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UNDERGROUND 193
Fruity taste will gather friendsBest friendWith him and on the road more funShare your smile.Fru-u-u-u-tella...Let's enjoy together.Fru-u-u-tellaTogether we will...The singing split his head, Kharitonov groaned, covered his ears and rolled over on his stomach. The sound became muffled, unlike the pain. But he noticed something else. The turn onto his stomach was too easy, as if he had no stomach at all.The bed creaked, and he immediately recognized the piercing sound he had once feared. Old, forgotten instincts reminded of themselves, causing the muscles to petrify. They always tense up at that sound. What a crappy spring. He tightened the fasteners, put in a sheet of plywood and oiled the frame, but this staccato screech still deafened the stillness of the night from time to time.Kharitonov felt that his bare legs were freezing and decided that it was time to stop delaying the meeting with reality.He removed his hands from his ears and tried to open his eyes...Kuku hand i
UNDERGROUND 194
On the next landing, Kharitonov tugged at the “neighboring” doors, rang the bell, even heard muffled trills, and finally pounced with his fists on one of them - the door opposite, upholstered in leatherette, behind which a decent family lived. In which he also knocked once and more than once. As then, his knock on the door was answered with silence.The drunken raspy laughter from the open door became even more furious. What's wrong with her? She never laughed like that. This old woman has gone crazy. And why the old woman? She wasn't that old after all.Clutching the sleeping puppy to his chest, Kharitonov went into "his" apartment.- Returned? - Met his raspy voice from the chair, mixing with a cough. - So, not all brains were beaten off.“You talk a lot for the deceased,” Kharitonov threw in and heard in response a new portion of deafening, smoky laughter.- Look at yourself!- Get it from me!Kharitonov remembered that after his death they always communicated in this way.The voic
UNDERGROUND 195
The clothes turned into an ice suit. The dry and cold air was unaccustomed to intoxication, the body shook with a large shiver, but the hands gripped the rifle tightly, while large unblinking eyes scanned the dark corners and the numerous transitional bridges overhead.Convinced that there was no threat, Pustovalov trotted like a wolf along the wall, hiding behind earthen hills, swept from the side of the faults by yellowish snow. He carefully looked out of the end opening and saw a cleared area surrounded by abandoned buildings, which for the most part were bare boxes of external walls with a pile of collapsed stairs and ceilings inside. On the opposite side, by the dangling strands of the cable bridge, a snowplow tractor gleamed like a brand new cab, behind which rose a freshly painted hangar with a large padlock on the gate. In everything else, there was total desertion and desolation. Neither sharp eyesight, nor the same sharp hearing, nor Pustovalov's inner wolf instinct caught d
UNDERGROUND 196
He stopped in the middle of the highway and looked at the sky for about a minute, trying to find at least some connection between everything he saw, but the more he went deep into the mental search for answers, the more new questions arose. Pustovalov knew that this would not lead to anything good and moved on.At the factory, he climbed to the second floor of the former foundry, from where he looked around the surroundings from the balcony for several minutes, but quickly realized that this was a waste of time.The lock and eyelets on the hangar gates turned out to be the most common ones - another confirmation that serious guests were not expected here. With the help of a hammer and a chisel, he quickly got rid of them, pulled the gate leaf towards himself and froze in amazement at the riches he saw.The first thing that caught my eye was two rows of all-terrain vehicles of various colors, sizes and brands. There were tall wheeled all-terrain vehicles, caterpillar ones that looked l
UNDERGROUND 197
Pustovalov began to retreat, noticing that the wall, slightly refracting, was moving under water, revealing for a moment a greater depth, but realized that it was too fast. He only managed to cover his face with his hand, and removing his hand, he saw that the wall had already passed through him and, turning pale almost to the point of invisibility, went out of the lobby into the street. It seemed that she had disappeared, but she went on - he saw how the sides of the horse under the stone St. George the Victorious flashed with a bluish light, and then the upper corner of the Leningradsky railway station.He ran out after him and looked at the sky, guessing that all this had something to do with the black spot. In the sky, in the opposite direction from the arc, two barely noticeable points were moving towards the wall, which at first seemed to be an optical illusion. Pustovalov watched them until they disappeared behind the roof of the vestibule.This is where the manifestation of si
UNDERGROUND 198
- He is here! - A woman's voice squealed right into Pustovalov's ear, which made him flinch and instinctively intercepted the rifle, and the floor crackled under him.- Ma-a-am! Well, don't! - There was a plaintive childish voice from the piano.Pustovalov recognized the notes of fear. He shook his head, but there was no one in the room.- I'm talking here! Here he is! - Hysterically repeated a female voice and gave Pustovalov even louder right in the face: - Here! Floats right here!“Le-e-ena,” drawled a male voice, apparently from the next room, “don’t scare the child.”The male voice tried to sound calm and slightly ironic, but Pustovalov heard weariness in it.- Mom, who is swimming? - There was another voice. This time behind Pustovalov.Also a child, but older. Teenager. Girl.The woman again squealed in Pustovalov's face, which made him wince.- Mom! The children cried out in unison.- Here he is! Looking straight at me!- Mum...- Not! Through me! On ... On ... Alena quickly g
UNDERGROUND 199
His legs were stiff, he couldn't feel them, but his face was wet with sweat. Behind the glass is darkness, no lights, only two bluish dots in the sky.Pustovalov sighed, realizing that he had seen a nightmare - the worst nightmare of his life. He only now realized that it was only the realism of the fear that made the nightmare so real, and that fear was still pounding in his chest, making him tremble.Out of habit, Pustovalov froze and listened. Yet something was not right. The hand slowly reached for the rifle. The second is for the doorknob. Opening the door silently, he saw huge footprints in the snow right under it. A chain of strange square footprints stretched in both directions along the all-terrain vehicle. Pustovalov noticed that the footprints were crawling on top of each other, had a multidirectional drag, and “stomped” in front of the door, which meant only one thing - someone had walked more than once in both directions or possibly around the all-terrain vehicle and look
UNDERGROUND 200
- Distortion. Or, if you like, curvature.“But why have we never experienced something like this before?”- Oh-oh-oh, - the old man laughed and reached for a Belgian chocolate bar, - this human dependence on the constants of the past!- You seem to be enjoying yourself.“For people like me, looking beyond the boundaries of human experience is a real feast. For the sake of this, we are ready to die even young, no matter how pathetic it may sound, but I am already a very old man. Imagine, to see live what has been hidden from you for sixty years in uncountable tensors, and occasionally flashed behind the monstrous meanings of formulas.- And it's irreversible?The old man looked at Pustovalov with strange thoughtfulness.- Here I learned a lot, in particular, to accept what surprises me and seems impossible, but still some things are given to me with particular difficulty.- What kind?- For example, your appearance here.Pustovalov chuckled.“You know, I have to thank you. I took the a