Dragon City. James Axler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ would much rather keep well away from the strangers. Still, if he had to face them with anyone at his side, better Sela Sinclair than being teamed with one of the Cerberus cooks or Mariah the geologist, neither of whom was much use in a firefight.

       Slowly Sinclair pulled the front door to the house back on its ancient hinges. Beyond, the once-immaculate front lawn looked more like the bottom of an aquarium, fronds and ferns jutting out of the churned-up earth. Bradley had been a casualty of the nuclear war that had ravaged the United States more than two hundred years before, and it had been long since lost, an untouched artifact from another age. For Sela Sinclair, a woman born in the twentieth century and cryogenically frozen for two centuries before being discovered and revived on the Manitius Moon Base, it was like stepping into the past half-remembered. Things out here were familiar, yet they seemed strange and ghostlike, as if a forgotten world had come back to haunt her.

       Pistol raised, Sela Sinclair stepped out onto the porch, its wooden boards groaning in complaint at her weight. She turned to Farrell and gave him a silent look of warning, indicating the creaking boards beneath them. Farrell nodded.

       Outside, three house lengths away, the two hooded figures moved through the undergrowth. They were not being especially stealthy from what Farrell could tell, but just hacked their way through it, two Stanleys searching for their Livingston.

       Sinclair edged forward, hunkering into herself as she stepped off the porch and out onto the overgrown front lawn. She was wearing dark clothes, a sleeveless vest-top in a black that had washed out to a green-gray, combat pants and sturdy boots. Farrell wore his Cerberus operational uniform, a white one-piece jumpsuit, but he had augmented this with a dark green windbreaker that blended—passably if not well—with the junglelike flora all around. He followed the sec woman as she made her way to the property boundary, passing a rusted pipe that had once formed the exhaust of an automobile, using the plants for cover, her eyes never leaving the hooded figures that approached.

       Sinclair stopped behind a clutch of sprouting reeds that had reached over seven feet in height, nosing at them with the muzzle of her gun to see the street. Farrell joined her a moment later, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, pulsing in his ears. The robed figures were moving efficiently along the street, checking left and right without slowing. Their clothes were just like the jailers who had held them captive in Life Camp Zero; there was no question in Farrell’s mind that they worked for the enemy.

       “Dammit, Sela,” he whispered, “they’re Ullikummis’s people. We need to get out of here right now.”

       A thin smile touched Sinclair’s lips. “We’ll be safe,” she assured Farrell, her voice low.

       Farrell watched the street from over Sinclair’s shoulder, glanced at the gun in her hand, back up the street. What the hell was she thinking? That she could shoot them both right here and now? What if she missed? The two recruits for Ullikummis continued making their way along the street toward them, as if sensing their presence. A shaft of sunlight cut through the plants and, just for a moment, Farrell saw the face of the woman of the group. She looked young and pretty, but her blue eyes seemed vacant, as if she was in a trance. He had overheard the Cerberus field personnel who had come into contact with Ullikummis’s troops describe them as “firewalkers,” as if their minds were locked in a hypnotic state, their actions not entirely under their own control. The way these two moved without discussion made him think there was something in that, like watching two puppets being moved across some grand stage, their strings hidden from his sight.

       Sinclair narrowed her eyes as she watched them, the Colt pistol held steadily out in front of her in a one-handed grip. Farrell watched as her other hand came up to add support to the grip, planting it firmly beneath the ball of her hand. Wait a minute, he thought. Is she nuts?

       “What are you doing?” Farrell whispered. “You can’t shoot them.”

       But Sela Sinclair wasn’t listening to Farrell. She was listening to the drumbeats as they pounded louder and louder, like a thunderstorm raging in her skull.

       The robed figures were just a house away now, standing there and looking it up and down like a parody of a newlywed couple choosing their first home.

       “They’re getting close. We should get out of here,” Farrell insisted, nudging Sinclair gently but urgently on the arm.

       Sinclair turned, a sudden movement like a lightning strike, and Farrell found himself falling even before he could acknowledge that she had tripped him.

       She jabbed the pistol at his face as he landed.

       “He’s here,” Sinclair said, enunciating the words clearly so that they reverberated down the overgrown street. “The nonbeliever.”

      Chapter 4

      It was like a child’s toy, Mahmett thought, this city so empty and so devoid of life. Squawking birds circled overhead and occasionally the bark of a wandering pye-dog or the meow of a cat might be heard. But the animals kept their distance, avoiding the place the way they might avoid fire, some instinct they chose not to challenge.

       Mahmett was here for two reasons: a city that was empty inevitably contained untold riches. Even more inevitably, he wanted to impress a woman. But now, walking through the echoing streets with his brother Yasseft and his cousin Panenk at his side, Mahmett wondered just how far he would need to go to find one and hence achieve the indulgence of the other.

       “People have died poking around there. There are easier ways to get a woman to notice you,” Panenk had berated before they had set off for the strange city.

       “But this will prove to her that I am brave,” Mahmett insisted.

       “And if you die, then what will you have proved?” Panenk asked. “Better just to buy a trinket in the market and then tell Jasmine that you went to the city and got it there.”

       “But I will know,” Mahmett had argued with all the naivety and conviction of youth.

       “And so will I, and so will Yasseft,” Panenk had said, “but at least we’ll be alive.”

       But Mahmett wouldn’t hear of it. So now all three of them wandered through the eerily silent streets that shone a creamy white in the sunlight, feeling cold despite the warmth of the afternoon. The city itself had not been here six months ago. It had appeared, like the ruins of some ancient civilization washed up on the shores of a dream. Mahmett had recalled the stories he had heard of America, where a terrible cataclysm had befallen a great society leaving only the Deathlands, where scattered monuments waited for brave explorers to make their fortunes. That had been more than a century ago, but the myth prevailed, the same myth of lost treasure that had been told over and over since the dawn of language.

       The city itself was empty. Everything was made of the same substance, a chalky stonelike stuff that slowly crumbled to dust beneath the sun, the streets and buildings and channeled drains all molded from the same. Bisected by the Euphrates, a confusion of spires and domes climbing toward the sky, interior courtyards and ugly, misshapen towers lunging forth as if vying for space among the narrow, alleylike streets. Those claustrophobic streets wound on themselves like string, doubling back as often as not; narrowing and bloating like a series of valves and pipes. Here and there clear water swished along the sides of the streets in drainage channels, reflecting the sun in bright flashes like lightning under glass.

       People had gone missing here, traders and settlers, young and old. No one had explored the place and come back to tell of their findings. Mahmett half expected to find the place full of bones, СКАЧАТЬ