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The car stopped. Tony heard the door lock click, but the policeman did not exit the car. Logan, out of breath, ran up to the front door.

"Officer... thank God! I understand how what I am going to tell you will sound, but..."

Words got stuck in his throat.

For he saw that the letters "CPR" written on the door rep
resented something different than what he was used to. Not "Courtesy - Professionalism - Respect."

But "Cruelty - Profanity - Rampage."

The door swung open and the policeman stepped out onto the sidewalk.

When somebody shoots his own temple, he is actually ex
posed to a significant danger. The danger is that he will survive. And more often than not, the survivor will suffer consequences that disrupt very different brain activities (not to mention purely cosmetic effects, of little matter to a corpse, but not palatable for a survivor). Professionals dealing with gunshot wounds–including, certainly, policemen–know this very well. Therefore, when they decide to end it all with the help of a bullet, they select a more reliable way. Shooting not to the temple, but to the mouth, while directing the barrel upwards and slightly back, to the soft palate. This way, the brains are knocked out in the most literal sense that gives an absolute guarantee of resting in peace.

Or not so absolute.

Anyway, the condition of policeman who got out of the car refuted this guarantee.

The top of his head was gone. The upper part of his skull had been blown away entirely, having left on its place a grinning hole, with everted edges of sharp bone shards to which shreds of hair were stuck. Lower down, whitish lumps of brain, similar to dead slugs, and black gore clots were caught in his remaining hair. The right eye had fallen somewhere inside the skull, leaving a dark pit in its place; the left eye had slid down the cheek and hung on it as a round drop spotted with bloody streaks, still held by a string of nerves stretched from the eye socket. From his nose something hung down like dense bloody snot–probably, also brain remnants. The upper jaw was broken up, and to the right, cracked teeth on bared gums stuck out from under a crooked upper lip. The lower jaw was intact, but powerlessly drooped and slightly rocked when the cop was moving. The chin was wholly covered in blood with small lumps stiffened in it.

But the uniform and the badge were in perfect order. At least, as much as it was possible to judge in the dark.

And the handle of a pistol–most likely
the very same
–stuck out from an unbuttoned holster.

"E-everything is all right, officer," Tony squeezed out of himself, moving back. But it was too late–the incarnate horror in an uniform stepped towards him. It moved quickly enough, con
trary to zombies in movies.

And then the corpse started talking. It was not very good at it because of the condition of its jaws, so it had to help itself, propping up the lower lip with its left hand. Judging by how dex
terously it managed to simulate an articulation, it already had had enough time to adapt to this manner of speech.

"You have the right to
scream
," it said, putting its right hand on the holster. "And it can and will be used against you."

Having heard this version of the Miranda warning, Tony took one more step back. And at the very same time something cold and wet–he felt it even through his trouser leg–touched his leg from behind.

Tony shouted and jumped aside more than two yards; he had not known before that he was capable of such standing side jumps. But the landing was not so successful–under his foot was some slippery rubbish which caused Logan to fall to hands and one knee and tear his palms against the asphalt. In the next instant he understood that, stepping back, had simply bumped into a leaking fire hydrant. But he understood also something more important: the dead cop twisted his head around awkwardly, seemingly having lost his prey.

"His eye!" Despite the nightmarish situation, Logan's common sense nevertheless got into gear. "It isn't connected any
more to the eye muscles, therefore, it can look only in one direction. And, to look around,
it
has to turn its head... or to turn its eye with its fingers..."

However the policeman, it seemed, had not figured out the last method of seeing and did not notice Tony on the ground. But Logan understood that this would grant him only a short respite. There was no place to hide on this street, so sooner or later this... this thing will manage to see him. And the farther Tony runs, the more likely he is to be seen. He did not know, of course, how ac
curately the cop in his present condition could shoot... but he had no desire to test it.

Therefore Tony, with a heroic effort, overcame his in
stinctive desire to get as far as possible from the cadaver. He rushed on all fours directly at it.

Several hours before, even in a ghastly dream, the idea of attacking a policeman would not have come to Logan's mind. But then even in a ghastly dream he could not imagine
such
a policeman... And no act in all his previous life had demanded even a tenth of such boldness–and not at all because it was necessary to overcome a taboo of a law-abiding citizen...

Tony had flung himself at the cop's boots (they were covered either with dirt or blood), still remaining out of its sight. And then he jumped sharply up right before its face, seized its ter
rible eye, and pulled with all his might, simultaneously clenching his fist. The sphere of cold slime burst in his hand, like a huge rotten grape.

Logan immediately jumped back, at the same moment fas
tidiously shaking the lumps of the squashed eye from his palm. The cop's fingers fumbled at Tony's shirt and scratched his shoulder, but could not hold him. Tony ran down the street towards the nearest crossroads, zigzagging from side to side since he wasn't sure that he wouldn't be targeted by sound. But, apparently the blinded cop tried to get back into the car–probably to call for reinforcements–bumped into the half-open door (Logan heard it slam), and then, unable to find the handle, began to punch the glass.

Tony turned at the crossroads and realized that he had already been here, but this time he ran in a new direction.

However, he quickly regretted his choice.

Ahead, blocking the left sidewalk and half of the narrow street, a garbage truck stood. Stood with extinguished lights, without any signs of life. Very recently, of course, such a sight would not have frightened Logan at all and would hardly have drawn his attention. Well, he would have been surprised that the driver had left the truck turned slantwise across the street, abut
ting its nose against the building at the left and causing an obstruction for both traffic and pedestrians. Though, here and now, there were neither pedestrians nor traffic...

Now Logan trusted no municipal motor vehicles anymore.

However the danger behind him was more real, and there was no way to turn anyway, so Tony continued to run forward. During the next few seconds, he understood that the garbage truck had been abandoned long ago. Its body, once white, was eaten with rust, its cab gaped with the blackness of broken windows, and tires hung on rims like the rotten flesh on bones of a corpse. More surprising was that nobody had moved this wreck out of the way... however, this did not surprise Logan now. And then he saw that, before turning into garbage itself, the truck had spilled its contents out onto the road. Black plastic bags lay behind it on the street and on the right sidewalk. One bag still hung down behind from the truck. The appeal not to litter on a door–one of the few places on the truck body where the paint had escaped the effects of corrosion–looked in this surrounding especially incongruous.

And having run yet some yards more, Tony understood that these were not the usual garbage bags.

They were twice as long as normal and each was bound by rough ropes from outside. And the outlines of the things inside resembled human bodies.

Logan stopped so sharply that he almost fell. And at the same moment he heard the sound of a police siren behind.

In despair he rushed forward again. The only possible path was through the black bags. Logan hoped that he could jump over them, but in one place they lay too densely, and he had to step his unshod right foot on one of them. Under his foot something soft squelched and the bag made an unpleasant sound, similar to an exhalation of a choking asthmatic. Two more jumps–and Tony darted to the left, trying to hide from a probable pursuit from behind the garbage truck.

And understood that he tried in vain.

Ahead, the street came to a dead end at the brick wall of some huge uninhabited structure–either warehouse or factory. On both sides of the street there were only closed doors of offices and shops. There was no place to run anymore.

But that was not what filled Tony with the greatest horror. He was struck dumb looking not at the wall blocking his way, but above and behind it.

The fog was vanishing, its muslin thinned and torn like a decaying shroud. And, appearing from gloom, over a wall, over jagged silhouettes of roofs behind it, over all Downtown there rose two giant pillars of Twin Towers, their windows glowing in dim, unsteady crimson light.

The sound of the siren again howling behind Tony jarred him out of his stupor. His eyes feverishly swept around. Under the truck? No time to hide in its bed... maybe in the cab–but he wouldn't be well concealed there... But, having darted a glance to
wards the cab, Logan saw that the truck nose not simply abutted its right corner against a wall, but had pushed through the glass storefront of some shop. And to the right, behind the glass, motionless figures stood and stared straight at Logan.

But Tony wasn't frightened, since he understood at once that they were mannequins. The idea of standing among them was born instantly. During his university days, he and a fellow student once had had a lot of fun in Madame Tussaud's New York mu
seum. In a dimly lit room representing a party, where wax figures were not lined up along walls, but settled down in easy poses around the room near visitors, the young men had posed motionlessly. When some visitors began to photograph them, the students suddenly moved and enjoyed the reaction. Probably, this trick would work now, too–the creatures pursuing Tony wouldn't guess that he stood right before their very eyes. His clothes were not in the proper condition to look like those on a mannequin, but inside the shop it was much darker than in the museum. But the shop door, naturally, was closed. Would it be possible to squeeze through the broken glass storefront, between the garbage truck cab and the rapaciously grinning splinters of glass?

But there was no time to reflect further. He did not hear the siren any more, but the shimmer of police car lights already lit up the street, shining feebly from under the truck. Tony darted to the store's front window and had time to notice that the broken glass had a thick layer of dust. However, it was no wonder, con
sidering the aged condition of the truck... And only thanks to this dust was Tony able to discern in the dark the sharp glass tooth ready to rip his throat. A wider splinter lower down was ready to stick into his belly, leaving no chance of climbing in through the narrow gap without damaging his intestines.

At this instant, Logan felt the dead fingers on his wrist weakening their grasp. But against the backdrop of the night's nightmarish events, this movement did not frighten him. On the contrary, he thought with spiteful pleasure, he had been given an opportunity. He seized the wrist of the rigidly frozen hand and used it like a stone to strike the glass splinters blocking his way. Glass collapsed with a wallop on the sidewalk. Tony had the im
pression that it would be heard not only in the police car, but in the neighboring blocks as well. It was, however, too late to change plans. He slipped into the store display window to the right and stiffened behind the glass between the mannequins of a young girl and a little boy. But that damned hand marked him nearly as much as his torn and dirty clothes... Tony made a new attempt to unclench its fingers and realized that they had no will of their own. Obviously, they had simply begun to thaw, making the grasp weaker... Tony wanted only to unbend them, but they started to break with a crunch, though their skin did not tear anymore. He hardly had time to fling the maimed hand somewhere deep into the dark interior of the shop, because the police car appeared from behind the garbage truck, driving directly on the black bags. And Logan was struck dumb staring at it.

It was not the car which Tony had already seen. Probably the eyeless cop really had called for reinforcements, or perhaps the arrival of this car was simply a coincidence. It had rolled off the production line, at the latest, in the early seventies, but it
wasn't that which caused Tony to stare at it without trusting his eyes. The car's lights had been broken long ago and the fluctuating orange light did not come from them. The car was
burning
. The whole back half of it was conflagrant. Tony looked in horror at the tongues of flame licking the gas tank cover and waited for the explosion at any second. But there was no explosion. The car slowly moved forward, as if nothing was happening (even in spite of the fact that its back wheels had become shapeless charred rims, stinking of burned rubber). Its driver seemed unaffected by the events right behind his back. (This time, as far as Tony could make out through a dirty glass, it was a black man at the wheel, but Logan was not sure that it was the color of his skin from birth.) Even in the front seats the heat should be intolerable; what would happen to an arrested person in the back seat was terrible even to imagine. Tony stood not breathing, trying to resemble a mannequin more than the real mannequins.