Uncaged Read Online Free

red as a beet, and at the corner of the next hall, looked down and saw a half-dozen people crowding toward a stairwell door and more still coming out of the animal containment facility.
    McClane screamed, “Halt!” and brought the gun up, jerked off a shot, which went through the ceiling fifteen feet in front of him.
    The shot was like a thunderclap in the tile hallway, and McClane rocked back, astonished by what he’d done. He was disoriented, screamed, “Halt!” again, and fired another shot, which also went into the ceiling. At that moment, the leader stepped through an office door behind McClane, fifteen feet away, with the Taser.
    McClane was already into his third shot and fired it, and saw a masked raider at the stairwell go down, and then his world blew up as the Taser element buried itself in his hip.

    The sixteen-year-old nervous giggler, the honors student Aubrey Calder, took McClane’s last shot. The bullet hit her in the back, blew through a shoulder blade, broke her collarbone on the way out, and then smashed through a window down the hall. She fell faceup, her eyes half closed, stunned. She was awake for ten seconds, then began to shake, her eyes rolling up, not understanding, feeling no pain or anything like regret, and then she passed out.
    A boy her own age stood over her shouting, “Oh jeez, oh jeez! Aubrey!” and unconsciously smacking his head with his fists. The older raider, who’d fired the Taser into McClane’s hip, hopped over the twitching body of the security guard, ran down the corridor, stooped over her.
    “We’ve got to leave her,” he said urgently to the boy. “We’ve got to leave! She’s hurt bad, but she’s not going to die if they get her to a hospital. Leaving her is the fastest way—the cops will be here in two minutes.”
    He pushed the boy away from the downed girl, pushed him again, and again—and then the boy pushed back and said, “Fuck you, I’m staying! I’m staying with her!”
    He ripped off his jacket, ski mask, and T-shirt, then folded the T-shirt and packed it against the wound; the leader, the Taser shooter, looked back once as he fled toward the stairs and shouted, “Don’t tell them who we are!”
    The remaining raiders streamed out of the building. Sirens: they were close and coming fast, but they had known that would happen. They had time …
    In the building’s security lights, they could see monkeys scattered across the lawn, struggling to walk, to crawl, monkeys screaming atthe darkness in pain and despair, metal wires glittering in their exposed brains. Two other monkeys stood silhouetted in the second-floor lab windows, apparently unwilling to jump.
    The raiders threaded through the gate and disappeared down the alley.
    By the time the cops got to the building, McClane had pushed himself into an upright seated position, leaning against a wall, his nerves still jangled by the high-voltage Taser pulse. Two deranged and bloodied monkeys were fighting a few feet away, paying no attention to him; the hall stank of fecal matter and urine and blood. A thousand white rats and mice scampered aimlessly down the tile hallway.
    At the stairwell door, a half-naked boy seemed to be praying over the body of a fallen raider.
    The cops came in with their pistols drawn, saw McClane, leveled their guns, and shouted, “Push the gun away.”
    “I’m security,” McClane shouted back.
    “Sir, push the gun away,” a cop shouted again. “Push the gun away or we will shoot you.”
    McClane realized that the cops didn’t like the idea of his having a gun, and he slid it down the hall toward them. One of the cops, his gun never wavering from a point on McClane’s chest, eased down the hall, kicked the gun farther away. “You have any other weapons?”
    “No. Listen, I’m the guy who called you.” He pointed at the boy and unmoving body. “They were with them. They were wrecking the place—”
    “Sir, I want you to lie flat, put your hands behind