Charles Kissick

The Lottery Losers Charles Kissick

The Great Collapse left society in disarray. Out of the chaos, one man offers hope, of a sort. Pick just one number out of six in Mr. Kozlov's twisted lottery. Pick the wrong number, and you could win millions. Choose correctly, and you're dead, shot by one of Kozlov's mindless, masked biobot "Hunters."



Not many who lose the Lottery hang around for the Hunters, but running is a futile act. A sophisticated satellite system-along with a homing device in each player's brain-ensures Hunters always find their prey. Only in the sewers and abandoned subway systems can Lottery Losers hope to evade their fates, and those subterranean places are home to the mutated beings known as Morphs.



Desperate to leave his dead-end job, computer expert Storm Taylor takes on an assignment from Kozlov: infiltrate the sewers and reveal the location of an elusive group of rebels who somehow survive in the Morph-infested depths. Deep below ground, this group also manages to evade the Hunters' tracking devices. Taylor realizes he's on a death mission: death for the rebels, and death for him. But he agrees to go-you don't say no to Kozlov.



Once in the catacombs of the Old City, events conspire to put Storm on the Lottery Loser List, with a Hunter assigned to track him if he goes topside. That's bad enough, but it gets worse: Storm never played the Lottery.