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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
UNDERGROUND 201
A shapeless shadow separated from the darkness, and began to approach, gradually acquiring the outlines of a human figure. The figure was large, broad-shouldered, with long arms and a spherically perfect head, on which two parallel horns protruded.The one she was approaching knew that the “horns” were the folded-out eyepieces of a night vision device, he himself had the same ones. The figure stopped in front of him, raised a hand clenched into a fist and made several circular motions in front of its own chest.The observer knew what this gesture meant, although in practice he saw it for the first time: “I feel danger, but the source is unclear.”Without waiting for an explanation, he covered his face with his hands - the right lower part of the face, the left eyes and forehead. Then he put his left hand in the direction of the concrete fence and vigorously moved it back and forth.The sign language is very stingy, but the first understood what the second wanted to say: “I don’t under
UNDERGROUND 202
Coming up to him, Maurice found a crumpled fireman's heat-reflecting suit and smiled. We must pay tribute, although Maurice was not upset at all. He could have guessed right away that the trick with heat guns only made sense if you were already inside. It didn't matter now. Maurice knew that infrared sensors would not be a problem for him, like everything else that they had already prepared. He knew that the one they were waiting for would go very far, perhaps even manage to reach the very end. Of course, to the end, to which he is allowed to reach. That's why Maurice was here. And Maurice was rather upset if the one they were waiting for deceived his expectations.After walking a few more meters, Maurice saw a shining helmet with a visor-mirror in the bushes, and his smile grew wider. No, as long as he did not deceive his expectations.***Having reached the northern section of the bypass route, Kruchina quieted down and took a step. Moving along the trodden path, he soon came to two
UNDERGROUND 203
He appeared on the bridge in a couple of minutes. Maurice, who was sitting under the window of a high tower, calmly rose and aimed his rifle at him:- One, two, three, and well, freeze! - He said cheerfully.Pustovalov obeyed and, without raising his head, said:“Using your man as bait?” Clever.“You used yours to get out too, didn’t you?”Pustovalov raised his head. Maurice saw through the eyepieces of the night vision device that Pustovalov was without night vision devices and knew that he only saw the outline of a dark silhouette in the window.- Komsomolskaya, - Maurice nodded with a smile, - now I understand why Daniker began to be so lucky before his death.- You're confusing me with someone else. I happened to be there.“Just a subway passenger?”- Exactly.Maurice burst out laughing and at that moment Pustovalov disappeared. He quickly figured out that he just jumped through a hole in the bridge.Still laughing, Maurice jumped lightly onto the bridge and called out:"You're br
UNDERGROUND 204
The car ran into a minibus lying on its side, Boris opened the door, leaned half out of the passenger compartment, exposing his haggard face to the frosty wind. There was a false peace here. Distant screams and shots were drowned out by unobtrusive music, but this tiny lane adjoining Frunzenskaya Embankment bore little resemblance to the island of former life. Rather, the coldness of the future blew from him - the very one that none of them would ever find. Desolation oozed from the planed poplars gathering darkness, from the mangled cars sprinkled with snow, forever left after yesterday's accident, from under the architraves of the shifted "stalinok", from the black windows of the buildings deprived of power supply.Boris looked at the piece of paper with the address and saw how it was distorted by a five-centimeter wall, carved from a dark space ice floe. With a crackling, cascading arc, the wall passed through Windman and, outlining the front facade of a two-story Chinese restauran
UNDERGROUND 205
- Stole?Boris nodded, pointing to the picture.- On the day of the visit to Novikov, Colonel Basurov, a well-connected former member of the procurement commission of the Ministry of Defense, was with Pustovalov. Most likely, he played the role of an intermediary. He went missing that day. Since Pustovalov himself is a ghost and it is impossible to track his movements, we tracked Basurov's movements before he disappeared in the warehouse. And through him they came across a certain Dementiev. We interrogated him. Dementiev is a professional safecracker, it was he who helped Pustovalov steal the installation. He also said that there were two installations. That is, one working sample, and a spare case without filling - in fact, a dummy. But it looks like the real one. He confirmed that Pustovalov was going to sell the unit to Yasin after learning that he was behind her order on the black market. In addition to Basurov, another person went missing that day, previously in contact with Pus
UNDERGROUND 206
Only one person directly looked at her - a stern, gloomy old man from the gallery on the second floor. She had seen him before, I think in the ninth block - an ordinary mute worker with the right of free movement. He seemed to her out of his mind, but in his current “hawkish” look there was some kind of repulsive meaningfulness, without a hint not only of compassion, but even of curbed hatred. He looked at her just like a log, dissatisfied with the fact that the log was too thin and would not give the required warmth. There was no life in that look, only cold. This is how a dead man who managed to challenge life itself would look.However, all this, even the dumb old man, she saw fragmentarily, as in a painful dream, and then completely disappeared, only the darkness above her head remained - real or in her imagination. She stopped hearing conversations, footsteps, and the creak of the wheels of the gurney; only dull pops were heard in her head, reminiscent of explosions of a gas-air