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

With his scream, his abdomen burst outward in a spray of flesh and gore and a full-size adult
alien came forth. Impossible, it wasn’t physically possible! It smiled at her, showing the sharp
carnivore’s teeth. Slime and blood dripped as it reached for her…

“Wilks!”
Billie sat up, alone in her cubicle. Her shirt and panties were soaked with sweat, her hair hung
limp.
Oh, fuck. A dream. Only a dream!
But she knew better. It wasn’t a dream. It was a vision. A… communication. It was too real, it
went too deep.
They were here.
On the ship.
Billie grabbed her clothes and ran.

Wilks was fiddling with the program that ran the external pickups, hoping to figure a way to
magnify images visually when Billie rushed in. She was half into her coverall, drenched in sour sweat.
There wasn’t much water on this tub, they probably all smelled a little overripe. Even Bueller, who
had sweat glands that did a fair imitation of human ones. He was in the other seat, having
hand-walked in earlier, dragging his little plastic cradle behind him like some beggar from the streets
of West L.A.
“Wilks, they’re here. On the ship!”
She grabbed at his shirt. “Take it easy, take it easy! You saw one?”
“She dreamed about it,” Bueller said quietly.
Billie turned and glared at him, as if he had violated some secret between them.
“It wasn’t just a nightmare, Wilks. I felt them. Remember the spacefarer alien who saved us,
how I could feel his hatred?”
“Yeah, the elephant man. Scavenger of doomed races.”
“It was like that. I can still feel them. It’s like some kind of light touch against my mind. I can’t
quite put my finger on it, but it is there!”
Wilks shook his head. The kid was stretched too tight. They all were, cooped up on this
bucket. They’d been through a lot. The stress had to come out somewhere. He’d been doing sets of
push-ups and chin-ups and squats every day until he couldn’t move anymore, trying to burn it out of
himself.
“Look, Billie, it doesn’t make sense—”
“Where is the gun, Wilks? If you won’t help me find them, I’ll do it myself!”
Wilks looked at Bueller. The android looked away. Dealing with emotional women was out of
his territory, Wilks knew that. Like it was something he knew how to do. Christ, women were like
another species sometimes. He didn’t understand them at all.
“Well?”
“All right. You want to play marine? We’ll play marine. But I’ll keep the gun. We’ve only got
part of one magazine left.”
He stood, moved to the locker where he’d stored the carbine. He’d locked it securely away,
along with the pistol he’d had before they went into the sleep chambers. He should have collected
more ammo, maybe another couple of M-4lEs before they lifted from Earth, a good marine armed
himself as best he could when he could, but time had been a little tight. When your choice was
hurrying to catch a ship leaving or staying to face either an atomic fireball or a hungry monster, you
didn’t dick around looking for spare ammo. He did have a couple of grenades for the
under-the-barrel launcher of the carbine but those weren’t much use on a vessel cruising through
hard vacuum. Bust a hole in an external wall and the cold emptiness outside would suck your air out
and freeze it into nice little crystals for you. Only a madman wanted to make something go boom! on