"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

instead of a corporal.
I drifted through black stormclouds, feeling like I
was falling endlessly backward, dizzy with vertigo. I
kept jerking, trying to jerk awake, like you do when
you're in a horrid nightmare and you know you're
just under the surface between sleep and wake, dark
dementia and the cold light of dawnЧbut I just
couldn't do it. I hovered there grabbing for the
surface, but it was just out of my grasp. My brain
wouldn't reboot. I felt the pain, but from the out-
side. . . . When I was a kid, I used to watch the X-
rated pictures over at the Covergirl Drive-In; I could
see them from a treetop in the woods between our
farmhouse and the town of Bartleston. I couldn't hear
the sound and the picture was shaky in my binoculars,
but there it was, sex on the screen, bigger than I ever
wanted real life to be. That was me in my blackness,
feeling my pain, but from a distance. Not quite
reconnected with myself.
I slowly swam back. I gathered I wasn't dead, unless
the penguins were all wrong about everything and hell
was repeating the fallen world endlessly. I blinked
awake and felt the agony for real at last.
Clenching my teeth against the ripping pain, I
pulled against my restraintsЧbut, by God, I was not
going to give those bastards a scream. Clenching all
my teeth? Jeez, they'd fixed my mouth! Arlene lay
mostly in my field of vision; I blinked away the tears
and noticed the pallor of her skin. She had lost a lot of
blood, probably more than I had, and she was white
as the cliffs of Dover overlooking the English Chan-
nel. I watched closely; I could ignore the pain if I had
something else to draw my attention. Her chest rose
and fell regularly, and every so often she moved her
feet slightly. Arlene Sanders was alive, but how much?
We both were strapped down to gurneys in a
gunmetal-gray room fitted with couches and what
might have been a sink, but without any visible
faucet. I leaned back, silently sobbing, and stared at
the overhead: a darker version of the bulkhead color
with thousands of tiny bright holesЧsome sort of
light source, I reckoned.
The door opened, and the clipboard sergeant we'd
spotted earlier entered, probably in response to my
neural rhythms changing with coming awake. He
walked all around me in a counterclockwise circle,
looking at dials and readouts and scribbling on his
clipboard. He didn't say a word, even when I talked to
him: "Hey, you . . . where am I? Am I aboard your
ship? We're not the aliens you're looking for, but