"Attanasio, A A - Radix 02 - In Other Worlds 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Attanasio A.A)

his key in the lock by the light of the sparks leaping from his fingers
did he notice that a thin ghostfire was burning coolly over his hands
and arms. He left the door unlocked behind him, afraid that
something awful was happening to him. His apartment lights, like
all the lights in the building; were browned out. The filaments in
the bulbs glowed dark red but cast no radiance. The TV worked bat
gave no picture, only a prickly sound. He wheeled the TV to the
door of the bathroom, and by its pulsing blue glow 'he had enough
light to take a cold shower. The chilled water invigorated him, and
when he looked down at his arms, he saw that the shimmering was
gone, if it had been there at all. Relief widened in him, and he
washed the one lens of his glasses and put them on to examine
himself more closely.
The air was a vibration of luminance, and the wavering static
of the TV seemed louder and more reverberant. He slid open the
glass door to the shower, and his heart gulped panic. The TV was
blacked out. The illumination and the sound were coming out of
the air!
He jumped out of the shower stall and nearly collapsed. The
bathroom was refulgent with frenzied
light; waterdrops hung in the air like chips of crystal. Through the
glare in the mirror, through an anvil. of ripping-metal noise, he saw
that his head was blazing with swirls of silvergreen flames.
Dumbstruck, he watched the terror in his brilliantly oiled face as
green fire fumed from his body in an incandescent rush.
A white-hot shriek cut through him, and his body went glassy,
shot through with violet sparks and flurries of black light. Silence
froze the room to a cube of crackling light. And the last thing Carl
Schirmer saw was the glass of his own horrified face shatter into
impossible colors. '
Zee was the first to see Carl's apartment when he came by the
next morning for their planned run. His knock went unanswered,
but he heard the TV, so he tried the door. And it opened. The
apartment smelled windshaken, bright as a mountaintop. Zee went
over to the TV, which had been wheeled across the room to face
the bathroom door and was blaring a morning soap. He turned it
off.
"Oh sweet Jesus!" The words escaped him before he knew
what he was seeing. Ile bathroom was a charred socket. The
mirrors were purpled from exposure to an intense heat, burned
imageless. Zee entered, and the tiles crushed to ash beneath his
sneakers. He stood- numb in the scorched and shrunken room. The
seat of the fire-glossed toilet had curled to the shape of a black
butterfly, and the sink counter that had held toothbrush and
shaving implements was reduced to twisted clinkers.
The police, later, would classify the fare as unclassifiable. No
human remains were found, and Carl was recorded as a missing
person.
Caitlin and Sheelagh came by late in the afternoon