Free NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) by Olsen J. Nelson Page B

that whatever he is able to come up with will be enough.  The men head for one of the cages near Ikaros; he takes his only chance and yells, "Hey!  If you want someone to kill, come and kill me!"
    The men react by laughing and point at him mockingly.
    "You think that's funny, do you, you fools?!  TAKE ME!" Ikaros yells with even greater fervour.  He then violently throws himself against the cage, falls on his back, and starts kicking at the bars aggressively, careful not to let the bindings unravel.  He rolls over and spits in their direction as he watches them head towards his cage; they start abusing him in Thai and laugh heartily, thinking the whole scene is quite amusing and believing they've broken him.
    "You want your turn, huh?" asks one as he leans down, unlocks the padlock and opens the door while two of the others point their machine guns into the cage, poking Ikaros painfully in the ribs.  Ikaros starts to exit, "I never told you not to screw with me.  Do you have any idea why?"  Ignoring him, one man without a gun grabs Ikaros's left arm, but, as he begins to stand upright, Ikaros releases his grip on the leather bonds, slips his left hand out and both hands race towards the barrels of the two guns, clasping them firmly and raising them into the air; the barrels are already above his head when they start to fire.  Sascha watches with surprise as Ikaros swings the ends of the barrels down towards the other two men who then fall to the ground dead before the guns stop firing.  In the struggle that follows, Ikaros commandeers a gun, pokes the barrel in an eye and smashes a butt into some teeth, finally shooting the remaining two with a few short spurts while they suffer their injuries for a brief but agonising moment.  Surprised by the result, but satisfied that they've been dealt with, he turns and races towards the shed only twenty paces away.  He leans up against the wall and waits with his gun pointing at the entrance.
    The four remaining guards, alerted by the unexpected commotion outside, run out of the shed to investigate with their guns at the ready yet to little effect as they don't spot Ikaros before he opens fire.  Three of them are wounded and drop clumsily to the dirt; the remaining man spins instinctively towards Ikaros, spraying bullets in an arc along the shed wall as he does so, which quickly encroaches on his position.  Having the advantage, though, Ikaros takes careful aim and fires just a few well-placed rounds that result in blood and other debris spitting out the back of his target's head.
    Ikaros walks towards the entrance firing at the other three on the ground until they stop wriggling.  At the entrance, he peers into the shed with his rifle at the ready and sees an operating table with the bloody body of the young woman on it and two blood-drenched 'surgeons' desperately racing for the back door in a futile attempt to abandon the scene.  With only a slight hesitation, he opens fire and shoots both several times in the back.  Dismissing them before they hit the floor, he walks through the entrance a few steps and looks around the room spotting several refrigerators and a collection of lumpy body bags lined up on the floor, evidently containing the harvested corpses of the already-perished passengers.  Shaking his head in disgust, he turns and runs towards the strewn bodies near his cage and picks up a set of keys lying in the dirt; he strides across to Sascha's cage, leans down next to it and looks at the lock then the keys, trying to work out what the system is, if there is one, but doesn't find anything obvious like numbers or colours, only a series of characters that, as far as he can tell, don't seem to have any discernable pattern to them.
    Sascha looks at him with mixed surprise.  "Did you just do that?" she whispers, still not quite believing it.
    "Yeah, I did.  It's gonna be okay now; we're gonna make it out."  He impatiently tries a number of keys — the fifth