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

 The scientist looked exactly as he had in the nightmare, exactly as he had since Blade first knew him. His
lean, twisted frame was enveloped in a ragged laboratory coat that might have been white once, after its
last cleaning years ago. His white hair stuck out in the same disorder as always, and his bushy eyebrows
seemed as ready to drop like a curtain over the dark, intensely bright eyes.

Blade let J describe the nightmare, while he himself went off to the changing room carved out of the rock
wall. At this point in the proceedings, he always disliked waiting one second longer than absolutely
necessary.

A few minutes later he stepped out of the changing room, naked except for a loincloth, smeared from
head to foot with the black grease that was supposed to prevent electrical burns. It or something had
always worked. He hadn't been burned yet-except in his nightmare.

Lord Leighton and J had apparently finished their discussion of the nightmare. Lord Leighton seemed to
accept that there was nothing to worry about, or else he was simply in one of his untalkative moods.

Blade walked to the center of the room and sat down in the chair inside the glass booth. From then on
events marched swiftly, following exactly the same path they'd followed twenty-five times before in real
life and once in the nightmare. The only difference between today's reality and last night's ghastly dream
was J's presence. Blade sincerely hoped there would be other differences!

In spite of what his reason told him, Blade was tense by the time Leighton stepped up to the control
panel. He forced himself to breathe deeply and not stiffen as Leighton's hand came down on the master
switch. Then the switch slid down its slot and reached the bottom.

A terrible shrieking and roaring filled the room, like a hundred factory whistles all sounding together. The
sound tore at Blade's ears, but there was no pain. An immense wave of relief washed over him, relief that
there was no pain, relief that his nightmare was not becoming reality.

Then the floor of the chamber cracked open, and a darkness like liquid tar flowed up around the feet of
Blade's chair. He saw it reach his ankles, his knees, his waist, but he felt nothing. He sat motionless,
taking deep breaths to fill his lungs, as the liquid darkness rose to the level of his chest. He took a final
breath and held it as the darkness rose up to his chin. It rose to cover mouth and nose. He closed his
eyes and felt a faint tickling on his eyelids as the darkness rose up over him. It was like being brushed
with tiny feathers.

He sat motionless, holding his breath until his chest began to hurt as if white-hot bands of iron were
tightening around it: He held his breath for a moment longer, until both head and chest seemed about to
disintegrate into hot dust.

Then he breathed in. The blackness that was outside flooded in, and as it flooded in, it drowned all his
senses at once.

Chapter 2

Blade awoke with a more than usually violent pain in his head and the feeling of something hard under it.
He ignored the hardness and lay still. His head always hurt after he'd passed into Dimension X, and there
was never anything to do about it, but wait until it stopped hurting.

Blade kept his eyes closed, breathed regularly, and gradually felt the pain fade from a pounding agony to