Captives

TWENTY

The next morning, the ship’s mess hall was packed full of Cazador soldiers eating like starved animals. X sat by himself at one of the long tables, surprised they hadn’t tossed him back into his cramped quarters.

He had proved himself in the sky arena and again in the wastes, but that didn’t mean all the warriors had accepted him. Most of them hadn’t fought by his side out there, and only two of those who had were still breathing.

Screw all these cannibalistic assholes, he thought as he took a bite of bread so hard it nearly cracked a tooth. He dipped the crust into the slop on his plate, trying to soften it while avoiding the flaky white meat that may or may not be fish.

The feeling of being watched didn’t bother him, and he didn’t need to look up to know that several of the hardened men and a few of the women were staring at him as they would an enemy.

X didn’t care. All that mattered was filling his belly after a decent night of sleep. His body still ached from head to toe, but at least he wasn’t dog tired.

Footfalls sounded, and someone who smelled like sweat sat in front of X. He finally looked up to see a woman smiling at him. Sort of. He couldn’t really tell whether she was grinning or frowning at him.

Most of her teeth were missing, bruises covered her neck, and she had one arm in a sling.

She was bigger than most of the men, and no youngster. On the left side, she had gray hair almost to her shoulders, but the right side of her head was clean-shaven, with the tattoo of a barracuda inked into her scalp.

“Hola,” she said.

The voice sounded oddly familiar.

“Uh… hi,” X replied.

Rhino walked over from the line of soldiers waiting for food. He set his plate down and sat beside the woman.

“Want to tell me why this lady is staring at me?” X asked.

Rhino glanced over at her and gave X a puzzled look. “Wendig?”

“No, this lady,” X said.

Rhino laughed. “This lady is Wendig.”

“Oh, shit,” X said, nearly choking on the moistened bread in his mouth. He had never seen Wendig’s face, and the breathing apparatus had always distorted her voice.

Wendig’s grin turned to a frown when Rhino explained what X had just asked. Then she gave a deep cackle and reached across the table with her good hand to clap X on his shoulder.

The gesture attracted the attention of the soldiers at the next table. Two of them walked over and said something to Rhino and Wendig. Judging by their eyes and gestures, he had a feeling they were talking about him.

Maybe going to his quarters would have been a better idea.

He had just taken another bite of bread when a hand reached in from behind him and yanked his plate away. X stood and faced three more Cazadores, all of them fair skinned and covered in tattoos.

“You don’t belong here,” said the middle guy, his blue eyes glaring at X. “I don’t care how many of the deformed ones you killed. You’re not one of us.”

“Not going to argue with you there, pal. I didn’t ask to come on this shit journey and fight with you.” X held out his hand. “Now, I would appreciate it if you gave me my food back.”

Rhino watched from his seat. Wendig also remained sitting.

“Not going to ask you again,” X said.

The man looked at his buddies and then slowly held the plate out. Right before it was within X’s reach, he tilted it, letting the slop fall onto the deck.

X sighed as Wendig and Rhino both stood. This wasn’t going to end well.

“Back off, Sergeant Lurch,” Rhino said.

The guy holding the plate directed his gaze at the lieutenant. “Rhino, me and the other boys don’t like how you’ve warmed up to this skydiver.”

“Hell Diver,” X corrected.

Lurch cleared his throat and then spat a yellow glob on the plate.

“Here you go, Hell Diver,” he said, handing it back to X.

A flash of motion came from the right. It happened so fast, X almost didn’t see Wendig swinging her metal plate. She smashed it over Lurch’s bald crown.

Slop dripped down his face, and he reached up and wiped away the muck from his eyes. Then he touched the bloody welt on the top of his head.

“You bitch!” he screamed.

He lunged at Wendig, but she sidestepped and he slammed into the table. The soldiers sitting there grabbed their plates and scrambled away, some of them laughing. X bent down and picked up his bread off the ground. He wasn’t going to let good food go to waste.

“¡Basta!” Rhino shouted.

X had a feeling that meant “stop,” but Wendig and the sergeant didn’t seem concerned. Lurch threw a punch that sailed over Wendig as she ducked.

Moving backward, X bumped into someone, but the soldier was too busy yelling at the top of their lungs to notice X.

Wendig taunted Lurch by waving her broken arm and muttering something about a dog. That drove the spectators wild, and it worked on Lurch.

The soldier barreled toward her, screaming like a Siren. They slammed into each other, knocking Wendig backward. She let out a scream of her own and leaped onto Lurch, wrapping her legs around him.

X continued eating his bread, happy not to be the one getting his ass kicked, for once.

The brawling tangled mass slammed into a table, and Lurch bucked Wendig onto its splintery surface, knocking trays to the floor. She grabbed him with her good hand and pulled herself up by his shirt, biting his ear. Lurch screeched in agony and elbowed Wendig in her broken arm.

The two warriors fought for a few more seconds until Rhino finally grabbed Lurch by the scruff of the neck and yanked him off Wendig. Using only one hand, he lifted the sergeant a good two feet off the deck.

The other soldiers quieted down, and Rhino continued holding Lurch up, veins popping out on his massive arms while the man kicked in his grip.

Wendig got off the ground, cradling her broken arm. She bared her broken teeth like a dog.

“Get back,” Rhino said.

She hesitated, then returned to her seat, throwing X a glance, and a grin. Rhino let go of Lurch as soon as Wendig was out of punching distance, and then dropped him in a heap on the deck, gasping for air.

“Give the Immortal your food,” Rhino ordered.

Lurch glared at the lieutenant, rubbing his neck, his bloodshot eyes filled with rage. Getting up, he reached over to his table and handed his plate over.

X looked at the slop. “Is that human or monster meat? ’Cause if it is, I don’t want any.”

Rhino gave a half smile. “It’s fish.”

Shrugging a sore shoulder, X took the plate. He was hungry, exhausted, and hurting. Food would help him recover for the trip back to the Metal Islands.

Rhino said something to Wendig in Spanish, but she just shrugged and went back to her meal. So did the rest of the soldiers. The room again filled with casual conversations in several languages.

Sighing, Rhino sat beside X this time, keeping an eye on Lurch.

“He’ll be doing a lot more of that now that Whale and Fuego are gone,” Rhino said. “I’m going to miss those bastards. I fought with them for years.”

X dabbed the rest of his bread into the fresh slop. “I know what it’s like to lose friends,” he said, “but here’s what I don’t get…”

Rhino scooped up a hunk of the white fish but didn’t bring it to his mouth. “What?” he asked.

“Why the hell do you guys waste precious ammo, supplies, and, most importantly, people to kill Sirens?”

“The deformed ones?” Rhino said. He put his spoon back down and leaned forward, as if not wanting anyone to overhear.

“El Pulpo believes the Sirens give us strength when we eat them,” he said. “Normally, we don’t lose this many on our expeditions.”

Wendig looked over her shoulder at Lurch, who was talking quietly with his men. Unlike the sergeant, most of the soldiers seemed to really respect Rhino. Either that, or they feared him. X decided it was a bit of both.

You people are freaking demented, he thought.

“He will try to kill me soon,” Rhino said, without a trace of fear in his voice.

“So kill him first.” X glanced at Wendig, who was nursing her injuries. “Or maybe let her do it.”

Rhino picked a fish bone out of his teeth. “I did the same thing to get to where I am,” he said. “Killed my way to the top.”

“I’m surprised you all haven’t killed each other by now,” X said.

Rhino chuckled. “It would take a very big army to take this one down. Lurch is just one of many who want someday to be general of the main force.”

“Main force?” X asked.

The lieutenant set his spoon down and cracked his neck on one side, then the other. “You didn’t think this was all of us, did you? We’re just a platoon, Immortal.”

X swallowed his food as the realization filled him with dread.

If there were more Cazadores he hadn’t seen yet, then the Hell Divers wouldn’t have a chance, even though they had better weapons. He tried to keep calm, but all he could think about were his friends.

“How long until we get back to the Metal Islands?” X asked.

Rhino shrugged. “Depends on how long it takes us to find the missing vessels.”

“I thought we were going back to…”

“Not yet.” Rhino’s pierced nostrils flared, and he drew in a deep breath. “We’re going to meet up with another platoon—or find them, rather.”

X picked up his glass of water, trying to appear nonchalant while his mind raced with questions.

“One of our ships and some boats went missing,” Rhino said, “and that doesn’t happen very often. Not like this. Not without a trace. That’s not how it works. We have communications and beacons like in your airships. One minute, they were there, and then they were gone.”

X sipped his water and kept his poker face. This wasn’t the work of some random storm. This was his friends. They were finally coming to the Metal Islands, and they had no idea what they were up against.

Katrina had waited her entire life for this moment. So why did she feel so nervous?

Lightning sliced through the soup outside the protective glass of the USS Zion’s command center. The scene transported her back to the final moments before a dive, when the glass floor of the launch bay revealed the storms raging beneath her boots.

In a few minutes, Deliverance would arrive over their location, and in a few hours, the Hive would also show up with the rest of their people.

The final moments before the beginning of the end were finally upon her, and she felt that she was going to be sick. Everything was riding on the attack’s success.

Just twenty miles east, the barrier between dark and light awaited her on the final leg of the journey to the Metal Islands.

She picked up the receiver and checked the coordinates they had used to contact Timothy Pepper of the Sea Wolf. Several days had passed since they last spoke to the AI, and they hadn’t been able to reach him in the past several attempts.

The likelihood of Timothy sending another message was slim, but she had held on to the hope he would deliver more intel on what they were about to face. But now she feared he was disabled or worse. If he was compromised, he could doom them all.

A voice broke over the static. Eevi stood at the top of the ladder, holding a tablet that lit up her grim face.

“We’re not picking up anything on radar out there,” Eevi said. “No airships and no Cazador vessels.”

“Copy that.”

“There’s something else, Captain.”

Katrina waited for bad news.

“We lost one of the civilians from the container ship. A woman. She was too dehydrated… We couldn’t save her.”

“I’m sorry,” Katrina said. She knew they wouldn’t be able to save everyone, but the report stung nonetheless. Every life mattered now more than ever, and she had ordered her people to do everything they could to nurse those people back to health. “Once the airships arrive, we’ll have better medical supplies for the survivors,” she said. “Speaking of which, any update on what we salvaged from the container ship?”

Looking at her tablet, Eevi rattled off the new inventory.

“Ten assault rifles, two thousand rounds of ammunition, and a tank of gasoline with over five hundred gallons remaining,” she said.

“Excellent,” Katrina said.

Eevi continued, explaining the cache of frozen fish found in the belly of the ship that would last months if they could keep it cold. Even better, the ten captured Cazadores had jumped overboard when she aimed the MK-65 at the container ship’s hull.

The sharks had gotten their fill of meat over the past few days, and after seeing the butcher shop aboard the container ship, Katrina didn’t feel even a twinge of empathy.

Next on the chopping block was el Pulpo.

She planned to kill the bastard herself, just as she had Captain Leon Jordan. But first, she needed to sharpen the sword hanging from her belt.

The thought snapped her back to reality. She had much to do before she could hack off the cannibal king’s head.

“Captain, we just picked up something on radar,” Sandy said over the comms. “Looks like Deliverance. They’re coming in from the southwest.”

Katrina lifted her binos off the porthole sill and pointed them to the southwest, using the night-vision optics to scan the clouds. She held them for several minutes until she saw the flames from the six thrusters appear through the clouds. The sight filled her with pride… and adrenaline.

“Let’s go,” she said to Eevi.

They climbed back down to the bridge, where Jaideep, Edgar, and Sandy sat patiently at their stations.

“Okay, people, this is it,” Katrina said. “You all know what to do. You have the bridge, Eevi. I’ll be in the cargo hold.”

She moved through the USS Zion as fast as she could, going through the plan in her head. Everything that happened from here on out had to go smoothly, or the entire plan would derail.

When she got to the cargo bay, the door was already open. The wind outside was blowing the rain sideways.

Alexander, Trey, and Vish watched over the captives they had moved over from the container ship. There had been twenty-one new people, but a blanket covered the recently deceased woman, dropping the number to twenty. A grieving man knelt beside the body.

This was just the beginning.

Katrina took a quick inventory of the other newcomers. Only five men were in any sort of fighting condition. Victor was the leader, but he could speak only a few words of English, and communication was difficult. That would change, she hoped, when Deliverance showed up and she had Timothy to translate.

A draft of wind hit her as she made her way around the group. She put a hand to her bruised ribs. It still hurt like hell to breathe deeply.

Deliverance’s turbofans whirred as the airship moved into position, its smooth black belly hovering five hundred feet above the stealth warship. One of the children pointed at the sky, and all the newly liberated people looked up in wonder, as if at an alien craft descending from the heavens.

Katrina smiled and nodded at all the new faces. Most of them looked at her with wrinkled brows, untrusting.

She couldn’t blame them. This was only the second group of outsiders most of them had ever seen, and she didn’t fully trust any of them yet, either.

She moved over to the open door as Deliverance rotated a few degrees to hover over the USS Zion. The cargo bay in the warship’s belly opened. A rope dropped from the airship, and the blue glow of a battery unit came sliding down it. The moment the diver unclipped from the rope, another diver emerged from the airship and rappelled down into the cargo bay.

Footsteps clattered in the cargo bay as the captives from the container ship all got up for a better view of the two Hell Divers, one of whom was a good foot taller than the other.

Alexander and Vish remained standing guard, but Trey ran over to greet his father.

“Dad!” he yelled.

Les hurried over and hugged his boy.

“Captain,” he said, nodding to Katrina.

“Good to see you again, Lieutenant,” she said.

Layla took off her helmet, smiled, and went to give Katrina a hug, then stopped when she saw the thick bandage around her chest.

“That doesn’t look good,” Layla said.

“It’s not a big deal,” Katrina said. “How are you?”

Layla shrugged, and Katrina looked back up at the airship, sensing that her friend was worried about something besides the imminent battle.

“So where is Commander Everhart?” Katrina asked.

“Med bay, healing from his procedure,” Layla said.

“Procedure?”

“He’s got a surprise to show you,” Les said.

“I guess I’m heading up to Deliverance for a bit,” Katrina replied. “I’ll go with these people once we work out a bucket system to get them up there.”

Layla turned to look at the recently freed prisoners. “What are we going to do with them?” she asked.

Les and Layla took a long look at the haggard lot, who seemed to be studying them in return, as if they were alien creatures from another planet.

“I hope you have a plan,” Les said.

“I do,” Katrina said. “We’re going to save these people. Just as we’re going to save X, Magnolia, and Miles.”