Street Rats

Hov-Bus

The smell of the viral mold doesn't scare me one bit. The royals put the mold in the containment capsules for prisoners like me so Royals don't have Street Rat's or other criminals oppressing to their rules. Before it kills, it eats at you flesh and muscle while you are chained to the hologram from a neck brace to ankle cuffs, over the course of a year. You're entirely bonded by holographic imagery. Which I think is smart but stupid at the same time.

I am seventeen and in my life I have been put there twenty times. I am immune to that mold now. They don't know it yet. Hopefully they never figure it out. I am, right now, in the stage of detoxification to be able to enter the Royals' Sector of Adentrine. Basically, there is a bubble dome that separates the entire planet of Adentrine outside the Royals' Sector. In the process of the detoxification, I am having to deal with all types of injections, syringes, and different diseases exposures to see if I am immune and in the process become immune to the viral and bacterial diseases that lurk out side of the "Capital" or the Royals' Sector.

Once I came out of the enclosed box that they had put me in to expose me in, alive, they hand cuffed me one more time. These cuffs went over my entire hands and over the cuffs already put on me two days ago. They were titanium and I was already starting to work my way out of them. I am transported on a hover bus with the few beings that are either going to meet the Imperial Sultan or death is in their future. We stop with the traffic in the street, I am basically seconds away from freedom...wait.....

I sling off both cuffs across the bus, punch the guard in the nose sitting right next to me, knocking him out instantly. Making him slam the back of his head on to the sharp edge of the seat killing him. Two out of the ten guards raised their basters at me, but I was faster to grab a B-pistol from the dead guard. Shooting one in the head, the other in the throat. I continued to shoot the rest of the guards as they got up. The driver, a chunky dude with a mechanical eye was frozen in fear from the commotion. The light had been green for a whole two minutes, though the bus didn't move an inch. Hovers were beeping at at us and trying to go around us. He still did nothing as if he were holding a artictimmer.

I walked up to him, put the gun up to his right temple, and said,"Keep driving..."

He put his hands over the orb to steer and selected the start button. We continued forward to the Sultan. I snatched the codes to the other cuffs of the other prisoners on the bus. And tossed it on the floor of the middle of the hover bus.

"Find your cuff code and get out, you are on your own after this."

The other prisoners fled off the hov-bus as it was moving. I kept the B-pistol on the drivers right temple, pushing down harder. The driver now shaking in fear continues to drive toward the Grand Palace. The location of the Sultan and his daughter lived, along with all his other personal subjects.

"Drive toward the dome's barrier in a remote place. You will let me out of the hov-bus and drive straight back to the palace. Once I have passed through the barrier, you will go to the palace and tell them that I am dead. If you don't I will find where you live and kill your ass."

He sat there trying to soak up all the details for a few minutes while driving. He did what I commanded. A few minutes from the dome and I was almost to freedom. I needed to see my friends and see if they were okay. I needed to hear their voices. Having not seen them for two weeks kills me inside.