Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

X took his duty seriously. Sure, the little perks like extra rations and private quarters were nice, but those weren’t why he dived. He dived to keep humanity in the sky. Every decision he made on the surface affected whether they lived or died. And right now he was wasting time.

Peering down the long incline of brick and metal, he found himself weighing another decision. He could climb down and risk a tear to his suit, or find a way around. The radiation readings made the decision simple: a tear would result in a lingering, painful death.

He stepped closer to the edge to look for a way down. The darkness hid all sorts of traps that had claimed the lives of countless divers. He had watched teammates swallowed by sinkholes, crushed inside unstable buildings, shredded in dust storms that stretched for miles. Hell, he had even seen them torn apart by mutant things that had adapted to live in the radiation zones—zones like this one.

He reactivated his night vision and searched for signs of life. No motion and no heat signature—nothing to suggest that anything had crossed through here lately.

A strong gust pushed him back, and he stumbled to the side. He planted his boots, but the slight movement changed his view. A hundred feet to the west, a path that he had missed earlier curved to the bottom.

He worked his way over to the trail and picked his way down to the cracked street. There wasn’t much cover between him and the buildings. Although he didn’t see any movement, that didn’t mean he was alone.

After making a final sweep of the area, he took off at a dead sprint across the open stretch. A blast of wind laced with dirt hit him a few feet from the building. He fought it, head tucked to his chest, and propped his back against the wall.

Hot breath fogged the inside of his visor as he rested for a few moments, eyes roving for threats, ears searching the whistling wind for anything out of the ordinary.

A brilliant delta of lightning streaked overhead, the thunderclap barely half a second behind. He waited for the noise to pass, then stepped away from the building to look at the double doors looming above him. They were sealed—a good sign that the building hadn’t been raided yet.

Hugging the wall in a low crouch, he slunk to the alleyway separating the cluster of warehouses. Another flurry of wind slammed into his suit as he stepped out into the narrow passage. He took a cautious step across to where the alley grew darker. Dust eddied and swirled through the narrow defile as he slowly worked toward a steel door pocked with rust.

X quickly brushed off the security panel, pulled a small cord from his vest pocket, and patched the cord into his minicomputer. Numbers flickered across the display, freezing in place a digit at a time. The access codes downloaded, and the security panel chirped. A series of hollow clicks sounded as the locking mechanisms worked for the first time in over two centuries.

He slowly pushed the door open with one hand, keeping the rifle leveled in the other. The metal creaked open to reveal a space about the size of the Hell Diver launch bay. He stood in the stillness, playing his weapon over the space and listening.

Row after row of shelves, stacked with boxes and metal crates, rose to the ceiling. A staircase to his right led to two mezzanine levels that extended over the aisles of storage. The ceiling sagged and bulged in one corner. He paused to examine the hole. It looked large enough for a man to crawl through, but he spied no sign of life.

The darkness always hid something, but he didn’t have time for a full search. He grabbed the railing and took the stairs two at a time to the first landing. A catwalk stretched down the first aisle: shelves stacked with electrical cables. He continued up the stairs to the second platform. The shelves here were piled with what looked like computer parts and monitors.

He loped up the final stairs to the third platform. His heart leaped at the sight of stacked metal cases bearing the international radiation symbol.

Jackpot .

He hurried over, pulled a case from a shelf, and flipped the latches. The lid clicked open, and he felt his lips twist into a half grin. Five cylindrical power cells. He lost the smile, though—it didn’t feel right. Three of his men had died for these. The cells would power the ship for years, but no matter how he looked at it, X couldn’t see it as anywhere near an even trade.

Closing the lid, he grabbed the handle and traversed the catwalk. The cases were heavy, at least forty pounds. He would have to come back for more after he dropped the first at the supply crate.

X hurried across the mezzanine, footsteps clanking over nonskid metal, but beneath the echoey sound was another: a buzzing, almost electronic whine. He slid to a stop, ears on full alert, wondering whether he had tripped some sort of alarm.

The noise stopped abruptly, but the sudden silence only put him more on edge. He waited a beat, then walked on. His ears had played tricks on him in the past, picking up phantom sounds in a world of darkness. That was probably the case now. Too keyed up, that’s all. He picked up the pace.

A second buzzing screech sounded when he was halfway along the platform. Not his imagination. Not an alarm, either. This was a cold, shrill noise. And it was organic, not digital or electronic. In all his dives, he had never heard anything like it.

X bolted for the staircase. He grabbed the railing and swung down, two rungs at a time. He hit the second landing hard, stumbling and nearly toppling down the bottom flight.

Movement below pulled his gaze toward the floor. There was a wide crevice in the ground at the far end of the room—an entire missing floor section he hadn’t seen earlier. A rookie mistake that could cost him his life—could cost everybody’s life. He scanned the room more carefully now, looking for anything else he might have missed.

And he had.

He wasn’t even sure what that something was. A trio of bulblike cocoons, covered in thick bristles and scabby tissue, like half-molted snakeskin, hung from the upper left corner of the ceiling, over the exit door. The shadows had disguised them when he entered the warehouse, but he could see them well enough from the stairs.

X took a step closer. Not cocoons, but nests, with openings at the crest and center. An outer rim of the coarse skin, like hardened lips, surrounded the ridges of the holes.

He took another step, accidentally banging the fuel-cell case against the guardrail with a loud clang.

A shrill screech sounded in response. He cursed in his mind, eyes flitting to the wall in the darkest part of the room, where a blob of flesh fell from one of the nests and dropped to the ground.

What in the hell…?

X ducked down and held his breath. Through the gap in the railing, he could see something moving down there. It pushed at the floor with two hands and rose into a bipedal crouch. He stared, unbelieving, at the green-hued NVG image of what looked like a human physical structure. The creature let out another screech, which grew into a bellowing roar. Then it clambered out of view before he could get a better look.

Whatever it was, it had looked unsettlingly human. But that was impossible. They hadn’t found a survivor on the surface in over a century. Nothing could survive the rads, especially here.

X duckwalked to the other side of the platform and scanned the warehouse. He caught a glimpse of the thing darting down one of the aisles. The screeching waned as it vanished with a yowl that sounded like the trailing end of an emergency siren.

Turning back to the exit, he found that he wasn’t alone. On the floor beneath the nests, shrouded in darkness, perched a second figure.