Creature of unknown kind - страница 22

– Well, yes. No! I had the aliens to the fullest from the start, almost choked; faced the Father and his terrible daughter. The same day, to be honest… It was on the next day as I presented myself to the personnel at the Commandant's office upon arrival. On the seventeenth of November of nineteen ninety.

– And your “kiss”, by the way, if it's not a secret…

– Pour some water. A single “greeting”, no tongues. Good timing. Fucking paralysis of the fucking eyeball. The left one. My intuition is weak, you can count I don't have it at all. Accordingly, the “kiss” is alike this, incomplete. Just like “get off”.

– And you say that you have never been in the Zone…

– I haven’t been in the Zone, I haven’t. This is the truth. You think I'm kidding you? I'm not kidding. I guess I should tell you, right?

– I haven't seen the Father… Very interesting! Legendary times.

– For now maybe they are legendary. But then, I did not make a step out of the Headquarters without a jar of bromine… When you are sitting in a meeting with the citizens on Thursdays and Fridays, only bromine can save you. No vodka. Straight to the grave. People would drink to death, die in a mouth. Because a day lasts for a year… The same in the Zone and outside… “A hundred meters – ten miles” Yeah…

(Drops the plastic glass. I get under the bed to take the glass.)

– Sorry, slipped out. Yes, so the Father… Even CATU201 did not exist at that time. Two years before CATU. And the Zone wasn't even registered as QZAI212 yet in Russian documents. Only locals called it the Trouble. The Trouble, they said, the Mother-Trouble. And outside it was “the emergency zone”, and that's it. The gas meteorite. There was an order to provide an exclusion zone, and strict one, at least for ten kilometers around.

– And ZONA, Z, O, N, A, – when is this?

– This is when Yeltsin and Clinton signed the Memorandum. But who's gonna call it like this here? The Zone is the Zone. Kapustin's quarantine. Blue houses!

– Oh, already then?

– Yes. When else? They are deeply Soviet, these Finnish trailers. They found a few at the warehouses in the Middle Akhtuba, dismantled, still lying there from the seventies. Helped a lot. Exactly two families, two entrances. I myself had been living in one with my wife for about four years.

(Pause)

– It was detected from the tower in the city. Do you know about the tower? Later it burned like a candle. It was built behind the highway, opposite Volgogradsky checkpoint, right in the middle of the Dog's village, where they demolished a residential complex. Almost on the “neutral”, oh God! That time the “neutral” did not get to the center of the Dog's village yet, only the first line existed… Didn't you hear about that tower? Really didn't? One hundred and fifty meters? By accord! Five hundred thousand rubles down the drain! I was absolutely amazed when they showed it to me. Ostankino223 lookalike! Then they tried to sort out the paperwork for a long time, and then it burned down when the “neutral” spread in '93. Shame on you, historian… So he was walking along Severodvinsk street, the Father with his girl. During the night wooly had eaten the fog on the Terminal Square, so the visibility through the summer part of the “neutral” was perfect. Right above district thirty-nine. And he was wa-a-alking right down the roadway. I had just come to the Maldavanov's office, haven't even opened the vault yet. And they give me a call from the tower: this, they say, and this, comrade Colonel. We are informing you, according to the instructions. A person with a child is walking in the city, on the territory of the disaster. Do you understand? D-damned watchers, caught me up, as if I was new. “Turn on the video system, comrade Colonel!” And broadcast an image from the camera on the TV in my office.