"personal demons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fowler Christopher)

The guard's jacket was smoking. 'Christ,' said Ben, dropping the tasor.
Swan turned on him. 'Blasphemer!'
This is not going to look good on my CV thought Ben as he kneed Swan in the testicles and pushed him down the stairs.

The 35th floor was devoid of life. Somewhere in the distance were screams, moaning, the sound of breaking glass. The monitors droned on in the reception area, but the tape of sunsets and dolphins was slurred and distorted. The receptionist was sitting on the floor with her legs straight out, nursing her head like a character from a Laurel and Hardy film. Marie ran to her work station and collected her coat. She tried to telephone the police, but watched on her display unit as the call was diverted to a dead line. She punched out a 9, then 100. 'Hello, operator, I'm trying to get connected to the police. Why can't you? I know we're not under police jurisdiction, that's because the company has its own security services, but surely a 999 call is still - well, yes, it is an emergency.'
She cradled the receiver under her ear, looking around.
Lucy had set fire to a wastepaper bin and was standing on a chair holding it near the ceiling, trying to set off the sprinkler system. One of the other typists was seated at her keyboard printing out hundreds of pages of Z's. Carmichael had over a dozen biros protruding from his back, and lay sprawled on the floor beneath his desk. Everyone else had fled to darker corners.
Clark wandered about his office clutching his face. The muffled cries and scuffles emanating from the floor outside made him look up in a state of dementia.
'You killed him, didn't you?' said Marie as he hoved into her eyeline.
'Felix's report suggested delaying everything while we investigated the problem,' Clark moaned. 'The shares would have plummeted. I didn't mean to kill him. But I - get - these - headaches.'
Marie slowly replaced the receiver. 'What did you do with his body?'
'Put him in a cool place, somewhere off limits,' he replied dully. 'The sensor room.'
'My god, that's supposed to be a sterile area. You left a corpse in there with the building's sensor units?'
'I wasn't thinking too clearly. I'm better now.' The heavy executive suddenly lunged at her, and they fell back on to her desk as Marie desperately cast about for something to hit him with. Grabbing wildly behind her, she smashed a 'You Don't Have To Be Mad To Work Here But It Helps' breakfast mug over his head, which briefly dazed him.
Clark scrambled after Marie as she fought to get away. She rammed her chair at him, and while he was tipped back against the desk rubbing his head she pulled the plastic bottle from the water cooler beside her and flung it at him. From the way he suddenly grew rigid and began grinding his teeth she could only assume that her keyboard, too, was now electrified, and that he was sitting on it in wet trousers.

Marie and Ben stumbled into the building's deserted atrium and made for the main doors. They had been forced to use the stairs down, as people were making love in the lifts. Fights had broken out on every floor. 'I'm sorry I took so long to find you,' wheezed Ben, 'but a gang of bookkeepers ambushed me in Accounts.'
'The system won't let us out,' said Marie. 'These things are locked.'
'What do you mean, locked?' he said stupidly, staring at the steel deadbolts that had slid across the inch-thick tinted glass. He hurled himself against the door but it did not even vibrate under his weight.
'We'll never get out now.'
'What are you talking about? The police, fire, ambulance, emergency teams, they'll all turn up here any minute.'
'No, they won't,' shouted the elderly caretaker. Hegarty was hobbling toward them using a desk-leg as a stick. There was a thick smear of blood on one side of his head. 'The phone lines are all diverted. The entrances and exits are all sealed. The building will deal with the crisis without enlisting outside help. That's what it's designed to do.'
'So what happens now?'
'In an emergency situation - a Code Purple - the system can attempt to restore balance in the building by starting all over again.'
'And how will it do that?' asked Ben, dreading the answer.
'By sucking out all of the air, purifying the structure with scalding antiseptic spray, flash-freezing it and then slowly restoring the normal temperature. The process won't harm office hardware. Of course, it's never been used on humans.'
Ben looked up at the flashing purple square on the atrium wall and listened as the warning sirens began to whine. 'I guess now would be a bad time to ask for a salary increase,' he said as the great ceiling ventilators slowly opened.


ARMIES OF THE HEART

Looking down at the child, he realised he had surprised himself with his own strength. The boy lay face down in the litter-strewn grass, his hands twisted behind his back with the palms up, as if he had fallen to earth while sky-diving. His jeans were torn down around his thin ankles, his pants and buttocks stained carmine. His baseball cap had been caught by the thorns of the gorse bush that hid them both from the road.
His attacker rose and wiped the sweat from his face. It was getting dark. He would soon be missed at home. He had not meant to be so rough. At his feet the boy lay motionless, the focus of his eyes lost in a far-off place. Thin strands of blood leaked from his oval mouth to the ground like hungry roots. An arc of purple bites scarred the pale flesh below his shoulder blades where the cheap cotton T-shirt he wore had been wrenched up. His life had been extinguished four days before his eleventh birthday.
There was nothing to be done for the lad. Readjusting the belt of his trousers and shaking out the pain from his bitten hand, the man stepped away from the cooling body, walking back toward the path that bisected the waste ground. His main concern now was relocating the Volvo and getting home to his wife and children before they started to ask where he had been.

*

'You won't.'
'I will.'
'You won't.'
'I will.'
'You bloody won't.'
'I bloody will.'
'Wait, I forgot what you two are arguing about.'
'She says she'll get in, and I say she won't.'
'Well, we'll just have to see, won't we?'
The venue was five hundred yards ahead of them, a large Victorian pub standing by itself at the junction of two roads. It appeared derelict; the windows were covered with sheets of steel and wood, painted matt black. No lights showed. The tenebrous building reared against the stars like a great abandoned ship. On either side of it apartment blocks curved endlessly off into darkness.
'We should get off the street, man,' said Bax. 'This is not a good area to be seen in.' There were three of them, Bax, Jack and Woody, whose real name was Claire Woodson. There was no-one else around.
'It's okay for you,' Woody complained. 'We're white. We stick out like neon bulbs.'
'Fuck you, Woody. You wanna know something? There's as many white people living here as black. You're just scared of being around poor folks. You wanna hang out with your low-life friends so you can piss off your mummy and daddy. They ain't gonna let you inside, anyway.'