Hell Divers: The Lost Years: X and Miles by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Author:Nicholas Sansbury Smith [Smith, Nicholas Sansbury]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2024-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

DAY 250

“This is Commander Xavier Rodriguez, hailing anyone out there,” X said into the radio mic. “I’m holed up beneath the ITC facility in Chicago with access to food, water, and tech . . .”

His voice cracked, and he coughed into his hand. Pinpoints of blood flecked his glove. He dragged his sleeve over his mustache. Then he rubbed his throat. The inside was raw from all the coughing over the past few months. The first virus, or whatever it was, had lasted two weeks. No sooner had he gotten over that than he picked up a stomach bug and lost ten pounds.

The constant illness had knocked him off his routine. He had stopped working out, stopped shaving, stopped taking care of himself. A perpetual fatigue plagued him, leaving him hardly enough energy to function.

You have to snap out of this . . .

It reminded him of his days as an alcoholic on the airship. Back then he was always teetering on the edge of a cliff, and now he was right back there, standing at the edge, staring into the abyss. Wondering if maybe it was better just to fall in and let it swallow him whole.

He was close to doing just that, and if he didn’t break out of this funk, he would lose the last of his desire to live.

Coming here to the radio transmitter didn’t help things. Neither did sitting with the dead. He had never bothered to clear the corpses from the command center. There were too many, and even decomposed and desiccated, they were still heavy and unwieldy, and anyway, he had nowhere to put them. He had covered the twisted, bony remains with sheets, but he could still feel their presence. Sometimes he had the sensation of being watched or thought he heard whispering voices.

Those had to be in his head, but still they sent a chill up his spine.

X thought he heard something now—not a whisper, but a scratching. He picked up his shotgun and went to the window panels overlooking the main hub below. Lights flickered over the desks, screens, and covered bodies of the former operators.

He checked the shadows, but nothing moved in the dead room. Another few beats passed before he sat back down at the radio and the bank of monitors. X almost flinched at the reflection in one of the screens.

It looked like a ghost. But this ghost was still alive. He hardly recognized the haggard features—the sunken eyes and dark-brown, gray-streaked bangs. He brushed the long strands back over his ear. His cheekbones stood out above his thick beard. This was the thinnest he had been in years.

X looked away, his gaze falling on a partially exposed corpse in the corner of the room. The sheet had fallen away from the man’s mummified features. In some ways, X didn’t look all that much different. Soon, he would probably join these silent companions—dead from the next disease, from one of the monsters, or from falling into the abyss.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.