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

virgins would keep her eternally young and beautiful. During the opening years of the seventeenth century,
she murdered over six hundred young women, practicing abominable tortures and draining their bodies of
blood for her horrific beauty regimen.
Mama Samm's admonition to "unmask the whore of Babylon before she puts her red dress on" might
have made sense four hundred years ago. But the infamous Blood Countess of Hungary died, walled up
in her dark tower, in 1614. How could that have anything to do with me?
Other than the fact that the B├бthory castle had two names.
Today it is known as Cachtice in the Slovak tongue.
In Erzs├йbet's time, the Hungarians called it Castle Cs├йjthe.
***
Five blocks up and one over was the Community of Christ church.
I took a shortcut through a long alleyway, going from late evening to near midnight conditions in one
swell foop. As the sidewalls of the alley blocked even the ambient light, my vision shifted over into the
infrared spectrum without conscious thought. Perhaps it was a reflexive response to the sudden darkness.
Or maybe the thrumming rhythms of the physical act of running triggered ancient predatory presets in my
hindbrain. No matter, I went with it. I needed the practice and it made the scenery more interesting.
Imagine humidity as a color: blackish red. With swirls of dark purple like eddies of smoky black light.
Mindful of the glimmering yellow splotches signifying the thermal decay processes of rotting garbage, I
thought about dropping by to see if anyone was in this late in the evening. I dodged the small red-orange
heat signatures of rats scurrying along the alley walls and recalled that the Book of Revelation in the New
Testament said something about the "Whore of Babylon." If memory served, there was even something
about a red dress or something. Maybe the pastor would be available for a quick Sunday school lesson.
Maybe we could have a nice friendly chat about eternal damnation and whether the blood of Christ
could wash away the sins of those who must take bloody communion from human hosts.
The issues of sin and salvation were abruptly back-burnered: I was not alone.
Two human-shaped openings knelt in the crimson-flecked mists. The victim was a flickering
yellow-orange, like a candle flame slowly guttering down. The executioner was a dark hole in the reddish
curtain, its flesh too cool to register as a heat signature.
Too cool to be alive.
Wrong shortcut! I decided as it turned a dark, head-shaped emptiness up to stare at me. I whirled
and ran the other way.
At the mouth of the alley where the warm darkness shied away from the icy wash of a corner street
lamp, I stumbled against a garbage can. I dropped out of the infrared spectrum and shifted back to
normal vision.
What are the odds? I wondered, shifting from a sprint to an all-out run. Move to another city,
another state, complete change of identity, paper trail erased: a brand new friggin' life and I run into one
of them by accident!
I kicked it up a notch so that I was doing twenty-five, maybe thirty mph.
Once upon a time I had taken up jogging as a healthy pastime. That was in another lifetime. In my
present incarnation I ran more to alleviate my boredom than to condition my transforming flesh. Except
now I was anything but bored and was literally running for my life: two birds with one stone, as it were.
The sun had been down an hour but the temperature still hovered in the mid nineties. The edges of
my vision still registered in the infrared band and the pavement glowed brick red out of the corners of my
eyes.
How could I have been so stupid?
If hot summer nights had seemed a soothing balm for my too-cool flesh, wouldn't it be all the more
attractive to those whose bodies had grown eternally cold? In thinking of my own comfort, I had
probably raised the odds of this encounter by a hundredfold. I glanced over my shoulder, expecting
pursuit. Saw none. Swung my attention back to the front and saw him come floating down, out of the
night sky, like a lunatic Peter Pan.