bluff. Pinpricks of red light surrounded the charred remnants of the airship.

“I’m sorry,” Weaver whispered. “God, I’m so sorry for…” He choked on his words, distracted by a blur of motion in the sky. Something swooped from the clouds and soared over the field of embers, vanishing in the plumes of smoke.

Weaver fumbled for his binos, wondering if he was really losing his mind. He pulled them from his vest and zoomed in on the debris for the first time. Scattered coals glowed everywhere he looked. Pieces of shrapnel, hunks of metal… His breath caught at the sight of smoldering bodies.

“My girls,” he murmured. “My beautiful baby girls.” He felt like tossing the binos and screaming at the top of his lungs, but another flash of movement streaked over the embers. He followed a dark outline to the edge of the field, where it dropped to the ground. Another brilliant explosion ripped through Ares, spreading a curtain of light over the wreckage.

Weaver shielded his helmet with one hand and waited a moment for the brilliance to pass. When the light began to recede, he brought the binos to his visor and searched the field. A Siren stood over one of the embers, but this one was different. Leathery wings hung at its sides. It dropped to all fours and hunched its back, and the spiked vertebrae split in half, swallowing the wings like a mouthful of teeth closing over some morsel. The monster let out a screech, and a cacophony of wails answered from the sky.