In the Valley of Armageddon
* * *The fragments from the novel "In the Valley of Armageddon":
... He tried to gripe stronger the knife haft and whispered uncertainly:
"We all become lambs sooner or later…"
"The clouds are gathering over the mountains…" the phrase, repeated by an invisible voice three times, got stuck in his head. As if there was somebody behind his back. But something didn't let him turn round. He suddenly began seeing everything through a mist. The cachetic sacura bent in a fantastic dance. And he lost sight of the Polly's bag at all…
"These damned mountains, the clouds are gathering over… No! Anything but it" Hally murmured sobbing and, wobbling like a drunk, got ready to run. But his hands were finishing what he had begun. Now he saw them cutting Polly's throat. She will never become a reporter…
Then the deep cut throat wheeze and a strong orgasm, shaken all his body, followed. Just like that time, in the mountains…
"This time I managed to do it, too" he thought and wanted to sleep very much.
... Hally reached his hotel late at night but he did not ask the receptionist to give him a wake-up call at five in the morning. He knew that those who had sent him on the mission would give him a call of their own.
He dreamed of lions dressed in military fatigues. They were chasing a small group of tired men catching the exhausted ones who fell back and pushing them into cages. Those who fell down to the ground unable to move were killed with a swift blow of a merciless paw.
"I shall not give myself up," cried Hally tearfully in his sleep and dreamed of climbing up a baobab tree.
The baobab was huge and it was not easy to reach up to the nearest bough. He climbed and fell down to the ground and that was repeated several times. Other men were boldly climbing and falling down, too. The lions were approaching fast…
He was no longer scared of them because even while sleeping he remembered that at quarter to five his cell phone would ring. After a brief greeting he will hear an oddly-sounding phrase: "Sooner or later we all become lambs…"
The phrase may sound odd to the uninitiated but for Hally it was full of profound meaning.
* * *
Sir Kevin Alison whose fortune was about one and a half billion pounds was dying alone. He would rather pass away in Polly Snow's tender hands. A nice, kind girl. He met her three years ago in one of the private clinics he got to in an awful state, with no hope of pulling through. She seemed to be born to relieve from pain such people as he.
After the discharge sir Kevin Alison offered her to work in his house for the salary twice as much as she was earning in the hospital. The girl didn't hesitate. And he understood that she needed money badly…
* * *
... The morning let him down gain. It betrayed him with yearning.
The money he had earned in the Balkan Mountains war melt like pieces of ice in a glass of whisky. High Street Kensington was seized with stunned silence. Night clubs and pubs were closing one by one their doors…
The rib hurt by the bouncer didn't let him breath properly. But Jerry Stone didn't give a damn about anything.
He couldn't understand what was making him sick the most: either good-for-nothing life and world where money came so slowly and dwindled so fast or overdrunk beer and whisky.
Jerry hadn't still put the thought out of his head to wake up rich and famous one day. He didn't care much for the latter, though. He had once been famous. But sooner or later everything is over. Only doors hastily locked with an indifferent hand and loose little thoughts of the legendary Clondike of the XXIth century remain.
* * *
... Tom Ritsborg had a good night's sleep. He dreamt about the mountains and death. A lot of deaths. And during the whole sleep he was asking himself the same question: how did he manage, "The Daily Sensation" reporter, to survive in this nightmare?
"You shouldn't refuse such groove!" a bearded guy named Ahmet cried in his face.
"But I have a wife, Polly!", Tom cried helplessly.
"Everybody has a wife", Ahmet shouted with laughter, unfastening his camouflage trousers. "But everybody does it nevertheless …"
"She'll make a laughing-stock of me if she gets to know about it," Tom resisted weakly.
"Just have a try!" the soldier tried to outvoice the thunderclaps. "You'll be grateful to me later!"
"No-o-o!" he cried going into hysteric.
At 4 a. m. Tom Ritsborg was awakened by a strange phrase: "The clouds are gathering over the mountains…" It seemed to him that somebody he couldn't see whispered these words in his ear. But who could enter his bachelor flat, thoroughly locked of late? This phrase, he thought uneasily, must have been the echo of the nightmare.
"The clouds are gathering over the mountains…" Tom Ritsborg repeated aloud and leaped up from his bed as if he was carried away with a hurricane. He dressed hurriedly and rushed into the night obeying a call from the past...
* * *
"All they need is my body. That's the matter… You, bitch, you'll feel all my body now. Through your ass, like that soldier. That is the only way I can end what I've begun. Damn you all! Dead or alive…"
"No," Polly bit his finger, "I don't want it. I'll die of pain!"
"You won't even feel it." "I wonder what did those federals feel before they…"
"Have patience," he said, "now you'll feel something you can't dream about in the most sweet sleep."
* * *
...Having come home, Jerry Stone opened impatiently the envelope and… All blood running in his body seeemed to flood into his face. Invisible little mallet hammered in the temples. He even thought that it was a dream. The meeting with sir Kevin was a dream, too. There wasn't a multimillionaire's house with a linden alley. And the strange conversation consisting of semi-hints was only a dream…
"There wasn't anything!" he ached to cry out, ached and dreaded it too.
But here it is: the cheque drawn on Jerry Stone, on his name. And here is the sum scared him to death. Did the the overtaken the old man grief make him go out of his mind?
"Maybe it's me that went out of my mind? And it was only his imagination…"
If Jerry Stone was in the streets now, he would surely drop in at a nearest church and pray for hours for the greater glory of the Most High and this Kevin Alison. Yesterday's unemployed, who could end up in the London gutter, Jerry Stone became a real millionaire!
"Mamma! May God bless the minute you gave me birth!"
"Diana, sweetheart, it's your sign from there!"
"Good Heavens! Do such things really happen in this world?"
Most of all Jerry was afraid to go mad. At quick pace he crossed the holl, reached out his hand behind a thick volume of William Shakespear and took out a broached bottle of the most cheap whisky, filled a glass to the brim and drunk. The rest was flushed mercilessly down the toilet.
"Stop! No more of this! It's time I got down to work."
Five million pounds! Such fee couldn't appear in a most fantastic Jerry Stone's dream!
* **
…Her anhungered lips, forgotten of shame, stuck to his bud. Michael's moan was sweep and defenseless. The heaven burst with resounding thunder crash. Whether from fear or from pleasure his rod began to jet in her face.
"I'm ready to kiss you from top to toe, like a cow kisses her newborn calf. Once I was in a kabuts and saw this scene…"
"You couldn't see it. Cows don't kiss their calves, they lick them."
"As you wish. But you haven't paid my for my pains," Ruth said fancifully.
"Sorry," he fished for the wallet."
"You haven't understood a hang! Pay me in a different way…"
Michael was at a loss:
"What pay do you want?"
"Give me to drink the balm from these vessels."
"But is it drinkable?" the soldier shrugged his shoulders.
"You're such a nice, chaste, sweet kibuts lad, living in a world smelling with lime-blossom, honey, youth and life."
"Sometimes - with death…" he protested.
"Don't dare think about it!"
Probably, the young soldier, grown up in a kibuts, knew well about caress between cows and calves, but as for the rest - he was as innocent as an angel, Ruth thought. And inpatient words escaped her sinful lips:
"It tastes peerlessly, doesn't it? Nobody has a balm like yours…"
"How do I know? I'm not a taster."
"Please, don't jaw at me and don't think bad of me."
"Take more. Whole! Entirely, please…" he moaned. "I've got problems because of it's big size. Problems with girls, do you understand? They don't allow me within firing range as soon as they see it…
The guys envy. Fools, they can't even imagine what a problem can an excess inch bring…
Michael adored chattering during love. Blitz confessions poured out of him like of the horn of plenty.
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Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon. 
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon.
Alexander Akishin. In the Valley of Armageddon.