February 19, 1994
Saturday
I killed Saturday sprawled across every soft surface in the apartment. Useless! Couldn’t manage to fall asleep. A whole day passed without sleep, my eyes aching, my joints throbbing. In any bed, in any position, I felt sick and wracked.
Sunday brought some relief. Vera rushed over in the morning, stuffed me full of pills, rushed off again. I managed to black out. A couple of hours into a half-sleep, half-doze, angry, unstrung, my brain blazing from lack of sleep, I focused my eyes on the alarm clock.
Huh! Ten o’clock, Monday.
Felt like I hadn’t slept a whole day, more like I’d tossed in bed for five minutes! Exhausted, feverish, I got up, went through the morning ritual: washed my face, brewed coffee, drank it. Took the pills off the saucer on the table – for the headache, for the fever, and vitamin C.
At half past ten I went down to the Torus, which Vasilich had brought around. Handing over the keys, he gave me some advice about the suspension. What advice, exactly, didn’t stick in my head. Something needed tinkering with.
I clicked the alarm off, got behind the wheel, gathered up saliva and swished it around my mouth to get rid of the pills’ aftertaste.
All desire to go to work had drained away.
I remembered the flu doesn’t cure itself in three days, and the illness needs riding out lying in bed.
I made myself a bet: if the car didn’t start, same as a week ago in the twenty-below frost, I’d go back home, call an ambulance, and be properly, seriously sick.
The Torus started on the first turn of the key. Without warming up the engine, I pulled out of the courtyard and…
Aaah!!!
A crash, a ringing, a crack, hellish pain in my forearm, animal terror in my gut, glass shards everywhere… one! two! three!… three bursts of pain, fusing into a single flash of blinding light somewhere in the crack between my eyeballs and my brain!
Before my consciousness flew out of my body, I noticed the shooter blazing away with a «Kalashnikov». Blazing away as in a film about Rambo – with relish, without aiming, the stock braced against his hip. A dozen red-hot crowbars were driven into my body and began turning my insides over. Blindingly white molten metal was poured into my skull.
That’s it.
The end.
There would be nothing more.
My past life didn’t even have time to flash before my eyes. Maybe there was nothing worth flashing. Nothing to regret…
