Read Online Quarantine (The Shadow Wars Book 7.5) by S. A. Lusher - Free Book Online Page B

on the air. There was nothing and no one waiting for him in there. Pushing through it, Allan hit the far door, opened it up, moved through a small antechamber and came to the living quarters section.
    “They've found me! They're breaking down the door!” Fletcher cried.
    He could hear pounding, but he wasn't sure where from. Letting out a short, frustrated huff, Allan took off in the likeliest direction.
    “Is there any other way out?” he asked.
    “No!”
    “Just...hold on, I'm almost there!” he replied.
    He raced through flickering, derelict corridors, passing several open and closed doors, trying to find the one Fletcher was hiding behind. It would at least be easy enough, considering there would be a mob of psychotics trying to break it down. Coming to the end of one corridor that terminated in a T junction, Allan hesitated, listening, then broke left. He pounded down another passageway, took a right turn, then stopped.
    “ALLAN!”
    He heard that both over his radio and from close proximity. He saw the back of a crewman entering one of the living quarters. Allan raced down the corridor, hearing Fletcher begin screaming. He reached the doorway, grabbed the nearest crewman by the back of his suit, pulled the machete back and rammed it forward through the man's throat. Not bothering to check and see if the man was actually dead, though he couldn't imagine him surviving, he ripped the blade out, yanked the body backwards and tossed it into the corridor.
    He spied three or four more psychotic security personnel inside. He couldn't tell because they were all a tangle of thrashing of limbs as they converged on Fletcher, who, Allan realized with a sudden, stomach-freezing terror, wasn't wearing her suit of armor.
    They managed to lock eyes once before one of the security personnel grabbed her head and gave a hard, vicious pull. The flesh around her neck ripped apart in a spray of blood. At the same time, another began the process of tearing her arm off. The other two began mercilessly pounding what remained of her body with their bare fists.
    “ Fletcher !” Allan shrieked.
    Something broke in him, and suddenly, time seemed to come to him through a red-tinted haze in confusing flashes.
    In one instant, he was bashing someone's head into a wall over and over again. Powerful hands grabbed him from behind as he watched the skull cave in, blood and brains spraying out from the wound he'd created.
    Then he was bashing in a chest with his pipe, blood flying across his visor, his armor, other constantly shifting bodies.
    In the next instant, he was on the ground, wrestling with someone, their face hovering above his faceplate, the face an expression of bloody fury.
    Then he was squeezing someone's neck with his suit-enhanced strength, the neck collapsing within his hands, getting smaller and smaller.
    Blood, so much blood, everywhere.
    A flash of metal, bones crunching, a furious shriek.
    Then he was sitting on the ground, his back to something, heart pounding, lungs heaving, his visor covered in viscera. Allan let out a low groan. His throat hurt, felt raw, and he had a bad headache. He tried to swallow, but found his mouth dry. As he stood up, he realized it wasn't just his throat that was sore, but his muscles as well.
    Allan surveyed the room he was in.
    For a second, he wasn't sure what had happened, he could only get flashes of violence. But then he remembered as his eyes fell on the five corpses. They were all horribly beaten, mangled and, in some cases, dismembered. His gaze paused as he spied what remained of Fletcher, and a sharp bolt of miserable guilt struck him. She had been trying to prove herself, just a scared tech looking to not go to jail because of political bullshit.
    “Fletcher...” he moaned, then felt his stomach twitch.
    Turning, groping for his visor control, he stumbled out of the room and just managed to get his visor open as he collapsed to his hands and knees in the corridor and vomited. He kept