D A Novel (George Right) - By George Right Page 0,109

the inscriptions, why smash the equipment? Madness, madness...

He suddenly felt himself very tired–not so much physically, though his head remained heavy, the infinite, hopeless weariness raising from these attempts to consider the situation rationally, the process of thinking per se painful. "Nobody has survived" had escaped suddenly, as an agonizing exhalation, from the depths of his mind. The accident affected not only this building, everything was much, much worse, no people remain in the whole world, nobody, only mutant spiders and cockroaches, and he never will get out from here, never, never.

He mutely moaned through clenched teeth, leaning against a wall covered with something sticky, shocked with the power of the despair which had captured him. Despair, yes. Were these inscriptions made under such conditions? "Kill yourself now." No, he should struggle! He would not allow this place to win, whatever it actually was. It was necessary to search for an exit. ("No!", his frightened subconsciousness peeped. "Don't search. No, don't search anything!") It was necessary to search, he firmly repeated to himself, and, having gathered himself up, made him step into the darkness of the unlit part of the corridor.

For some instants he moved forward, carefully rearranging his feet and expecting every moment that something cold and slippery from the gloom would suddenly seize his ankle. The darkness seemed to go on longer than he expected. There was, probably, a cascade switching off of several lamps successively. But at last ahead an unsteady light began to dawn around the bend. Some more steps and...

Something cold and slippery occurred under his foot and stuck its teeth into his sole.

Overwhelming fear kept him from jumping aside, freezing him in place, a behavior beyond reason. However, the paralysis, lasting a pair of infinitely long seconds, allowed him to understand that the jaws unclenched under his foot were too languid and didn't try to bite him at all. He had simply stepped on the face of a corpse.

"Kill yourself now." Did someone really yield to such advice? Or, more probably, someone was helped.

At that moment the head of the dead person turned (not by itself, a late understanding came, it happened simply because he pressed on the face with his weight), and his foot, having slid off, was stuck into a floor. But instead of dirt and garbage familiar already, he felt under a sole something different. During the following instant he understood that he was standing on the long matted hair stretched around the dead head. Is that a woman?

Probably, he should explore the body more carefully, at least to the touch, and better to drag it to the light. But the disgust, and also the fear that the thing that killed the woman could still hide somewhere here in the gloom, flooded any rational thought. The man darted off and rushed to the light, as if being pursued by hellish demons. His makeshift skirt fell down, but his reflexes managed to catch the falling oilcloth. Several instants later he was already taking a breath, standing under the next flickering light fixture. Nobody pursued him. Only his heavy breathing was heard in the dead air.

Having calmed himself, as much as possible under the circumstances, he put his attire in order and again moved forward. Soon his efforts were rewarded, at least partly–the passage leading, obviously, to the ring center occurring on the right. But he had no time to be glad about this, as he noticed something else, something far less encouraging.

It was the bloody prints of bare feet, which went along the circle corridor in the opposite direction and turned into this pass. And not only feet... Here and there between footprints the large blots darkened, somewhere merging in the whole paths, similar to the traces of huge worms. So the idea that someone had simply passed through a bloody pool had to be rejected. In that case, each succeeding trace would be paler than the previous, which did not happen here. No, blood streamed from the legs of the walking one, but he(she?) persistently went forward, overcoming the pain.

All right, the man thought, whatever happened with this person, it happened from where he came, not to where he was going. He turned into the pass.

Here the light glowed particularly dimly, some light fixtures periodically dying out completely. Then–probably when some condensers had time to accumulate a charge–with a click they would flash on for a short time. These flashes did not so much help, as blind him, preventing his eyes