James Axler – Rat King

one-eyed bastard for me.” He picked up the handset of the radio and opened the

channel between the wags. “Listen here, people. I smell trouble, and if you

don’t, then what the fuck have you been doing all your lives? I don’t know what

we should expect, but look alive. Dismount and proceed with extreme caution.”

He didn’t bother with the call signs, an indication of his own nervousness and

wariness. It communicated itself to all the wags, where the military remnants of

the old ways gathered their standard-issue Uzis and H&Ks, checking that they

were ready for tiring. No one spoke.

In the lead wag Murphy turned to the four soldiers behind him, who were also in

the process of checking their weapons.

“Let’s go, people. Follow me, with extreme caution. Terminate with extreme

prejudice. I think we can forget breeding stock this time out, unless we get

lucky. Remember, aim for the head. We want those organs undamaged when we gather

the harvest. Okay, let’s go.”

He spun the sec lock on the wag’s door and slid down onto the dirt floor of the

circle, keeping watch all around him for any signs of life. There were none, not

even the mangy hounds that they raised in this pesthole for watchdogs, and meat

when the animal grew old. There was nothing at all.

Murphy heard the clicking of other sec locks, as the rear door of the wag opened

and the four men in back jumped out, fanning out around the wag to keep it

guarded—to keep one another guarded. The men in front and back of the other wags

followed suit, until all twenty-four men were in the circle, surrounding their

wags.

Still there was silence, as though the very atmosphere of the storm itself was

holding its breath, waiting for the first move.

RYAN SETTLED the Steyr against his shoulder, nestling the butt of the blaster

into the hollow. His finger caressed the trigger, while he sighted with his eye,

drawing on the driver of the last wag into the circle as he dismounted. He’d

thought about taking out Murphy first—he had a score to settle with the sec

chief from the redoubt—but decided against it as Murphy might be useful in

getting them back into the redoubt.

The man in his sights looked around slowly, his Uzi leveled, his eyes glittering

and alert. It caused Ryan only a ripple of surprise to see that the driver was,

in fact, a woman. And a ripple of surprise only because she was larger, heftier

and more muscular than any of the men in the detail.

It might be doubly useful to take her out first. He wanted to chill a driver so

that it freed one wag for them to capture. Ryan assumed that the other sec men

in the wag wouldn’t be able to drive. He’d gathered enough about the redoubt to

assume that each handed-down position was specialized and jealously guarded as

such. The woman looked stronger than many of the men, so it would be good to get

such a formidable opponent out of the way.

“Keep staring right at me,” Ryan whispered to himself, so much under his breath

that it only emerged as a sigh. Keep staring, keep giving me a great view of

your face, a clean and simple target…”

Ryan squeezed gently on the trigger, shoulder braced for the recoil, squeezed

until…

Ryan was already on the move when the shot hit home, killing the driver. He

tapped the ville dweller next to him on the shoulder to let him know that he was

to maintain the position, then jumped off the roof of the shack and headed out

along the back alleys of the ville.

He heard the burst of Uzi fire, and the eerie scream of a man with no tongue as

the sec man he had left behind caught the ricochet of Uzi fire. There was no way

it would be directly fatal at that range, no way anyone could have got an

accurate shot in with a machine pistol. The poor stupe had to have just been

unlucky.

First blood to Murphy’s men.

Ryan had memorized the alleys until he felt that he’d lived in the pesthole for