James Axler – Rat King

escaped from the drunk’s stretched throat. With his free hand Ryan chopped at

the man’s exposed Adam’s apple. He felt cartilage crack beneath his granite

hand.

The drunk choked and coughed blood. He was limp with shock, and it took Ryan

just one twist to break the man’s neck.

An angry cry from behind Ryan alerted him to the possibility that the squat

drunk had become a danger once more. He rolled to one side to see the drunk

coming toward him, holding the handmade knife. His legs were blistered and

charred, and the denim appeared burned into his skin, but above the waist he

seemed to have escaped damage from the fire. The rifle lay across the room,

discarded in drunken anger.

Good. Ryan stayed calm, despite the adrenaline race of his pulse. The more angry

an opponent, the more likely he was to make mistakes.

Like lunging at a man and committing his strength and balance to one direction,

when his foe was moving in another.

With a wild yell the squat drunk threw himself toward Ryan, who moved back

across the slumped corpse of the skinny drunk. His muscle-bound opponent wasn’t

expecting Ryan to head in that direction, so the knife hit empty dirt, sticking

in the floor.

Momentarily confused, the squat drunk was torn between going after Ryan and

retrieving his sole weapon. It was a mistake that enabled Ryan to spring to his

feet. The squat drunk turned his head to see where his opponent was just in time

to receive the toe of Ryan’s combat boot at the point of his jaw. The bone

shattered like delicate porcelain china, splintering in the drunk’s face.

Ryan stepped back as the drunk hit the floor for the last time, and turned,

expecting to see the barkeep ready to argue about the damages.

Instead he was greeted with a sight that made his senses reel. Harvey, his dead

brother, the cause of so much trouble in Front Royal and the reason Ryan had

been forced to leave the ville, stood behind the bar, flanked by sec men.

“Congratulations, Ryan. Now see what you can do against my boys…”

WALLACE AND MURPHY had left Dean, now disconnected from the comp, and stood over

his father, watching the signs on the monitor.

“He’s ready,” Wallace said, nodding.

J.B. HAD THE WORST nightmare of his life come true. The Armorer was defenceless

against a horde of stickies. All his weapons jammed. All his grens had refused

to go off. His fedora was lost, as was his minisextant.

But most importantly of all, his spectacles had been knocked off at some point

that he couldn’t quite recall. So he was fumbling in a blurry mist.

Dark night, but he never lost his spectacles. It was something he went out of

his way to avoid, and he couldn’t understand where or how they had gone missing.

All he knew was that the Uzi had jammed as soon as he squeezed the trigger, the

M-4000 scattergun had no cartridges and his capacious pockets were suddenly,

mysteriously empty except for grens that failed to detonate. His knife was stuck

in the body of the only stickie he had so far managed to chill. Stuck so hard

that he couldn’t move it, and couldn’t waste time devoting his full attention to

it as the horde of muties overran him.

J.B. couldn’t even see where he was as they pinned him to the ground. He could

smell their foul odor and feel the heat of their bodies as a multitude of

suckered ringers grasped his body, wriggling obscenely across him as he was

secured in a tight mass grip and lifted from the ground.

He felt the quality of the air change as he was lifted above their heads and

carried along. The light increased, and he guessed that he had been sheltered

somewhere, but was now out in the open. The landscape blurred as he was jarred

up and down on the uneven ground. He could hear the debased chattering of the

stickies as they moved en masse.

He struggled, even though he knew it was pointless. There were too many of them,

their grip was too tight and he was severely impaired by the loss of his