| Rat King | |
[[Image: Deathlands 51: Rat King | |
| Author | Andy Boot |
| Illustrator | Michael Herring |
| Publication date | September 2000 |
| ISBN | 0-373-62561-2 |
| Publication Order | |
| Preceded by Pandora's Redoubt |
Followed by Zero City |
Back Cover[]
Fractured Reality
What was once the United States is now the rad-blasted world of Deathlands...a place that more than lives up to its name. Led by a one-eyed warrior called Ryan Cawdor, a straggling band of survivors roams the nuke-ravaged land, homing their survival skills in a wasteland where danger lurks over the next hill.
Emerging into one of the predark installations known as redoubts, the group is taken prisoner in a fully functioning army base operating in a parody of life before the blowout. Its occupants are inbred soldiers, a legacy to the lost secrets of the Totality Concept. Led by the mad general of an obscene military project, the base has found its last hope in the ragtag bunch, a fate that may be even more horrifying than the hell they have survived.
In the Deathlands nothing is certain...especially the future.
Plot[]
Trivia[]
- In Rat King, there's a machine called the Moebius, Mk II, aka the Rat King - a fusion of mechanical and biological parts formed by linking several human subjects together via a computer interface. This is named after an actual creature, the rat king, a group of rats - most often black rats - whose tails are bound together with ice or frozen dirt. Even after the ice melts, the rats' frantic attempts to free themselves only serve to knot the tails and make them more tightly bound. There are fewer than 60 specimens in existence, but it has been proven in recent years that they do occur naturally; prior to this, it was suspected they were either falsified or simply mythological.