Free Hurt World One and the Zombie Rats by Stuart Parker Page A

up. It proved a hot and sweaty ten minutes before a
rescue crew arrived. Sweating hands had almost proven his undoing
then, though at least all his ammunition had already been spent,
making for a much lighter load.
    Three years had passed since then. Hurt World
One had kept Kaptu Z busy. Of all the wild life in captivity in
Asylum City, it was the residents who were wildest. Breeders,
gamblers, traders, killers, and when they grew too ugly in their
ways, people like Noice would come to Kaptu asking him to do
something about it. And it had to be Kaptu. Anyone else faced the
risk of provoking the wrath of Mayor Glutter, for he had his
fingers in many pies and was vicious in seeing his interests
protected. But what gave Kaptu protection was the amount of aid
money Glutter received from the United Nations, so much more than
he ever made in his side-businesses and it often came in the form
of New Dollars or gold bullion rather than the Asylum City Yen.
Glutter wouldn’t risk biting that hand. It did not mean Kaptu was
untouchable, however, simply that the mayor did not see any profit
in touching him up himself. Getting himself killed in the line of
duty was another thing altogether though and Glutter was sure it
was only a matter of time. He would have his fingers crossed
now.
    The Meltman was the most dangerous of the
Asylum City gangsters. He was entirely ruthless and his reach
extended across the whole city: he made a point of gaining access
to anyone who slighted him, and of being in return nothing but a
shadow, of being nowhere, lost within the tunnels and hideouts that
centred in the Gibraltar and Basque zones and that webbed out into
an endless maze. Kaptu had not gone after him before because it
would have in turn driven him into the shadows as he braced himself
for lethal retaliation - and the only tunnels at his disposal would
have been those he dug in his head. He had seen the result of such
things often enough in the Asylum City police. Cops getting buried
so deep they became lost even to themselves - like disorientated
cavers who no longer knew which passageway would return them to the
surface. Asylum City had developed so many ways to shake the
shackles of reality, both lethal and non-lethal, that there had not
been a confirmed case of suicide in over twenty years. People would
slip away from themselves and just keep going. But Kaptu would hold
onto the surface just as tightly as he was the bridge.
    He glanced down at the tracks he was centred
above. Sixty miles of it winding through the city, linking up the
Meltman’s many loan houses, massage parlors and gambling dens. A
train line without stations and that didn’t sell tickets. A
gangster without building permits and a track that even the Mayor
himself did not dare touch.
    The train had arrived. Kaptu watched the
carriages speed under him in a blur and let go. Detecting the
sudden descent, his belt thrusters instantly activated. Originally
designed to protect the elderly from falls about the home, Kaptu
had modified his to provide an extra spurt of speed. It gave him
twenty seconds, but that was all he needed. He latched onto a roof
and quickly turned the thrusters off. If he was thrown from the
train, there just might have been enough power left in the
batteries to save a bone or two.
    The Meltman Express was reaching speeds of
150 kilometres per hour, entering into the Ukrainian Sector with
its densely packed buildings and its grimy coal-burning factories.
The Meltman’s track was the newest piece of infrastructure in the
district, its shiny high-grade steel a stark contrast to the
crumbling roads and crumbling sidewalks that provided for general
use.
    Someone was wailing in the carriage beneath
Kaptu. It sounded like Ukrainian. A forlorn male voice. It might
even have been singing.
    And then the first of the snake monkeys came.
The creatures were genetically modified African chimpanzees bred
for extra strength agility and aggression. But it was the