Marines by Jay Allan Read Free Book Online Page B

straight up at me, lifeless eyes wide open and two bullet holes in his head. 
    The whole thing is a blur to me now, and I really don't know how long I was in the apartment.  It could have been just a few minutes, or it could have been much longer.  To this day I really can't remember. 
    I frantically looked for my sisters, and I found them in our sleeping room, lying under the remnants of the mattress where they'd been shot at least ten times as they tried to hide.  There were bloody pink bits of foam everywhere.
    After 30 seconds, five minutes, an hour - I really don't remember - I stumbled out of the apartment.  I didn't take anything with me; I didn't even look to see if we'd been robbed of our meager possessions.  I just hobbled out into the hall, down the ladder and stairs, and out into the street.  It was a sunny day and I recoiled from the brightness that assaulted my eyes.  In a daze I ran around to the back of the building into the dark comfort of the shade, and I fell roughly to my knees and bent over as my stomach emptied.
    I must have wandered around for days - or weeks - stumbling through the streets, scavenging something, anything, to eat, and at night hiding in whatever spot I could find.  I never went back to the apartment, or even near the building. 
    At first I was sure I was going to die, and truth be told, I didn't really care.  More than once I thought to myself, just lie down and stay there until it's over.  Or climb up to the roof of one of the buildings and end it in an instant.  But something kept me going, pushing me forward.  It's not like I really had any hope or any real reason to live.
    As time went by, though, I became better at living in the streets.  I found relatively secure places to stay...there was an endless labyrinth of abandoned tunnels and chambers under the city.  I learned to steal too, first for survival, but in time I just began victimizing the Cogs for no reason other than I was angry and I could. 
    Eventually I hooked up with the Wolfpack, and over the next five years I committed every manner of crime and outrage imaginable.  The less said about those years the better, so we'll just say I was angry at the world and felt I owed it and its inhabitants nothing but retribution.  They were there for me to use and exploit, like a crop in the fields, and that's how I lived for a very long time.
    Life in the gang brought with it a crude sort of luxury.  It was nothing like the clean and orderly environment in the MPZ, but we took over the buildings we liked, and stole whatever we wanted to fill them.  If anybody complained, we killed them.  Simple.
    I also got back into the MPZ several times, making drug deliveries and, on one occasion, conducting a robbery.  We used the vast underground city to get past security and into Midtown.  The ancient tunnels, power conduits, rail lines, sewers, and other infrastructure, much of it abandoned, weaved a tangled web under the entire city, and we had a number of routes mapped out. 
    We owned the underground mazes, but trips into the MPZ were still dangerous missions, and it was on one of these narcotics delivery runs that I was caught.  We made our way through underground rail tunnels to an abandoned station that was situated below a large apartment building.  There was a rough cut passageway from the station to the sub-basement of the building. 
    The exit from the passage was hidden behind some machinery, but someone must have found it, because as soon as we squeezed out, the doors opened and cops in riot gear poured into the room.  We opened fire simultaneously, but they had body armor and better guns.  It was over in less than a minute.  There were seven of us, and four were wounded.  The rest of us were hit by stun rods, and by the time we woke up we were shackled and leaning against one of the walls. 
    There was a neat row of four bodies along one of the walls, each one with a single hole in the forehead in