Read Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm for Free Online

and his weapon in hand. But now it had some kind of long thin attachment along the outside of the barrel – and from its near end emerged a curly cable that extended to a metal canister protruding from his pocket.
    He made a beeline to where Ali was whirling in circles around a boxing/MMA dummy, ritualistically slicing and stabbing at it with her wooden sword – and silently lamenting, for the thousandth time, that Pope was no longer around to give her a proper kendo sparring session.
    But now she turned and ducked as Juice brought his rifle up, it emitted a barely audible sound like a puff of air, and a spike shot out the end of it into the dummy’s head. By the time Ali had blinked, Juice was already retracting the spike, with a flick of his left thumb on a button fixed to his vertical foregrip. It seemed to be a rifle-mounted pneumatic spike, run on compressed air.
    “Nice,” Ali said. “Where’d you get that?”
    “I got Chief Shields to badge me into the engineering workshop down on 04 Deck – and he gave me the run of the place. Knocked it together in there.”
    Ali nodded, remembering the lunchtime discussion. “Just like you, Juice. The rest of us bitch. You shut up and go build something.” She ran her finger over the tube, slid it down to the foregrip – and actuated the weapon. The sharp and narrow spike shot out again, fully eighteen inches of it.
    Juice shrugged. “Purely selfish motives. I remembered having to thrust my bayonet into all those flaming zombies on Beaver Island. Got tired just thinking about it. And technology—”
    “Yeah,” Ali finished for him. “Beats dumb brute strength every time.”
    Pred, who had wandered over with Reyes, now admired the device. “Like goddamned Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men . Except scarier.”
    Ali smirked. “Hairier, you mean.”
    “A little less old and tired, anyway,” Juice said. He tapped the tank of compressed air, which was about the size of a small fire extinguisher. “With this, it’s good for about four hundred shots.”
    Ali put her hand on her chin. “We’re gonna need a name for your pneumatic head sticker there.”
    Juice nodded. “PHS?”
    “Not catchy enough. The Brutus?”
    Reyes leaned in. “No, man. Not pop-culture enough. But don’t worry, I got this. The OJ .” He smiled big, obviously pleased with his own cleverness.
    “I like it,” Predator said. “The Juice for Juice.”
    Ali shook her head, not all that amused by the image of a man stabbing his ex-wife repeatedly in the head and neck. “Wow. LA is a very tacky place, isn’t it?”
    His smile not dimming one watt, Reyes said, “Probably now more than ever.”
    And then he reached around and slapped Ali on her ass.
    There was a very pregnant pause, during which nobody there breathed, and Ali just slowly cocked her head. Ordinarily, she would have taken this in her stride and just let it go. She was after all one of the boys. But, then again, it occurred to her that they were here to train.
    So she brought the side of her fist, thumb protruding, around in a side swing that Reyes literally didn’t see coming – it was outside of his cone of vision. It caught him in the nerve nexus in the side of his neck – not hard enough to knock him out, but just hard enough to cause his leg muscles to give out from under him.
    As he dropped like a sack of swarthy cement toward the deck, Ali caught him in a combined wrist and arm lock, bent him over at the waist, and frogmarched him toward the stack of sparring mats.
    “Oh, you want to play grab-ass… sure, man, let’s do it…”
    The only noise out of Reyes now was a pained sputtering for breath, before Ali threw him onto the mat in a tangle of his own limbs. The remaining group of operators erupted with a unified roar of laughter that rose up twenty-five feet to the hangar ceiling.
    Handon smiled at this.
    Team building , he thought.
    * * *
    About an hour later, Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick appeared at the