"Tom Purdom-Toys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

closed around his legs. A girl shrieked with pleasure. "Give him the needle. Hurry. Hurry up."
"I'm right here. Get out of the way."
Edelman's heart jumped. He threw himself away from the girl holding on to his legs and fired the sonic
beam on the sound and prayed the batteries would last until the stupid kid fainted.
The boy backed away from him moaning. The moans disappeared in the general racket and he swung
the beam in a wide arc. More children screamed in front of him. The three hostages moaned through their
gags.
 He pulled his knife out of his belt and squatted behind one of the deck chairs. His hands found the
plastic wires that tied the hostage's hands to the chair. "Go when I tell you," he mumbled. "Crawl into the
water and swim to the elevator."
He sliced through the wires without worrying if he drew blood. Somewhere in the darkness a boy was
groping toward him with a big ache in his head and a needle in his hand. If he had three seconds left in the
batteries that powered the sonic beam, he was lucky; if the kids had built a beam generator that could
generate a beam like that for more than thirty seconds, they had done a first-rate job.
He sliced through the last wire and groped toward the next chair. His fingers brushed against a hand
and he repeated his instructions and slid the blade across the bonds. At least three children seemed to be
yelling and shrieking after Fracarro down by the elevator.
"He's behind the hostages," the kid with the rifle yelled. "Are you still there, Janie? I've still got the gun.
Find him and I'll get him."
He squatted behind the third hostage. His hands found a large, definitely masculine hand. The fingers
tightened as if they were squeezing something and he started slicing. Every nerve in his skin was jangling
alarms.
A body moved toward him from the left. A hand brushed against his shoulder. He whirled and the
body scrambled back. "He's here," the girl yelled. "He's setting them free."
The boy banged against something in the dark. "I'm coming. Hold on."
Edelman threw himself flat on the floor. He pressed against the deck chairs and peered into the
darkness.
The girl's hands grabbed his thighs. "He's here. He's lying down. Where are you?"
Edelman rolled away from the chairs. He hit the girl hard with a wide sweep of the arm holding the
sonic beam; she grunted and crashed into the back wall. He scrambled away from the chairs and
crouched on his hands and knees like a panic-stricken animal.
"He hit me," the girl moaned. "He's near the chairs."
"Where's everybody else? Where're the lancers?"
"We're right here. What do you want us to do?"
A bomb clanged against the console. Edelman edged toward the chairs with his eyes straining into the
dark. He found the chair David Rice was sitting in and sliced through the wires with two angry strokes.
He shoved Rice on the shoulder to let him know they could go and threw himself against the back wall.
Three chairs scraped. Three bodies splashed into the water. The girl and the boy with the rifle yelled.
"What're we gonna do?" the girl wailed. "They'll kill us."
"Get out of here, Janie. Everybody away from the chairs. Lancers-- charge! Sweep the area clean."
The girl ran past Edelman. The lancers yelled like actors in a medieval costume play and he dropped
to his knees and faced the charge with his arms squeezed behind his back.
A pole rammed into the bulletproof padding over his stomach and he twisted it out of the kid's grasp
and swung it along the floor at ankle level. A kid tripped over it and went down howling. He jumped
down and ran toward the far wall. Behind him everybody was yelling at once. "No more bombs," he
hissed at Fracarro. "Give me some light. Take the hostages up as soon as they get there."
"They're coming out of the water now. I think everybody down here is out of play. What about you?"
"I think I can disarm them."
"I'll be back down. I'll take the kids I've got down here up with me."
He waited in the dark with the pole and the sonic beam in his hands. The kids were yelling at each