"Bradbury, Ray - Sound of Thunder, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

glittered like a thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with
slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that
the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even while
the monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of
raw flesh blew down the wilderness.
"Get me out of here," said Eckels. "It was never like this
before, I was always sure I'd come through alive, I had
good guides, good safaris, and safety. This time, I figured
wrong. I've met my match and admit it. This is too much
for me to get hold of."
"Don't run," said Lesperance. "Turn around. Hide in the
Machine."
"Yes." Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet
as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of
helplessness.
"Eckels"
He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.
"Not that way!"
The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with
a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in four
seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm
from the beast's mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime
and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with
sun.
Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to the edge of
the Path, his gun limp in his arms, stepped off the Path, and
walked, not knowing it, in the jungle. His feet sank into
green moss. His legs moved him, and he felt alone and
remote from the events behind.
The rifles cracked again. Their sound was lost in shriek
and lizard thunder. The great lever of the reptile's tail
swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of
leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweller's hands
down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush
them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming
throat. Its boulder-stone eyes levelled with the men.
They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic
eyelids and the blazing black iris.
Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche,
Tyrannosaurs fell. Thundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with
it. It wrenched and tore the metal Path, The men flung
themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of cold
flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its
armoured tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount
of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac
of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They
stood, red and glistening.
The thunder faded.
The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a green peace.
After the nightmare, morning.