"Guy N. Smith - Bats Out Of Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

It was a quarter of an hour before the bat's eyes dulled and it died. The last
victim, an hour ago, had suffered for forty-five minutes before it was granted
a merciful release from its suffering.

'Hell,' the tall man muttered to himself, 'I've never seen anything like it
before!'

The girl moved closer to him, and asked in a low, husky whisper, 'What is it,
Brian? What's happening to them?'

He seemed to notice her presence for the first time, and his expression
softened momentarily. 'I don't know,' he murmured, averting his eyes from her
gaze.

'But. . . ' her fingers closed over his as she spoke, and he made no attempt
to remove them. 'The tests. The tests we did yesterday. They're bound to show
something . . . the reason for this paralysis in the bats, the mad rages, the
pain ...'

Professor Brian Newman looked silently out of the window. Out there, across
the soft, springy heather which was just beginning its new growth, were
something in the region of twenty-five thousand acres of woodland and heath -
Cannock Chase, a well-known beauty spot to which crowds of tourists thronged
at weekends and on bank-holidays. A natural environment, except for this
place, the Midlands Biological Research Centre, an ugly scar on the landscape.

Newman remembered the beginning of it all, the protests, the petitions by the
locals. It hadn't got them anywhere. They hadn't achieved anything, simply
because they had been conned by the authorities. Local councils had been
persuaded that the centre was for the good of the people. Well, the Professor
thought, smiling wryly to himself, it was certainly supposed to be for the
good of all mankind. Except for... for this\ His gaze was drawn irresistibly
back to the glass cage, the dead and dying bats, the small bodies of the
doomed thudding continuously against the sides as they swooped and fluttered
insanely, often colliding with each other. Soon these creatures would all be
dead. It might take until the day after tomorrow. There was no way of helping
them or alleviating their suffering. All he could do was to watch them die and
hope that it would end there. Then cremate the corpses and say nothing, not
even to Haynes. Haynes wouldn't understand. He-was an administration man, and
the less he knew, the better. Likewise the other scientists. There must be no
more meddling. Once these bats were dead, that had to be the end of it.

'The tests,' Susan Wylie squeezed his hand and whispered huskily. 'What did
they show, Brian?'

Newman turned to her, and sighed loudly. They showed that the inexplicable has
happened. Something which we cannot explain, only accept. The virus is a
mutated one caused by experimenting. I've tried to determine the difference
between bacterial and viral meningitis. In humans it's difficult to tell in
the early stage, which is the very time when either the virus or the bacteria