James Axler – Rat King

“My kind?”

“The insiders,” Tilly spit back. “You want to see what your kind has done to me?

Just because I didn’t fit what you wanted from your gene pool—not that it

stopped your sec men fucking me afterward, like pigs.”

Tilly began to unwrap the rags around her head. Her eyes burned brightly with

hatred, and also with something that Krysty felt sure was self-loathing.

As the rags came away in her hand, a dirty and multicolored bandage that

unraveled onto the earth, Krysty could see that Tilly had no hair to speak of,

just small tufts of down that appeared on a red raw scalp. It looked as though

someone had taken her by the hair and roughly sliced away the skin. Her forehead

was heavily lined and crisscrossed by scars.

Around her eyes, the skin was baggy, making her burning eyes seem ancient and

old when fully revealed. Her face was scarred with the remains of old burns, her

lips almost gone and her nose hollow and devoid of flesh.

“They set me on fire after taking my scalp. They wanted the hair and skin for

DNA tests. The burns were for tests on antibiotics. When I was thrown out to

die, the sec men took me because they hadn’t been allowed to mate and felt the

urge…” She uttered the last part with as much of a sneer as she could muster

from her broken face.

Ryan kept his gaze steady on the woman, noticing that Krysty didn’t flinch in

her face. From the corner of his eye, Ryan could see that the other guards

weren’t moving. There seemed to be an unspoken assumption that Tilly, if not

actually outranking them, was certainly of a higher standing.

Ryan had been at the mercy of psychotics in charge of sec forces many times. It

was never a good experience.

Krysty was breathing shallow and fast, trying to stop herself from appearing

shocked or disturbed by either Tilly’s appearance or her actions.

“Take a good look, bitch,” Tilly breathed, her voice reduced to a harsh,

venomous whisper. “Take a good look, ’cause you’ll end up like this, too. You

and the black bitch.”

“Tilly don’t like women much,” Mac said. It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that

the irritating humor was gone from his voice.

“Of course she doesn’t,” Mildred said quietly. “We remind her too much of what

she used to be.”

Krysty breathed a sigh of relief as Tilly whirled away from her, trailing rags

like banners behind her in the now gentle breeze. With a few strides that seemed

to float her across the surface of the ground without touching, Tilly was in

front of Mildred, waving the knife in her face.

“Shut the fuck up,” she screamed, an edge of madness seeping into her tones.

“Just shut the fuck up, or I swear I won’t wait until the ritual. I’ll chill you

now, and it won’t be quick. It’ll be slow and—”

She was cut off as Mildred snaked out a hand and gripped Tilly’s knife wrist.

The ragged woman was taken by surprise, a blank look of incomprehension crossing

what was left of her face as Mildred twisted her arm. With her free hand she

snatched the knife from the weakened grip, at the same time twisting farther so

that Tilly had to turn or risk dislocation of her elbow or shoulder joint.

“Hold it right there,” Mac snapped, raising his blaster. With an indication of

his eyes, he made sure that the other two covered Dean, Krysty and Ryan while he

covered Jak, whom he trusted least.

J.B. flicked his eyes toward the lip of the chasm. Tod had Mildred and Tilly in

his sights, and a quick estimate told J.B. that the spray from the gigantic

blaster would almost certainly chill him, as well.

“Okay, it’s okay,” Mildred said coolly, dropping the knife and pushing Tilly

away from her so that the woman fell into the dirt. “I was just making a point.”

She looked at her companions and shrugged. “There’s nowhere to run yet, anyway,”

she added.

Tilly picked herself up, claimed her knife and hastily rewrapped the bandages

around her head until she was completely swathed. She stood back, a little apart