Overrun Read Free Page A

see it was
the body of a small boy.
    Wagner didn't stop.
    Kirken felt his heart fall. A
fresh layer of sweat beaded across his face.
    Wagner stepped over the boy and
ran for the transport. Weapons rounds ripped across the ground after him
tearing everything violently apart. Wagner never broke stride or turned to look
back. A volley of the heaviest firing yet kicked up more dirt and settled
across where the boy fell.
    "Son of a bitch!"
Kirken screamed.
    He lumbered down the ramp past
Wagner who scrambled up. Rock and sand flew around. Flying metal seared through
the air.
    Kirken reached the boy in two
quick strides, scooped him in his arms and scrambled madly back towards the
transport. The truck shifted gears and moved forward again. A fury of bullets
sliced through the air and across the ground. The soldiers providing cover fire
ducked back inside.
    Kirken was almost to the back of
the transport when its brown ramp suddenly started to pull up from where it
dragged along the ground.
    He pumped his legs and gripped
the body he held tighter in his arms. He couldn't see anything through the
flying earth except for the scared faces of a few soldiers reaching to pull him
up.
    With a last surge of strength,
Kirken tossed the boy over the ramp and then threw himself inside. His legs and
waist scraped across the ramp’s edge when his body sailed through. He landed
across three of the soldiers knocking all of them crashing to the truck floor.
    Kirken untangled himself from
the pile of bodies and dragged himself over to the boy who laid eyes closed and
still next to the soldier he had rescued in the street. The soldier was
unconscious. Blood seeped from a series of wounds.
    "Just what the hell do you
think you were doing!!?" Wagner shrieked.
    Kirken picked up the boy and placed
him on a stretcher. His hands shaking and his breathing coming in violent
gasps, Kirken tried to tend to his wounds. Two soldiers with bandages and
medical kits came to his side and pulled him away.
    His knees wobbly, Kirken stepped
back and watched them work. He leaned back against the transport’s metallic
wall and slid tiredly to the ground. He ripped his protective glasses from his
eyes and tried to stop the hammer of his heart.
    He ignored Wagner’s glares as he
stood over him, and he tried not to notice the others scrutinizing him out of
the corners of their eyes.
    Kirken just sat there and let
his recent dose of medication take him while the truck rolled from town. He
looked for peace in his own medicated thoughts far away from the world around.
    "That was the most
irresponsible thing I've ever seen," Wagner said his voice low and his
eyes blazing at the unconscious boy.
    Kirken didn't look up. He felt
his body rock as the transport bounced along the corroded ground. The
medication muffled his hearing, but he sensed the roar of its giant engine as
it raced back towards the dome.
    Kirken didn't respond. He sat
there on the floor, closed his eyes and just tried to sleep.

Chapter 2
     
     
    Three U.S. jeeps drifted
silently to a stop near the front of the warehouse located somewhere on former
Soviet soil now controlled by Japan’s Great Union. According to recent
espionage reports, the warehouse was actually an illegal dome technological
research facility.
    Six men pounced from the jeeps.
Each looked quickly around silently in the dark.
    “Squad Leader,” Commander Edward
Knight whispered to the man next to him. “What do we got going on inside?”
    "Ten men, most likely
scientists, working with atmospheric processors on the roof,” Squad Leader J.J.
Slavik answered softly struggling to keep the excitement hidden from his voice.
“Security station on Level Five. The whole building including the roof is monitored
from there.”
    It was Slavik’s first
outer-facility mission. In fact, it was the first time he had ever been on the
outside at all. He had been training inside the domes since he was sixteen
years old for this night. He could barely