"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Hell on Earth (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

place.
It all rolled downhill from there. We ended up on
Deimos somehow—and I'm still not sure how that
happened!—and duked our way up one side and
down the other, killing more types of monsters than
you can shake a twelve-gauge at, finally ending up in a
hyperspace tunnel . . . you'll have to ask Arlene Sand-
ers (Exhibit A, the gal to my left) to explain what that
is. But when we finally killed everything worth killing,
we lucked into stopping the invasion cold. See previ-
ous report-from-the-front for full details.
In the end, we faced down the spidermind—the
handy nickname chosen for the spider-shaped "mas-
termind" of the invasion, chosen by Bill Ritch,
requisat in pace, a computer genius who helped us at
the cost of his own life.
Right before defeating the spidermind, I'd thought
there was nothing left in me. I was certain that I
couldn't have continued without Arlene, a physical
reminder of what we were fighting for, like old-time
war propaganda. While she breathed, I had to
breathe, and fight. Blame it on the genes. We'd had
the strength to go on against hundreds of monsters.
We weren't about to let a little thing like the laws of
physics stop us now.
Arlene couldn't stop looking at California, so I
gently led her away from the sight. "You know,
Arlene, I feel really stupid that I didn't think of the
shed; especially after using the rocket fuel to fry the
friggin' spider."
She blinked her eyes and rubbed them. I could tell
she was trying not to cry. "That's why you need me,
Flynn Peter Taggart."
So we went spaceship shopping.
Of course, there was the little matter of adding to
our personal armaments. We hadn't seen any mon-
sters for a while. Maybe we neutralized all of them—
but I wasn't about to count on it.
"Once, I was asked why I don't like to go out on the
street without being armed," I told Arlene.
"Must have been an idiot," came the terse reply.
She'd regained her self-control, but she was still acting
defensive. We were good friends, but that made it
easier for her to be embarrassed in front of me.
"No, I wouldn't call her that," I continued. "But
she'd lived a protected life; never came up against the
mother of all storms."
"What's that?" Arlene wanted to know.
"Late-twentieth-century street slang for when the
bad mother on your block decides it's time to teach