"Frank Herbert - The White Plague" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

A woman off to John's left said: "Let me through. I'm a nurse."
This, more than anything else, stopped John's struggles against the policeman.

People were helping. There was a nurse.

"It'll be cleared up in a bit, sir," the policeman said. His voice was
maddeningly calm. "That's a bad cut on your head. I'll just help you across
to where the ambulances are coming."

John allowed himself to be led through a lane in the crowd, seeing the curious
stares, hearing the voices on his right ooing and the calling upon God to
"look over there" -- the awed voices telling John about things he did not want
to see. He knew, though. And there were glimpses past the policeman who
helped him to a cleared place against a building across from the green.

"There now, sir," the policeman said. "You'll be taken care of here." Then
to someone else: "I think he was hit by a flying bit; the bleeding seems
to've stopped."

John stood with his back against a scarred brick wall from which the dust of
the explosion still sifted. There was broken glass underfoot. Through an
opening in the crowd to his right he could see part of the bloody mess at the
corner, the people moving and bending over broken flesh. He thought he
recognized Mary's coat behind a kneeling priest. Somewhere within him there
existed an understanding of that scene. His mind remained frozen, though,
frigidly locked into limited thought. If he allowed himself to think freely,
then events would flow -- time would continue . . . a time without Mary and
the children. It was as though a tiny jewel of awareness held itself intact
within him, understanding, knowing . . . but nothing else could be allowed to
move.

A hand touched his arm.

It was electric. A scream erupted from him -- agonized, echoing down the
street, bringing people whirling around to stare at him. A photographer's
flash temporarily blinded him, shutting off the scream, but he could still
hear it within his head. It was more than a primal scream. This came from
deeper, from some place he had not suspected and against which he had no
protection. Two white-coated ambulance attendants grabbed him. He felt his
coat pulled down, shirt ripped. There came the prick of a needle in his arm.
They hustled him into an ambulance as an enveloping drowsiness overwhelmed his
mind, sweeping away his memory.

For a long time afterward, memory would not reproduce those shocked minutes.
He could recall the small car, the brown-sweatered elbow on the windowsill,
but nothing afterward. He knew he had seen what he had seen: the explosion,
the death. Intellectual awareness argued the facts. I was standing at that
window, I must have seen the blast. But the particulars lay behind a screen
that he could not penetrate. It lay frozen within him, demanding action lest
the frozen thing thaw and obliterate him.