Birds and a Stone. Anastasia Novykh

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СКАЧАТЬ the action of his pals. There was a boy behind him who was tied to a radiator next to the window. He was plaintively crying, screwing up his eyes with fear. A woman was lying on a couch to the right, bound with a linen rope and gagged.

      Rebrov frantically tried to think out what to do next. But, all of a sudden, the gangster with the automatic gun grasped the man’s hair and, pointing to the child, yelled: “Watch, you rubbish!” He beckoned to his pal, and the latter lifted the axe against the child’s fragile body. The boy let out a deafening squeal...

      Rebrov as if got discharged. Not taking a single instant to ponder, he made a dart, shouting out some standard phrases and not even hearing his own voice. The only thought frantically pulsating in his mind was to rescue the child at any cost. At that moment he felt as if a bright sizzling ray pierced him from behind in the back of his head. It seemed to have exploded inside his body, generating multiple shivers like after a mighty discharge of electric current. From that very moment, Rebrov’s perception pattern completely changed. Thoughts disappeared. Lucidity and absolute peace set in. Time seemed to slow down.

      He saw a gunpoint aimed at him, but felt no fear. There was only lucidity of mind and cold intention. His eyesight was concentrating unusually and clearly fixed how the bullet was flying out of the gangster’s gun barrel. Rebrov mechanically deflected his head from the bullet flight path. And only afterwards he saw the fire bursting from the round black outlet.

      He glanced at the right shoulder of his adversary. Strangely, Rebrov neither his clothes nor even his skin, but just a shoulder joint being torn by a bullet. He pulled the trigger mechanically. And, in an instant, the bullet pierced his adversary precisely in the target point set by his eyes. Acting almost automatically, Rebrov took a jump incredible for his age towards the gangster with the axe and stroke the gangster’s chest with his left foot as if he practiced Oriental fighting techniques during his entire life. His adversary heavily knocked against the wall, then bounced back off it like a ball and fell to the floor, having dropped the axe.

      Rebrov slightly turned his head to the right. The third bandit, having let go the man’s hair, was already raising himself and aiming the automatic gun at Major. Rebrov acted rapidly, easily and coherently as if he had been practicing these movements for years up to automatism. He kicked off the gun aside and then held it down with his right foot. Carrying on with the movement, halfsquatted, he turned his entire torso and struck a mighty blow from behind the gangster’s ear with his left elbow. The bandit collapsed unconscious, having fallen straight on the house owner. Rebrov shifted the gun into his left hand and started to pick up the automatic gun with the right one. At that moment, he fixed something strange with his side vision.

      Major turned his head. In the Further in the communicating room, near the doorway where he had stood a second ago, he saw a transparent shining silhouette. Its features were further becoming clearer and more distinct, and finally an image of a beautiful face appeared. The creature’s gaze was penetrating deep into the soul with any hindrance, illuming its most secret stratums with its light. Rebrov felt he could neither endure the power of this gaze, nor he was able to turn away from its delightfully pleasant and kind gravity rejoicing his heart.

      However, in a second, to Rebrov’s ineffable amazement, his side vision worked in such a way as if he looked straight at what was happening sideways. Rebrov discerned in the smallest detail how the window was shattering to pieces, how a wood log was flying into the room, having broken the window frame, and how the senior lieutenant Chmil’s robust figure was tumbling in afterwards. Wondering at such an unusual quality of his vision, Major hardly tore his eyes from the shining face and looked at the window which strangely appeared to be intact. But suddenly the glass indeed shattered to pieces, and the scene recorded by Rebrov’s mind accurately recurred in reality. Chmil flew into the room like a hurricane. But, seeing Major alive and unhurt as well as the gangsters lying around him, he stopped taken aback. Having overcome his numbness quickly, the senior lieutenant began to tie the bandits’ hands.

      Rebrov was in the same state of absolute peace. He again glanced towards the communicating room which attracted most of his attention. But the room was already empty and gapingly dark. Only a slight dissipating light was fluently moving away, shimmering from the corridor. Rebrov moved to follow it without hesitation.

      The world was changing its outlines with his every step. The further Rebrov was moving away from the bright light, the more focused and condensed the space around him was becoming. Having entered the darkness of the corridor, he seemed to plunge into a slowly revolving tunnel. Round “walls” and “floor” were in an amorphous condition. Putting it more precisely, “walls” and “floor” were notions from Rebrov’s past. Now he saw something like various by configuration and subdued light congestions of atoms and molecules which were changing their shape as if being animate and were copying imprints of his steps. Rebrov’s hand freely penetrated the “walls” of this mass. Though his hand turned to be not a hand, but a streaming flow of multicoloured energies enveloped with same ultimate particles as the corridor “walls” and “floor”.

      In the front, he saw strangely grouped atoms and molecules mixed up with scattering light of fading energies. “The old lady”, flashed in his head. A slight luminescence was surrounding her body. In the head area, in its very middle, a little jelly-like paste was pulsating with golden-reddish light. A small glaringly bright clot was hanging poised above the body. Rebrov somehow comprehended that the clot of energies and the pulsating jelly-like paste piece were a single whole constituting the very essence of a human residing in a corporal shell. It seemed to him this small beaming Something was a living indeed, perennial creature. He felt its invisible gaze at himself along with tension and some soul-oppressing yearning. And he understood what it was without any words. “Everyone’s alive, alive”, Major uttered in his mind. The creature perceived his thoughts precisely. It burst with smooth, incredibly warm play of colours, duplicating these tints on the jelly-like paste and leaving a similar appeasing and placatory sensation in Rebrov’s heart. And it suddenly dawned upon Rebrov that there was no death existing as such!

      Such revelation astonished him, having opened the door to a world unknown before, but yet more than real, to a world of eternity, filling his life with a totally new sense of existence. Having come outside, Rebrov found himself in a world kind of familiar, but completely different at the same time. Flows of charged particles washed his body with a gust of quite palpable living power which people call “wind”. These particles penetrated the corporal shell and saturated with their energy other particles which transmitted their power to the rest by chain, generating feelings of vivacity and freshness in the entire organism.

      The world was by no means painted in dark colours. It was shimmering with a fantastical light of life which Rebrov had never noticed before. Everything around was beaming with variegated colours. And there was no division into animate and inanimate objects. Everything was living in its own way, moving, uniting, acquiring unique scales of tints and tinges, coming apart into separate pulsating hues, transforming its states unusually...

      Stunned with what he saw, Rebrov squatted on a porch edge. And only then he noticed that he was seeing in a strange mode like a chameleon. His range of vision widened significantly. He could watch almost everything located above, below, behind and sideways without turning his head. Only a small zone located behind and below remained invisible. He needed to turn his head slightly to observe that part of space. Rebrov could not understand what had happened to his eyesight. He closed his eyes, having covered them with his hand. Yet, although his eyelids were now closed, Rebrov strangely saw his own hand with the fingers out over the eyelids. Moreover, he saw everything happening around him as if there was no obstacle at all.

      Rebrov removed his hand from his face in shock and looked at it. But then he discovered other surprising abilities of his eyesight. The more he focused his attention on his finger tip, the deeper his gaze delved into, enlarging the visible range numerous times like through a magnifying lens. Although Rebrov simultaneously felt he was holding his hand at the same distance from his eyes. He saw the patterned outline of СКАЧАТЬ