"James Herbert - Domain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert James)

darkness with its violence, tearing at the walls, the roof, causing the ground to rise up and throw the
creatures into scrambling heaps. They lashed out at each other, clawing, gouging, snapping frenziedly with
razor teeth.

More thunder from another source.

Dust, fumes, sound, filled the air.

Rumbling, building, becoming a shrieking.

More. More thunder.

The world and its underworld shivering.

Screaming.

The creatures ran through the turbulence, black-furred bodies striving to reach their inner sanctum
within the tunnel network. Fighting to exist, deafened by the noise, squealing their panic, desperate to
return to the Mother Creature and her strange cohorts.

The man-made caverns shuddered but resisted the unleashed pressure from the world above. Sections
collapsed, others were flooded, but the main body of tunnels withstood the impacts that pounded the
city.
 And after a while, the silence returned.

Save for the scurrying of many, many clawed feet.



The first bomb exploded just a few thousand feet above Hyde Park, its energy release, in the forms of
radiation, light, heat, sound and blast, the equivalent of one million tons of tnt. The sirens that had warned
of the missile and its companions' approach were but a thin squeal to the giant roar of its arrival.

Within two thousandths of a second after the initial blinding flash of light, the explosion had become a
small searing ball of vapour with a temperature of eighteen million degrees Fahrenheit, a newborn
mini-sun of no material substance.

The luminous fireball immediately began to expand, the air around it heated by compression and
quickly losing its power as a shield against the ultraviolet radiation. The rapidly growing fiery nucleus
pushed at the torrid air, producing a spherical acoustic shock-front which began to travel faster than its
creator, masking the fireball's full fury.

As the shock-front spread, its progenitor followed, quickly dispersing a third of its total energy. The
fireball grew larger, almost half a mile in diameter, leaving behind a vacuum and beginning to lose its
luminosity. It started to spin inwards, rising at an incredible speed, forming a ring of smoke which carried
debris and fission-produced radioactive isotopes.

Dust was sucked from the earth as the swirling vortex reached upwards, dust that became
contaminated by the deadly,