"William Mark Simmons - Undead 2 - Dead on My Feet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons William Mark)

got the jagged end of a broken mop handle planted in his chest. He screeched and fell backward. I
scrambled up and headed once more for the second exit.
This time I made it. I ran down a connecting hallway and found myself in the chapel. Dodging
between the pews, I had almost reached the podium at the front when I heard a familiar hiss behind me.
To quote my realtor, "location is everything": I had evidently missed the monster's heart.
Rounding the podium, I cut to the left, behind an ornate screen of carved wood. As I reached for the
door set in the far wall, the vampire crashed through the screen and into me. I crashed through the door
and we both went tumbling down a flight of stairs into the basement.
The vamp was still stronger and faster than I was but, surprisingly, I was the first one back up on my
feet. Maybe I just had more experience in taking punishment. I saw a door to my left and a heavier,
reinforced door to my right: I gambled on the one to the right. I slammed it behind me and fumbled for
the lock.
There was no lock.
I fumbled for the light switch.
There was a light switch.
I had just enough time to take in the general layout of the mortuary's workroom and vault the first
embalming table as the vampire kicked the reinforced door off its hinges.
He stalked into the room and glared at me, now crouched between the steel table legs. No mocking
smile, no "little bunny" now; he had finally figured out that, despite my appearance, I was more dangerous
than a human. And the mop handle through his chest had pushed his need for fresh blood to a dangerous
level. I wouldn't catch him off guard again.
Slowly, deliberately, he reached over and flipped off the light switch, plunging the room back into
darkness.
Unlike the hot, humid air outside, the embalming room was kept cool by refrigeration units that were
separate from the central air system serving the rest of the building. That kept the room temperature in the
upper fifties for the customers who passed through for their final cosmetics. With the lights off, he could
still see my heat signature in the infrared spectrum. Down in this air-conditioned bunker, I had the
disadvantage: he wasn't warm enough to register as a heat source and the surrounding air wasn't warm
enough to offer a contrasting backdrop.
Blind man's bluff and I was "it."
I rolled under the embalming table as he vaulted it in turn, his heels smacking down on the tiled floor
where my head had been a second before. I upended the table, throwing some four hundred pounds of
steel over and onto my undead assailant. I heard him toss it aside as I fell across a second table. The
metal edge knocked half the wind out of me but, more discomfiting, this one was already occupied.
Instinctively, I flung myself to the left and the vampire smashed against my former location, sending the
dead body flying in one direction and the heavy structure careening in another.
A light glimmered at the far end of the room, a tiny wisp of blue-gold flame. I stumbled toward
itтАФstumbled being the operative word as I caught my toe on some unknown part of a corpse's anatomy.
As I went sprawling, I felt the intimate breeze of someone passing just overhead.
He caught up with me just before I reached the glimmering light. I was slammed against the
wallтАФbrick this time and not as forgiving. As I slid downward, the rough surface peeling my cheek like a
cheese grater, I grasped a dim projection. A knoblike handle. It twisted in my hand and the tiny flicker of
the pilot light erupted into multiple rings of flaming gas jets behind oven-tempered glass.
As an icy claw closed around my throat, I looked at my assailant's face in the flickering light. His lips
were split and one eye was puffed shut. He grimaced and I was rewarded with the sight of one and a half
fangs instead of two, now.
I tugged futilely at his wrist with my right hand while my left scrabbled behind me for leverage. I found
another handle, pulled down. The door of the crematory oven creaked open and, with a puff of hot air,
the flickering light intensified. His eyes widened, the puffy one showing a little iris, now: rings of red
surrounding the pupils glowed with a crimson incandescence.