"Nyx Smith - Fade to Black" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Nyx)

and ran, tool belts clanking, to the front of the van, hopping over toolcases, a stripped-down engine block, an
eviscerated Suzuki Aurora, a partly disassembled Kaydee A.C. condenser twinpak, hubcaps, nuts and bolts,
an antique C.R.T., and an old General Products multifuel power generator, like a freaking kangaroo!
The ghoulies had come a-calling. Thorvin leaped up into the driver's seat and slapped the black lead
from the driver's console into the datajack at the side of his neck. His vision blanked, then returned. The
van's external vid-pickups replaced his eyes and ears. The van had become his body.
The ghoulies were there all right, all around him. Pounding on his armor-reinforced, metal-alloy flanks.
Using fists, bricks, and metal bars. Skeletal jaws flapping, fingernails like talons, clothes hanging in rags,
they looked like rotting corpses just emerged from their worm-infested holes. And Thorvin knew what they
wanted. They liked their meat raw. Human was best, decayed and rotting even better, but in a pinch, if
enough of them got together, they'd go for anything, even something alive. Even a freaking dwarf!
Just the thought of those slimy, decaying monstrosities clawing at his metal-alloy skin sent chills up his
rear doors. Back. Whatever. No effing way they'd get inside. He had a Magnum V-12 850-horsepower
blower-driven petrochem heart. For blood he had Super-98 octane with injected nitrous oxide. He set his
power plant to roaring and slammed his tranny into drive. His rear wheels churned, screaming, sending up a
billowing storm cloud of smoke, seizing the road and hurling him ahead.
The gleaming red graphic indicators overlaying his external view went wild. Velocity shot toward 200
kph. Engine revs pegged max. Targeting indicators guided by his onboard combat comp streaked left and
right, winking and flashing. A raucous symphony of electronic warning tones, beeps, and bleeps rilled the
back of his head, his real head, somewhere inside ... not quite forgotten.
Things bounced off his van-body, banged and slammed and then fell away. Building debris, derelict
cars, assorted junk, garbage, and other things, not junk or garbage. Things that squished and splatted. Like
bodies. There must be a whole tribe of the freaking zombie cannibals hanging around, closing in from
all sides. That's what he got for treasure-hunting so near the freaking cemeteries. Suddenly, one stood in
the road directly in front of him, a shambling monstrosity with spindly limbs hefting what looked like a
freaking shoulder-mounted Panther assault cannon.
Thorvin's own nervous system pegged max.
The M-134 minigun in the pod on his roof popped up and stammered rapid-fire. The ghoulie in the road
jerked and spun, then slammed against the crash-grille guarding Thorvin's front end.
An ocean of red-tinted slime splashed across Thorvin's external sensors. Mentally he flinched. The
van swerved and pitched, bounding up then slamming down. Things crashed. Fortunately, his all-terrain
General Products F-6900 self-healing tires could really take a pounding. He switched on his forward-looking
infrared radar and found himself hurtling straight into a building wall.
Panic time.
He cut his wheels right, roared up an alley, smashed through a pair of cyclone fences, and shot out
onto a broad open space like a weed-infested parking field.
Bad move.
A half-dozen beat-up, smashed-out petrochem heaps were wheeling around the crumbling,
debris-strewn concrete. As many as a dozen motorcycles whizzed back and forth. Every driver and every
passenger held some kind of weapon-handguns, rifles, shotguns, SMGs. Thorvin recognized the colors even
as the thundering barrage of gunfire assaulted his audio pickups. He'd steered himself right into a freaking
war! Chiller-thrillers versus a go-go-gang, the Toxic Marauders versus the Rahway Blades.
Great Freaking great.
A cycle came screaming toward him. Bullets pinged and panged rapid-fire off his front grille. Winking
red targeting markers homed in on the cycle. Thorvin opened up with his minigun and hurled himself into a
skidding, tire-screaming half-circle.
The cycle exploded.
Thorvin fired himself back down the alley. A storm of rocks, bricks, chunks of metal, and other junk
crashed against his sides and roof as he roared out onto the street. Ghoulies again. Just freaking great. He
set his power plant to whining, and went squealing around the very next corner, almost, but not quite,