Creature of unknown kind - стр. 2

What Vadim had already understood was that Petrovich does not act in the Zone in vain or for nothing. So he nipped a chuckle “Vomit follows the trail!” in a bud. Everything is real in the Zone.

– You!… What is your name… Sverzhin! – exhaustedly said Bashkalo, laying down on his side. He was also wearing an American cap, but this one was colored in dirty-yellow and had an inscription. He was wearing it backwards. – So you didn't even spit after the vehicle? Just passed through and that's all? As if you, a cub, know the Zone and it knows you? Damned contractor…

Vadim shrugged, feeling the weight of the backpack and the strap of the rifle slipping from his right shoulder. How Bashkalo was obsessed with this contract. Actually it is called “contract of employment for extended service”. Yazov, the Minister of Defense. Signature, date. “It's already the second time the Defense Minister hires you personally to work”, Mumbler54 squeaked the obvious again.

– So here the fuck you are! – said Bashkalo with condemnation.

– Vasya, clean up after yourself, – Petrovich said to him quietly, picked up his backpack, put it on his back, raised his machine gun by the strap, hung it on a shoulder, took off the cap, inspected it, put it on.

Bashkalo, glancing at Vadim and hissing under the breath, was kicking a bump, shaggy with last year's grass. “A chunk”, thought Vadim. A Soviet Ensign is “demobbed” until retirement. At this moment he remembered Ensign Antonov and smiled. Not every Ensign is.

Senior Ensign Petrovich was looking around attentively, Vadim followed his example. On this side of the railroad visibility was “a million per million”, no atmospheric condensation, no precipitation, no light pockets. No ashes, which hellishly annoyed them in the morning. The mound was low and the highway on the other side was also perfectly visible, the poles on it, the sheen of the first frost on its concrete, and even the KUNG6 with the screaming dead people, collapsed into the concrete, was visible in the distance. “However”, thought Vadim, “for some reason they cannot be heard from here.”

And the vehicle, that looked like a mechanical corpse with three passenger railcars, one of which was that “combined shonoting”, had already disappeared.

How much time had passed?

Vadim scraped off the hazmat suit's cuff from his wrist and looked at the numbers on his seven-melody “Montana” exchanged, by the way, with lieutenant Gonza for the phalanx in epoxy on plexiglass not far from here less than two years ago. It was half past eleven in the morning. Today. And from the “Obelisk” site – the place of the previous halt – they left at twelve fifteen, according to the same watch. Today. Damn it. Vadim barely restrained the urge to bring the watch to his ear, to check if they worked.

– Keep going. The way we went before to pole number three hundred twenty-four, – said Petrovich. – Are you ready, Vasily? Sverzhin? Throw away your watch. I told you, the track is biased. Go. This direction.

And turning on the heels, using his stick (the broken pole) he casually showed the exact direction. Along the mound, take the left. “God, what familiar places are these. How many times I have traveled from “seventeenth” to Ten, that means Kapustin, and back. As exactly on this vehicle by exactly this railway, as along exactly this road by bus, and once by “ambulance”, and about ten times with Zhitkur and Doctor Vyatkin in a famous brand new “Willis”, released in '43.”