James Axler – Rat King

than to end up like this, prone to lapses into insanity. For a man with Doc’s

intelligence, it was a strain to know that he walked a narrow ledge between

coherence and madness. He had once heard someone say that stupidity had saved

many a man from madness. Perhaps that was true.

“Doc, what we gonna do?”

Doc was jolted back to the moment. He looked at Lori, peering through the

darkness to focus on her.

“I said, what we gonna—”

“I know, my dear. I heard you the first time. My grasp on sanity may be a little

tenuous at times, but my hearing has not suffered. As to the action I propose we

take, I would suggest that the best course of action at the present time is to

actually take no action.”

Lori giggled. “You’re crazy, Doc.”

Doc smiled to himself but refrained from comment. Slowly, in his mind, the

fragments of the puzzle were assembling themselves into a whole. He remembered

the fat, evil-looking woman whose throat he had sliced in twain. He remembered

the attempt to escape from the redoubt, and the signs of a sudden evacuation by

the staff. And then there were the trank darts fired from the strange vehicle.

And now he was here.

With Lori?

Doc felt the weight of the LeMat in his hand, and knew that it was primed to be

fired. In his other hand he held the swordstick. It was a sign to him of the

changes that had occurred in his life that he, an academic by vocation, no

longer felt safe unless he had a weapon or two at hand. Particularly now.

Particularly as, although she was standing next to him, he knew that Lori had

been dead for no little time.

Doc was about to speak when a blast of air hit him like a solid blow to the

solar plexus, doubling him over and driving the breath from his body. He was

aware of Lori screaming, her shrill voice mixing into the roar of the gale as it

hit them.

With a sickening realization, Doc knew that they were facing a foe worse than

any baron, scavenger or mutie. They were facing the implacable force of nature

gone wild, distorted by the rad blast of skydark.

It was a foe against which all weapons were useless.

“Doc! Help me…”

“THE OLD DUDE is looking a bit wired,” remarked Pri Firclas Baker, scratching

his head and noting idly that he’d made his tender scalp bleed again, a tuft of

hair caught under his nail.

“It’s nothing we can’t handle,” snapped the willowy woman who was the end of a

long line of techs for this section. By some fluke, Dr. Tricks was an almost

perfect specimen of womanhood. A throwback to a cleaner, less rad blasted gene

pool, she had flowing raven hair and sharp, classical features with high

cheekbones. As a result she was the target of lustful attention from every male

in the redoubt. At first Gen Wallace had high hopes of using Tricks to start a

new gene pool and eradicate some of the problems of inbreeding and mutie

infiltration.

Until he discovered the one flaw in Tricks’s otherwise immaculate makeup: she

was sterile. He ruled that she was out-of-bounds. If she couldn’t breed, then he

didn’t want his men wasting their seed on her.

It didn’t stop them trying, which made her weary of the attention.

It also made any male soldiers assigned to her section slack in their attention

to detail. Baker had been commanded by Wallace to inform him of any change in

the old man’s signs. He was too busy watching Tricks move around the lab to

really pay much attention to the way in which the monitor screen was registering

a rapid variety of signals. Like Dean, studied so carefully in the next room,

Doc had REM that was going crazy, and sweat poured from his body as the muscles

twitched beneath his skin.

“Don’t you think you should go and tell the Gen what’s happening here?” Dr.

Tricks said archly.

“No, it’s nothing,” Baker replied without giving the monitors a second glance.

“The old dude’ll probably kick it, but so what?”