"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

pulse, as the voice intruded on his confinement from about

a foot behind his ear. In his startlement he tried to stand
up and smacked his head off the top bunk, consequently
collapsing to the floor as his legs buckled beneath him.
СAh-hahahahahaha - fuckin' waaank!'
He was facing away from the bed, barely able to focus,
breathing rapidly through gritted teeth. He clutched both
hands to the top of his head, pressing down so hard that if
he had been a Striker football figurine, his right foot would
have booted the ball off the table and all the way under the
fridge, whence never to return. Tears, it did not escape his
notice, were no problem now.
Sarah had once explained to him why applying pressure
to an injury helps dull the pain: it sends supplementary
information along the nerves, effectively taking up some
of the brain's sensory-processmg capacity that would otherwise be more
exclusively applied to acknowledging the fact
that you'd just, for example, rattied your head off a metal
bedframe. On this occasion, however, Parlabane felt it was
more a matter of holding his skull together.

СAh-hahahahahaha! Fuckin' lyin' burlin'. Ah-hahahaha!

Daft cunt.'

He blinked a few times, widened his eyes, shut them,

then widened them again, strenuously beseeching the room

to behave. In time, the batteries ran out on the stroboscope,
and the giant who was shaking the cell like an unopened
Christmas parcel finally got bored and put it down on the
floor again. Parlabane tentatively lifted his fingers from his
scalp, and grimaced at the sensation of stickiness. There
couldn't be many parts of the human body which didn't
make him queasy upon the secretion of moisture to the
touch. Indeed, off-hand the only one he could think of
wasn't even on his body, but it would be wise to put that
from his mind for a while. A long while.
Parlabane examined his fingers. There was blood, but
little more than a smear. It would probably be pushing it
to ask the warder whether a CT scan might be called for.
He turned his head delicately to look at the bunks. On
the bottom, pressed back against the wall and leaning up on
one elbow, there lay this wraith of a creature, sneering like
an anorexic gargoyle. Parlabane hadn't noticed anyone else
in the cell when he was brought in, and though he would
admit his own dedicated obliviousness could account for