Hell divers x fallout, p.2
Hell Divers X: Fallout, page 2
Every hair on his body rose up, and every muscle fiber seemed to tense.
“Aaron!” X shouted. “Aaron, do you copy?”
Static crackled over the comm.
X put his altitude at around two thousand feet or a bit higher. He began to come out of the nosedive in anticipation of pulling his chute.
Just as he fought back into a stable falling position, the HUD winked back on.
His heart skipped at the altitude reading of 1,500 feet.
“Oh shit!” he shouted. He bumped his NVGs back on with his chin and saw the wasteland burst into view.
To the east, X saw a glowing object falling far slower than he was. Aaron had already deployed his parachute.
“X!” the voice surged over the comm. “Pull your chute!”
X pulled the pilot chute, released it.
He expected to feel the suspension lines become taut and the sensation of being pulled skyward, but instead, he kept falling.
“You got to be fucking kidding me,” X muttered. He pulled his reserve. “Please work.”
The low-porosity reserve chute fired out, and the lines snapped taut.
He let out the breath he had been holding and took a moment to study their drop zone.
The Old World city was much smaller than the megacities they were used to diving into. It was much warmer here, too, almost eighty degrees.
Instead of the typical snowy ground, he saw mounds of sand.
They were in a desert, below the border of the former United States, deep in the land once known as Mexico.
But the terrain wasn’t all desert. X spotted some sort of flora carpeting the outskirts of the city, some of it encroaching on the decayed structures. As he drifted earthward under his canopy, he raised his rifle scope to his visor and zoomed in on what looked like large snakes.
Not snakes, he realized. Vines.
“You seeing this?” X asked Aaron over the comm.
“Yeah. Never seen anything like it before.”
There were trees also, towering structures with skeletal limbs that curled at the tips like melting candles.
“My God,” Aaron said.
X didn’t believe in God, because he didn’t believe any supreme being would allow the world and all its animals, plants, and marine life to shrivel and die. And like most places, this Old World city was dead. Nothing except for mutant beasts could survive this radiation.
After securing his rifle, X grabbed both toggles to steer his canopy toward the hospital at the western edge of the town. A warning sensor beeped, and a new reading came on his HUD. He took his left hand off the toggle to grab the duct-taped grip of his rifle. His heart was ticking faster now than during the dive.
Aaron sailed overhead toward the drop zone—the roof of the hospital. X was low enough now that he could see that it wasn’t going to work.
There was no rooftop.
“Follow me to a new DZ,” X said over the comm.
He toggled over to a field outside the hospital, where the foundations of buildings poked out of the dust and sand. X guided his chute down, pulled on the toggles to slow his descent, and bent his knees slightly.
As the ground rose up to meet his boots, he performed a two-stage flare. He hit the ground hard, raising a puff of dust. He ran out the momentum, and with no wind on the ground, he easily kept his balance.
Halting, he went down on one knee, raised his rifle, and held security while Aaron floated down to the surface. Another cloud of dust billowed up where he touched down.
X scanned the structures all around them—mostly just foundations, which made spotting the three-story hospital easy. It seemed to be the only building still upright.
The area hadn’t been hit by one of the nuclear warheads, but it had burned. Everything was charred, which made X worry the medicine would be destroyed if it hadn’t already been looted.
X didn’t see anything moving, but other divers had told him of camouflaged desert beasts—creatures that looked like stone, and man-size reptiles that could blend in with their surroundings.
Aaron packed his chute and brought up his rifle to cover X. Five minutes later, they had their gear slung over their backs and were moving out.
“Radiation is in the red,” X said. “You all buttoned up?”
“Suit integrity is one hundred percent. You?”
“Same.”
Side by side, the two men advanced through the ruins, along a street buried under a layer of dust and sand. X knew it was a road only by the rusted, windowless vehicles parked there.
They passed a rotting brown hospital sign.
X turned to watch their six, backpedaling while Aaron took point.
After crossing through the first block, they came to a road covered in vines. The creepers tendriled around the burned husks of vehicles and over ruined foundations.
Aaron kept going, but X walked over to one of the bloated red vines with spiky, twisted stems.
“Don’t touch it,” Aaron said.
X hurried to catch up with his partner.
It was as deathly silent as interstellar space.
Around the hospital, the vegetation thickened as if the structure itself were providing it nourishment. X and Aaron both halted at the edge of the property.
Vines curled out of the rooftop.
X bumped off his night vision, using the sporadic lightning flashes to see the mutant cladding of ropy red vines that enveloped the rooftop.
“This is remarkable,” Aaron said.
“Not exactly the way I’d describe it,” X said. “Come on, we need to find a way in.”
X checked his radiation gauge and found it unchanged. As long as he didn’t puncture his suit, he would be fine for an hour or two.
They brought up their weapons and slogged through the sand toward the building. Normally, X didn’t like wind on the surface, but about now a nice gust to cover their tracks would be most welcome.
A cracking noise stopped X midstride. The hair prickled on his neck.
He moved his finger to the trigger.
Aaron turned. “What?”
X brought a finger to the mouth of his helmet to indicate silence.
The two men slowly played their rifle barrels over the blasted landscape where thick ropes of vine lay coiled like anaconda snakes, their hard skin covered in strangely curved barbs.
X scanned twice for any camouflaged beasts hiding amid the vegetation. Seeing nothing, he signaled to advance.
They crossed through a lot where vehicles stood parked on bare wheels, their tires long since rotted out and the bodies rusted to thin, fragmented shells.
The building was in much better condition. One door remained at the emergency entrance. X went straight for it, entering a lobby with overturned chairs.
Most of the hospital seemed to have been spared from the flames that wiped this small town out. He made his way down a corridor framed with hospital beds. It wasn’t until they got to the emergency wing that they saw the first bodies.
Two corpses lay in the hall, covered in dust, their clothing tattered over bodies mummified in the dry desert air.
X moved around the bodies and headed for the pharmacy, hoping the meds were still in their cryo–storage containers. Time after time, when they found supplies or nuclear fuel cells for their ship, they had gone bad over the 240 years since the bombs dropped. He prayed this was not one of those times.
Still, X pushed on, shining his helmet lights down the corridors. Vines grew over the ceiling and walls, the spiked barbs coming within mere feet of his armor.
Thirty minutes later, they found the pharmacy, its door propped open. At first, he thought raiders had hit this place already, but looking closer, he saw it wasn’t people who had opened it.
Vines had burst out from the inside, forcing the double doors open.
X stepped over broken glass, some shards crunching under his boots. Aaron followed him inside, carefully stepping over the vines on the floor.
They entered a lobby with a counter. Beyond it were shelves, most of them stocked with generic medicines. X walked around the desk and started down an aisle. Pill jars and boxes littered the dusty floor.
He made his way to another open door, which led into what should have been an airtight room.
At the entrance, he froze.
“What?” Aaron asked.
X shined his light on two armored bodies.
Aaron walked over. “Holy shit, are those . . .”
“Hell Divers,” X said.
The two men walked into the room, stopping about five feet from the armored corpses. They were both covered in some sort of gray-green moss.
X crouched down and shined his light on the helmets. Broken visors gave a view of bare skulls.
“Makes no sense,” X said. “How could they be more decayed than the bodies in the hall?”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Aaron said. He stepped around them and went to the cases on the shelves while X examined the skeletal remains.
He reached out with a gloved hand and touched an arm. The simple touch moved the armor, and the bone snapped, some of it turning to powder.
X practically fell on his butt in surprise. “What the hell?”
Aaron stood in front of a crate. “Leave them alone and come help me,” he said.
X got up and noted the same mosslike substance clinging to the walls and ceiling.
“I’m not seeing any Redotal,” Aaron said.
X pulled out his knife and cracked open a lock on a drawer. He pulled it out to find vacuum-sealed bottles, but not what they were searching for.
As they scoured the room, X heard the cracking sound again. Aaron froze too.
As X waited, he saw a door like that of a walk-in freezer. It was marked with an R.
“Found it,” he whispered. “It’s been in thermal isolation for two and a half centuries.”
“Let’s hope it worked,” Aaron said.
“We’re gonna find out.”
X opened the door and searched until he found the medicine. Under his helmet light, he held up one of the bottles, confirming it was what they had come for. He carefully secured the bottles in a pouch.
On the way out, X picked up the pace as they walked past the dead divers. He wasn’t sure who they were, only that they weren’t from the Hive.
X hurried down the corridor, almost tripping on a vine. He hopped over it and then stopped.
Aaron kept going.
“Hold on,” X said.
“What now?”
“That wasn’t here earlier.”
“So?”
“So if it wasn’t here earlier, how’d it get here? I didn’t put it there. Did you?”
“It moved.”
“Vines move?”
“I don’t know, man, come on, let’s get gone . . .”
X backed away when the same cracking came again, this time behind him.
“X . . .” Aaron began to say. He turned and accidentally stepped on a vine, crushing it under his boot. Red liquid trickled out.
“Watch out,” X said, pulling Aaron back just as the barbs on the vine began to burst. Pink mist puffed into the air. The cloud expanded right toward them, moving fast.
“Run!” X said.
They both took off down the hall. They could hear more barbs popping behind them, trailing them. X ran hard, but the sound grew nearer. He looked over his shoulder as barbs on the vines clinging to ceiling and walls burst, releasing yet more of the pink mist.
“Faster!” he shouted.
He leaped over vines that were now actively snaking their way across the corridor. One sagged down from the ceiling and tried to catch him in a loop. Another peeled off a wall and shot toward his leg.
They made it back to the hallway where the two corpses lay. The pink mist grew denser, darkening into a bloody red swirl as it enwrapped the bodies.
X shined his lights on the remains and was astonished to see the mummified flesh consumed in seconds, leaving nothing but clean, white bone.
Aaron stopped to look, but X yanked on his arm, pulling him into a hospital room. “Follow me!” he shouted.
X shouldered through a broken window, knocking out the remaining shards of glass. He fell three feet onto the sand, landing hard on his side.
His shoulder hurt, but it was the warning sensor in his helmet that made him almost piss himself. Data rolled across the HUD. Suit compromised . . . He had minutes to get out of here.
Aaron helped X up, and they dashed across the sand, away from the hospital building, hopping over the writhing, grasping vines.
More of the little pink explosions puffed into the air. X risked a backward glance to see an entire cloud of red, venting up from the top of the hospital.
“We have to get into the sky!” Aaron shouted.
X looked up at the lightning storm above them, then noticed that the radiation warning on his HUD had elevated. The readings were going up as the pink cloud rose above the hospital.
X didn’t hesitate another second. Reaching over his shoulder, he activated his booster. Aaron did the same, and two balloons fired into the sky, quickly filling with helium. X grabbed his toggles as his boots swung up off the ground.
The storm of red reached out toward them, tendrils of spores swirling upward. The radiation gauge chirped louder.
X watched in horror as he shot upward toward the threat of lightning. He was stuck between a radioactive cloud and the electrical storms.
Heart pounding, he slowed his breathing and searched for Aaron. He was floating twenty feet away, his balloon pulling him higher.
“We’re good, man, we’re good,” Aaron said over the comms.
Lightning flashed around them on the long ascent back to the airship. X watched for it in the darkness. Ice crystals formed on his helmet as he rose higher.
The radiation warnings finally ceased at two thousand feet. He looked down at the tear in his suit, praying he hadn’t gotten a lethal dose.
Only time would tell.
For now, he was returning in one piece, with medicine to help save the sickest people on the ship.
X looked up as salvation hovered over them. The bay doors of the beetle-shaped airship opened, swallowing Aaron and his balloon. X floated up next to join him in the silo-shaped chamber.
A door sealed under their boots. The platform rose up as another door opened above them. Overhead, a plastic dome lowered from the launch bay to seal them inside. Chemical spray hissed out of jets on the platform, covering them both in white foam.
They turned with their arms out, leaving no square inch untreated.
Fifteen minutes later, the decon process was complete, and water rinsed off the chemicals.
The dome pulled away to a single person standing in the launch bay in a CBRN suit.
“We found it,” X said.
“There was something down there,” Aaron said. “Vines that move, and a radioactive mist that . . .”
Captain Ash listened but gave no visible reaction. It was almost as if she already knew about it.
“Well done,” she said. “You saved a lot of lives today.”
X and Aaron threw up a salute.
“Tell no one about what you saw down there,” she said on her way out. “That’s an order, divers.”
ONE
The dream had come to King Xavier Rodriguez the past two times he rested his eyes. He let out a groan as he sat up in a briefing room on the CIC of the assault ship Frog, where he had fallen asleep from pure exhaustion.
As he stirred awake in his chair, he recalled the dive to the hospital all those years ago. He’d thought the carnivorous vines were a fluke of nature, but now he wondered if this was what had killed everyone else who ventured to the Panama Canal over the past two centuries.
X replayed Rodger’s SOS message on a tablet.
“Help! Vines . . . coming through the walls . . . They’re turning people . . .”
There was little doubt in his mind what had happened at the outpost. And X held out scant hope that Rodger or anyone else had made it out of there alive. The bunker wouldn’t have saved them; it would have doomed them.
X got up and opened the hatch to the CIC. The place bustled with activity. He strode through, ignoring salutes, to stand at the remaining window. The broken ones had been sealed off to keep out rain and radiation.
Outside, he could see a shoreline littered with wrecked boats. The Frog was anchored off the northwestern shore of Fraser Island, adjacent to Kangaroo Island and 184 miles from Brisbane.
Seeing all those wrecks, X had decided to anchor the amphibious assault ship here for repairs, hoping some of those vessels contained what they needed to get her seaworthy again.
They had fled north to escape the radioactive fallout after Captain Rolo nuked the supercarrier Immortal. Almost two days had passed since then, and X was still in a homicidal rage.
For now, they were far enough from the fallout, they were safe to make repairs. First they had to find the parts. Behind him, the remaining crew worked swiftly to identify what was needed. The damaged ship had a slew of issues.
Waiting for a full briefing, X was getting more frustrated by the minute.
Over the years, he had experienced many betrayals and lies from superior officers. That list included Leon Jordan, former captain of the Hive, who had left X stranded on the surface for nearly a decade. Up until two days ago, that betrayal had topped the list. But Captain Rolo had officially surpassed Jordan.
The spineless old bastard was the king of betrayers.
Nuking the supercarrier hadn’t just destroyed their most valuable ship. It had also killed hundreds of innocent soldiers and sailors. With one single bomb, Captain Rolo had all but wiped out the Vanguard military.
Eevi, Timothy, and other sky people loyal to X would have tried to stop him from this, and while X wanted to hope they were still alive, he didn’t see how that was possible. Rolo would never have left anyone alive to tell the story.
