"Stephen Kenson - Technobabel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenson Stephen)

"Good evening," the gray figure whispers to me, and I realize it is night, the
dark sky covered with a gray shroud of clouds. I also realize neither my two
"handlers" nor the creature crouching above me are surprised or shocked to see
me awake. They know I'm not dead, and the implications break over me like a
wave. If they knew I was alive the whole time, then I haven't been taken for
disposal like some kind of rubbish off the streets but for some other purpose.
The ghoul's comment about "fresh meat" comes to mind and I shudder again and
try to move. My limbs jerk spasmodically this time, causing the creature to
stop smiling and back away a bit, even as he waves the two handlers in closer.
"No, no," he whispers in his low voice, "don't try to move. You'll be better
off if you stay still. We wouldn't want you to injure yourself." His words are
intended to sound comforting, but they only make my skin crawl. I look up at
his pinched, gray face and his sightless eyes and see no pity or sympathy
there.
"Bring him," he tells the two handlers. "You can come back for the rest later.
It's not like they're going anywhere." Chuckling a wheezing laugh at his own
joke, the

creature turns and moves off as the handlers each grab one of my arms and lift
me up. I notice that Weizack is a man with a bit of a paunch and red-rimmed
eyes. He wears a scuffed leather jacket and a faded and stained denim shirt. I
also notice the butt of a pistol protruding from the side of his belt
underneath the jacket.
His partner is a tall, hulking figure with a broad, flat face. Two short tusks
protrude up over his upper lip and his ears are longish and pointed, lying
back against his skull. He looks like a goblin or ogre out of some fairy tale,
but I realize he's an ork, one of the metatypes who assumed their true forms
when magic returned to the world. He is right about one thing; his face is
ugly as sin, but it's nothing like the hideous visage of the creature they
work for, the ghoul. I catch the thing's face out of the corner of my eye as
they lift me off the ground, and he almost looks sorry for me. That worries me
more than anything I've seen so far.
The two handlers carry me away from the meat-wagon, my feet dragging on the
ground, toward a low brick building. The van is parked in an alley alongside
the building, and there's a side door nearby. The weathered brick walls of the
building are smeared with years of accumulated graffiti; the signs, scrawls,
and symbols meshing together like the secret writing cities use to communicate
with those who know how to read it. The symbols are strangely familiar to me,
but then I notice something else scrawled in vivid red near the door of the
building: "Beware the Tamanous."
I'm dragged through the door, down a corridor lit by the blue-white light of
flickering fluorescent tubes, a glow to make a healthy person look dead, which
only emphasizes the ghoul's pallor. He leads us into a room and turns to
Weizack and his partner.
"Put him up on the table," he says, "so I can get him prepared for delivery."
Delivery to whom? I wonder, as the men drag me toward a flat, steel table in
the middle of the room. Next to it I see a tray of shining, polished
instruments: scalpels, needles, tubes, wires, and gleaming hypodermics.
"It seems like such a waste," the creature sighs softly