"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 26 - City of the Living Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Blade 26: City of the Living Dead

By Jeffrey Lord

Chapter 1
Richard Blade sat down in the chair in the glass booth far below the Tower of London. He felt the
rubber of the chair's back and seat cold against his naked, grease-smeared body. He tried to relax while
Lord Leighton scurried about, fastening cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade's skin.
Twenty, fifty, a hundred of them. Each one was connected to a wire, and each wire led off into some part
of the vast computer that filled the whole rock-walled room. The gray crackle-finished consoles towered
above Blade, pressing their tops against the ceiling. Blade always thought it would have seemed more
appropriate if the computer had been the master here and the men its servants, instead of the other way
around.

Lord Leighton was the master nonetheless, the man who had created the computer out of his own genius
and many millions of pounds sterling. In a few more minutes he would use it to send Richard Blade
hurtling off into Dimension X. Dimension X was a previously unknown realm of existence discovered by
a lucky accident and now being systematically explored by Richard Blade-and Richard Blade alone.
There was no other living human being in the world who could travel into Dimension X and return alive
and sane.

Lord Leighton finished his work and gave Blade a final inspection. Then he stepped over to the main
console for the whole computer and stood within easy reach of the red master switch. Blade followed the
white-coated figure with his eyes, about the only part of his own body that he could still comfortably
move. Lord Leighton's movements were as brisk as ever-astonishingly brisk for a man past eighty with
his spine bent by a hunchback and his legs twisted since childhood by polio. But then Lord Leighton had
always ignored the limitations of his body, just as he'd always ignored the wishes and preferences of
other people. Neither his own frailties nor the opposition of others had ever been allowed to stand
between him and what he wanted to achieve.

Blade looked to one side of the console. The spectator's chair was still folded up into its niche in the
wall. It didn't look as though J were going to make it down here in time. A pity, and J would regret it, but
it couldn't be helped. The old man had always been busy when he was head of MI6 and Richard Blade
was one of his crack agents. He was still busy, now that he worked with Project Dimension X. Things
were always unexpectedly coming up to drag him away or chain him to his desk.

Blade turned his attention back to Lord Leighton in the exact moment the scientist's hand gripped the
master switch. In a single, smooth motion, he drew it down to the bottom of the slot. Lights danced
across the control panel in a continuous ripple of color, and pain swallowed up Richard Blade.

He'd felt pain before-wounds, torture, the pain that exploded and thundered in his head when it was time
for him to return to England from Dimension X. Pain was never a friend and could never be one, but it
was an old, familiar enemy. At least it had been familiar until now.

This pain was different. This was pain that gripped every part of his body from his scalp to his toes in
white-hot pincers, rending and clawing, stripping away the flesh from the bones and tearing one bone
from another. The pain blinded him, searing his eyes like molten metal. He couldn't look at himself, but he
knew that if he did he would see flesh blistering and blackening and his blood boiling away before it could
flow, his exposed bones cracking, his fingers and toes curling up like dead leaves and dropping to the
floor. Lord Leighton would be staring in horror, torn out of his scientific detachment. Something had