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