Готовый перевод Ведомый / Follower: Интерлюдия: «Министерство не твоих собачьих дел»

Interlude: "The Ministry of None of Your Fucking Business"
Interlude: "The Ministry of None of Your Dog's Business"

* * *

Some kind of absolutely savage madness was happening in the city, bordering on no less savage fucking hell, and sometimes even noticeably going beyond it. This thought had been haunting Andrei Prokhorov for several weeks, a once young, once promising police captain. The city was already experiencing not even a crisis, but some kind of infernal horror, next to which the usual domestic murders, robberies, rapes and arson of businesses by competitors seemed like some kind of childish nonsense. Corpses, missing people, missing people found and just completely incomprehensible shit was happening everywhere, from decent neighborhoods and business centers to remote garage cooperatives and half-abandoned enterprises. A real nightmare was happening, because of which Andrei and his comrades were quickly drinking themselves... or simply ran out.

As Zhorik ran out, by hanged himself in his own office. He complained for three days that people were whispering nasty things to him from under the floorboards at home. When they broke into his apartment, it turned out that his wife had hanged herself even earlier, three days earlier, judging by the state of her body. His five-year-old daughter and three-month-old son simply disappeared from the apartment, no traces at all. They were developing a version with kidnapping and blackmail, but no one believed it, to be honest, and the first non-believer was Andrey himself. What children's whispers coming from under the floorboards, calling to play hide-and-seek down there, down there, he personally heard. He ran out of there faster than his hoarse scream, and then managed sent people to tear apart that fucking floor, looking for either some kind of speaker or Verochka, the daughter of the colleague who hanged himself, really hiding under the floor.

Rafik didn't hang himself. He just disappeared. An old and crazy granny called him in about a suspicious noise in the basement, tearfully begging a young lieutenant to take a look, saying she was scared. He went, losing a coin toss to his partner, then disappeared. They found neither a body nor a trace, only a few spent cartridges, despite the fact that the other swore that he hadn't heard any shots. In another situation, they wouldn't have gone into the basement or responded to the call at all, but the orders from above were so strict. And they brought so many bosses from the capital to the city that you couldn't even fart. He would have hated them with a vengeance now, but he knew that the newcomers hadn't managed without losses either, both strange and terrible. They had suffered so much that they had been sent reinforcements twice, and there weren't many more at all.

Someone was torn to pieces by dogs, who were hunting on the outskirts of the city without any embellishment, hunting people and even those who tried to shoot them. The last chewed-up boy was found with empty magazines for the "AKS-74U" he was given, in a whole pool of blood and fur. Well, they found what was left of the man and the dogs he killed before his death, and the forensic experts swore in their diplomas that such bones as those left from dog corpses simply could not be found in dogs, no way, it was anatomically unrealistic. Another of the new guys went to the psychiatric hospital because, according to him, he saw how his partner and the woman talking to him were dragged into the sky by a tentacle woven from snow and swirls of air. They found only one woman's shoe, and that one was two yards from the scene of the crime, solely because it fell on the head of some passerby.

People in high ranks and expensive suits were kneading buns, intending to carry out the evacuation, and ordinary people, driven by primordial horror, were leaving the city as if from a plague zone. The streets were empty, store shelves were empty, passers-by could not be driven out into the streets, and most of the businesses had already closed for temporary isolation. The authorities could not cope, nor could their colleagues, driven and driven into the city, cope, not only from the capital but everywhere. There were rumors that any day now, not new units of the police, the Russian Guard, or soldiers would enter the city, but fully equipped tank columns. There were rumors that at the very top, all over the globe, they had already almost officially, albeit not publicly, acknowledged what Andrei himself had learned much earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_Russia

Magic has come into the world.

The problem was that it was so fabulous that it made you cry. It was in the spirit of old unedited fairy tales, like the ones he had once foolishly read as a child. Where girls were forced to dance in hot boots, cannibals ate children, and blood poured more abundantly than in the last seasons of Rome or Game of Thrones. Andrei himself couldn't believe he believed such nonsense, but he had seen it, he had seen it! He had seen the corpse of a dog shot with a machine gun, which was the size of a good calf, and instead of a face had something like an ugly face. He saw a man who put the FSS officers who came to tie him up in coffins, naturally teleporting from place to place. When he ran past him, wounded and almost falling down, Andrei spat on all possible penalties, pretending to be unconscious. He saw that kid, too, vaguely familiar, for his father wore the epaulettes of a lieutenant colonel in one of the neighboring precincts, the kind of kid who threw fucking green lightning bolts from his hands. He saw the tape of the storming of an underground drug house, where drug addicts had fused into a howling and screaming mass of limbs and mouths, successfully devouring part of the storming group. He saw autopsy reports and witness interviews, saw, heard, and knew too much, so much that he wanted to get drunk and forget himself in an alcoholic coma.

Or really shoot yourself.

Things should have gotten easier now. Fresh forces, special forces, and regular soldiers with heavy and automatic weapons are already in the city, deploying and even acting. And he, for example, was assigned as an observer and consultant, knowing the city and its outskirts, the old industrial zone, sometimes covered in snow above the windows of the first floors. The utility workers, it seems, have completely abandoned this part of the city, clearing roads only in the center and residential areas. The guys who arrived, it seems, recently, were tough, pompous, and all that, but no longer sloppy. They realized where they ended up. A couple of them went out for a beer yesterday, and only one was found, partially, the lower part of it, along with two boxes of beer cans. The beer cans, characteristically, were completely empty, despite the fact that none of them were opened, remaining hermetically sealed.

Dressed in armor and winter uniform, armed to the teeth, angry, and having managed to believe everything that Andrey told them. They approached their task as they were supposed to approach a combat mission. They no longer allowed themselves to laugh at the goal, despite the fact that they were brought to fight with the proliferating stray dogs. With what had once been stray dogs. Impressed by the atmosphere of their town, the specialists did not grimace, listening to the stories of a couple of dog hunters who had survived their hunt, whom they had lured into an ambush and long, with pleasure, driven through empty courtyards. And after all, there were initially more than ten of them, not two.

"They don't eat poison, none at all, they're not afraid of noise, flashes, or the stench of repellent, and they're smart, really smart." Said a very young guy who had become one-eyed and had lost both legs, as well as some of his fingers. "I swear, they acted more intelligently than we did, they distracted attention, sacrificed the weakest of the pack as bait, and then... and then they ate us."

Many of them still had the ineradicable skepticism of a hardened materialist in their eyes, but not Andrei, who just two hours ago had laid out on the table the protocols from the site where the remains of the hunters had been found. And many other reports on the discovery of remains, including children's remains. The junior school nearby is already closed, but nothing will bring back the lives of a whole class of kids who decided to run away from class and play snowballs. But the salaries and positions of responsible persons, who have been silencing the tragedy until now, could still be saved. So they did. The children were not even playing in the industrial zone, on its outskirts, but the dogs have long since lost all fear. But the people had lost all fear. Fear became their constant companion. Fear and the cold penetrating the whole nature, cold and as if penetrating into the bones, driving them crazy, taking away warmth even from those who were sitting almost with their asses in the fire.

The specialists heard everyone. A few hunters, quickly found and recruited by order of the big bosses, were also included in the groups, albeit on a “do as you're told” basis. The grumbling of the commanders, who did not want to see outsiders and personnel not trained in common tactics in the squads used to each other, was suppressed by direct and loud orders. Even if those orders were quite stupid for the soldiers who had not had time to get accustomed to the coherence. And the war machine moved, bringing out the fighters dressed in white to the mortal combat. They were serious, but did not fully believe in that seriousness; they thought they would be dealing with dogs, only big and evil, mutated and sinister. But dogs. Andrei was sitting in the middle of the temporary headquarters in the territory of the pipe-rolling plant, next to Lieutenant Colonel Tochkin, who was in overall command. He sat wrapped in several layers of warm clothes, clutching in his hands a large cup with hot, scalding coffee.

Andrey was cold.

Shots, bursts, and singles, from all sides at once, clearly indicated that the battle had already begun. Tochkin's short and collected commands into the radio, interspersed with capacious obscenities, seemed to remain somewhere in the background. Someone complained about the snowstorm, because of which it was impossible to raise the birds with cameras, someone dryly wrote down the contact coordinates and put a dot on the city map, covered with a bunch of notes.

But Andrey was cold.

So cold...

* * *

A group of fighters uses thermal imagers, tracking the movement of dogs, but it does not look like a fun shooting. It does not look like anything at all. The creatures do not just see them perfectly in the blizzard. No. They maneuver, hide, use the folds of the terrain, and simply demonstrate a level of skill in tactical thinking that they have not seen from colleagues in the military craft. The creatures are mortal. Bes saw their blood and corpses, huge, impossibly healthy for simple mongrels, some distorted, crumpled, not even being dogs. Against their background, Klim Fyodorov Bespalov, callsign Bes, understood that it was the creatures that were much more like hellish demons than any person, no matter how deadly he was.

The squad presses and pursues the creatures, but they don't run away. They circle around, hiding behind garages, buildings, and dense fences, hiding in the storm that is rising again. In which their mechanical-electronic eyes begin to malfunction. Single shots and stingy bursts pierce the darkness over and over again, and from the darkness there is an angry whine that marks the hits, and silence. The creatures don't growl or bark. They don't behave like dogs at all, and Bes, willingly or unwillingly, begins to recognize a long-understood truth that he had been afraid to realize. They are not dogs at all. The group shoots back and drives, drives the creatures to the positions of Granit and Kochet, who have already taken a convenient position to mow down a herd of infernal hounds with the fire of a couple of MGs. And, as it seemed to Bes, this comparison would have to be tested very soon.

They shoot, they charge and drive and drive and drive and drive the enemy, it's getting easier and easier to see dogs - fucking dogs! - as the enemy rather than some kind of joke, because the joke doesn't come out funny. The coordinated actions of a team of experienced fighters and the fact that the critters are afraid of gunfire, afraid of their own demise, lead the entire pack to slide into a passageway between two half-abandoned workshops. As if they were usually guarded by some men, so that the Union's legacy would not be torn apart for scrap by all sorts of hooligans, but those guards have disappeared. Someone didn't come to work, someone just disappeared; only brown stains on the snow were found. They were told about it, explained the danger of the coming collision, but at first they didn't believe it, at first they laughed and thought that they were being tricked, like beginners. And, of course, it is better to be shaken than to laugh and all that.

The radios were wheezing, the connection was getting worse, the blizzard was getting stronger, and the dogs seemed to pay no attention to what was happening at all, as if they saw through the darkness and snow, saw through it. The group shot three of them at once before they could slip into the passage, and then rushed after them, trying to drive the silent freaks out under the bullets of the ambush group. And not at once did they realize that the radios were silent. They did not at once realize that the eyepieces of thermal imaging cameras and useless in the blizzard nightlights were malfunctioning not at some of them, but at all of them. Bes had been through a lot of hot spots, had experience of confronting various fans of guerrilla and ambush tactics, that's why he understands, not with his eyes and ears, but with his gut and heartfelt despair, that it was not them who drove the dogs, but dogs lured them. He yells, orders to take off the thermal visors and stand in a circle, and from the windows, glazed and dark, the first dogs come out of the halo of glass shards, and these dogs are in much greater numbers than were seen at first.

The panes of glass shattered, flying out with the frames, letting the huge carcasses of dogs into the battle, which did not even growl, whine, bark, only breathed heavily, and rushed forward. My God, how big they are. The shots sound a staccato, they all switch from single to full automatic, trying not to let them get close, trying to kill them before they die. The creatures fall, one by one - a fifth, a sixth, a seventh. The eighth one knocks the Snifter down with the whole weight of its body, covers the face of the terrified gunman with its jaws and simply chews it off with the bones, as if it had bitten off a soft pie, not a human skull. Nearby Repa gurgles with his throat torn out, Mishka, screaming in terror, is dragged by the leg into the darkness, and the other one lies on the snow, clearly visible in the flashes of muzzle flame.

Bes manages to grab the grenade on his belt. He remembers the order not to use explosives within the city limits, not to turn the hunt for strange non-dogs into a real massacre, otherwise the explosion craters will harm public peace, but the dogs started the massacre first. He manages to grab the grenade, but doesn’t have time to do anything else. An unbearably heavy carcass hits him in the back, silently and without making a sound, sneaking up on Bes, and he stops feeling his legs and his whole body below the waist. The thought of whether he will be given a pension, as someone who received a disability during the military operations, or simply “during his service”, is somehow distantly racing through his head. This thought occupies his mind very much, strongly enough that he does not scream in horror right away, but only five seconds later, when he realizes that dogs have begun to slowly devour his legs, which do not feel anything.

* * *

The group with the call sign ‘Granit’ had settled down smartly and comfortably, because their immediate commander was a Siberian by birth and a great expert in hunting all kinds of animals, including predatory ones. Of course, they tried to charge him with poaching, but everybody knows everybody, everybody knows how to negotiate, but now his knowledge came in handy. It was like a wolf hunt, but instead of Taiga, it was a stone jungle. They had taken a good point, in a blind blind alley, with only a smooth brick wall behind their backs and on the sides, but they could fire at a large part of the industrial zone, taking advantage of the elevation and complete desertion. If you wanted to hit a civilian, you couldn't find anyone to shoot at. When communication suddenly, as if by magic, went down, the storm and blizzard intensified by an order of magnitude, threatening to blow away the tent covering and maskset from their fortified point, and then all electronics began to malfunction, it became clear to everyone that the situation had not gone according to plan.

They tried to shout over the radios and began to shoot at the flickering figures in the cone of vision, which had less and less canine features and more and more something infernal. Granite fought well, fought off the first trial and full-fledged attack, explaining to the cannibal dogs that great speed and survivability multiplied by a complete lack of self-preservation would not help in a battle against these small lead balls, accelerated to fucking speeds. And then a piece of brick fell on Odd's helmeted head. It was small, literally the size of a little finger, and it rang in his head, for it fell from above, so it was hard not to feel the landing of the debris. The old soldier felt the hair on his head stand on end, and warm liquid was about to pour into his trousers.

Because try not to shit your pants in horror, when above your head, just three metres away from you, there are huge dogs the size of calves, clawing at the brick wall with their misshapen paws. Hanging like spiders and staring straight into your soul, silent and without a growl. He has time to yell, to warn Granite, to turn his submachine gun, and even start shooting. And then all these dogs, and there were at least a dozen of them on the wall, like flies on stale meat, abruptly began to obey the heartless gravity, collapsing into a position closed from any attack of ordinary beasts, and began to chew uncomplicatedly on people screaming in pain. Their walkie-talkies are only rustling and static, but it seems as if a mercilessly cold wind is howling from there too, making the blood freeze on the snow in seconds.

* * *

The soldiers were all so proud of themselves when they went into battle, like heroes, heroes from fairy tales, and judging by the shots coming out, there was a real battle. Police Captain Ivanov was a man of knowledge, and, therefore, he was sincerely glad that he was not there now, not helping the bastards who had come to the city to navigate in the unfamiliar labyrinths of the industrial zone, but here, in the almost cosy cordon. People from here were almost all taken out and evacuated, and those who were not taken out, left on their own. There are still traces of normal life in the downtown and sleeping areas, but the outskirts just look extinct. Here they were the first to sense a complete fuck-up and the first to start getting away from the hell that was going on. Ivanov himself would have left, but he's standing there fucking guarding the civilian population, mentally listing exactly where he's seen the population, the oath, and the duty. For the salary he gets, you don't have to protect the country, you have to harm it a little bit!

That doesn't mean he's relaxed, no, no shit, no shit! The bulky beer belly is tightly stretched on the body armour, the submachine gun on his belly is also loaded and cocked, the powerful torch shines through the snow drifts, looking for the creeping scum of the man-eating animals. And he parked the service truck in such a way that he could not approach from the back, and his partner, though young and early and a lieutenant in general, but smart, so that the engine did not stop and was ready to rush to hell at any moment. Maybe even to rush off without waiting for Ivanov to get into the car. The only question is where to go. The snowfall was so heavy that he couldn't see a thing, and even the road was no longer visible. And it was so cold that coffee in a thermos didn't help, not even adding good Armenian cognac to that coffee in a ratio of one to one, which was pleasant to the heart!

And the shots kept on going, firing so loudly that even through the blizzard, you could hear them. Somehow, the honourable police officer doubted that the shooting of even the most vicious dogs would require such an expenditure of ammunition, such a frantic, choking, and gradually silencing fire. Well, either they also know how to write off their surplus, and prefer to empty the magazine first, reload, and only then check if the creature is alive with a couple more test shots. What a fucking creepy mess his hometown was in! How did it happen that in a couple of months, a cosy and quite normal, if you didn't wander around the back alleys at night, place had turned into some kind of war zone? And it used to be scary, too, which was just completely fucked up! Ivanov still remembered how his crying ex called him at night, begging him to take her and the child anywhere but away from the flat. Not from him, which also made his wife an ex.

Then, swearing and spitting with venom, he told her everything he thought about her, the unfaithful whore, but he went. Still, though a bitch, but the man just could not imagine what exactly could make the proud bitch call first and almost beg on her knees, albeit through the phone. It turned out that there was something like that. It turned out that he'd been wrong to think that she was completely fucked up and needed to call a mental hospital. He put her and the kid, dressed in PJs, in the car, turned on the heater, and went to pick up his things, despite the screams of his ex, whom he was seriously going to drag to a psychiatrist. That's retarded. Claiming a soft fucking toy is trying to kill them! Maybe she had a psychosis because of the divorce, so she saw the big teddy bear he gave her as a gift as some kind of monster?

That's what he thought until he walked into the unlocked flat and saw the bear standing in the middle of the bedroom doorway. Standing fucking there. Standing like a human being, and he could have sworn that the abomination turned its head in his direction. Anyway, he didn't take her to the psychiatrist, he took her home, gave her some clothes and things for the first time, and in the morning he took her to the station. Let her go to her parents, you fucking slut. He still believed for a while that he had also imagined it, that the bitch had tuned him up, that he himself had freaked out and seen a delirious glitch. But then all the neighbours of his girlfriend's stairwell had disappeared somewhere? He checked it on purpose, first to calm his nerves and then not to go crazy. Just silence, two families of newlyweds and an old single grandfather disappeared without a trace. All these oddities continued, began to expand, and now Ivanov has no doubt that that night he escaped something terrible, something deadly.

Like now, for example – only now you can’t avoid it.

However, he now has a machine gun and a service pistol with him, and not just a swear word, and therefore, seeing some suspicious shadows in the night, he immediately knocks on the roof of the service car, bringing the machine gun into combat position and pointing it into the darkness. Only a moment later, the darkness is illuminated by a flashlight, illuminating two dogs slowly and cautiously approaching through the snowstorm. Enormous, angry, bearing some kind of irregular muzzles in an evil grin, they clearly did not come to fawn at his feet. Ivanov's police reflexes involuntarily turned on, and, instead of an instant shot, he began to speak, trying either to intimidate or reason.

"E suka blyah! Stand the fuck up, stand up, get down, put your hands on your heads, for fuck's sake!" The delusional and contradictory order came out of his mouth a second before the shot was fired, but the shot was delayed by the fact that the dogs reacted to the order, which finally knocked Ivanov out of his rut and the remnants of his materialistic worldview. "Holy shit!"

The dogs stood up.

They silently stood up on their hind legs, like people, only not people, their bodies were not human, their proportions, everything was inhuman! Yes, fuck, they didn’t even look like typical werewolves from movies, no! Just dogs with elusively irregular muzzles, which stood up on their hind legs. Like people. Almost like a human, but not human. Only some kind of strangled wheeze and squeak escaped from Ivanov’s throat, and his body was seized by an irresistible spasm of pure horror, the primordial fear of a caveman before the unknown. He still tried to force himself to shoot, but realized that he simply could not move a finger. And one of the dogs took a leisurely, uneven, and staggering step towards him and opened its mouth, making the first sound heard from them:

"Woof. Woof. Woof." It wasn’t a dog’s bark, it was words, as if a person had read out the written “woof” without even trying to make it sound like the animal’s original sound. "Woof. Woof. Woof."

The lieutenant saves the situation by simply honking the horn and yelling. Ivanov reflexively jerks and pulls the trigger all the way, obeying some primal instinct. Almost nothing was stored in his mind, which had almost fallen apart from insane horror. He sort of shot, sort of even knocked down one of the dogs, emptying a full magazine into it. It seems like Shurik shot from the window of the paddy wagon, knocking down the second creature a step away from Ivanov, which almost knocked out the car window. It seems like the young man helped him get into the car and stepped on the gas, driving him away from this hell through the snow, the blizzard, the missing communication, and the incessant cannonade of shots.

Ivanov remembered it poorly and was very glad about it, he was glad for every second of his life. Without waiting for the morning, throwing the machine gun he was given right on the couch of his apartment, throwing his service weapon and uniform there too, he drove the car away from the city. Almost without things, with a minimum of cash, having thrown away his phone to hell, the man was leaving for a new life. Far away from here, far away from this snowy Hell, far away from the madness that did not want to let go of the hysterically giggling and rolling into ringing laughter captain even now.

Because of his laughter, he missed the moment when the car in the darkness and snowfall went off the road, fell onto the side of the road, and miraculously did not flip over, but damaged a wheel and bent the hood. Because of the laughter, which could not die down, he did not notice that a staggering human figure came out of the snowstorm into the light of the headlights. He laughed when the figure approached the bumper of the car, laughed when it put an icy palm to the windshield, laughed when the glass began to cover with frost, when the temperature dropped, dropping to bitter frost in seconds, laughed when the last breath froze on his lips, turning Ivanov into a frozen statue. In whose eye sockets two small ice floes sparkled, shining with the lights of the Aurora Borealis.

* * *

The headquarters is noisy and stuffy, despite the frost, the freezing cold in Andrey's body and soul, and the growing fear. The skills of an armchair general were no longer needed to realize that the dog hunt had not gone according to plan, and it was not only because the connection had suddenly gone out, but also because of the frantic and gradually dying down shooting. The hunting groups were crushing one after another, and the headquarters itself was saved only by the fact that there were enough guards around it, because there were a lot of important officers and big shots here. Such people would not leave themselves without protection, so this security could now admire how the authorities and the command were increasingly slipping into hysterics. Especially after the first shots were heard right behind the wall, next to the building that had been converted into headquarters.

They dragged the first wounded man into a relatively warm room, bloody and covered in snow that did not melt even in the warmth, because all the warmth was blown away by one stream of icy draft. The order to use grenades sounded, and their explosions sounded deafeningly in his head and ears, while Andrei lazily and calmly sipped coffee. After all, he was told to sit and not interfere, no new order was given, so he drinks, slurps hot coffee, dreaming of pouring even hotter alcohol into it. He drinks, but does not warm up, only trembles more and more; the shouts of the no longer cool and pompous specialists from some secret special forces unit are getting louder. Nothing matters to him anymore, everything has cooled down so much in him that he himself seems like a corpse. Just for some reason, still moving, breathing, and thinking about the vicissitudes of the villainous fate.

The wounded soldier is moving a little, trying to fix or remove the tourniquets that have been put on himself, clumsily pulling off his bulletproof vest. The man who runs in for a fresh box of machine gun ammunition only tells Lyokha to lie down, they barely pulled him out anyway. They almost dragged him into the darkness by two particularly vicious dogs. Lyokha only mutters something, indistinctly and hoarsely, inaudible in the pops of gunfire. Andrey finishes another cup of coffee and presses the button on the coffee maker, hoping to brew another one, hoping to have time to brew it. Instead of the usual hum felt by touching the warm surface of the machine, and not by the ears, there is only the blinking of lights and a squeak, indistinguishable in the surrounding cacophony. The beans are gone. Andrey thinks about whether he should look into the nightstands and look for fresh beans, but he understands that he will run out much earlier.

He understands, looking into the eyes of Lyokha, who has managed to sit down with his back against the wall. His face, covered in blood and dirt, melted snow that got stuck in his "tactical beard", seems unnaturally twisted. And smiling, smiling with a completely wrong smile. A wrong smile. Andrey himself does not know why he reaches for his service pistol, but his movement is noticed by one of the commanders, who unsuccessfully yells into the radio. He notices and then turns his gaze to the smiling Lyokha. And, characteristically, he shouted and pulled up precisely his subordinate, and not Andrey, who was panicking for some unknown reason.

"Lyokha, fucking hell, stop smiling, or did they inject you with too much!?" He yells, shouting over the new melody of machine gun fire. "What's wrong with your mug, Lyokha? Lyokha!?"

But Lyokha smiled wider, even wider, so wide that the cheeks on his face simply burst, like rubber that had been pulled tight in the cold. They burst, but there was no blood; it was just that from under those cheeks overgrown with a neat beard, a very sloppy stubble emerged, and it wasn’t stubble at all, but fur. And it wasn’t Lyokha’s face that burst, if you look closely, but bloody skin that had been torn off alive, like in the fairy tale about Little Red Riding Hood. And it wasn’t Lyokha who was smiling in the middle of the headquarters with a smile with hundreds of sharp teeth, a mouth that anatomically couldn’t exist on a head of that size. Andrei wasn’t even surprised. He wasn’t scared, it was just that all his fear froze, froze, and died of frostbite. Therefore, there was nothing left to be afraid of.

And no one.

Besides him, two more managed to react. They were combat officers after all. They had if not experience, then beastly intuition, but the first shots were replaced by screams of pain and agony. The creature slipped out of the removed skin, and Andrei was even surprised. It turns out he could still be surprised. That surprise had not frozen. How was it possible to miss it? How was it possible not to notice these torn and bloody edges of the skin, the carelessly thrown clothes on top of that skin, how was it possible to miss the completely inhuman proportions of the body, how, how, how? The creature slipped out of the removed skin, starting to tear and tear, this creature was a dog, a damn dog, without normal arms and legs, but still impossibly fast, too sharp.

Machine guns are firing frantically behind the wall, because the creatures have waited for the attack from within to attack from the outside as well. The creature is rushing around in the confined space, blood is pouring out, and Andrei, somehow, indifferently and calmly, continues to shoot. The creature does not dodge, but it seems to be covered by a transparent haze of incomprehensible distortion, from which both bullets and touches flow, and only blood, only human blood, is absorbed into the fur, feeding this haze. Andrei does not think, is not afraid, he is simply and unpretentiously cold, he wants all this to finally stop. Without thinking, pondering, or trying to understand, he obeys the voice of his intuition and steps forward, right under the fangs of the creature. He steps, simultaneously blocking the barrel of his service weapon with his palm, firing the last bullet right through his flesh.

The creature's blow is incredibly powerful, as if a car had crashed into him, but there is no second blow or anything else after the first, only a sluggish twitching of the already dead carcass. The bullet that flew through the palm hit it right in the eye. If he wanted to repeat it, he couldn't! The pain felt somehow distant, as if it wasn't happening to him, which was the effect of either a surge of adrenaline or the cold that penetrated him all over. There was panic all around, screams, cries of the wounded and dying, but it seemed that now people were fighting back and the military, armed and dangerous, moving straight from the headquarters, defending their lives, were turning the tide. Even the most important big shot would try very hard for the common cause if his life depended on it, and it did.

Andrei had already lost a lot of blood gushing from his shot wrist, was very tired, and had not slept for too long, so at first it seemed to him that he was simply seeing hallucinations. Sparkling with an incomprehensible and unfamiliar, never-before-seen color, vaguely resembling turquoise, the ball appears right above his head, flies out of the flesh of the killed dog as a ghostly haze. Andrei does not know what exactly he is doing or why. He just wants not to be so cold, and inside the ball, a spark of true and so desired warmth pulsates. Slightly closing his eyes and already losing consciousness, Andrei Prokhorov stretches out his shot-through palm and touches the sparkling ball directly with an open wound.

And, for the first time in many days, he feels warm.

* * *

Внимание! Этот перевод, возможно, ещё не готов.
Его статус: идёт перевод

Переведено на Нотабеноиде
http://notabenoid.org/book/87876/586539

Переводчики: Camrad_RIP