Just as the last one rested, another crowd, this time a hundred or two snouts, came around the corner.
- Let's get the f*ck out of here," I commanded the golem.
I walked back home the other way and came across an UAZ-powered ambulance, splattered with fresh blood and badly battered. At the wheel, leaning back in the seat, sat an elderly man in a blue overalls.
- Hey!" I slowly walked over to his side and tapped my finger on the window. - Man!
Zero attention, and there's no way to open the door because it's locked from the inside. By the way, you can see the dried bloody streaks from your fingers on the glass.
- Smash, but gently, a tenth of the force hit, - I ordered golem.
He hammered the handle of the sledgehammer into the glass, showering shiny little crumbs on the driver, who did not even move. Why, I found out ten seconds later, when I unlocked and unlocked the door. Simply put, he was dead. There was a puddle of blood under the man, and the entire seat was soaked in it, like a dishwashing sponge with Fae foam, and the carpet was as full of it as a basin. There was a huge gaping wound in her right side, which caused the driver to bleed out. There was a torn pack of bandages nearby, but he had no time to use them. However, I don't think such a hole could be bandaged. There was no one else in the car besides the man at the wheel of the loaf.
At my order, the golem took the body from behind the wheel and laid it on the lawn under the trees. It's unlikely that someone would bury him, and most likely he would end up in the stomachs of zombies, but not to leave directly on the roadway, and myself to bury ... well, I do not have time for it, no, that's all.
The idea of privatizing the car occurred to me as soon as I saw the UAZ. Its appearance was such that it is unlikely that the driver came to this park on a call. So, I would scare the guy, maybe I would take him home, and hell, the car was mine. Most likely, he was running away from the center, where a bacchanalia of the living dead and someone else, who ripped a piece of meat from his ribs, because human fingers, even dead ones, can not do that.
It wasn't the right thing to do, but my gut told me that the time for fear of punishment for breaking the law was over, and now I had to get out of the city by any means necessary. The rest of us would be killed.
Because of the car, I had to make a detour to get through the railway crossing. The railroad divided my town into new and old parts, and the latter, where I lived, consisted of ninety percent private sector and was a quarter of the size of the whole town.
Outside my house, a neighbor's Niva was hanging out in front of my house. When I pulled up to my gate and climbed out from behind the wheel, his eyes widened to the size of anime characters.
- Ale-ex ? - he stretched out. - What's that?
- Waved without looking at the bike, - I answered. - Lumberjack, out you go, into the house.
There were more people in the street, especially women and children. When I saw a fat granny with a stick rushing over to me, she was waddling over like a duck in her step, I quickly rushed to my place and bolted the gate.
Ugh, I made it in time, I don't want to waste time with explanations, explanations, and other verbal nonsense.
- Alex! - I heard a noise from the other side of the fence, which, thank God, was made of profiled sheeting and therefore protected me from prying eyes.
I did not answer, so instead I went into the house, where I began to gather things and food. I tied everything into knots and ordered the woodcutter to pull it to the gate. There was a lot of stuff, but to leave even socks with a hole in the heel was a pity. They can be darned, but who will sew new ones? There was no telling how our life would go on. If the dead rise up and replenish their army, I don't envy the fate of the living. The mere living, let me be clear. Somewhere there must be mages like me, able to cope with the invasion of such terrible enemies.
Things, bedding, dishes, tools, curtains, shoes, all sorts of shampoos and gels and soaps and washcloths-I took everything!
The grannies behind my gate got tired of straining their voices, and someone (I even know who, there's an old hanger) knocked on the gate with a stick.
- Alex!
- Stop crumpling my iron! - I yelled from the back of the fence, and in a heartbeat, to release his anger, I kicked the wicket. I already feel as it is, that only under the dropper to lie, and here this bunch of gossipy moss-raised gathered at the door.
They were silent on the other side.
When all the knots were folded, I unlocked the lock and went outside.
- Alex, what is it? - Granny poked at car with her stick.
- The car, - I muttered. - Stand aside, please, I have to get to it. Stand aside!
Crowd gathered huge, I think half of the women's part of the street, which is about forty people. And all this mass blocked my way. At my shouting someone jerked frightened, but most of it did not even scratch. So, well, well.
- Lumberjack, take off your clothes and show yourself.
Everyone gasped when they saw my magical protector, and my heart bled as he snagged his cloak on some protruding part of his body and ripped out a huge chunk with a crunch. I've only got one such set of OZK, and that was it. The golem had torn my stockings earlier, trampled them with its iron legs.
- Get out of my way, or the robot will crush you. I'm not kidding, I threatened.
After the threat the surrounding people parted, a dozen people slowly ran home, a few moved about fifteen meters away and watched me from the side.
- Alex, Granny asked ingratiatingly, so what is going on around here, where did you get that skunk?
- And where are you packing? - Marie, a thirty-five-year-old woman, owner of two stalls in the old part of the city, spoke up.
- And where did the car come from, why is it so beaten up and covered in blood? - I asked my neighbor, still walking on the street with a gun, but at least he was wearing washed camouflage pants and sneakers.
I turned to the crowd, pondering for a few seconds what to tell them. If the truth, they'd take me for a lunatic, but lying... and though the Tin Man is right in front of their eyes. If they don't believe him, that's their misfortune.
- The town's in trouble. There's some nasty stuff coming from the sewage treatment plant or the service station that's turning people into zombies. I was out scouting, wanting to see what the shots were from afar, but I ran into a crowd of two hundred dead people. I found the car empty, but covered in blood, maybe the doctors had been called to the scene, and there the converts had bitten them, after which they drove off, became zombies themselves and went off to look for the living. It was more or less quiet in the Pushkin Square district, but it was full of looters, people sat in their apartments and looked out of the windows at the streets. It seems to be the same in Factory Zone, but I was not there, I drove down Workers Lane to the crossing and here. I'm going to leave the city for Lapriisk and I advise you to do the same, because the number of zombies is growing by the hour. It's a robot, I accidentally subdued it myself, I found a strange glowing plate that looked like a piece of microchip, and it absorbed itself into my body, here," I turned my shirt collar, showing the purple bruise that was left by the stone, "this thing sits here. I wanted to put it in the inside pocket of my jacket, but I snagged the skin, because my hands were shaking from everything I saw and... you see the result. Immediately after that, out of some junk came this creature, which is completely subservient to me.
I generously mixed the truth with fiction, and I didn't care that several people saw the Tin Man when I left the house to do some recon. Now everyone was in such a state of shock that my head refused to think straight and analyze, to reconcile the facts.
At that moment the roar of a diesel engine raging at high revs was heard at the end of the street and a few seconds later the muzzle of an L-200 belonging to Vlad showed up. He rushed past us without slowing down, nearly hitting the loaf and the crowd.
- What a lunatic! Bitch! - people shouted after him. - Drunk again, you freak!
- I don't think he was drunk, he must have seen what I saw. You can go to him now and compare our conversations. By the way," and I turned to my neighbor, "what have you done with those things?
- Huh?
- The ones that were lying dead by your car.
The man's eyes went wide.
- I'm...
- Throw them on a dumpster," I interrupted him, "they are inedible at all. But first show me what kind of mutants we have in the city this morning.
- What kind of mutants? - Granny was instantly interested, but I waved my hand in the direction of my neighbor, transferring all the arrows.
When all the things were loaded, I called Licker, and under the dumbfounded looks of others he was loaded into the cabin Tin Man, who squeezed in behind. I wrapped the blood-soaked seat first with an old plaid and then with food wrap I'd found while gutting the kitchen. I replaced the blood-soaked pants and jacket with clean clothes as I packed my bags.
I left the city in ten minutes, heading north toward Lapriisk, where my parents lived. All my fuss was fueled by thoughts of them, the worry that no one would protect them. They lived practically in the middle of nowhere, and if the apocalypse had happened in the city in the same way as it had in mine, then...
- "I don't know what to think, damn it," I whispered, and clutched the steering wheel tightly. - They are doing well, everything is fine.
Ten kilometers later a Lancetti came towards me and raced past at breakneck speed. Looking in the mirror after the madman, I saw the brake lights go on far behind, and the car stopped and then started to turn around.
- What are you up to now? - I hissed through my teeth.
In a minute the unknown man followed and started to press the horn, then he pulled out in line, lowered the side window and began to shout something, he was echoed by a young pretty girl no older than twenty-five who was sitting in the front passenger seat.
I wasn't paying attention, I just kept checking to make sure he wasn't shooting at me in anger.
Finally, the driver of the Lancetti had had enough of the throat-wrenching, and he lunged forward, only to put his car across the road after a hundred meters.
- What a freak," I slammed my fist on the steering wheel as I watched three people get out of the car-two guys and a girl, and not the one who was sitting next to the driver. The men had a sapper blade and a bat in their hands, the girl had what looked like a gun, and nowadays I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a gun at all. - Those fuckers are fucked up.
When I got out of the car, the trio perked up and walked toward me, shouting something. As they walked, I opened the back doors and let the Lumberjack out with his iron mallet and shield.
You should have seen the other people's faces when they were ten meters away from the loaf and then a surreal figure of iron junk with a huge sledgehammer and a shield in his hands came out at them.
- Uh..." stretched out one of them, who was holding a shovel. - Ahh...
- Oh, crap," the girl yelped and started backing away, pointing her gun at my golem.
- What do you want? - I shouted from behind the guard.
- Are you normal?
- What?!
- I mean, are you human? - He corrected himself hastily, then put his hands up, glanced at his bat, and tossed it under his feet. - We just kind of wanted to talk... ask for help, that's all. We saw the ambulance, so... Anyway, sorry, we see you're in a hurry, can we go?
- Can you... no, stop!
They shuddered all at once.
- What's up ahead? Where are you coming from?
- From Vladivostok. This morning we saw..." He hesitated, then looked at my Golem. - Anyway, we saw some crap...
The foursome turned out to be close friends who, even yesterday, were vacationing at a cottage near my town, from where I was tearing up my claws. At dawn a few strange and scary birds flew in, more like bats with heads from the "obscure". After locking them in their room, the comrades loaded themselves into the car, leaving almost all their belongings behind, and rushed into town, but on the way they saw some black cloud hanging over the car service stations and the garage cooperative, not far from the Vladivostok treatment plant, with green flashes blazing inside. The cloud covered all the garages, and it was impossible to tell whether they were in place or something else was already there.
Right in front of the terrified onlookers, several clouds of gray-green burst out of the cloud and went in different directions. Two headed toward the city, one toward the cottage cooperative, right at the young people, and one more floated away somewhere in the direction of the forest, which everyone called Roundabout.
Figuring that these clouds were no good for them, the guys raced at full speed around town on dirt roads, making a detour of seventy kilometers and meeting me on the road. Seeing the battered ambulance (the blood had dried and dusted, becoming indistinguishable from the dirt), they set out to find out what had happened, then their hot, young blood on a mixture of adrenaline and fear kicked in when I ignored them.
- There the road ends, there is no road, there are fields and there is a forest on the horizon," the guy finished his story.
- How does it end? - I was taken aback.
- Just like that, in short," he threw up his hands. - Asphalt, signs, bounding poles - and all of a sudden a field overgrown with grass to the height of the car roof. And no tracks. What's going on in the city? You're driving from there, and we're going that way.
- There's zombies and mutants. The whole side where those clouds came in that you saw is dead. Maybe not all of it, but I've dealt with a couple hundred undead, and before that I've dealt with some flying things, maybe the same ones you're dealing with. I also fought mutants, like little boars, but with needles on their withers and long fangs as long as my palm. I wouldn't recommend going there.
- But how could it be? - They looked at each other confused. - Our parents are there, and anyway...
- Is the whole town infected? - Almost shouted girl. - The factory district, how?
- When I drove through there, on Worker, I didn't see any mutants or zombies, and I was kind of alive myself, which means that there was no zombie poison in the air.
- I have my mother there," the girl explained with relief, and then turned to her companions: "Guys, let's go quickly.
- Let's go now, just a second," my companion nodded at her. - Who are you, my friend? Where did you get such fighters?
And he pointed to the Tin Man and Licker, who climbed out of the car and now waved five knives clutched in the false legs menacingly.
- I became a mage, a golem-builder. I don't know how or why," I said wearily. - I felt that I could make pseudo-living things out of earth, stones, and iron.
- But how? - he wondered. - Can we?
- Do you sense something strange?
- Uh," he looked confused, "no, I don't think so.
- Then you can't. It's a feeling you can't miss, you can't forget, it's like a voice in your head or a dream you want to remember. I don't think I'm the only one, but I highly doubt there are many mages, either. Okay, guys, I gotta go. I'm going to my parents', too. I was just going to have to hurry, because there's a lot going on in the city- looters, zombies, mutants," and I cut the conversation short. - "Bye.
- Bye.
- I saw rings on the moon this morning, like Saturn," she said.
- What do you mean?
- Well, rings like that, made of space dust and meteorites," she said hurriedly. - Maybe it's something to do with it, some kind of radiation, the satellite crumbled and there were some mutagen spores under the upper crust.
- Pfft," snorted one of the boys. - Already heard, babe, not a load of people.
- Or in another world altogether," she said very quietly.
- The road is ours," I stomped my foot. - The air is the same, gravity seems to be the same. And the sun had risen in the east, so it looked normal.
- The road ends farther away," said the boy with the spade wistfully. - Maybe we are in another world. We should wait for the night and look at the stars, that would be the most accurate definition.
- You'll have to live to see the stars," I said angrily. - You, me, our parents.
It was a quick goodbye: bye-bye, and our squads went to their cars. The four of us drove into town again, and I drove forward until I hit a thick carpet of grass, when the asphalt, as promised, disappeared abruptly, as if cut off with a sharp knife.
Why didn't I lie to the road acquaintances, as I did to my neighbors, though there was a much better chance that the lie would have gone over well? Tired, that's all. And what was the point of lying? Honestly, at home I was afraid that I could get a beating from the women if I told them who I really was and where my golems had come from. The human mind and logic, especially of frightened and angry women, are still dark places. Well, I know how the world deals with those who are not like the gray masses, and it is not even necessary to remember the times of the Inquisition. Why go that far? Fifty years ago, if you crossed yourself on the domes of a church, you were immediately denounced, then a party meeting, expulsion, and dismissal. And eighty years ago, half the time a sign of the cross led to prison.
Now I might have been lynched if my neighbors' frightened brains had thought that I was to blame for what had happened. This was blood and pain, a fight in which all the odds were against my golems. People just want to find a way to get even for their own mistakes, their own fears, their own misfortunes on someone else who isn't like them.
Climbing onto the roof of the UAZ, I put my palm visor over my eyes and looked around carefully. On the left, in the distance, I could see a rutted dirt road that approached the highway; most likely, it was this road that my recent interlocutors had jumped onto the asphalt; they had made a pretty good detour to get into town; that was what fear does to people. On the other hand, who knows how it would have gone if they had decided to get ahead of that cloud they had told me about. To the right and ahead is just a huge grass plain, beyond that, about seven kilometers away, a strip of forest can be seen, which has covered the entire horizon.
And how do I get to my parents if there is no road?
By the way, for some reason no cars are visible at all, as if the residents of Vladivostok are sitting in their apartments and houses in the hope that the trouble will pass them by. When they realize it is time to save themselves, it will be too late. If the contamination spreads throughout the new part of town, then in the private sector, where my... ahem... my former home remains, no one will have a chance to survive, even if only zombies get to them, without the poison cloud. Not only is that part of town three times as big, but there are ten times as many inhabitants. Can the inhabitants of the private sector, where most of the population is elderly people, cope? I doubt it, I doubt it.
I was moving onward along the lack of roads, now praising the native cross-country vehicle, now scolding the medicine for the shabby equipment, bald tires, almost non-functioning ratchets in the front axle. I was lucky I didn't come across any ravine on my way, where I could have easily fallen without noticing it because of the high grass.
Then there was the forest, and what a forest it was! I traveled five kilometers until I came across a large clearing, the result of an old fire. And then the thicket flowed for miles again, where I could barely find my way without losing my direction.
Without the Lumberjack, I would have been stuck for the first thousand yards.
My golem lived up to its name one hundred percent. He dragged fallen trunks out of the way, smashed stumps and small trees to smithereens with his sledgehammer, filled holes in the path or pulled up piles of small debris, as if the forest was inhabited by land beavers who had decided to build a dam of twigs and branches.
The twenty kilometers I drove through more of it, if the meter on the dashboard was to be believed, took up three hours of my time. It was like moving on foot!
And it was worth getting out of the woods when I found myself in the middle of a huge meadow again.
I drove around until dark, burning up the rest of the gasoline in the tanks, but I couldn't find Lapriisk. But I came across a settlement and a village, whose inhabitants were shocked by everything that had happened. Zombies and mutants were not seen, but they had enough of the fact that two kilometers from their homes began unfamiliar terrain. In the village, by the way, I filled up ten liters of gasoline, paying a hundred rubles for each liter! The salesman clearly had a family of bitches in his family. Anyway, he was a cheapskate anyway: if my suspicions and that girl's guesses were right, then the cost of the green paper with a monument to Lenin the Wise was zero point ten.
I met the night in the middle of the meadow on a small hill.
I was so exhausted for the day that now I could hardly keep myself from falling asleep. I pecked my nose constantly, and pinches, ear rubs, and other tricks did not help at all. Mental and physical exhaustion and blood loss were all taking their toll.
Whether or not the stars that poured out in the sky - I can't say for sure, since I'm very far from astronomy. At least, I could not find a star bucket. But the main answer was given to me by the local moon. It was smaller than the Earth's, or simply located farther away, had a reddish hue, like Mars, and most importantly - the satellite was surrounded by a wide silver ring. Just as the stranger in the "lancetti" said.
- So it's not Earth," I whispered, falling asleep. - Maybe it was for the best, keeping my parents safe.
-------*All equipments and weapons is russian!*-------