Готовый перевод Житие Мое / Life of Mine: Глава 5

Chapter 5

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During the week of digging through the dumpster, we found a lot of different things, but all of them dated back to the period of the construction of Yudoli - this was clear even to me - and was of no historical interest. There was beginning to talk that there were no Sand Nits on the island and that the phenomenon might have nothing to do with Cape Town at all. Mrs. Clements strongly disagreed with this view.

"We need to expand the geography of the search!" Her eyes burned with fanaticism. "The commission's report spoke of ruins spotted on the shore five kilometers to the south. We're bound to find something there!"

Another ruin, and an uninhabited one at that. Brilliant! Something told me we might not find what we were expecting.

For the initial inspection of the new place, Mr. Smith went himself and took Pierre as his assistant, of which the fool was terribly proud. They returned, strangely enough, in one piece. Smith was carrying a trunk, the contents of which he showed no one but Mrs. Clements, but there was something in it that was undoubtedly important, for discussions were over, and the redeployment was scheduled for the next day.

My uncle and I, Pierre, and one of the guards, Geric, volunteered. I noticed the fact that there was no black ones left in the base camp but decided Smith would know better where we were needed most.

"What, they don't take your sycophant?" My uncle sneered.

I didn't immediately understand who he was talking about.

"I never knew you had such a thirst for power, nephew! I wouldn't be tempted by that pale worm."

Was he talking about Aleh? I had never noticed the white one as a sycophant - it was just his nature to be always admired. I was flattered, of course, that the older guy recognized my authority, but it was not a matter of command but rather of the Big Brother complex that had awakened in me after my visit home. Before, I just hadn't noticed how much I enjoyed feeling like the head of the family. But why was my uncle suddenly meddling in my affairs?

"Are you jealous?" I asked innocently.

Ha! He sure is jealous! He's even blushing. Yeah, man, you used to be the first guy in the village, but it doesn't work - young people are getting impatient. Call me ugly, but being an object of envy is an awfully pleasant feeling! Uncle, realizing his mistake and the topic no longer raised. But the deed was done: I realized for the first time clearly that the two of us were also black. This means that it will be our turn to settle the matter. Just not now. My Source of Power, the threats of the island, and the tacitly present problem of money are now on the agenda. This is no time for hierarchy building! And I need to think of a way to distract my uncle from this matter. Get him in a fight with Smith again?

But as it turned out, I was worried for nothing - King's Island was the first to find a way to entertain us.

The new excavation site was in the most inaccessible part of the coast. How the notorious commission managed to find it was a mystery. Nevertheless, it was found, marked on maps, and even named Cape Solitude. We landed there as paratroopers - by rowboat from a boat, we literally squeezed through the coastal cliffs. I was a little worried that we would have to perform such a feat every day. Beyond the line of rocks was a shallow cove with the remains of an ancient road in its wake. It was not clear who, when, and why had built it; it was impossible to bring a large ship here.

Our target was well above sea level, on a cut-off mountain top. Geometrically regular piles of sand and rubble marked the remains of three or four large buildings. They resembled Capetower in scale, which must have appealed to Mrs. Clements. It took us about twenty minutes to scramble up there, pretending to be pack mules and cursing quietly. When we had dumped the first load, I took a breath and strolled through the ruins.

Up close, the ruins looked rather chaotic. All around was the typical landscape of King's Island. Stones and only stones, not a speck of green, not even moss in sight. The walls of the ancient houses were crumbling and settling unevenly, and so in some places, the rubble lay in large piles, while in others the structures of the ground floor were visible. There were no steel plates here, but there were fragments of glass, thin and muddy, and once the eye found something resembling weathered bone. Otherwise, it was hard to imagine that this place had ever been inhabited. The place lacked many small details and traces of human hands. It had already almost reverted to the silence of primordial nature, dissolved into time.

I felt a sense of unnaturalness, but I couldn't quite grasp the reason for it. After walking through the ruins, the strange feeling did not disappear but rather intensified. As if I had seen an unusual object but could not remember what it was. Spurred on by an inexplicable uneasiness, I stepped into the confines of the non-existent building and looked around. To my right rose a mountain of rubble that had once been the upper floors of the structure. To my left small stones flowed down the ruined stairs to the entrance to the basement floor, through a half-filled gap in the doorway darkness peered out of the basement. And silence, soft and promising. It could be quite a scary place at night. If anything happened, there was nowhere to run. I peered down carefully. I was beginning to actively dislike this place.

The stones crunched behind me - Pierre followed me into the ruins.

"What, are you scared?" he snorted and pretended to push me into the gap. Then he elbowed me in the face for real. Some things are not to be trifled with. "Oh, really? I was joking!"

"Cretin!" I got angry. "There's something... someone out there! I can feel it!"

At the noise of the quarrel, my uncle pulled up, looked into the gap and became very frowny:

"Get Smith in here! There's undead in there, but I can't tell what kind - I'm level six."

Only lab technicians at Redstone were level six. The question was, why the hell was he messing with a battle mage then?

Our chief black supervisor was very unhappy to be torn from unloading, but when he looked into the hole, he didn't just turn pale - he turned green.

"Let's get out of here now!!!"

I pushed aside a bewildered Pierre and almost tumbled to the shore. When a black magician says you have to get out, you have to get out fast. It had nothing to do with cowardice.

"Into the dinghy, into the dinghy!" Smith was yelling. "Let's leave everything. Let's go!"

I was the first to arrive, having climbed the slope in a record six minutes. My uncle was not far behind, and Smith walked conscientiously to the last, almost with his back to the front, though it was a sunny day, and the undead was not supposed to follow us. What was there to discover?

"At the very least, Rustle," his uncle muttered, answering an unasked question. "Or maybe something worse."

I can't imagine anything worse than Rustle. The only thing nastier than this undead is a gang of ghouls. They can run after you in the daytime, too. If Pierre had entered the failure, Rustle would have tagged him and, for the first time, might have let him go. But after a few days, the victim would have the unbearable urge to return here, preferably in the company of others. It works especially well on children. There have been times when ten or fifteen people - friends, acquaintances, parents - have followed the first victim into the monster's arms. Unlike Predator Echo, Rustle is agile, which means when darkness falls it will try to catch up with us.

"Back to base camp?" Geric suggested.

"No!" Smith interrupted him. "Let's go straight to Trunk Bay."

It's definitely a Rustle. He's also active since he wasn't there yesterday and now he is today. Now we'll be stuck in Trunk Bay for a month, the location of the NZAMIPS Regional Center and a special clinic for the victims of the otherworldly attack. Survived victims, of course.

"Will the quarantine days be paid for, sir?" My uncle inquired in a businesslike manner. "My nephew and I are definitely clean."

"Are you going to argue with Watchdogs, Mr. Ferro?" squinted Smith.

Uncle shrugged. Eh, my part-time job's ruined! I got paid for a week at best. Well, at least I got to see King's Island - not many people can boast of that. The boat passed the prison wharf, displaying flags and signaling, but no one came ashore. Smith ordered the boat to drop and climbed the signal mast to view the camp through binoculars.

"However, one must go there, sir!" Uncle approached the black mage as he came downstairs. "They can't not hear us."

Smith stared tensely into the jetty.

"However, we've only got two hours, sir," the uncle whined.

"I know! You're coming with me."

Their gazes met. Questions of the hierarchy were put aside, differences were forgotten, and they now had a common enemy. That reconciled the black magicians better than any sermon.

"And take my nephew - his eyes are better than mine!" my uncle generously offered.

I wasn't particularly happy about the offer, but I didn't object either. It would be hard for the two of them to survive, and a person who is insensitive to black magic couldn't go there. Smith was giving the last of his instructions:

"Whoever tries to follow us, tie him up and guard him. He is probably infected. Do not approach the shore, even if I call for you personally. When we return, give us a call; if we do not answer, do not let us get too close and go straight out to sea. After sunset, do not wait. Go to Trunk Bay, and demand help."

The boat captain nodded tensely while Uncle Gordon filled large flasks with seawater. Salt, not silver, was the most effective against the smaller undead; the larger ones would not be affected by simple rituals.

We were approaching the shore at a very slow speed - my uncle ruled while Smith looked out for any threats on land. Eventually, I was the first one to notice the strange thing on the jetty. Something was floundering in the water. A body? My uncle had brought the dinghy close to the point where the surf was hissing on the boulders, and the waves were tossing back and forth an unidentifiable white object. Smith realized what it was and swore. It was Aleh, alive but frozen to within an inch of his life. They dragged the poor man into the lifeboat (he could not move) and tried to revive him. One look was enough to see that he had been swimming for nothing. +++

+++ Aleh was in the water with his clothes on, his shoes still on, one sleeve of his shirt almost missing, and a long scratch on the white man's cheek. The theory of a trivial brawl could be immediately dismissed as fantastical - the contingent was not that kind. Aleh himself could not tell the cause of his distress, for he was shaking desperately and had time to bite his lips bloody; he only pointed in the direction of the prison compound and moved his hand up and down.

"The tower?" Uncle guessed at random.

White nodded, though it was more like a convulsion.

"Follow me!" Smith commanded and jumped onto the jetty.

I gave Aleh my jacket.

"Stay here! Don't go ashore; if we come ashore, give us a call. If we don't show up before dark, go to the boat, but call out to them first. They're all scared now."

The expedition camp was suspiciously quiet. No one was walking or talking. The generator was stalled again, and it gave rise to unpleasant thoughts. They took water canteens and tried to stay away from windows and doorways. We were moving in a wedge towards the interior of the prison compound, where there was a distinct sound of commotion.

The water tower was the only structure the prisoners had not completely rebuilt, probably because they did not intend to live there. In fact, the thing should have been called a water lake: the tower did not stick out in the middle of the courtyard but adjoined a rock, and on top of the structure, there was a huge reservoir, half-lying on man-made pillars. The reservoir was filled with water from streams flowing down from the mountains when it rained - the only source of fresh water on the island. +++

+++ If the builders had limited themselves to a simple dam, their descendants would not have had any problems, but the previous owners wanted to squeeze in a distribution system with pipes and dampers somewhere. Therefore, the ancient foundations were raised and reinforced, and the stairs and slabs were packed tightly inside the tower. The only light inside was an oil lantern, which gave the tower a dark and cozy hideaway for the undead. By the time the expedition arrived, the tower had been unlocked for a hundred years, and there were no repellent spells on it.

Now people were crowding the entrance to the water tower: the guard, the cook, and a student whose name I could not remember. Mrs. Clements, who was clutching at the jamb, prevented them from entering. The stupefied men had no sense to grab her arms or bend down and skip past her, but there were three of them, and she was alone.

"Stay strong, Rina," Mr. Smith exhaled.

"It's Rustle. He's all over the place!" Mrs. Clements wheezed back.

Uncle aimed a scoop of seawater from the flask and splashed it into the darkness. There was a sound like the rustling of many dry leaves falling. The lantern above the door flashed brighter, and the pressure of the bewitched weakened.

"Grab them!" Mr. Smith ordered, first pulling the burly guard out of the pile and shoving his arm behind his back. I concentrated on the cook - he was shorter.

Mrs. Clements, dingy and tired, dragged herself after us.

"I thought it was the end," she moaned. "They dragged me with them!"

"When did he have time to break so many?" panted his uncle (the student he'd got started to fight back). "We've only been here a week."

"Stupid-headed sheep!" Mr. Smith hissed through his teeth. "I told you, you can only take locals or blacks here, not these donkeys!"

Yes, only a small child in Krowhard would fall for Rustle's trick.

"Pointless bickering," Mrs. Clements sighed. "The keeper was gone before we arrived. It's just that there's more activity here than anywhere else. It had to be taken into account."

"Here's your keeper!" The uncle announced in a cheerful tone.

A man was standing on the bank between us and the jetty, dead for all intents and purposes. The lower half of his face was completely missing, the wound had dried and blackened, and there was no fresh blood in him. The softened tissue melted away from the bone, held in place only by the tension of the skin. Only on King's Island could a corpse be preserved like that; there were practically no insects here. Somehow I didn't want to know what the undead was capable of.

Mr. Smith squeezed the guard's neck and lowered the unconscious man to the ground:

"Rina, look out!"

The black mage stepped forward, blocking the dead man's path, and around his arms danced invisible threads, a lace of black silk. There it was, real magic! When the weave was complete, Mr. Smith tossed it forward like a fishing net as the dead keeper's body was instantly entangled and bound and then lowered. Nothing held him any longer, the bones tore through the skin, and a stinking, bubbling slurry crumbled to the ground.

"Move, move, move," Smith muttered, once again taking on the guard.

There was no need to persuade us. I was enriched by the sight of a black magician engaged in witchcraft, and the company enchanted by Rusle had sobered up a little, so it was easy to tie their hands and get them into the dinghy. By the time the boat had picked us up, the sun had just touched the water, and the King's Island was in deep shade. It was clear that the expedition was over.

Perhaps those who bet on the late King were right - he does know how to stand up for himself.

We left the cursed island without losing anyone but without gaining anything (unless you count life experience as gain). The men struck by the Rustlers were tied up tightly and locked in the hold. The crewmen making repellent signs in our direction. Uncle looked as if he'd personally rescued everyone and cleaned the King's face. Mrs. Clements cried on Mr. Smith's shoulder for the rest of the time to Trunk Bay (six hours full sail). He stroked her head and whispered something sweet and comforting in her ear. I never dared to ask what their relationship was - there are questions for which the black mage does not hesitate to punch anyone in the eye.

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