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.Weturned with more than just strength, and thecovering jerked free in our hands.We easedit upwards, letting a smell of congealed kit-chen fat and diluted faeces wash up to hit usin the face. 202/1048 Boots, we said. We need boots, amask, gloves and, when we re done, deter-gent and lots of lemons. For a moment Templeman looked like hemight argue.Then he said, All right.I cando that.Anything else? Yes.Salt-water, a strip of rustingsteel steel, mind you, not just iron water-resistant matches, a can of petrol and acrowbar. Another pause as he processed this in-formation.Then, How long will you need? Ten minutes, once I go down.When I min there, call the police, tell them there s abomb. To what purpose? he asked. There are people in the dusthouse.Notall of them are going to die tonight. You can t help every stranger, warnedTempleman. There are alwaysconsequences. Are you going to help or not? we asked. 203/1048For what it was worth, he was. I ll see what I can do. It didn t take him long.The crowbar wasalready in the back of his car.Meanwhile wesat in a doorway, watching nothing, listeningto nothing.It was the hour of absolute still-ness, when even the hardest of the partyershad gone to bed, the doors had been closed,the lights snuffed out.Muggers and bandits,with no one left to prey on, turned in for thenight; cat burglars had made their hauls andin the supermarkets tomorrow s milk wasstacked up on the shelf.In the emergencyward at UCH the last of the night s alcohol-poisoning victims and men caught up in thewrong pub brawl were laid up to sleep on acocktail of morphine and absent-adrenaline,and the only ambulances now skiddedthrough empty dream-time roads towardsthe flats of old women whose hearts hadmissed a beat, and old men whose alarms 204/1048had started to ring in the night.At this hour,even emergencies were losing their drum rollof intensity.We sat alone, and wondered if that wasthe dust from Meera s death clogging up thespace under our nails.Could we scrape herout, like mud?We sat, and did not move.When Templeman returned, he broughtbig yellow boots, big yellow gloves, a brightorange plastic pair of trousers complete withbraces, a bright orange jacket with two zipsup the middle, and a gas mask which stankof rubber and chewed peppermints.Wedidn t ask where he d found them.He alsocarried a plastic bag and, as we changed, heproduced from inside it a small plastic bottleinto which he poured eight paper sachets ofpurloined restaurant salt; a pack of water-resistant matches with warning signs on thepack; a piece of rusting old metal with deadlysharp edges that looked like it had been 205/1048snapped off the frame of a rotting bicycle;and a small, half-empty can of petrol.My feet swam inside their yellow boots,my palms were sticky with instant sweat.Itook the plastic bag of goods off him word-lessly, felt the weight of the petrol moving in-side its container, said, Call the police and,without another word, we descended downthe open manhole, into the darkness below.People think the wrong things aboutsewers.They think piss and shit, a sludge ofbrown.That s not it.That s just the scum thatskims along the surface, that s just the loath-some icing on the cake.It s the cooking fats, the congealed rem-nants of washed-away meats, the scrubbed-down rotting husks of vegetables, and yester-day s mashed potatoes.It s sanitary towelsflushed into a toilet prone to blockages, it sold tissue paper never quite disintegrating, 206/1048and it s human hair that tangles like spidersilk and doesn t break.It s detergent fromthe washing machine and soap from thedishwasher, it s baked-bean grease and un-eaten leek soup that has grown mould on itssurface from being left in a broken fridge.It sthe fat they fast-fried the chips in, and theremains of old rotting onion.It s pregnancytests that gave the wrong answer and thecondom that split; it s used nappies and pukeand the bleach they tried to use to take awaythe smell.It s everything you ve ever notwanted it to be, running busily away down-hill through brick-built tunnels, towards pitsof rotating slime or the wide open sea.The mask wasn t there to stop the smell;that would have been futile.It was just thereto minimise the initial shock, so that youonly gagged instead of passing out.Walkingwas at first a slippery nightmare, feet goingout beneath you, hands scrambling at wallsof slime bred into the brick
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Tematy
IndexJohn Norman Gor 04 Nomads of Gor
Stasheff, Christopher Rogue Wizard 04 A Wizard in Peace
Colette Sidonie Gabrielle Klaudyna 04 Klaudyna odchodzi
White James Szpital Kosmiczny 04 Statek Szpitalny
Emilie Richards [Ministry is Murder 04] A Lie for a Lie (pdf)
Roberts Nora Bracia MacKade 03 i 04 Więzy krwi tom1 Serce Devina tom2 Miłoœć Shane'a
John Connolly Charlie Parker 04 The White Road (com v4.0) (lit)
§ Preston Douglas, Child Lincoln Perdergast 04 Martwa natura z krukami
Clancy Tom Jack Ryan 04 Polowanie na Czerwony PaŸdziernik
mśÂ‚oda polska (2)