From the bestselling author who brought you the award-winning Extinction Cycle series, comes an all new vision of the apocalypse and the future of humanity. HELL DIVERS [Blackstone Publishing; July 19, 2016] is a thrilling post-apocalyptic work of s...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER ONE
The average life expectancy for a Hell Diver was fifteen jumps. This was Xavier Rodriguez's ninety-sixth, and he was about to do it with a hangover.
He waited outside the doors of the launch bay in silence, head bowed, palms against the cold steel. The armed guards standing across the hallway might have thought he was praying, but he was just doing his best not to puke.
The night before a dive was always fraught with tension, which sometimes led to poor decisions on the Hive. Normally, Captain Ash turned a blind eye to the diver teams' debauchery; after all, she was dropping them into the apocalypse to scavenge for parts on the poisoned surface of the Old World. Rarely did all the divers come back. A bit of booze and sex the night before was practically a given.
"Good luck, X," one of the guards said.
X sucked in a long breath, tied the red bandanna with the white arrow insignia around his head, then pushed open the double doors. The rusted metal screeched across the floor, drawing the gaze of Team Raptor's three other members. Aaron, Rodney, and Will were already suiting up near the lockers.
At the far end of the room, past the dozen plastic domes of the launch tubes, stood a few divers from Team Angel. They were easy to spot in the crowd of technicians and support staff gathered along the wall. Engineers, soldiers, thieves: divers had a wide variety of skill sets, and they would stand out like a flame in the dark even without their red jumpsuits.
He gave the room a quick scan. Team Apollo hadn't shown up this time. That was fine with X; he didn't like being watched anyway.
"Nice of you to make it, X!" Will shouted. The newest member of Raptor threw on his dented chest armor and looked X up and down as he walked over to his locker.
"You look like hell, sir," Will said, chuckling.
"Nothing a few stims can't handle," X replied.
He didn't need to look in a mirror to know that Will was right. X looked much older than his thirty-eight years. Crow's-feet had formed around his eyes from too much squinting, and his habitual frown had carved its way into his cheeks and forehead. At least he still had most of his teeth. But for his unusually white smile, he would have looked a good deal worse.
X stopped at his locker for another ritual. Tracing a finger over his name tag, he took a moment to remember the divers who had come before him. It was growing more difficult by the day. Some days he couldn't remember some of their faces at all. But today that was partly a product of his pounding headache.
Opening the door to his locker, he searched the top shelf for a bottle of the stimulants he had discovered on a dive a few months back. The precious tablets—one more thing that was impossible to make on the Hive—were worth their weight in gold.
