Beneath the Ashes 3 by Misty Vixen

Author:Misty Vixen [Vixen, Misty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Royal Guard Publishing LLC
Published: 2024-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The elevator locked into place.

This was it.

The ride up had lasted about two minutes, and after the first fifteen seconds or so of nothing going wrong, they began to relax… except for Indigo. She hadn’t said a word the whole time up, and now Ethan was beginning to worry about her.

“You doing okay, Indigo?” Ethan asked as Kasumi prepared to open the doors.

“What? Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied, but she didn’t quite sound it.

“If you need a minute–”

“I said I’m fine! Can we get this shit on the road?” she snapped. He looked at her. She huffed a sigh that briefly fogged her faceplate. “Sorry. I’m ready to go. I want to get this over with.”

“All right,” Ethan said after a moment of studying her further.

He still wasn’t completely sure she had all her shit together, but she did have a valid point: they had a job to do and the longer they took to do it, the worse their overall situation became.

“At the ready,” Ethan said.

Everyone slipped into as defensive a position as they could in a big, empty, round room. Kasumi opened the doors.

And Ethan saw the surface of Earth for the first time in his life.

There had been a building in front of the lift, but it had long since been destroyed.

Heaps of ash lay everywhere. Beyond the scarcely defined boundaries of the building that had once been, he saw the remains of the colony that had been on the surface. There wasn’t much left. Crumbling ruins covered in ash, mostly. In the distance, he could see a large wall that was by far the most intact thing left.

They waited for something to attack them or even move, but the only thing that shifted was the ashes in the wind.

He could hear the wind as it scoured the landscape. It was a cold, painfully lonely sound.

“Casten, with me,” Ethan said, and led the man out of the elevator.

Ethan checked right and Casten checked left. Neither found anything, just more of the same. More ashes, more desolation.

All of this sat beneath a mournful gray sky covered utterly by dense, jagged-looking clouds. Somewhere in the distance came a vast rumbling sound. Ethan seized up in sheer terror as it continued. It seemed to be coming from somewhere overhead.

“What the fuck is that?!?” Indigo demanded.

“I have no fucking idea,” Casten muttered.

“It’s thunder,” Kasumi said. “It’s okay, it isn’t a threat. Just nature. Well, we have to be careful of lightning strikes.”

“Oh... right,” Ethan said quietly, glancing skyward. They’d covered that in the data on the surface. “Will it rain? That’s what thunder means, right?”

“That’s what it used to mean. I... don’t know if it will rain,” Kasumi replied. “Regardless, we’d better hurry.”

“Right. I got no movement out here. Come on.”

They began to leave the elevator but then he heard Kasumi say, “Indigo, do you see something?”

He turned back and saw her standing stock still inside the lift. “I... don’t know if I can do this,” she whispered. He could hear the naked fear in her voice.

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