The Kill Order by James Dashner Page A

the workpad.
    Workpad. It seemed anything but. Games, books, old news programs that predated the sun flares. There was a personal journal that couldprovide a ton of interesting information if it had been updated recently. But there wasn’t much work-related stuff on the device.
    Until they finally found the mapping feature. It obviously wasn’t functioning from the old GPS satellites—they’d all been destroyed in the radiation holocaust of the sun flares. But it seemed to have a link to a tracer on the Berg, maybe controlled by old-school radar or other shortwave technology. And there was a log of every trip the now ruined ship had taken.
    “Look at that,” Alec said, pointing to a spot on the map. Every line tracking the Berg’s flights returned to it eventually. “That’s obviously their headquarters or base or whatever you want to call it. And judging by the coordinates and what I know about this ridge of hills we call home, it can’t be more than fifty or sixty miles away.”
    “Maybe it’s an old military base,” Mark offered.
    Alec thought about it. “A bunker, maybe. Having something like that would make sense up in the mountains. And we’re going there, boy. Sooner rather than later.”
    “Right now?” Mark knew his brain was still jumbled up from being hit during the crash, but surely the old man didn’t want to hike all that way before going back to the settlement.
    “No, not right now. We need to get home and sort out what happened there. See if Darnell’s okay. And the others.”
    Mark’s heart sank at the mention of Darnell. “You know what we saw on that Berg? The boxes of darts? There’s no way those people went to all that trouble to do a flyby flu ambush.”
    “You’re right. I hate it, but you’re right, kid. I don’t expect much good news upon our grand return. But we need to get our butts there all the same. So come on.”
    Alec stood up and Mark followed suit, slipping the workpad into theback of his pants. He’d rather return to the village than search for a bunker any day.
    They set off, Mark’s head still woozy and achy. But the farther they went, and the more his pulse quickened, the better he felt. Trees and sun and bushes and roots, squirrels and bugs and snakes. The air was warm but fresh, smelling like sap and burnt toast, filling his lungs.
    The Berg had taken them a lot farther from home than they’d thought, and they ended up camping in the woods for two nights, resting just long enough to feel strong again. Small game hunted by Alec and his knife provided their only food. They finally got close to the settlement in the late afternoon of the third day after the Berg attack.
    Mark and the old soldier were about a mile away from the village when the stench of death hit them like a fresh wave of unbearable heat.

CHAPTER 10
    The sun was just a few hours from setting when they arrived at the base of the hill below the outlying shacks and huts.
    Mark had ripped a wide strip of cloth from the bottom of his shirt to wrap around his nose and mouth. He pressed his hand against it as they came up the last rise before the village. The smell was awful. He could taste it on his tongue—dank, rotten, moldy—all the way to his stomach, as if he’d swallowed something that had begun to decompose. Fighting the urge to throw up, he took one step after another, breathlessly waiting to see what horrors lay in the aftermath of the attack.
    Darnell.
    Mark had no expectations there, had accepted, with a heavy heart, that his friend might be dead. But what about Trina? Lana? Misty and the Toad? Were they alive? Or sick from some crazy virus? He stopped when Alec reached a hand out and touched Mark’s chest.
    “Okay, listen to me,” the old man said, his voice muffled behind his own swath of fabric. “We need to set some things straight before we get up there. We can’t let our emotions rule everything. No matter what we see, our number one priority has to be saving as many people