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

his garage, his little empire, shaking his head in resigned bemusement at



the people rushing by. His two attendants, who had fled without his authority as soon as they had heard
the sirens, were in for a rollicking when they returned. Huh! He could just see their sheep's faces now.

The motorist was climbing back into his car.

'Hold up, Chief!' Howard called. тАШYou owe me ...'

The blinding flash stopped his words. His legs felt suddenly weak and his bowels very watery. 'Oh no
...' he began to moan as he realized it actually was the real thing, there had been no mistake; then he, his
garage, and the motorist, were scorched by the heat. The petrol tanks, even though they were below
street level, blew instantly and Howard's and the motorist's bodies - as well as the bodies of everyone
around them - were seared to the bones.

And even those hurled through the air began to burn.
 Jeanette (real name Brenda) stared out from the eighth-floor window of the London Hilton, her gaze
upon the vast expanse of greenery below. She casually lit the cigarette dangling from a corner of her
lipstick-smeared lips while the Arab and his two younger male companions scrabbled around the suite for
their clothes - the older man for his pure white robes, the other two for their sharply-cut European suits.
The buggers deserve to panic, she thought without too much rancour, a stream of cigarette smoke
escaping her clenched lips. According to the newspapers, they were the cause of all this, holding the
world to ransom with their bloody precious oil, sulking at the merest diplomatic slight, doling or not doling
out the stuff as the mood took them. Acting like a spoilt kid in whose house the party was going on: you
can have a cake, Amanda, but you can't, Clara, 'cos I don't like



you this week. Well now they'd all paid the price. The party was over.

She studied the scurrying people in the street below, the riders spurring their horses along Rotten Row,
the lovers running hand-in-hand through the park. There were some, resigned like her, who were just
lying down in the grass, waiting for whatever was on its way. Jeanette flinched when a pedestrian trying
to cross the traffic-filled Park Lane was tossed over a car bonnet. The person - no telling whether it was
a man or woman from that height - lay by the roadside, not moving and with nobody bothering to help.
At least he or she was out of it.

Behind her the Arabs were screaming at one another, pulling on trousers, shirts, the old, fat man the
first to look decent because he only had his long frock to wriggle into. He was already heading for the
door, the other two hopping half-undressed behind him. Fools. By the time the lift came up it would be all
over. And they wouldn't get far down the stairs.

At least the sirens had stopped. They were more frightening than the thought of the oblivion to come.

Jeanette drew in on the cigarette and enjoyed the smoke filling her lungs. Forty a day and it wasn't
going to kill her. Her laugh was short, sharp and almost silent. And her looks would never fade. She
glanced around the empty hotel room and shook her head in disgust. They lived like pigs and they
copulated like pigs. How would they die? No prizes.