tried mentally to hurry the burning car, but it, on the contrary, went all the more slowly and finally stopped just opposite the storefront. There was no engine sound, but only the crackle of the flames. And Tony, struck with horror, noticed out of the corner of his eye what he had missed previously looking at the other side of the car: on its blazing back seat someone sat. Someone... or something..., it was only a skeleton charred black... but could a skeleton sit up straight? Would it not fall to pieces? However Tony was afraid to give himself away by moving even his pupils and forced himself not to look in that direction. Though, of course, if the cop could see his pupils, he also should see more appreciable signs distinguishing Tony from a mannequin... beginning with the condition of his clothes... however, if mannequins gather dust in the window of a shop abandoned for years...
"Anything, anything but him noticing me!" Tony mentally begged. In the next moment, however, he thought that his plea was too precipitate.
The car moved again. It slowly went around the garbage truck and disappeared from sight. Still, for some time behind the rusty truck gleams of flame could be seen, but then the street sank again into gloom. Perhaps it was a trap, and the police would still return? Logan waited a few minutes more to be sure. Nothing happened.
"Wheeew," Tony, at last, dared to relax, feeling, how his whole body ached because of a wooden immovability. And how very cold he was still–however, he shivered not only from coldness. Now he would like to move, talk, even to joke. "Thanks for covering, guys," he said to the mannequins. "Why," he wondered, "were they left here after the shop closed and even their clothes had not been taken off? By the way, a good idea!" Women's and children's clothes wouldn't fit him, but there were male mannequins too. At least he could bundle up and replace his trousers... if only the sizes matched... what a pity that mannequins had no shoes...
He resolutely stepped to the nearest male figure, tried to remove its jacket... and understood that it was not a mannequin at all.
Logan'shands were lying on the shoulders of a corpse. The dead face was stiffened in a grimace of last pain; streams of dried up blood stretched downwards from the corners of a wide-open mouth; rolled up eyes blindly stared with two whitish cataracts. "Why doesn't it fall?" Tony thought perplexedly, jerking his hands back. However, his recent experience reminded him that dead persons can not only stand, but can also drive cars... But intuitively he felt that that this body was really dead. Rigor mortis? The body was rigid indeed, but it would probably fall down even from a little push...
Tony moved his eyes downwards. And saw something gleaming between the legs of trousers which he had been going to put on. This unfortunate person had been impaled on a smooth metal stake. Brown stains–possibly, not only of blood–had befouled the trousers and dried on the bare feet of the corpse. The base of the stake had been thrust into the round support for a clothes rack. And, looking again in horror at the face of the dead man, Logan more guessed than saw the sharp end of the stake resting against the palate in the black hole of a mouth.
Tony rushed from one standing figure to another, already knowing that everywhere he would find the same. A half-dozen corpses were in this store window and no fewer than that were on the other side of the door... Men. Women. Children. Everyone was impaled on a stake which had been carefully adjusted for height and had passed precisely through a throat, instead of emerging somewhere between ribs or from under a collar bone, as quite often happened during such executions. Whoever had done it, the executioners, obviously, had approached their business with great diligence and attention to details.
When did it happen? The shop had been abandoned years ago, but the bodies looked fresh, even rigor mortis had not passed yet... however, how well could Tony know what happened to dead bodies here?
Something rustled again behind him. But this time he stood with his back to the street.
Tony turned back sharply. And saw that one of the black bags–which, it seemed had avoided the wheels of the police car–was bending in half and sitting up in the middle of the street. The rotten