"Axler, James - Deathlands 035 - Skydark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Axler James)

Ryan figured the part about accepting fate was a flat-out given; what the rest meant was a mystery to him. He had no idea who or what Doc thought he was saluting, .or if the old man even knew. The experience of
having been time-trawled into the future had done something to the old man's mind. He didn't always talk rationally.
A swirling gray mist appeared near the chamber's ceiling. Tendrils of the mist drifted down, obscuring everything.
A curious person caught in the same situation might have wondered if the fog really existed or if it was an illusion, a figment of a mind already being systematically deconstructed, cell by cell. Ryan Cawdor wasn't a man to linger over questions that served no immediate purpose. He was a stone-hard pragmatist, a bottom liner, which was why he and his friends used the mat-trans units. Having journeyed across post-Armageddon America on foot and in the Trader's war wags for many years, he knew how dangerous Chose alternate modes of transportation were. The odds were heavily stacked against the long-term survival of conventional travelers, no matter how well armed they were. Of the many thousands of human fatalities he had seen in Deathlands, few had been quick and painless.
Ryan fell through the space where the floor should have been, spiral ing downward, faster and faster through black emptiness. Somewhere in the middle of his wind milling fall, he completely lost consciousness. Mercifully everything went blank. But not for long. The mind dreamed in transit, and the dreams were always bad.
The instant of deathlike oblivion was shattered by a
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surge of color, sound and the full range of physical sensations; the jump dream had begun.
It was night.
He hit the ground running. His bare feet slapped against moist soil as he raced toward a distant tower of flames. And as he ran, he knew it wasn't his own body that carried him. It was too light, too quick, too strong for its size. The differencesЧthe raw speed and the agilityЧamazed him.
Effortlessly he closed the gap between himself and a crude defensive wall of skinny, unpeeled logs seated in heaped, tamped earth. A narrow section of the tree-trunk barrier was smoking, the ax-sharpened tops of its logs shattered into fans of splinters as if by a lightning strike. He slipped through a break in the wall and into the midst of a tiny, triple-poor ville. Ryan knew he had never been there before, but he had seen many outposts just like it, clinging for life at the edges of Deathlands. The nameless ville's packed-dirt courtyard was surrounded by a jumble of thatched-roof shanties. Most of its two dozen mud-and-stick huts were already burning. Beyond their steeply peaked roofs, at the rear of the compound, he could just make out the sawtooth top of the log wall.
All around him the humid darkness echoed with animal shrieks of pleasure and cries of pain. The air hung heavy with a maddening perfume: the metallic scent of freshly spilled blood and the sour smell of wood smoke. He caught the dim shapes of white limbs moving frantically at the edges of the firelightЧthe arms
and legs of others like him, gleefully killing with bare hands and feet
His kin had already found their prey.
He caught himself gasping, not from the exertion of the full-out run, but from the intensity of the excitement he felt. Heat radiated from his very core, surging through his limbs and his face. It was the heat of desire, of an unquenchable hunger. Not a hunger for sex; this lust wasn't focused in his loins, but in the center of his torso, between heart and stomach. Even as the heat billowed outward, it seemed to compress his lungs in hoops of steel, forcing him to sip greedily for air. And from his own throat came a strange mewling sound, liquid, plaintive, sinuous. The vibrations of the soft cry cascaded over his chest like a caress.
He turned slowly, taking in every detail of the grim scene: the fires, the brutal murders of the ville's people and their livestock, the wanton destruction. Everything he saw as he turned, everything he felt was newЧand fascinating.
A staccato crackle of gunfire froze him. It was from a single blaster, inside the ville's perimeter. There was still at least one survivor. He crossed the courtyard, homing in on the source of the sound.
When he tried the front door of the shabby hut, it wouldn't open, even to a full-force kick. It was heavily barred from the inside. Without a thought he climbed the hut's front wall, as quick as a lizard, scampering up onto the thatched roof. He peered down through the ragged hole that had been torn in the thatch. The room
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below him was lit by rows of guttering candles, illuminating several corpses around a long table.
Ryan dropped twenty-five feet, landing softly on the killing floor.
Three adults and four children lay facedown in the middle of their evening meal. He sniffed at one of the crude wooden bowls, recognizing boiled mashed roots, boiled mashed beans, boiled prickly leaves. It was a gray-green, tasteless last supper. The rough-hewn table was puddled with the blood of the seven diners. From the eye sockets up, the tops of their skulls had been ripped off, the contents plundered, splattered and smeared over the clay-colored interior walls. Their arms and legs were cracked and twisted into impossible positions, their necks grotesquely bent.
The sweet stench of gore suffused the warm, moist air, and made it even harder for Ryan to breathe. A surge of internal heat, more powerful than anything he had yet felt, slammed him. And he had the sudden urge to throw himself into the pool of blood spreading across the tamped earth floor, the urge to roll and wallow in it. At some deeply submerged level of mind, Ryan recognized the alien nature of the thought and recoiled. Though he tried, he couldn't stop himself from kneeling and touching the spilled blood. Nor could he stop himself from feeling disappointment when he realized it had already gone cold.
He examined the floor. Multiple bloody footprints led away from the red pool. And then he caught a faint whiff of a familiar, fishy odor: kin on the hunt
His strange new body's response was automatic. Once more the strangely pleasurable mewling sound erupted from his throat. As it did, a horrendous, sustained burst of gunfire rang out, this time so close it seemed to shake the hut's walls. Ryan leaped over the blood and through the yawning doorway beyond. It opened onto a cramped, dark room where rude straw pallets were spread out on the ground. At one end of the room a door to the outside stood ajar. He peered cautiously around the jamb. The doorway looked onto a small lane that separated the ragged line of huts. Lit by the nearby burning rooftops, the dirt track lay heaped with still-thrashing white bodies: his kin tangled up in yards of their own spilled bowels.
Only one creature remained standing in the narrow lane.
The enemy.
A tall, rangy and powerfully built man bent over a fresh corpse, trying to pry the first six inches of a long-bladed knife from the center of its bony chest. With his back to Ryan, the black-haired foe braced the sole of his boot on the dead face while he savagely levered the knife handle back and forth.
The sight sent a wave of righteous hatred and rage coursing through Ryan's blood. Under the hate and the rageЧand more terrible than eitherЧhe felt a surge of pure delight, delight in what he knew to be his own vastly superior physical strength, delight in the destruction he was about to visit upon the unwary man.
In a single, catlike bound, he crossed the space be-
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tween the doorway and his target. He launched himself with his arms outstretched, and when he slammed onto the enemy's back, he caught hold and drove him forward, but not down as he had planned. With a combination of balance and strength, the man managed to keep his feet despite the sudden impact. Ryan's arms whipped in a blur, hands tearing at the broad shoulders. Cloth gave way, presenting him with bare, warm skin. Ryan snatched hold and pulled as hard as he could. The skin stretched and stretched until it could stretch no more, and then it began to rip loose from the dense layers of muscle underneath.
The man screamed and whirled, punching, kicking, trying to throw him off.
Ryan held on, riding his enemy like a wild horse, and when the man paused for breath, he repositioned his grip. As he moved his hands, he saw the torn strips of skin, the bright, slick blood and the rows of round red welts he had left behind. Suddenly everything made sense. The speed. The uncanny climbing ability. The animal urges. Even as Ryan realized with a pang of horror what the welts meant, what kind of subhuman, mutated body he possessed, his body slapped a hand against the side of the man's face. The tiny suckers that lined his fingers and palms seized the flesh of cheek, nose and forehead. Bracing a knee in die middle of his enemy's back, he used all his power to twist the straining, corded neck and draw the chin toward him over top of the bleeding shoulder.
The dark-haired man had a single eye, blue and full
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of hate. The empty socket on the other side of his face was covered by a patch, which only partly concealed the old blade scar that split eyebrow and cheek.
It was like looking into a mirror.
The life Ryan Cawdor was about to take was his own.
Then something even stranger began to happen: it started to hurt.
Bad.
For a terrible instant Ryan floundered in a jumble of conflicting viewpoints and sensations. His world blurred as two different sets of images, from two different sets of eyesЧmurderer's and victim'sЧwere superimposed on one another. His consciousness inhabited both of the struggling dream-bodies at once, but he couldn't control either. Though he ordered the aggressor to let go, it wouldn't obey; though he commanded the victim to break free, the attacker on his back was too strong. Ryan simultaneously felt exquisite pleasure and unendurable pain as the tendons that anchored face to bone snapped, and the brutally drawn flesh tore free from the front of his skull. Victim Ryan's head wrenched back with such force that his neck vertebrae shattered, severing his spinal cord.