The Slab (Gears of War)

Ten years after Emergence Day, as the Locust Horde advances on humanity’s last defended area—Ephyra—in a bloody war that has seen billions die, Marcus Fenix does the unthinkable: he defies orders and abandons his post during a critical battle in a bid to rescue his father, weapons scientist Adam Fenix. But Adam is buried in the rubble during a ferocious assault on the Fenix mansion, and Ephyra falls to the enemy. Marcus, grieving for a father everyone believes is dead, is court-martialed for dereliction of duty and sentenced to forty years in the Coalition of Ordered Government’s brutal maximum security prison, known simply as the Slab.

But Adam is very much alive, snatched from the destruction by the elite Onyx Guard on Chairman Richard Prescott’s orders. He’s now a long way from home and in a prison of his own—a COG doomsday bunker on the tropical island of Azura, a place hidden from the rest of Sera since the Pendulum Wars. His own guilty secret has been exposed: Adam knew the Locust existed deep below the surface of Sera long before Emergence Day, and were being driven from their tunnels by a lethal parasite known as the Lambent. Now he has to find a way to destroy the Lambent while the dwindling COG forces fight to hold back a growing Locust army that’s threatening to overrun the city.

As Adam struggles to find redemption in his comfortable island jail, Marcus seeks his own atonement in the squalid, closed world within the Slab’s granite walls. While Dom Santiago and Anya Stroud fight to get him released, ready to make any sacrifice to free him, Marcus gradually finds unexpected kinship among Sera’s most dangerous criminals—and a way to carry on his personal war against the Locust.

 “Adam, you knew this day would come.”

It was a familiar voice: silky, imperial, polished, and utterly human.

“Hello, Myrrah.” Adam Fenix found himself thinking of the terrible Locust food again. “You got my message, then.”

“And how right you were. We do need you. And we shall take you. I hope you’re not planning anything foolish. You have responsibilities, Adam.”

It would be a living death. The Locust Queen would never release him, even if he developed a countermeasure. But he didn’t deserve any better.

“I also have my service pistol.”

“And I can take your son at any time.”

He had the measure of her, then, and she had his. “You leave Marcus out of this. It’s a condition.” He opened the desk drawer and took out the handgun, a 9mm officer’s weapon. It made a distinctive clunk on the wooden desktop as he slammed it down. “If anything happens to him, I don’t care what happens to the rest of Sera.”

Marcus Fenix. War hero. Decorated Gear. Loyal son. Traitor. As the Locust Horde advances into one of humanity’s last bastions—Ephyra—after ten years of a bloody global war that has seen billions die, Marcus does the unthinkable: he defies Colonel Hoffman’s orders and abandons his post in the middle of the battle in a bid to rescue his father, weapons scientist Dr. Adam Fenix. But Adam is buried in the rubble of a ferocious assault on the Fenix estate, and Ephyra falls to the enemy. As the Coalition of Ordered Governments struggles to defend Sera’s surviving humans from the invading “grubs,” Marcus faces a court martial. Deserting his post in wartime means the death penalty. But his sentence is commuted to forty years in the COG’s most notorious prison—known as the Slab—where a prisoner’s life expectancy is less than two years.

In the Slab, there are no rules and no mercy. As Marcus begins a nightmarish day-to-day existence, it will finally be revealed why his sentence was commuted and who intervened to save his life. While his friends and fellow Gears Dom Santiago and Anya Stroud try to secure a legal appeal for him, Marcus learns to survive in an institution populated by the most dangerous dregs of society—not just the criminals imprisoned there, but also the corrupt guards.