False Memory полностью

While he played The Untouchables at the Alamo, the doctor worked out the details of Holden “Skeet” Caulfield’s termination. Skeet must go before dawn, but one more death, in the midst of all this carnage, was of little import.

Snake eyes were rolled and the ace of spades was drawn on the same turn, which by the doctor’s complex rules meant that the supreme commander of each army must turn traitor and flee to the other side. Now Colonel James Bowie, gravely ill with typhoid and pneumonia, was leading the Mexican Army, while Mr. Al Capone was fighting for the independence of the Texas Territory.

Skeet must not commit suicide on New Life property. Ahriman was a semi-silent partner in the clinic, with a substantial investment to protect. Although there was no need to worry that either Dustin or Martie would file a liability claim, some relative that the doctor didn’t control, maybe a second cousin who had spent the last thirty years in a hut in Tibet and hadn’t even met Skeet, would come riding in with a malpractice attorney and lodge a suit five minutes after the little dope fiend was stuck in the ground. Then an idiot jury — the only kind that seemed to be impaneled these days — would award the Tibetan cousin a billion dollars. No, Skeet would have to walk out of New Life, willfully, heedlessly, against the advice of his doctors — and then off himself elsewhere.

A marble, fired by one of the Alamo heroes, ricocheted around the landscape and took out an amazing nine Mexican soldiers and two of Capone’s capos that hadn’t defected to the Texans with him.

Saint Antonio of Valero, for whom the Franciscan priests had named the mission around which the great fortress of the Alamo was built, would have wept at this seemingly endless, grievous loss of life in the shadow of his church — except that he was dead and finished with weeping long before 1836. Most likely, he would have been dismayed, as well, to know that Al Capone was proving to be a better defender of this sacred ground than Davy Crockett.

The private nurse watching over Skeet on the evening shift was Jasmine Hernandez, she of the red sneakers and green laces, who was unfortunately professional and incorruptible. The doctor had neither the time nor the interest to put Nurse Hernandez through a complete schedule of programming just to be able to render her blind and deaf to the instructions he needed to give to Skeet. Therefore, he would have to wait until her shift ended. The nurse who came on at midnight was a lazy twit who’d happily park his butt in the employee lounge, watching the Tonight show and sucking on a Coke, while Ahriman had a powwow with Dustin’s pathetic half-brother.

He didn’t want to chance instructing Skeet in suicide over the phone. The miserable junior Caulfield was such an iffy subject for programming that it was necessary to put him through the drill face-to-face.

Paper clip. Ping. Disaster. Colonel Bowie is down. Colonel Bowie is down! The Mexican Army is now leaderless. Capone gloats.

Lovely, the forest, deep and cool. The huge trees are crowded so close together that their smooth, red-brown, polished trunks blend into one encircling wall of wood. Martie somehow knows that they are mahogany trees, although she has never seen one before. She must be in a South American jungle, where mahoganies flourish, but she can’t recall making the travel arrangements or packing her bags.

She hopes that she brought enough clothes, remembered the travel iron, and included a wide selection of antivenin, especially the last of those items, because even now a snake has sunk its fangs into her left arm. Fang, singular. The serpent appears to have only one fang, and the tooth is quite peculiar, as silvery and slender as a needle. The snake has a thin, transparent body and hangs from a silver tree with no leaves and one branch, but you expect exotic reptiles and flora in the Amazon.