"Night Warriors - 01 - Night Warriors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

The medical examiner pulled a face. 'Girls of this age are always susceptible to being killed, either on purpose or accidentally, or else through carelessness. Pretty girls especially. They have more power than they know. Their youth and their looks give them power. The trouble is, they never know how to use it. Not safely, anyway.'

With exaggerated care, the two medics eased the girl's body out of the sand, and then rolled her on to her back.

Her arm fell against the wet beach with a slapping sound and then one of the medics said, in a peculiar voice, 'Jesus Christ.'

Henry stared, but at first he couldn't understand what he was staring at. The medical examiner moved forward at once, and stood over the body, his face disassembled into no recognisable expression at all. Fear? Horror? Fascination? The two medics took a step back, one of them holding his hand over his mouth, and looking watery eyed. Lieutenant Ortega had been standing with his back to the body, talking to Morris and Warburg; but then Warburg nudged him and he turned around and saw what the girl really looked like.

Her face was almost beautiful, in spite of the fact that it had been swollen by the sea. A classic blonde, with classic American bone-structure, the sort of girl who could easily have found herself an acting part in Matt Houston or Magnum, P.I. or even Dynasty. Wide shouldered, large breasted; but beneath her ribcage the horror began. Henry suddenly understood what he was looking at, and whispered, 'Oh, God,' and Susan buried her face in her hands.

The girl's abdomen had been completely ripped out, from her ribs to her pelvis, and inside her abdominal cavity scores of silvery-black eels were writhing; a tumultuous nest of slithering creatures, twining and untwining themselves, blindly feeding on what was left of the dead girl's softer organs.

Gil turned away, buckled at the knees, crouched on the sand, and retched. The uniformed policemen stared in alarm and helplessness; even the photographer crossed himself. For minutes on end, there was nothing that any of them could do but watch the knotted tangle of eels as they heaved and twisted and wriggled, and the pale emotionless face of the girl whose'body they were slowly devouring.

The medical examiner turned to Lieutenant Ortega with widened eyes. 'Ever see anything like that, ever!'

Lieutenant Ortega abruptly shook his head.

'Me neither,' said the medical examiner. Then he turned to the medics and said, 'Get rid of those things.'

The medics looked unhappily down at the body. 'You mean . . .?'

'Whatever they are, those eels. Those snakes. Get them out of there.'

One of the medics picked up a stick from the beach, and approached the body gingerly. He leaned forward, and prodded the eels with the tip of it, just once. Immediately, the eels wriggled and twisted even more furiously, and the medic jumped back with a high-pitched 'aah!' of irrepressible disgust.

The medical examiner impatiently took the stick away from him and circled around the body himself. While everybody else watched him with flesh-crawling apprehension, he prodded the eels two or three times, and each time they boiled in the dead girl's stomach with the same slippery fury. Suddenly, however, the medical examiner managed to hook the end of the stick underneath one of them and flip it out on to the beach.

The eel was almost three feet long, with a flat chisel-shaped head and tiny blind eyes. It flapped and writhed on the surface for a while; then it burrowed its head into the sand, and within seconds it had disappeared, leaving nothing on the sand but a slight indentation. Almost immediately, the remaining eels poured out of the dead girl's pelvis, and scattered in all directions, burying themselves deep into the sand.

'Catch one!' the medical examiner shouted, urgently.

One of the uniformed policemen snatched at the tail of the last eel to disappear, and tugged at it furiously.

'Give me a hand for Chrissake!' he gasped to his uniformed partner. His partner came hurrying across and gripped the eel's body nearer to the sand, and between them, cursing and grunting, they gradually managed to drag the creature backwards out of the hole it had been burrowing for itself.

As soon as its head was clear, though, the eel lashed and looped and twisted wildly around in the air. Henry saw its teeth flicker; and then it wriggled like a whip, and caught one of the policemen directly in the face, clamping its jaws over his upper lip and part of his nose.

The policeman shrieked out loud, and snatched at the eel's head, trying to prize its jaws apart. Henry watched in horror as the man danced around the sand, the silvery-black eel wriggling from his face like a carnival nose. Bright-red blood began to sprinkle all around them.

Lieutenant Ortega dodged forward, and seized the officer from behind, tripping him up so that they both fell heavily on to the ground. The policeman was screaming wildly, and his legs were jerking like an epileptic marionette. Lieutenant Ortega reached around to the officer's face, and clutched the eel right behind its chisel-shaped head, squeezing the gills closed so that the creature would be unable to breathe. Then he held up his free hand and yelled, 'Knife, for God's sake!'

The medical examiner dug hurriedly into his pockets, and came up with a single-bladed clasp knife. Lieutenant Ortega snatched it from him, and then cut into the welter of blood in front of the policeman's face. The policeman screamed again and again while Lieutenant Ortega sawed through the eel's body. The eel's own blood spurted out dark, like bile, and splattered all over Ortega's hands and arms. Its tail lashed furiously from side to side, right up until the last moment when Ortega cut its spinal column, and flung its body across the sand. The headless body lay twitching and jerking, and the medics cautiously stepped away from it.

The medical examiner knelt down on the sand and examined the policeman closely. The policeman was shivering and trembling and Lieutenant Ortega was doing everything he could to soothe him. The eel's severed head was still gripping the policeman's face, and when the medical examiner quickly dabbed away the blood with cotton and distilled water, he could see that the creature's teeth had already detached half of the policeman's nostril and most of his upper lip. The eel's jaw muscles showed no signs of relaxing; it was plain that any attempt to pull its head away would make the injury far more severe than it was already.

Henry came up, and although he was trembling himself, he said, as steadily as he could, 'You know what they used to do in Vietnam, to get the leeches off?'

'That's right,' said the medical examiner. 'They used to burn them off with lighted cigarettes. Does anyone here have a cigarette?'