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Back Extinction Game Save as PDF
Chapters (33)
  1. Title page
  2. CONTENTS
  3. ONE
  4. TWO
  5. THREE
  6. FOUR
  7. FIVE
  8. SIX
  9. SEVEN
  10. EIGHT
  11. NINE
  12. TEN
  13. ELEVEN
  14. TWELVE
  15. THIRTEEN
  16. FOURTEEN
  17. FIFTEEN
  18. SIXTEEN
  19. SEVENTEEN
  20. EIGHTEEN
  21. NINETEEN
  22. TWENTY
  23. TWENTY-ONE
  24. TWENTY-TWO
  25. TWENTY-THREE
  26. TWENTY-FOUR
  27. TWENTY-FIVE
  28. TWENTY-SIX
  29. TWENTY-SEVEN
  30. TWENTY-EIGHT
  31. Acknowledgements
  32. By Gary Gibson
  33. Copyright page

They all ducked as I fired my rifle into the air. I was wasting a bullet, but I didn’t care. I’d had enough. Oskar tripped on something underfoot as he scrambled backwards from me.

‘You’re not thinking straight,’ I shouted. ‘None of you is. Why the hell would Casey strand himself here along with us? Does that sound to you like something he’d do?’

I brought my rifle back down, pointing it at the ground.

‘Jerry,’ said Yuichi, ‘did you see what just happened?’

‘I did. But do you really believe Casey doesn’t have some other way out of here?’

‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Rozalia.

‘Use your brains,’ I said. ‘There has to be more than one transfer stage around here. With access to every transfer coordinate the Authority has, who’s to say Casey can’t scrounge up a second portable transfer stage from somewhere, as a backup in case someone tracked him down the same way we just did? That way, if someone discovered his secret stage back on the island while he was on some alternate, he wouldn’t necessarily get trapped there – he’d always have a way out. What makes more sense to you – Casey dooming himself with the rest of us, or him figuring out some way to strand only us?’

Oskar gaped open-mouthed at me. Yuichi chuckled and shook his head, then walked away to the edge of the clearing, his back to the rest of us.

‘Maybe he made a mistake,’ Rozalia said slowly.

‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘he’s overplayed his hand. He didn’t need to attack us.’

‘God damn,’ said Yuichi, turning back towards us. ‘You’re right. If he’d just left us alone – assuming we’re not completely insane, and he really does have another stage out there somewhere – he could have got on with his job while we just sat here waiting forever for him to turn up.’

I pointed towards the city. ‘He’s panicking,’ I said, suddenly sure beyond a doubt that I was right. ‘Otherwise, he’d never have done something this stupid. He’s trying to slow us down, and that means we still have a chance of stopping him.’

‘Then we need to find that other stage as well,’ said Oskar, his voice low and full of venom, ‘because if we don’t we’ll be stuck in this shithole alternate for the rest of our very short lives.’

When Rozalia’s eyes met mine they were full of bleak anger. ‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘And then we kill the fucking son of a bitch.’

‘Yes.’ I nodded, and saw the others were doing the same. ‘And then we kill him.’

TWENTY-THREE