Section 31 / 39

Flashing its scythes with lightning speed, it mixes into one bloody mess the electronic innards of the multi-visor and the poor bastard's head beneath his own insane screaming...

A moment later the second rifle falls silent: the last of the four executioners floods the corridor with a gurgling wheeze. The rifle drops, and the mounted flashlight shatters with a brief "ding." It goes dark. Very quiet and completely dark. The thin metallic smell of a heated induction coil is the only thing I can perceive from the outside world, if you don't count the floor I'm lying on. For a while I just try to restore my ragged breathing, greedily listening to the silence.

And then the solid darkness fills with the clicking of chitinous paws. Hundreds of paws. It's some kind of arthropod parade that came in here as a whole army. Terror stops my breathing. They're everywhere. The darkness lives, breathes with this clicking that, like the sea, has flooded the entire corridor.

Honestly, at that moment I expect pain. Pain and death. I expect the moment when the sharp scythes will do to me the same thing they did to the guards. My heart doesn't seem to even beat, but rather creaks in my chest, convulsively tapping out its final rhythm... I cover my face with my hands, hoping I'll die before I feel chitinous claws in my eye sockets... But nothing happens. The sea of clicking paws continues to rustle busily around me. So close it seems I've become incorporeal and it flows through me. Then I feel: a creature, heavy as an overfed Doberman, jumped onto my chest.

Air rushed whistling into my lungs as I convulsively inhaled. I clenched my teeth until my ears rang and held my breath, frozen with fear. The claws caused noticeable pain, but at that second I didn't notice it, expecting something far more terrible.

For unbearably long half-seconds I waited for death.

And then the clawed creature disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. It seems the creature simply walked over me and went about its business. For some more time I was afraid to move, and the creatures clicked and clicked past me... Three or four times I felt the movement of air on my face when the next reaper was too lazy to walk around my body and simply stepped over. A few more times they stepped right on me, piercing my tunic with their claws, and probably my skin, but they didn't stop. Then at some point cries and disorderly gunfire rang out in the distance. Thousands of

paws immediately accelerated, rushing toward the sound. And a few seconds later everything quieted, and the march of the reaper army became measured again. Then silence fell. The sound of my own breathing seemed so loud that I involuntarily restrained myself, not allowing myself to inhale fully. Finally I calmed down. It seems these creatures have left. Time to get out.

I slowly rolled onto my stomach. All quiet. I raised my head, hoping to see something, but the darkness was so thick you could shoot it in the eye. Then I tried to remember where that burly guard fell... I was facing where my left hand is now, then I threw myself on the floor... And he fell to the left... So I should turn around... And if everything is right, three meters away will be him—with the keys to my handcuffs. If I haven't made a mistake. Damn darkness. And I crawled.

Panic pounced on me like a hungry stray dog on a bowl of slop, spattering with its dirty snout the meager remains of my will. It shrieked, wailed in both my ears that the reapers hadn't gone anywhere, but were sitting around, invisible in the darkness. That one more centimeter—and I'd run right into a huge chitinous muzzle. I'd poke my face in, and the reaper would grab my eyes, or my lips, or all of it at once, turning my face into bloody jam... It was unbearable to want to freeze. Just lay my head on the floor and close myself off with my hands. But then that's the end: panic won't retreat until it passes me from hand to hand to death. Until one of the reapers gets interested in the weak electric field from the battery powering the artificial kidney.

I multiplied two-digit numbers in my head. Forty-eight times thirty-seven—that's forty-eight times thirty plus forty-eight times seven; so first forty-eight times thirty—that's four hundred eighty times three plus seven times forty-eight... It helped: calculating, I continued to crawl.

My palm slid into something wet and sticky. Blood. I carefully felt the space around and immediately found a strange object. Also wet and semicircular... With sharp uneven edges... Like a shell. And then it dawned on me—I'm touching a smashed-open head! Trying to banish visual images from my thoughts, I felt for the neck. Yes... At least the head doesn't lie separately... This makes the search much easier... Here are his shoulders, stomach... Induction rifle across the torso... Unfortunately, I also felt the scattered casing with the magnetic coil—now it's just a piece of metal. Moving on... Belt buckle, belt...

No handcuffs. Damn, this is the wrong guard... Just in case, I shoved my hands under the corpse and ran my fingers along the belt. Some kind of case... A flashlight! I immediately frantically feel the body. Intact! By some miracle the reapers didn't get to it. Or... Oh, that's what it is! I move the lock with my pinky, and a lever slides out of the body. A flashlight with a dynamo machine. No batteries. You press on the sliding lever, like pumping a hand expander, and it produces electricity. There are some in every mission, but they're usually set aside for a rainy day. "Apparently today is exactly such a day," I tell myself grimly. Now I'll find the key, remove the handcuffs and go where the stairs were. Since they haven't eaten me yet, they won't eat me later, right? God, but why are they so big! They were no bigger than cats!

This thought came very inopportunely. The image of a huge reaper immediately appeared in my head, and it seemed my insides were covered with frost. Now I was afraid to use the flashlight. For some reason it seemed the nearest reapers were sitting ten meters away, if not closer, and were looking at me now like grim guard Rottweilers. And a turned-on flashlight would be clearer to them than any "attack" command. Pointing the lens upward, I took a deep breath and sharply pressed the lever.

The mechanism squealed, and a bright beam tore through the thick darkness of the basement. I almost screamed with horror. They were everywhere.

(continued)

The burly one is over there—three or four steps away. And since I'm still alive, it means the battery in my implant is too weak for them. So my only enemy is panic. If I don't give in to it—I can get out of this hell alive. I really want to believe that...

Once in childhood my parents and I went to the beach at night. It wasn't deep there, even to go in chest-deep—you'd have to try hard, so I calmly splashed a few meters away from them. That time I deliberately took a mask to test it at night. The air had become cool, and against its background the sea seemed not even warm, but hot. So gentle and homey, like a bathtub. My parents were just walking waist-deep, holding hands, and I put on the mask and—dove.

I remember these feelings well. I was never afraid to dive, or of our sea, in which you could hardly find anything more dangerous than a jellyfish. I'd heard of people who managed to step on a stingray, but for that they had to go to an island, and many also had to get pretty drunk. But here, in the bay, twenty meters from shore and next to my parents, it was safer than in kindergarten. And so I dive forward, having overtaken my parents by a few steps—lower, to the very bottom, to enjoy the spectacle of underwater night...

And I see darkness. An underwater gloom barely lit by bright moonlight, in which a meter away from me everything turned into a black impenetrable wall. A living wall, toward which inertia carries me. A wall from which anyone could emerge.

Of course, no one could actually emerge from there. And I knew that. But fear doesn't care about logic. It filled my chest with leaden cold, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook, screeched in my very ears with a hoarse high voice. And I jumped out of the water like a cork, rushing back to my parents.

"What?" my father asked, bewildered. "What happened?"

"Nothing..." I said, surprised by how strong and uncontrollable fear could be. Moreover, groundless and senseless fear... But at the same time—unconditional.

Then I dove again. This time—right next to them, almost at their feet, only half a meter plunging into the wall of gloom. And again that same feeling of horror and helplessness before what might appear there, in the darkness... The third time I took my mother's hand and just lowered my face under water, so as not to swim anywhere and try to overcome the fear at least that way. But

as soon as I looked further than at my feet, the horror became stronger than me. The wall of gloom sucked me into the world of underwater monsters, where there was nothing rational, or even material. Only all-encompassing animal terror.

I returned to shore and didn't swim anymore that night. And even now I would hardly be cheered by a proposal to dive in the darkness...

Perhaps part of my current fear I brought from there—from the shore of the Black Sea thirty years ago. Be that as it may, looking into the thick, tangible darkness in the basement of the hospital on planet Ish-Chel, I felt the same thing as in childhood. The difference was only that in the Black Sea there are no dangerous sharks or any other monsters that my childish imagination drew for me. Now, though, I stood surrounded by the most real monsters. My consciousness remained above the clacking stream of despair only because I clung with all my might to a single fact: the monsters still haven't attacked.

"So they won't attack!" I mentally shouted, afraid of losing control of the situation.

"Or they're just preparing to jump," panic whispered in my ear, and I involuntarily drew my head into my shoulders. "By the way, they sense your fear."

"Nevertheless, I'm alive!" I shouted.

"For now," panic added.

These thoughts sounded in my head almost exactly as I describe them. Like those notorious voices that serial killers like to invoke. It would probably have been easier if I said something out loud. So that a real, not imaginary one would drown out this circus in my head. But to utter even a word was scary. And then I whispered with just my lips: "Enough! It's only three meters to the damn key for the handcuffs! Three miserable meters!" Numbers did calm me down. My brain was muttering something like that crazy old man, and was turning my frightened heart back and forth in trembling hands—and then numbers sounded, and it froze, forgetting about fear, and began to count. "Four-five steps across the empty floor," I added mentally.

Then I'll extend my hand and... "And you'll run into a reaper," panic hissed. I said only with my lips "shut up" and stepped. The second step was harder. Instead of a third there was some pathetic quarter-step, and then I was paralyzed. Panic convinced me that I

miscalculated the distance and got the direction wrong, and now I'm almost pressing my face into the nearest arthropod.

Then I got on all fours and crawled. It was easier that way. After half a meter I felt something like a pile of wet rags and pulled it toward me. Too light to be a body, but much heavier than just clothes. I felt the find. My hand slid into something slimy again. My God... This was half a body. The upper part of the torso. The belt with equipment remained on the lower half... Throwing away the corpse, I crawled on. Fortunately, the second half was right there. I found the keys without much trouble, despite being smeared with blood up to my elbows. But at the last second the keys slipped from my fingers, and I spent several more eerie and long minutes rummaging on the floor, afraid I wouldn't find them... Found them... Finally the handcuffs are off. I rubbed my wrists, carefully stood up and stepped back to where, it seemed to me, the center of the corridor should be.

And only then realized that while crawling on the floor searching for the keys, I'd completely lost my orientation. Well, I could try just walking with my arms stretched forward. Reach the wall and go along it... From a logical perspective, this was the only possible solution. But I already said how logic failed when it came to fear of the wall of gloom. "The living wall," panic reminded. Even to imagine that my outstretched arms would touch a reaper and it would drop its sharp scythe-like pedipalps... God, what a disgusting word...

Then something touched me from behind. Very lightly—I didn't even feel it right away. As if someone was pulling at my tunic. A reaper! A reaper crept up and carefully touched with its scythe! In horror I turned around and jerked backward. And immediately pressed my back against something hard and alive. It stirred indignantly, pushing me away. Sharply, like dry grass flares up, an angry crackling of chitin spread. A wall. A damn wall of reapers! I jumped back, covering my head with my hands, but stumbled and flew to the floor. Already falling, a wild thought overtook me that I'd land on a reaper too, so at the last second I did some incredible and absolutely senseless somersault, trying to avoid it. I managed to feel pain that pierced me from the bridge of my nose to the back of my head—hitting my forehead on the concrete floor. And then I don't remember.

(Section 18)

Flowering meadows swayed under gusts of hot wind like a lazy morning sea, and insects swarmed over them in large splashes. I looked out the window, which was strangely very close, right by my face. The glass was covered with dirty streaks. The loosely closed plastic frame, softly knocking, moved back and forth from the draft.

I was three years old. Apparently I was lying on something high, because just by turning my head I could see the meadows through the window. Maybe it was some kind of table... I didn't think about it then. I was looking at a large black-and-orange butterfly beating against the window on my side, trying to fly through the dirty glass and find itself there, on the meadows.

From outside came shouts and knocking, some motor was humming... I'd heard such things once. Dad and I were walking, and he said: "See, that's construction." And

I remembered the word and this cacophony of sounds that spread over the building built of white brick without a roof or windows.

"Construction," I thought and tried to raise my head. But it turned out that the slightest muscle tension immediately responded with sharp pain somewhere in my lower back. So strong I wanted to cry. I tried to call for mom, but my mouth was completely dry, and I couldn't shout. My tongue seemed stuck to my cheeks. And then I cried. Cried as loudly as I could so mom would hear and come.

But mom didn't come.

I remembered we were at a shopping center. I don't think I knew those specific words then, but the meaning was exactly that. Mom and I walked around the stores, and then she bought me ice cream and said: "Sit here, I'll be right back." And left. Then some man came up. He was holding a puppy—curly and red.

"Yellow!" I thought then and was very surprised that such existed. I wanted to show the puppy to mom, but she hadn't returned yet. And that man said he had more puppies, even better than this one. And I could choose any one and bring it to mom. And it would be a surprise... He took my hand, and we went. I tried to pet the puppy as we walked, which the man was holding, and he let me and smiled. Only there were no other puppies. There was another man, with a very angry face—he grabbed me and dragged me into a car. And then—I don't remember. Only how I screamed.

...Outside the window flowering meadows rippled under the wind's blows, and the butterfly didn't abandon its futile attempts to fly there, fanning the dirty glass with velvety wings. I'd been crying for quite a while now, but mom still hadn't come. The butterfly flew closer and closer to the gap between the frames, which the draft now carefully opened for it, now suddenly slammed shut with a bang. And I thought that when the gap widened, it would be able to fly out. And then mom would come right away. That's what I decided. And I worried very much for the butterfly, that it would fly quickly and that mom would come quickly.

And when the frame opened again, the butterfly really did slip into the gap. I expected it to fly to the meadows now, and I'd watch. But then the draft changed its mind. With an unpleasant crunch the frame crushed the unfortunate butterfly, and it remained in the coveted opening, half a centimeter from freedom. The air ruffled its wings, and they

convulsively twitched in a final flight, and the window frame opened and closed again and again, as if in fury unable to understand that the black-and-orange ladybug was dead. And delivered blow after blow. Blow after blow... I sobbed and hoarsely called for mom.

The world around was covered with a gray veil and seemed to move away. I didn't understand why, but the construction sounds now reached me as if through a thick pillow. And I—as if falling somewhere. I didn't know about death yet. And certainly had no idea what internal bleeding was. But I was scared. Very scared.

The fluttering wings of the dead butterfly—the last thing I saw then.

My parents told me about this event, but I didn't remember it. Never until this day. And now it emerged in memory so clearly, as if it happened yesterday.

Apparently, then someone hacked the medical database. Not so hard these days. And this someone saw that I had type four blood with a negative Rh factor. The same as that child whose body was rejecting synthetic implants. A child whose parents found money to pay and strength not to ask questions.

The kidney was cut out at night, and at dawn I was left to recover from anesthesia in a watchman's booth on wasteland. They even called my parents. Mom often said the phrase "Thank God at least for that," and the word "thank" always infuriated me.

All my life my last memory of that event was two men in a car, and the first one after it was pain and nausea in a hospital ward.

In the ward was mom. I groaned, and she immediately put a cool hand on my forehead and kept repeating: "Everything's fine, everything's fine." I didn't remember the booth. Didn't remember how I clung to life. And how with my last strength I called for her, thinking I was shouting for the whole world to hear, but actually barely whispering. And, most importantly, didn't remember how I thought she would never come.

So there, in the ward, I wasn't happy. Didn't think "finally." I only thought about how it hurt. And that I was tricked with that puppy by bad people, and mom wasn't there. And now I feel bad and scared, but she says everything's fine...

Obviously, all my life since then I've lived with a subconscious conviction that everything is bad. After all, the episode in the booth, crossed out from the list of memories, actually didn't go anywhere. On the contrary: it sank deeper, to the bottom of the subconscious, and became the main and most terrible experience of my life. And this experience confidently said: no one will save you and no one will help, no matter how strongly you wait. Everything will end badly, even if you refuse to believe it to the last. Half a centimeter from freedom the window frame will crush you. And you'll die alone, even if you don't yet know the meaning of the word "death." Because rescue never came to the three-year-old boy in the booth.

I understood all this as clearly as I understood that I'd come to in the dark basement of the hospital on planet Ish-Chel. So I know exactly where I am and what I'm doing here, even without opening my eyes. No disorientation or fear. I'm in a corridor full of reapers. And I intend to get out of it very soon. Because I won't be that boy who died anymore.

Now I'm the one who waited long enough.

(Section 1)

The darkness was no longer solid.

It hadn't gotten lighter, but the gloom had inexplicably found form and volume, the floor separated from the walls, and the walls and floor—from the blackness of the corridor. I stretched my arms out in front of me but still couldn't see them. But if I raised them higher, they suddenly became visible against the dark walls—as even darker silhouettes. The difference was so slight I had to turn my head back and forth and convince myself it wasn't an illusion.

After getting up, I approached closer.

It turned out the reapers were covered with tiny spots that barely glowed. So small, as if they'd been sprinkled with some kind of pollen. Until now my eyes had been too spoiled by the flashlight's light to distinguish such faint luminescence. Now, once my vision had adapted, it was quite enough to walk the corridor without running into a wall.

The arthropods were absolutely calm. They didn't react to me, as if they weren't the ones who'd killed four guards a few minutes ago. I remembered the artificial kidney and, just in case, stepped back from the wall a few steps. Apparently just one tiny battery isn't enough. And yet I remembered that when other sources of electric field appeared in the general's hands—a pistol—one of the reapers decided to get to the artificial heart too. So they sense the battery, but it alone is too weak to interest them? Be that as it may, better to stay as far away as possible.

I had to walk carefully: the black void of the corridor differed from the pale glow of the wall by some fraction of halftones. And yet I could move quite

confidently at a steady pace. The stairs should appear any moment now. It was quiet. No shooting, no sounds of battle, as if the reaper invasion didn't concern anyone... Suddenly it seemed darker. I didn't realize it right away, and even turned around to make sure. That's right—the reapers on the walls had "ended." The last ones glowed faintly behind me. Well, good. Though now I can't see anything at all. I took another dozen uncertain steps, until I noticed something right in front of me. Something pale green and tiny. Recoiling, I waved my palm, but there was nothing there but emptiness, and the strange firefly still hung at eye level. I tried to swat it away two more times, but finally understood the pale light wasn't nearby at all. I walked toward the spot of light, but it didn't get closer. After some more time the spot became noticeably above eye level—I was approaching.

Only when I stopped literally two meters away did I understand what it was. The green digit zero on the display above the elevator entrance. So, first, I went the wrong way—this elevator is for freight, and the corridor ended, running into it. And second, the elevator probably works. Since the digit is glowing, the reapers didn't get here, and as for generators, freight elevators here run on the emergency system... Without thinking long, I pressed the button, and the elevator responded with the hum of motors somewhere above. I looked around. After the bright zero on the display, my eyes could no longer distinguish the halftones of murk—I seemed to be pressing my face into a black wall.

In a few seconds the doors opened and unbearably bright light flooded the corridor. Stepping inside, I quickly pressed the button labeled "lobby." Having done so, I saw that the darkness at the end of the corridor had come alive and was rushing here in a swarm of startled reapers.

Need the button to close the doors! I frantically search for it, but in my panic can't find it... Unbearably long two seconds I stare at the cluster of sparse buttons, trying not to think about the approaching hurricane of claws... I notice it at the very top—two arrows toward each other. With peripheral vision I see how the darkness scatters into separate black whirlwinds, and they rush here, in their usual manner, ignoring the floor.

Only when the doors began to close did I allow myself to look around. Close, very close. And I prepared to push away the nearest one who shoves a chitinous snout into the gap.