"David Gerrold - Chtorr 3 - A Rage for Revenge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

The highways were going to be the backbone of our resistance; but first we had to worm-proof every
useful installation on the route. We needed to establish caches of supplies and weapons. It was grim
work-with grimmer implications: We were digging in for the duration.
But we'd borrowed one good idea from the worms. The domes that we associated with worm nests
were really only the entrances. Once the worms established themselves in an area, they tunneled in. The
greater part of the nest was always underground. We didn't know how deep a worm nest could get, but
it had occurred to the Science Section that we could use the same technique. Now, we were looking for
locations.
We pulled up in front of the station and I reached into the back of the Jeep for my rifle. I took it
everywhere. I even slept with it. "Wait here," I said.
The first dome stood open to the weather. It looked like it had been the office.
The second dome had been some kind of processing plant, but I couldn't identify the machinery. One half
of the room was sealed off by a double layer of glass. There was a loading bay behind the glass and a
conveyer belt leading into the next dome. On this side of the glass there were a lot of pipes. Two
generators. Several control consoles. A bank of monitor screens. And, behind another glass wall,
showers and decontamination chambers and a rack of isolation suits.
There were a lot of these hasty little structures left over from the plague years: emergency shelters,
storage depots, distribution facilities, decontamination centers, and isolated research labsbut this wasn't
any of those.
I passed into the third dome and the answer was clear.
There were ovens here.
The realization hit me like a wave. My knees turned to water, I almost collapsed. Dammit! I thought I'd
buried my grief! How many more times? Dammit! Dammit!
I pushed it down-again-and continued my inspection.
The plagues had killed more than seven billion people, more than sixty-five percent of the human race.
More men than women had died, more white people than black people, more yellow people than white
people. There were still hundreds of thousands of mummified bodies waiting to be discovered.
One of the continuing jobs of the aftermath years had been to clean up the dead. The bodies were
deadly. They still carried spores.
There were hundreds of these stations all over the country. The fabrication of them was easy. The domes
could be inflated, sprayed, and hardened in a day. The equipment could be installed and functioning by
the end of the week. Some of the stations had even been run entirely by robots.
If you found a body, you picked up the phone and punched DEADBODY or DISPOSAL, or any one of
a half-dozen other easy-to-remember mnemonics, and reported the location. The nearest retrieval van
would be notified and the body would be picked up within two to four hours. The vans delivered the
bodies to the nearest control station-an installation like this one-where they were burned.
The plagues still weren't over, but most of the dying was, so most of these stations had been shut down.
I could almost feel the heat from the ovens. And the stench. And-I don't know why-but I could imagine
screaming too. Women and children and men. Why was I remembering that? I hadn't been near San
Francisco when they'd
Never mind.
These domes were cold and empty now.
The dust was thick on the floor and a chill wind curled it up in little puffs.
All right, so now we knew what was here. I'd recommend that we not use this site. It wasn't defendable.
Hidden as it was between two hills, it was a sitting target for anything that came over either of those
crests. Maybe it was a good idea to keep a crematorium hidden out of sight, but not a fortress. No, this
wouldn't do. I turned around-
McCain was standing in the door, gaping. "Wow," he said softly, looking around.
I lowered my rifle and said, "I thought I told you to wait." Annoyance put an edge on my voice.
"Sorry, sir, but you were gone a long time. I got concerned."