Сергей Жарковский – Creature of unknown kind (страница 2)

The track was “taken out”. For the second time that day and the second time in his life, Vadim has seen this. He expected that, as in the morning, Bashkalo would kick-start his sensible whining that here it is, taken out, that means for sure that a loot72 is firing nearby, it would be nice to look around, to comb the area, because this is a thousand, even divided into three, is falling into the pocket… But now, for some reason, Bashkalo was not whining.

Vadim could feel the look of the Senior with his backpack and did everything by the book: he stopped, lifted an open palm, stopping the group, pulled from under his belt a strip of gauze, threw it on the track and waited with bated breath, and only after stepped over, “having marked the beginning of the movement by the same gesture of an open palm, visible by the wingman”, came to the paired trail and repeated the actions exactly. More to it, it is necessary not to cross it right above the gauze. Hell knows what. The Zone knows what Mumbler said somewhere between Vadim's eyes.

There was nothing to object.

– Look, the track is discharged, without a loot, – said Petrovich from behind. – I picked it up a long time ago. “Gnatyuk” was here, such a cutie. You see, although the trail is taken out, it's littered. And the working, evil track is always very clean, as if someone just passed by. Like on wet sand. But you did everything right, I have to praise you. Keep moving.

They went on down the track. Protective Mumbler in Vadim's head at the point behind the nose bridge, after awakening never shut up, spoke measuredly, mumbling, something like “You never left here, right? Did not demobilize and still live at the famous Range, right? As if you got into the “I am going to army again” dream, right? As if there weren't three years at home, Maika didn't exist, Katty wasn't born…”

– Stop! – Petrovich said sharply.

Vadim stood with a raised leg, then warily lowered it. He didn't turn back. Mumbler became silent. Both ears open, palms open. Ears and hands are required to be open up to the wrists in all weathers, under any circumstances. In winter the hat's ears must not be down! And no gloves or mittens.

– Vasya, fuck! Gnaw your butt! – said Petrovitch in a strange voice.

Here Vadim turned around cautiously – with his whole body.

Bashkalo, the rear-guard and the driver of the group, was looming ten meters behind as required. And Senior Ensign Petrovich, left his pole stuck in the wet steppe, in violation of all charters and unofficial spells, went to him, that means back. He went back, slowly raising his hands on the both sides of the cap. Going right up to the frozen Ensign, Petrovich dropped his hands so vigorously and spread them down there so vexatiously, and in an accent point-blank cursed the Ensign's mother, that Vadim realized: exactly It81, lying in wait for every third neophyte, has come to the first scouting mission of the private contract soldier, Sverzhin, Vadim Valentinovich, into the Zone. The exercise is finished, arms for inspection. Thanks for being alive. This, however, is unknown.

– Didn't get you, Nikolaich! – Hissing, just as with a fright, but also with a challenge, said Bashkalo.

Senior Ensign Petrovich walked around him, as if he was a Christmas tree, and asked in a hopeless-calm tone:

– Vasya, comrade Soviet Ensign! Where is the cart? Where are the poles? Damn your mother in all ways!

Bashkalo whirled himself around so, that even the KHM92 swung on him, slapped both his sides, and from ten meters away Vadim saw how his round face sharply and completely burned, turning exactly the color of a disk on a pole. It became even more crimson than disc painted with iron oxide. Even his facial features disappeared and only the mustache was protruding like swollen scratches. The red muzzle of the Ensign. Vadim had never read a book, but certainly in one there is this: “the red muzzle of the Ensign”.

“Let's not forget, all of a sudden”, said Mumbler importantly, “that Bashkalo has been going to the Zone from the very beginning, that he is a skillful and tireless stalker, and that an KHM, for some reason called by trackers along with AK-47, sings in Bashkalo's hands at the firing line cleaner than a nightingale. You should be careful with him.”

– Nikolaich… – Said Bashkalo. – Damn, Nikolaich! I don't know! Don't remember! I fucked up, Nikolaich!

In the garden cart, gently painted in grey color, Bashkalo was driving fifty poles – sharpened, treated with linseed oil cuttings for mops with numbered disks nailed to them by copper braces. Gently painted in bright red, fiery color. (The whole previous month, Vadim had dedicated two or three hours every God's day to painting carts and poles.) The combat mission of the group of the Senior Ensign Petrovich in today's expedition was formulated as “reconnaissance and designation of the third quarter of the route 'Obelisk – m/u 20224 '.” In that way, the loss of the poles was ruining the task, the mission in general, and Petrovich's reputation, as it is said: “the Senior officer is responsible.”

– As in a dream, Nikolaich, don't remember! – Bashkalo said earnestly. – Missed it!

“The chunk is lying”, thought Vadim. (Or that was Mumbler?) “He does remember. Left it intentionally. There, in a ditch below the embankment. There the cart is standing now, and forever. He was supposed to go last, dragging the cart along the gravel and across the rails, and in horror, and blindly, when the third railcar easily could catch the cart, also pulling him, could knock him down and chew him up under the real wheels… so to hell with it, the cart, and on the other side of the railway – be that as it may. The money for the mission had already dripped in, and next time Petrovich would not take him. And glory to the CPSU101. Missions with Petrovich aren't worth it. They almost draw lots.” For weeks the trackers had been talking among themselves, the rumor penetrated even in the “geese house”, and Vadim knows it, that Senior Ensign Petrovich now goes for terrifying tracks, not around the “neutral” but in the most unknown steppe; beats the wedges in the Zone, in those places where regular three kilometers on a map objectively had became thirty kilometers long time ago. In the most direct meaning – thirty, stretched “by the anomalous intensities of unknown kind near the surface of the planet Earth”.

“The last thing I need is the ability to read thoughts”, Vadim thought with unsighted anger. Now what? They have three complete poles, “connecting ones”: Vadim carried them in the backpack's loop, like swords in a movie with Bruce Lee. Another one, broken, was used by Petrovich instead of a cane (“Instead of a staff!”).

Petrovich silently returned to the middle of the distance between Bashkalo and Vadim. Pulled out the cane-staff.

– Sverzhin, go to the three hundred and twenty-fourth, – he ordered in his usual voice. – Take the next pole on the right, in three meters, and there stop on command. Forward, march.

Vadim took the pole in his right hand after ten minutes. It was sticking out askew, strongly rotated edge-on to their route. Vadim waited for the command, turned to his superior and fell on his knee feeling sweat between stocking of the hazmat suit and breeches. It was hot. Petrovich walked around the pole, made a “spiral” in two turns from it, “inspecting” the air, its density and humidity with his hands, then said pointing to the chosen place:

– Here we rest, have lunch and a smoke break. Bashkalo with me. Sverzhin stay where you are. Watch quietly, as it's done. If you smoke – smoke.

Bashkalo went to the specified place, both with Petrovich they knelt, facing each other, took off their backpacks and began to built the dastarkhan112. A couple of minutes later Petrovich, extending an arm to Vadim, snapped his fingers. Vadim took off and gave him his own backpack. He carried the bulk of the group's rations. He laid his poles next to the Senior Ensign's pole-cane. The Ensigns assembled lunch quickly, observing dozens of a strange little rules, almost imperceptible to the inexperienced eye. Vadim remembered (without any Mumbler) as the association was obvious, the words of cosmonaut Makarov. In the spring of eighty-two his father had another exacerbation (the penultimate one, he did not survive the next one), and Vadim was sent to stay with his mother in Sverdlovsk, accompanied by a special officer. And almost immediately, literally a couple of days after the delivery, in her filthy children's regional library his mother had a pioneer meeting with cosmonaut Makarov, who had come, the hell knows why, for some seminar, perhaps, or a congress. There also was the writer Strugatsky, a huge old man, next to whom the cosmonaut in an incredible leather jacket looked like a Lilliputian from a cartoon. But Vadim did not care about the writer, whereas the cosmonaut interested him, no matter how bad it felt inside, no matter how Vadim's heartache, despair and hatred were strangling him. This was the cosmonaut, after all… So, among all the different things, cosmonaut Makarov equally surprised the ragtag of pioneers in caps and stockings, as well as Vadim in his yellow jumpsuit and sneakers, when he said that the weightlessness is pretty disgusting and he, cosmonaut Makarov, did not like it; and then he said that many years of training before starting can not give as much useful knowledge as a five-minute observation of actions of comrades who were already flying, after launch. And he illustrated this with a scene of going to sleep in the living compartment of the “Soyuz” spacecraft. What kind of tricks there are, unexplainable on Earth. Indeed, the way Petrovich and Bashkalo were making fire, the precautions and tricks with which they were opening and heating the stew, there, outside, you can hardly explain to anybody on Earth.