Thicker Than Water читать онлайн

I was still thinking that when I caught a sudden movement off to my left. Honed reflexes made me turn right into it, and something hard and heavy smacked against the side of my head. The zombie had been clinging to the outside of the suicide netting, having crawled through one of the many gaps in its mesh. He knew damn well that his biggest handicap in a fair fight was speed - dead nerves and dead muscles taking their own sweet time to answer the call to arms - so he’d made damn sure the fight wasn’t fair, turning my own ambush back on me.

The first blow made me see stars and tweeting birds. I staggered and fell against one of the steel beams supporting the suicide nets. That put me beyond the reach of my assailant’s hands, but he got around that by kicking me in the face. The back of my head slammed into the beam: I caught hold of his foot at the same time, hauling him down on top of me. We sprawled and wrestled in an undignified heap, until he got his hand free and it came up again.

I saw what was in it this time: a builder’s hammer, with one flat and one clawed end. Like I said, an enthusiastic amateur.

The hammer came down, clawed end first, and buried itself in the wood of the planking as I twisted my head aside. I would have been doing okay except that the first whack to the head had left me sad f t dazed, my movements logey and slow. Since the hammer didn’t serve his turn, the zombie butted me hard in the bridge of the nose, then locked both hands around my throat.

I brought my knee up into his groin, but with no noticeable effect: a half-rotted nervous system has its upside."

"With a frown of effort, the dead man leaned hard into the business of throttling me. His grip tightened, and all strength went out of me in a black, liquid tide. I shouldn’t have bothered with the knee to the groin, I should have been trying to break his grip. I scrambled for his hands now, but I couldn’t make my own hands move in synch or take a tight hold of anything.

I was sinking into a swamp sown with broken glass. I was broken myself, and every ragged edge of me was shrilling in atonal discord like the factory sirens of Hell. My eyes were still open, but the seat of my consciousness seemed to drop from its usual position right behind them, plummeting into stippled darkness.

Time to fight dirty - assuming you count a knee to the balls as fighting clean.