Creature of unknown kind - страница 37

So that I didn’t start catching Fenimore as well.)

– And did he prophesy anything to you?

– No.

(And I can see that here Fenimore is not lying. And the Father was not trying to give him any predictions, and Fenimore himself was not asking for anything like that. Yes, I very abruptly lost initiative, letter didn’t work out even ten percent of time from usual one hundred and fifty and I, in dismay, was trying to change the subject.)

– You joined the “important ones”… in what time?

– In a year?..What am I saying? Less, of course. I spent a summer off from the army. Met autumn and New Year on the marge of the Staggering Forest… And this is it, already in February I put in a “notice of resignation” to Blinchuk. And he put his stamp.

– And why was Blinchuk signing these applications for “Yazov people”, do you know?

– I know it perfectly well, but this is not my secret. Here is a hint: talk to Petrovich, as you are in good relations with him. For real. By the way, they were introduced to each other by the Father! I remember that day very well.

(Pause. He looks at me, considering something. Smiling.)

– I will tell you. Autumn of nineteen-ninety. That time I wasn't in the “Pipes” myself, but I was close. And there was a story… Accidentally there happened to be a local guide in Blinchuk’s guard, from that area… hmm… Seryozha Nabis.

– Nabis?! Precisely Nabis?

– Well yes.

(He is smiling.)

– Nabis is a nickname, I already don't remember his surname. Such a dark-haired guy, curly, handsome up to the point of taking and killing him, casting a gypsum statue from him, and painting him instead of Socrates in the art shops. He was local, it seems.

(…)

CHAPTER 2

As all knowlegeable people Nabis went to the “Two Pipes” bar more than once, he knew when they were going there, – and was following the road, fully relying on Kharon. The “neutral” was safe in a sense of gitiks and attacks, may be only “shopototams” could reach a human here, as they have reached the Colonel today. And also everybody was always having a back thought, scared that the Zone border may move here and following Murphy’s law you may be caught. Just like under an icicle from the roof. Right now “shishiga” was moving slowly along the driveway of apartment block number 9. And number 9 (Volgogradskaya st.) itself was already in the Zone, and its corners were all covered with mushrooms, looking like the oil bubbles and statue’s eyes at the same time, watching you, wherever you go. And in the flat number 17 of this house (on the third floor of the middle entrance) in the middle of a totally ordinary room, Misha Bulygin, tracker-the Sergeant, had drowned to death. Drowned as he was the first who entered that living room. As soon as the “neutral” slightly moves, here you are – in the town Zone. And then almost certainly straight away – it is over. There were a huge number of different shit of unknown kind, from identified by “risks” still “heavy” and “light” places to very aggressive, totally unpredictable animals and insects, in Kapustin. The city was passable, of course, and very rich with loots, but the most of the trackers who where known by Nabis still preferred to hunt for loots and mark with poles the tracks, ordered by the army and scientists, only in the steppe. The city was swallowing the trackers very greedily, and also the following fact was recorded there: the power and intensiveness of local anomaly in the steppe was going down gradually, gravitational intensives degraded, shrunk and even became passable through, killing climate anomalies were slowing down, and you could meet fewer and fewer of vacuum pockets. But in Kapustin, at the airfield and at the premises of the army divisions, where civilization and technology concentratedly were continuing to crap the planet, all was staying the same as on the next day after the Lightning… And village Kapustino, nearby to which general Voznjuk and academic Korolyov built the rocket city Kapustin (officially – Leninsk, to confuse adversaries as there was one more Leninsk not far away, but totally civil) was deadly impassable, hardly a fews were saved from there, and no one knew what is happening there in the labyrinths of the private households… The only part the Zone didn’t touch was a small part of the village after the Astrakhan road, called the “Dogs’ village” since the beginning of times. Twenty thousand people lived in the town. There were almost six thousands in the village. Almost fifteen thousands from the city survived. From the village – less than a hundred.