"Vukcevich-CountOnMe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vukcevich Ray)

She turned on her perfect smile again and gave me a mock salute. "Well, there
are probably 820 things worse than being in the Army," she said.

Base 9.

I felt the blood drain from my head. I could tell by the way her green eyes
narrowed slightly that she'd seen my shock. I rushed a big frozen grin onto my
face.

"Right," I said. "Right." I hurried on down the stairs. I'd been on my way to
the corner 7-Eleven to buy a pretense for getting into her apartment later on
that evening, after she'd lugged all her stuff up to 29A. I planned on spending
the wait in the park we locals called "Three Trees and a Bench," across an empty
lot and one street over. I had my calculator and my binoculars, and the vantage
point would allow me to watch her with no danger of being seen.

I wouldn't change my plans. Even if she'd recognized me for what I am, it would
be a bad idea to let her spook me into doing something rash.

It was a fiery summer afternoon, just the day I'd most expected Celia Strafford
to move in. You see, 666 expressed in base 14 is 358, and if you subtract 358
from 365 (the number of days in the year) you get 7 --that is, July, the seventh
month. Then if you sum the digits of 358 in the Fadic fashion (3 + 5 + 8 - 16
(another sixteen!) and 1 + 6 - 7) you get the day. Ergo July 7. Poking out these
numbers on my calculator again as I waited for her to finish moving in, I became
even more convinced that she belonged to the Army of the Night, the Antichrists.
I had been born to stop them. It didn't matter that I might have lost the
element of surprise.

Right after I'd been asked to leave the Army, I'd spent several weeks in the
public library in Fayetteville, North Carolina, picking through city street maps
for the spot I knew must exist. I suspected I had found it when I saw the
address of my present apartment building on the outskirts of Las Vegas. 10131
FOX Road. The number 10131 is 666 in base 5, and according to the Pythagorean
system of Numerology, FOX also evaluates to 666. That might not have been
enough, but when I got here, I found that apartment 29A also existed, and that
clinched it. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone like Celia moved
in.

Celia had a lot of stuff. All the apartments in our building are furnished, so
she didn't have any really big items to move, but it took her all afternoon to
unload her rented trailer and lug the boxes up to 29A. I knew that the precise
number of boxes would be significant, and I tried to count them, but her red
hair distracted me, and the way she moved in her short shorts, bending at the
waist to pick up a box, slumping back against her car to catch her breath.
Watching her I drifted into a fantasy in which I chased the demon from her body,
and she, quivering with gratitude and relief, came into my arms, and we walked
together from this dying neighborhood into a white picket fence family, just the
two of us, multiplying, being fruitful. Wouldn't it be wonderful.