Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

Ten thousand feet. Halfway there.

He shot through a shelf of cloud as black and flat as an anvil and watched in shock as the entire sky lit up with flashes of electric blue. Experience immediately took over. Bringing his arms back into a V, he tilted his nose down, and narrowed the V into an arrow point.

His team had vanished in the clouds, but they would be doing the same thing. The wind shears and electrical disturbances would render them deaf and blind, their electronics useless. That was why X had trained his team to calculate their altitude and velocity by time in free fall, aided by whatever they could glimpse of ground or horizon, without the assistance of a computer program.

But running numbers while falling through a lightning storm was next to impossible. The wind beat every inch of his body, and the lightning strikes seemed to bend the darkness and warp the space around them. He hadn’t seen a storm this massive and deep in a long time. It spread across his entire field of vision. There was no getting around it. They just had to punch through as fast as possible.

He split through the clouds like a missile, his body whistling as his velocity increased. A scrambled HUD reading, “ 8,000’, ” flickered on his visor right before he slipped into the dark heart of the abyss. He was falling at one hundred sixty miles per hour and counting. Every fiber of muscle in his body seemed to quiver in readiness. The screaming wind gave way to the rifle crack of nearby strikes, and the bowling rumble of those more distant. The constant shears threw him this way and that, forcing him to stiffen his legs and adjust constantly with his hands as rudders to maintain the nosedive and avoid spinning or tumbling.

An arc of lightning streaked in front of him. With no time to move or even flinch, he felt every hair on his body rise as one.

The mere fact that he was having this thought meant the strike wasn’t critical. He could still see, and his heart was still hammering away. The strike hadn’t penetrated the layer of synthetic materials in his suit that was designed to offer a degree of protection against the electrical jolt. Still, he was bound to feel some of the burn before long.

Six thousand feet.

Bringing his arms out to his sides and bending his knees, he worked his way back into a stable position and finally felt the heat. His skin was on fire. He bit down harder on his mouth guard, tasting the plastic.

Five thousand feet.

The digital map on his HUD had solidified again. One of the blips had vanished, a heartbeat gone. It was Rodney, lost to the darkness.

“ God damn, ” X whispered. He clenched his jaw, fighting to compartmentalize the anger swirling under his burning flesh. Someone would pay for this stupidity, but it would have to wait.

Four thousand feet.

Lightning flitted through his fall line. This time, he didn’t even blink. He was almost down and was focused completely on gauging the time between himself and the surface. The suits had no autodeploy system—the engineers had removed them years ago at X’s request. He didn’t want a buggy computer system as old as he was determining when his chute fired.

A blinking dot in the welter of data on his HUD pulled his attention back to his visor. Will’s beacon had veered dramatically off course.

X tilted his helmet, searching the darkness for the blue glow of the battery unit, and glimpsed it spinning away into the whirling black mass.

Will’s beacon blinked off a moment later, his heart stopped by a fatal jolt of static electricity. The kid had ended up precisely on the statistical mean after all: dead on his fifteenth jump.

X felt a tremble of anger. The two divers had been so close, almost out of the storm, almost through to the relative safety of a toxic earth. And now they were dead. A waste of precious human life that could have been avoided if the officers in ops had done their fucking jobs. How could they miss a storm a hundred miles wide?

Screaming in rage, X burst through the cloud floor at terminal velocity and bumped the pad in his helmet to activate his night-vision goggles (NVGs). Below, a decaying city exploded into view. The rusted tombstones of skyscrapers rose out of the metal-and-concrete graveyard. Those buildings that hadn’t crumbled stood leaning against one another like a forest of dead snags. Their tilted girders, showing vivid green, filled his visor, growing larger with every thump of his heart.

Three thousand feet.

Clear of the storm at last, X tucked one arm and made half a barrel roll, then lay on his back, legs and arms spread. The glow of a battery unit came into view, and two seconds later a diver shot through the clouds above. Having confirmed that it was Aaron, he rolled back into stable position and pulled his rip cord. The suspension lines came taut, yanking him upward, or so it felt. Reaching up, he grabbed the toggles and steered toward a field of dirt to the north of two crumbled buildings.

With the drop zone (DZ) identified, he pulled the left toggle, turning the canopy to scan the sky. Aaron came back into view a heartbeat later, but something was wrong. He was still in a nosedive and screaming toward the pyramid of ruins.

“Aaron, pull your fucking chute!” X shouted into the comm.

Static crackled, and a second passed. Another two hundred fifty feet closer to the ground.

Aaron’s panicked voice boomed over the channel. “I can’t see! My night vision isn’t working!”

X squandered a half second checking his DZ. He was still on course for a clear landing. He returned his gaze to the sky, locking on the blue meteor that was Aaron.

“Pull your chute! I’ll guide you.”

“I can’t see nothin’ but rooftops!” The flurry of static couldn’t hide the fear in Aaron’s voice.

“Pull your chute, God damn it, unless you want to eat one of those rooftops!”

X breathed again as Aaron’s canopy finally inflated. He still had a chance to slow down, a chance to live. X would guide him. His eyes would be Aaron’s eyes.

“Steer left!”

Aaron pulled away from the towers, but there were so many. Too many. He plunged toward the jutting bones of what had once been a magnificent high-rise office building.

X rotated for a better view, his ears popping from the change in pressure. Dizziness washed over him. He blinked it away, keeping his eyes on Aaron. He was slowly gliding away from the stalks of broken buildings.

“I can’t see, X!”

“Keep pulling left. You’re almost clear!”

There was a pause.

“Remember what I told you about Tin?” Aaron’s voice was softer now.

X’s heart caught for half a beat. “Yes.”

“You have to take care of him. Promise me!”

“Aaron, you’re going to make it! Keep to your fucking left! You’re almost clear.”

The canopy pulled Aaron away from the jungle of steel and glass, but X couldn’t see a clear landing zone. He squirmed in his harness, eyes roving frantically across the desolate landscape for a way down.

“Promise me, damn it,” Aaron repeated.

X sucked in a measured breath. “I promise. But you’re going to—”

Before he could finish his sentence, the blue silhouette swung around and smashed into the side of a building. X watched helplessly as the chute caught on jagged metal. The force tore it free, and the blue glow plummeted into darkness.

The lonely crackle of static washed over the comm. An eyeblink later, he lost sight of Aaron, but he heard the crunching thud over the comm as his friend’s body smacked into the pavement.

X stared at the ruined buildings, the air seized from his chest, unable to process that Aaron was really gone. He had only seconds before he had to flare his chute and hit the ground himself, but he couldn’t pull his gaze away from the towers or bear the thought of finding Aaron’s mangled corpse. Not now, not after surviving this many dives.