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over his shoes, Yakamoto's feet went out from under him. He landed roughly on
his back. Forward momentum skimmed him across the surface of the deck. He only
realized that the inner fence directly around the pit had been rolled back
when he slipped out into open air. The scientist felt a horrible instant of
weightlessness.
Then he fell.
The pit walls tapered halfway down. Yakamoto hit the wall hard. Something
snapped in his right leg. Daggers of pain shot from his shin as he rolled to
the floor of the pit.
He fell onto something soft. In the darkness he couldn't see what it was.
All around was black. When he looked up he saw stars.
"Let me out, please!" he screamed.
His reply was a gentle hum of electricity from the walls. As the sound grew,
lights winked on all around him. Tiny dots of yellow arranged in perfect
little lines stretching around the four walls of the deep pit.
The nozzle lights illuminated the floor of the pit. He saw what it was he had
landed on.
Dr. Hiro Taki was cold in death. The scientist's mouth yawned wide from his
last moment of shock and pain.
When Toshimi Yakamoto saw the dead man's belly, his own mouth dropped in
shock.
Dr. Taki's stomach wasn't there. There was a wide hole from sternum to pelvis.
A perfect circle had been carved through from front to back. Whatever had
hollowed him out had somehow cauterized the wound. No blood or organs spilled
into the vacant, ghastly circle.
The hum grew in intensity. "Stop, please!"
Yakamoto was begging, crying.
He hopped on his uninjured leg, scratching at the walls. There was nothing to
hold on to. There were no handholds. The nozzles were rounded stubs. In his
clawing desperation he tore off a fingernail. He screamed in fresh pain.
By now the air around him was humming like a furious wasp. In all the tests he
had never before heard the sound. Somewhere in his terrified brain he realized
that sound could not escape the Vaporizer pit once the machine was switched
on. He didn't care. He cried and screamed.
The sound was sucked to silence from his parted lips.
And then was a sudden stillness. Yakamoto held his breath.
And all around nozzle tips flashed to brilliant white.
Stars in a midnight sky, impossibly close. Burning, flaring. The light
exploded from every point, all around-dizzying, blinding. And he was suddenly
part of the light, and the light was accepting him into it.
Toshimi Yakamoto felt a strange whooshing vibration as his molecules rattled
apart. As the world compressed and stretched into a single living stream, the
black wall suddenly flew up to meet him. A single glowing nozzle tip burst in
warm light all around him.
And then he was in the light and gone.
The black walls of eternity closed in around Toshimi Yakamoto. There was a
weird out-of-body experience as he traveled through an endless black tunnel.
It seemed to take forever, but he knew that it was only the wink of an eye.
The tunnel opened, the whooshing stopped and Toshimi Yakamoto found himself
looking at other stars.
These stars weren't regimented like the false stars of the Vaporizer. These
were the real thing, scattered randomly throughout the twinkling night sky.
The warm breeze touched the swaying tops of tropical trees. Though dry, it
felt wet on his skin. When he looked, he saw why.
What should have been skin was now a damp mass of reddish blue, a human husk
stripped and turned inside out. Fused bones of rib and spine curled in horrid
shapes from pulsing, exposed organs.
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
There was no horror. In fact, Toshimi Yakamoto didn't mind at all.
The brain had gone the way of the body, twisted in shapes that no longer
comprehended pain. When the end came, it came without understanding. The final
breath wheezed out, and the quivering mass simply died.
And on the growing mountain of garbage, the rats came tentatively out of
hiding. To feast on the inhuman jumble of flesh and organs that in life had
been one of the brightest minds of Japan's Nishitsu Corporation.
Chapter 13
The Caribbean sun rose yellow and beautiful in a cloudless dawn. Petrovina
Bulganin watched it sneak over the horizon as if it were a skulking enemy.
This mission was proving more of a nuisance than she had thought it would be.
It wasn't just the side trip to the Vaporizer where she was doing the work of
the SVR. It was the company she was being forced to keep. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]