Last Gasp полностью

If this thing had once been human it was human no more.

Then the most remarkable thing about it struck him like a blow. It wasn't wearing a mask! It was breathing the denuded atmosphere and surviving.

Chase's hand fumbled with the holster flap and gripped the butt of the automatic. He stepped backward as the nonhuman thing shambled toward him. A moment later Chase dropped through a trapdoor as his foot slid from beneath him and he hit the slimy pavement with a jarring thump that dug the air tank into the small of his back as if he'd been rabbit-punched.

Chase gasped with pain. Frantically he tried to squirm away as the nonhuman thing stooped over him, its face looming nearer like a rotting skull. The mouth opened. A few jagged pegs of black teeth remained in the red weeping gums. A string of brackish brown saliva leaked from its mouth and dribbled onto his faceplate.

The groping hands reached for him. Tugging desperately at the automatic, Chase at last got it free. But the nonhuman thing now had hold of his mask. One quick wrench and he was as good as dead: The toxic mix of gases would kill him even if oxygen starvation didn't.

In his panic Chase thought he was blacking out. The nonhuman thing's head had vanished. Huge dark spots obscured his vision. He couldn't see--just as he hadn't heard the explosion as Dan's shot smashed the thing between the eyes and scattered shards of bone and red-speckled brain matter ten yards across the street.

Cheryl helped Dan remove the headless body, but even without its weight Chase was unable to stand. They got him to his feet, one supporting each arm. His mouth was clamped shut. He gagged and vomit spurted from his nostrils.

"Hurry, for God's sake!" Cheryl started dragging him along the street. "If he's sick inside the mask he'll suffocate!"

Chase was bent forward, gagging and choking, the mask filling up. Drowning in his own vomit, he was led blindly up the street.

A few miles north of Fort Pierce they encountered civilization again: the pitted and pockmarked two-lane blacktop that was all that remained of the Florida turnpike. Regular patrols by the National Guard made the road reasonably safe.

Above the old 55 mph speed limit signs a warning had been added in large red capitals: don't breathe the air!

Some people still lived this far south, surviving in isolated communities. Like bacteria and insects, it seemed, the human race could adapt to the most adverse and hostile conditions. Chilling to think, Chase brooded, that in time they might adapt to the point of actual mutation --was the creature with which he'd come face-to-face in Miami Beach the portent of things to come?

Ten years ago even the gloomiest of doom-laden prophecies hadn't prepared them for the catastrophic decline they were now experiencing. Maybe Bill Inchcape had known, based on DELFI's predictions, but if so he'd kept tight-lipped about it. There was a sick irony in the fact that Theo Detrick's prognosis had been vindicated by events and the man himself raised to the misty heights of prophet in the popular imagination.

Chase bore some of the responsibility for that. His book One Minute to Midnight, published in 2000, had drawn extensively on Theo's research, quoting whole chunks from his treatise "Back to the Precam-brian." He'd also included information passed on to him by Boris Stanovnik concerning the Project Arrow scheme, and--the real clincher, which had given the book number-one spot in Time's list for thirty-four consecutive weeks--sensational revelations about the top-secret U.S. military plan code-named DEPARTMENT STORE. To this day Chase didn't know the identity of the person who had sent the dossier to Cheryl; but rumor had it that heads had rolled like ninepins in the Defense Department when the facts were revealed. General "Blindeye" Wolfe had taken the brunt of it. Stripped of his rank and dishonorably discharged, he committed suicide one year to the day following the book's publication, which, symbolic gesture or pure coincidence nobody knew, served to fan speculation to white heat and did nothing to harm sales either.

The theme of One Minute to Midnight, encapsulated in its title, was that the superpowers were deliberately engineering global catastrophe by means of the so-called environmental war, and that this wanton tampering with the forces of nature had brought the planet to within sixty seconds--following Chase's analogy of a hand sweeping around a twelve-hour clockface--of ultimate disaster. Then he hit them with the killer punch. Crazy and criminal as this military strategy was, the planet had beaten the superpowers to it and was already, thanks to man's two centuries of unchecked industrial growth, on a steep downward path and possibly already past the point of no return.

What the military sought to bring about, the factory furnace and the automobile had already accomplished.