"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Infernal Sky (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

"But manageable. That's all I'm saying. If we had a
live cyberdemon, then we'd have a problem of con-
tainment. The same as if our mancubus was living. I
know you call them fatties."
"You have a whole fatty?"
"Fortunately it's dead. Unlike the specimen here,
he seems to be slowly decaying."
I laughed. "They smell so bad alive I don't see how
they could get any worse."
"The stench reminds me of rotting fish, sour grapes,
and old locker-room sweat. Come on. I'll show you."
He didn't need to take my arm, but I let him. He was
like a friendly uncle who wanted to show off his
chamber of horrors. We went past sections of flying
skulls laid out like bikers' helmets. I'd always wanted
a motorcycle.
"What do you call the Clydes?"
"We don't," he answered quickly. "We think your
friends were wrong to think they might be the product
of genetic engineering. They're probably the human
traitors who were given some kind of treatment to
make them tractable."
The fatty was behind glass and made me think of a
gigantic meat loaf that had been left out in the sun.
The metal guns it used for arms had been removed
and stacked up next to the monster like giant flash-
lights. He looked sort of pathetic without them.
"You can't smell it from here, but if you want to
step into the room ..."
"No, thanks." I turned him down, unsure if he was
kidding me. "Let's see the zombies."
I wish I hadn't asked.
He led me to the end of the warehouse, where I
finally saw some other people in white lab coats. For a
moment it had seemed as if the whole place belonged
to Ackerman and his monsters. We went out into a
corridor. I figured the zombies had been given a
special place of their own.
Like I said, what's great about scientists is the way
they refuse to talk down to kids. Ackerman started to
lecture, and it was fine with me:
"The most interesting part about studying zombies
is the residual speech pattern. We have recorded many
hours of zombie dialogue. Some of them fixate on the
invasion, speaking cryptically about gateways and
greater forces that lie behind them. Others pick up a
pattern from their own lives, repeating phrases that
tell us something about them. A final test group
doesn't speak at all. We are attempting to find out if
they retain any capacity to reason after the transfor-