James Axler – Rat King

clean all the weapons in their possession. It was their task and purpose. That

was how it was in the good book.

Murphy spumed the use of tech weapons, claiming that they would be useless on

the outside, and that blasters and a well-drilled sec corps were the only

essentials.

Wallace furrowed his brow. Where was Murphy now? Unconscious, maybe chilled, on

a concrete floor.

And the outsiders he wanted so badly… Murphy would have chilled them. Wallace

wanted them alive. They were recyclable. Especially the old man. He seemed

perfect for the mechanism.

The vid screen flickered above the terminal the Gen was using. In shaky black

and white, reverberating in time with the movement of the wag, Wallace could see

the seven people standing by the open armory door. He knew he had guessed right.

They needed blasters, and he had used that need to trap them. That was why he

was the Gen.

They were frozen in disbelief for a fraction of a second. Then the one-eyed man

in front and the man with spectacles at the rear raised their blasters. The

black woman, the one with the strange hair, the boy, the albino and the old

man—yes, the all-important old man— stood between.

Gen Wallace stopped the wag and grasped the handheld microphone that stood by

the terminal. He thumbed a switch.

“You people. You will obey the regs and put your blasters on the floor. Hands on

heads, then follow the wag. No harm will befall you. We come in peace. It is

imperative that we have full and fruitful discussions.”

He saw the one-eyed man shout something and open fire with the Heckler & Koch.

The sec camera was obviously hit, as the screen went black.

Wallace sighed. Why did they do this? Didn’t they know the regs stated all

resistance was futile? He keyed in a comp code.

“BACK,” RYAN YELLED.

“Back where?” J.B. asked. “Damn redoubt corridors don’t have any cover.”

“Past the last sec door, John,” Mildred cried, passing the Armorer and pulling

at his arm. “Maybe they’re like all other soldiers and pencil the code under the

punch plate.”

J.B. figured Mildred had a point—that was usually how they found the sec codes

of some doors in redoubts.

“Worth a try,” Ryan yelled over the chatter of his Heckler & Koch as he emptied

the clip at the wag. “It’s the only way we can outdistance this thing, buy some

bastard time.”

He ejected the clip and inserted another from the meager supply he’d removed

from Panner’s corpse. It seemed to him that they were doing nothing but react.

They had to turn the situation around and act, get these soldiers on the run.

“Dad, get down!” Dean yelled as he saw the drum rise from the center of the wag.

It looked like a circle of blasters on a rotating wheel, which began to rapidly

spin.

Ryan dived as the rotating wheel spit fire. He felt a plucking at his clothes,

small objects whistling past his ears and through his hair.

Krysty screamed behind him. He tried to turn, but movement was sluggish. His

vision narrowed.

Trank darts.

His last conscious thought was that someone wanted very badly to take them

alive.

What reason could prompt that risk?

Chapter Four

Dean Cawdor was sure that there was something wrong. It was night, and he was

making his way across the marshy grasses that separated the boys’ dormitories

from those of the girls.

That was weird; in all his time at the Nicholas Brody School, he couldn’t recall

the area between the dormitories being such a swamp. It hadn’t been such a long

trek, either. Dean’s calf muscles ached, each step tearing at them and sapping

his strength. He ground his teeth as he pulled a foot out of the sucking earth

and moved on.

The girls’ dormitory seemed to fall farther into the distance the longer he

walked. His breath came in rasps, and his chest felt as though it were about to

burst, a burn crossing his lungs with each painful intake of air.

The more he thought about it, the more bizarre it seemed. He had no idea why he