"Guy N. Smith - Sabat 1 - The Graveyard Vultures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

around starting to take up the echoes.

Sabat fought against shock and horror which were threatening to petrify him into an easy target. A
sideways leap just as the blade came down, hearing it strike the rocky ground amid a shower of sparks.
Whirling, flinging the crucifix with desperation, seeing it hit his adversary full in the chest. But Quentin only
swivelled round, a horrific sneer on his aged features. 'The cross is powerless without you, Mark. Not
even a symbol, just a lump of meaningless metal.'

Panicking now, a Christian in a roman lion pit, knowing that his agility can only postpone the inevitable
mauling.

Mental torture added to bursting lungs and weakening muscles. Mark Sabat hurled garlic bulbs and saw
them bounce off his brother and roll away. Quentin followed him, the axe poised effortlessly, awaiting the
death blow. It was crazy that such a decrepit body could move so swiftly, the brain within the shrunken
bald skull tuned perfectly to outwit its retreating foe.

Suddenly Mark Sabat was airborne and falling, a wave of vertigo sweeping through him, a sensation akin
to having stepped off a block of high-rise flats into a black nothingness. Then a jerk checked him. He
was lying on his back staring up at an oblong that was lighter than the darkness all around; twinkling
pinpoints which he recognised as stars. It took him some seconds to realise what had happened and then
it all came to him; the musty damp smell of soil which showered down on him from the narrow, sharp
sides of the grave into which he had fallen, sharp slivers of rock gouging his back.

A familiar silhouette above him obliterated the starlight. Quentin. Old or young, it was the Quentin he had
hunted from Haiti to Bavaria, axe poised for the final blow, savouring this moment of fratricide. And it
was at that instant, even as he was preparing himself for death, that Mark's fingers closed over the cold
metal of the .38 in his jacket pocket. His movements were instinctive, an act of hopelessness tinged with
defiance, a condemned man spitting in the face of his executioner. A salvo of shots, so rapid that they
sounded like a single peal of cannonfire coming up out of the ground, stabbing flame that burned its way
through the material of the pocket in which the gun was fired, and gave off a stench that was a mixture of
singed cloth and cordite. And bullets thudding into a human body with a noise like catapult slugs striking
wet cardboard.

Quentin was thrown back up to his full height even as he started to bring the axe down, the hail of slugs
ploughing up his body, churning a furrow that began in his groin and ended with a savage gash across his
throat, as though a ferocious wild beast had savaged him. His scream of anger was drowned by the
blood gushing from the severed jugular vein, the agony arching his back so that his bowed spine
threatened to snap. One suspended second when he tottered on the narrow brink that divides the chasms
of life and death, his own death-wish suddenly expedited yet instinctively clinging to the life he had
known, reluctant to relinquish it. Tottering, swaying.

Mark's finger checked in the trigger. He heard the axe thud harmlessly on the ground, saw Quentin
coming at him, airborne, arms flailing like some ungainly prehistoric bird attempting to take flight, spouting
warm, thick blood.

Mark Sabat felt the rush of air, covered his head with his arms and braced himself. A sickening impact,
smothered by the still kicking body of his brother, feeling and tasting warm blood on his face.

And the younger Sabat was fighting for his life again. Somehow he managed to push the other off him,
struggled up so that they were wedged side-by-side in the deep, narrow grave. Only then did he open his