Extinction Game Read Online Free PDF

building, a rifle held in its hands. More people appeared at the top of the steps
behind the figure as I gawped.
    The sound of the pursuing jeep drawing nearer galvanized me into action. I sprinted diagonally across the road, towards a shadowy alley opposite the hotel, but not fast enough. I felt something
hit me in the back of the neck and I yelled from shock and pain. I reached up and plucked a dart out from my skin. I dropped it, fingers already growing numb at their tips.
    I took a step forwards, and collapsed. I managed to turn to look over at the man who had shot me. He had slung his rifle back over his shoulder: it was the Asian man with the handlebar
moustache, the one who had captured me. Instead of a hazmat suit, he wore a garish Hawaiian shirt and had a pink cocktail glass held delicately in one hand.
    ‘Still a crazy son of a bitch,’ he said, looking down at me. ‘You’ve been giving us all conniptions ever since you got here, you know that?’

THREE
    They moved me to a different room in the hospital. To my surprise, it had a window, through which I could clearly see the moon’s fractured face. I stared out at it deep
into the night, until I realized that I wasn’t crazy, and it was real; and that wherever I was, I was a long, long way from home.
    I might easily have accepted the notion I had been transported to some alien planet, but for the fact that aside from the monstrous gash in its face, the moon was recognizably the same one I had
seen all my life.
    By confronting me with my diaries, Sykes had forced me to face the madness into which I’d fallen during my long years of isolation. I had buried Alice myself. I had even written of the
event, so that I would never forget, but had then worked hard to do precisely the opposite. When I thought back to my imagined conversations with her, they seemed entirely real. I could still see
her in my mind’s eye, standing there before me. But try as I might, I could no longer conjure her into even the illusion of objective existence. She remained a phantom, even as I curled up on
the narrow bed they gave me, and I wept and cried out her name, filling myself with a grief too many years delayed.
    That night, I remembered with desperate clarity my journey across a dying land to try and rescue her, only to find her dying. I remembered burying her in a shallow grave in the garden of the
home we once shared. I remembered our honeymoon in Toulouse, where I had picked up a broken I Ching coin at a flea market, and joked we should each wear one half. And she, despite her derision, and
her despisal of anything resembling sentimentality, had nonetheless followed my suggestion. I remembered taking her half of the coin, and pushing it into her cold and lifeless hand, before spading
the dirt on top of her body.
    I had failed to save her, as I had failed to save the human race. And then I had failed even to join the rest of my species in death. But at least now I knew that this place in which I found
myself was, undeniably, real.
    I was still, however, cuffed to the bed, and a guard had been posted outside my door, which remained open at all times. Every twenty minutes or so he would peer inside to see what I was up
to.
    The morning brought me a new visitor: a small, heavyset woman with short dark hair. She carried a tray loaded with coffee and toast in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. She waited as the
guard uncuffed me, then she handed me my breakfast before introducing herself as Nadia Mirkowsky. There was an Eastern European lilt to her accent.
    ‘You want to know who we are, and why you’re here,’ she said. ‘In order to explain that, we’re going on a trip. But you need to promise you won’t pull any
more stunts like last night.’
    I rattled my chain. ‘You’ve been holding me prisoner without explanation. Why should I trust you?’
    She inclined her head, as if acknowledging the point. ‘Personally, I think that was a mistake. But they