bitari: переводы

→They looked at me like they thought I was kidding and didn’t really appreciate the seriousness of the situation. Then they looked at each other and shrugged. “Okay, pal,” the older one said. “We’ll squeeze him in.” The spike-haired paramedic shook his head, but he turned and opened the back door of the ambulance again and began pulling out the gurney.

→It was a very good question for someone in his profession to ask, but the only answers that occurred to me seemed a little flippant, so I just said, “I think you may want heavy sedation, too.”

→“What kind of condition is he in?” the spike-haired one asked me.

→I hurried over to where they were just closing the back doors of the ambulance. “Do you have room for one more?” I asked. “He won’t take up a lot of space, but he’ll need heavy sedation.”

→“Get the paramedics,” Doakes said.

→Doakes kept looking at it, but he grunted once and nodded at the side of the neck. “Tattoo. It’s Frank.” He grunted again, leaning forward and flicking a small piece of notepaper taped to the bench. I leaned in for a look: in the same spidery hand I had seen before Dr. Danco had written HONOR.

→“How can you tell?” I asked. Because really, you would think that all former humans in this condition would be awfully hard to tell apart. The only distinguishing mark I could see was forehead wrinkles.

→Doakes nodded. “Frank Aubrey,” he said.

→“You recognize this one?” I asked.

→Doakes was crouched over it, looking down at the remainder of its face with an intense lack of expression. “Frank,” he said, and the thing rolled its eyes to him. The yowling paused for just a moment, and then resumed on a higher note, keening with a new agony that seemed to be begging for something.

→It was strapped to a backless car seat that had been turned sideways, so it ran the length of the interior. The eyes in their lidless sockets were rolling wildly back and forth, up and down, and the lipless, toothless mouth was frozen into a round O and it was squirming the way a baby squirms, but without arms and legs it couldn’t manage any significant movement.

→By the time I caught up with Doakes he already had the rear door open and I heard the mewling noise coming from inside. It really didn’t sound quite so much like a dog this time, or maybe I was just getting used to it. It was a slightly higher pitch than before, and a little bit choppier, more of a shrill gurgle than a yodel, but still recognizable as the call of one of the living dead.

→SERGEANT DOAKES APPARENTLY FORGOT HE WAS SUPPOSED to be following me, because he beat me to the van by a good twenty yards. Of course he had the very large advantage of having both shoes, but still, he moved quite well. The van was run up on the sidewalk in front of a pale orange house surrounded by a coral-rock wall. The front bumper had thumped a rock corner post and toppled it, and the rear of the vehicle was skewed around to face the street so we could see the bright yellow of the Choose Life license plate.

→Someone Just Like Me.

→Someone Just Like Me.

→I had a son.

→It was a totally unthinkable thing to think. A ridiculous thought, but— All the pieces were there. It made perfect, poetic sense.

→Could it be? I thought again about the way he had put the knife so happily into his fish. I thought about his strange reaction to the neighbor’s missing dog—much like mine when I had been asked as a boy about a neighborhood dog I had taken and experimented with. And I remembered that he, too, had gone through a traumatic event like I had, when his biological father had attacked him and his sister in a terrifying drug-induced rage and beat them with a chair.

→Isn’t it odd what we think about when we’re dying? The car had settled onto its flattened roof, moving with no more than a gentle rocking now and completely filled with water so thick and mucky that I could not have seen a flare gun firing from the end of my nose. And yet I could see Cody perfectly clearly, more clearly now than the last time we had been in the same room together; and standing behind this sharp image of his small form towered a gigantic dark shadow, a black shape with no features that somehow seemed to be laughing.

→Slow down, Dexter. Where did that thought come from? Rhetorical question, of course, and I did not need the low rumble of amusement from my old interior friend to give me the answer. But with his prompting I put together a few scattered pieces into half a puzzle and realized that Cody—