Creature of unknown kind - страница 10

Bashkalo intruded a non-statutory awkwardness; he had finally got burst. Or got sick.

– Hey, so what are you doing?

– E-e-eh, kids! – said Petrovich, sounding very non-military. – So then fuck you. Forward, left step, to the “risks”, go around them, me on the left, you on the right. Do not step on them. And then – silence. Got it, boy? Bashkalo, from here we silently keep moving. Do you understand?

– As for me, I understand… – Bashkalo responded.

– Another one hundred meters according to the map, half a kilometer objectively. You will see how it is and what's here. He needs… – Petrovich muttered, not to Vadim, but under the breath. And to Vadim he said: – Think about it! And go ahead, come on, next to me.

They reached the destination in twenty minutes, using a dozen of “risks” and finding just as many old ones. Vadim remarked to himself that Petrovich had not ordered any pole to be driven into the ground. On the right the railway embankment also stretched on, and everything was so much the same, was so usual, the steppe, the cloudy summer sky, the embankment, but it lasted and lasted and dragged on, so you, dying of boredom, could imagine yourself inside a “combined shooting”, walking on the spot against the backdrop of a barrel with a landscape painted on it.

The destination was marked with a corpse. Or crowned, as Vadim would say, if he was a well-read guy. The corpse looked eerie. Vadim tried to comprehend in which position the person had died. A heap of broken bones in a hazmat suit. In one lump. Vadim changed his position, took a step sideways, Petrovich muttered mechanically: “Move carefully.” Vadim understood. The victim was sitting with his back to them, stretching out his legs, and these legs were smeared on the ground, like plasticine with a huge finger, for five meters, with fragments of cloth from his pants, intact woolen socks, flattened shoes. And a head in a hat made of dog's skin was torn into the torso. A bent AK-47 trunk stuck out above the hat with a rubber on the flame arrester, as rich Americans do. Hands, like a broken puppet, lay on the sides of an oblate torso, palms up, as if the dying man threw his arms up, and they broke away from the shoulders.

– Who is this? – asked Bashkalo quietly.

Petrovich did not answer straight away, and replied while preoccupied with surveying the area. Squatting down and looking at the nearest square meters of the steppe, he said after about a minute and a half:

– Please meet Candidate for Doctor of Sciences: Malyutin, Alex. From Moscow. We made a discovery with him. For the first time in the world the area of the gravitational locale of an anomalous, bitch, intensity, and this… vector of direction was located and explored. Also, bitch, abnormal. I seem to have said everything right. Well, fine, Alex the Candidate… Can you imagine, he tells me: you see, comrade Petrovich, it's all about gauze. We are, he says, not in a vacuum, the nut is initially heavier that's why, he says, the horizontal, I think, vector of anomalous gravity has time… well, to grab the gauze and to pull it, as I understood him. And the density of the air. And this can be seen with the naked eye. That's what, he says, we have to fix. Now you are going to throw and I will take pictures… Alex used to call this thing “procrustes”. There was such ancient Greek, a sadist. Together we, I mean me and Alex, were here four times. We even settled down a little… There is our fireplace… We dragged down the instruments, but in vain. These were all the measurements he made: the spring scale worked, the flares, a goose feathers and the gauze on “risks”. And some boxes with electricity – not a damn thing. And the camera. It was allowed then to use optics, it did not burn the eyes. But what killed Alex – was actually the camera… Fine. Group, stand at ease. I designate the safe limits. From here to here. A fireplace. Safety. Fifteen meters to the left – is unknown. Did you understand?