"Steve Perry - Aliens 02 - Nightmare Asylum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

only to leave enough room for a repair tech, since the thing had been built to be run by the computer
and a few service robots. The ’cast screens were blank, save for the two running ship data in
computer language. “Showtime,” Wilks said. He wasn’t smiling.

A man who looked like Albert Einstein at sixty said, “Have we got it? Have we got the
uplink—okay, okay, listen, anybody out there, this is Hermann Koch in Charlotte; we’re out of food,
we’re almost out of water, we’re overrun! The damned things are killing or kidnapping everybody!
There are only twenty of us left alive—!”
The man went away and abruptly there was another place. Outside, a bright and sunny day,
spring flowers in bloom, bright green leaves sprouting on the trees. Only something hideous wrecked
the scene:
One of the aliens carried under its arm a woman, as a man might carry a small dog. The alien
was three meters tall, light gleaming from its black exoskeletons its head was shaped like a mutated
banana; it looked like some obscene crossbreed between an insect and a lizard. Boney, notched
spars protruded from the thing’s back like exposed ribs, three paired sets. It walked upright on two
legs, a fact that seemed impossible given the way it was constructed, and a long, vertebrae-flanged,
and pointed tail swept the pavement behind it as it moved.
A bullet spanged off the thing’s head, doing no more damage to the hard surface than a rubber
ball bouncing on a plastecrete sidewalk. The alien turned and looked at the unseen shooters.
“Aim for the woman!” somebody screamed. “Shoot Janna!”
Before the alien kidnapper could flee with its prey, three more shots boomed. One of them
missed completely. One of them hit the alien’s chest, flattened on the natural armor, did no harm. The
third bullet hit the woman, just above the left eye.
“Thank God!” the unseen speaker said.
The alien sensed something wrong. It lifted the woman up, held her at arm’s length, turned its
head from side to side, as if examining her. The thing looked at the shooters. It dropped the dead or
dying woman onto the sidewalk as if she were yesterday’s garbage. Began to run directly toward the
shooters. Made a hissing, burbling sound as it came—

Here, what was once a school classroom: but the rows of blank computer terminals were
powerless; the only light was that which slanted in through a broken window. A human body lay on
the floor, parts of it gone, eaten away, leaving a fly-blown swollen mass. Maggots squirmed in the
rank remains, and the putrefaction had drawn ants and other small scavengers. The corpse was too
far gone to say what sex it had been. Above the body, spray-painted on the wall in letters half a
meter high the words: darwin estis korecto.
Darwin was right.
Had the dead person written those words as a final statement? Or had the human arrived later,
to contemplate them, to seek after truth—before the higher link in the food chain came for its due?
Words like these had power, but in the jungle, the sword, the tooth, the claw, were mightier than the
pen. Always…

A young man, maybe twenty-five, sat in a church, in the front pew. Religion hadn’t been doing
so well on Earth in the last twenty years, but there were still places of worship. A soft glow from
beneath a cross mounted behind the altar illuminated the young man, who sat in the first row of the
otherwise empty church with his eyes closed, praying aloud.
“…. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” he said. “For Thine is the
kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”
 Almost without pause, the young man began the prayer again, speaking in a monotone. “Our
Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name…”
A dim fuzzy shadow loomed suddenly on the wall at the end of the pew.