"Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

She slipped through the door, closed it gently, leaned her back
against it. The reek in the room pried at her sinuses like the
bouquet off a shot of cheap whiskey. Jane held her breath, playing
the penlight around. A television. Some kind of huge clothes hanger
like an outsized trouser press. .. a wardrobe. . . scattered tape
cassettes and paper magazines
Something was dripping. Thick oily dripping, down at floor level. It
was coming from the big trouser-press contraption. Jane stepped
toward the machine and played her light across the floor. Some kind
of bedpan there.
Jane half knelt. It was a white ceramic pot, half-full of a dark
nasty liquid, some kind of dense chemical oil. Grainy stuff like fine
coffee grounds had sunk to the bottom, with a nasty white organic
scum threading the top, just like a
vile egg-drop soup .. . As Jane watched, a sudden thin -drool of the
stuff plummeted into the pot.
Her light went up. It discovered two racks of white human teeth. A
human mouth there, with tight-drawn white lips and a stiff blue
tongue. The head was swaddled in bandages, a thick padded strap at
the forehead. Some kind of soft rubber harness bar was jammed into
the gaping jaws. .
They had him strapped to a rack, head down. Both his shoulders
strapped, both his wrists cuffed at his sides, his chest strapped
down against the padded surface. His knees were bound, his ankles
cuffed. The whole rack was tilted skyward on a set of chromed springs
and hinges. Up at the very top, his pale bare feet were like two
skinned animals. Down at the bottom, his strap-swaddled head was just
above the floor.
They were draining him.
Jane took two quick steps back and slapped her plastic-gloved hand
against the mask at her mouth.
She fought the fear for a moment and she crushed it. And then she
fought the disgust, and she crushed that too.
Jane stepped back to the rack, deliberately, and put her gloved hand
at the side of Alex's neck. It was fever-hot and slick with his
sweat.
He was alive.
Jane examined the rack for a while, her eyes narrowing hotly. The
fear and disgust were gone now, but she couldn't stop her sudden hot
surge of hatred. This was probably a fairly easy machine to manage,
for the sons of bitches who were used to using it. Jane didn't have
time to learn.
She undid the stop locks on the casters at the bottom, shoved the
whole contraption to the side of the big bed, and toppled it, and
Alex, onto the mattress, with one strong angry heave.
The straps on his chest were easy. Just Velcro. The padded latches on
his wrists and ankles were harder: elaborate bad-design flip-top
lock-down nonsense. Jane yanked her jigsaw and went through all four
of the evil things in ten seconds each. There was bad noise-a whine
and a muted chatter-with a sharp stench of chewed and molten plastic.