3
It took a while before Isaac could think clearly, his head was buzzing and spinning and he felt slightly nauseous. They were dragging him somewhere, with his arms in handcuffs painfully twisted behind his back. A van, a police station, iron bars slamming loudly, and his consciousness fully recovered once he was in the cell. “Never mind, they’ll figure things out,” he thought wearily and slumped onto the metal bed. Still feeling a bit sick, he closed his eyes and instantly blanked out.
He dreamt of a war…. a big war. He didn’t know who was fighting whom or why, but he saw a nuclear explosion, the plane falling. Whole districts were set on fire. He saw a lot of different cities without names, and all he knew was that one of them was Paris. Isaac observed the immense, towering conflagration from a hill about thirty kilometers away. He couldn’t make anything out clearly, but he knew for certain that it was Paris. He was gazing, spellbound at the appalling spectacle, when suddenly some soldiers drove up, six or maybe eight of them.
There was no fear, he calmly emptied his cartridge clip into the first two, grabbed his automatic and killed the others. He did it absolutely dispassionately, quickly and without a single hitch, feeling slightly frustrated that the bullets – they were bright blue, he could see them quite clearly – flew through the air with a strange slowness. Darkness. The picture had disappeared. Isaac was somewhere between sleep and waking, and he even started trying to analyze his dream, still without waking up:
“In real life he was not capable of murdering someone, but this wasn’t the first time he killed in a dream. What can you say about the life of a man in whose dreams cities burn, wars are fought and planes crash?”
Someone was prodding Isaac insistently in the side, and he finally woke up. He just wanted to be left alone to sleep. His head was filled with some kind of soft goo, weariness had eaten its way into his thoughts and settled there, but his annoying neighbor wouldn’t stop. The drowsiness in Isaac’s eyes gradually dispersed and he recognized who it was. He was in the same prison cell as the terrorist. Isaac knew there must have been some sort of mistake!
The hobo woke up Isaac, and was attentively looking into his eyes.
“Hey, how are you doing?” he inquired.
“Fine.”
“That’s good, good. You sure?” “Fine,” Isaac repeated angrily.
The stranger gave him another searching look. “What’s your name, lad?”
“Fine,” hissed Isaac again and closed his eyes.
“My name’s Mr. Elvis. I’m the Messiah, I fight the devil. I’ve saved you. We’ve got to…”
Isaac heard the stranger speaking on and on. He opened and closed his eyes repeatedly, without attempting to understand what this madman was driveling about. His head hurt badly enough already.
Suddenly he felt something on his palm, something hard and prickly. Tried to turn away, but Elvis jerked him rather sharply by the shoulder.
“Hey, you? Don’t you understand? I’ve been speaking for half an hour and you still don’t understand?”
“What? Yes, I understand, I do,” Isaac gasped out. Anything to get this guy off his back.
“What does he want from me? Hell, I’m in here because of him. Someone clubbed me over the head because of this asshole. I wish those thickheads would get on with figuring this all out. Maybe I need to go to hospital,” – Isaac’s thoughts flowed sluggishly through his head. He closed his eyes. He felt being shaken by the shoulder with crude determination.
Elvis continued spitting his words: “Hell spawn! Heart of the devil! Cursed machine! This devil will bring sorrow upon you. I saw the light, the determination in your eyes. They will take this away from me…”
It was some kind of a hideous dream! A waking nightmare! Isaac tried to stand up and call a policeman, but the attempt to get up gave him such a sharp pain in his head that he groaned out loud.
“God has no need for soulless bodies, and then the end will come…” Elvis went on raving, as if nothing had happened. “Are you listening to me?”
The hobo didn’t look like he was going to give up. He seemed blinded by his own insanity.
“Orange energy is people’s souls, don’t you understand? He’s taking away our souls. That is what makes us humans.”
“Screwball talk. Roaring. Roaring in my head. Everything’s weird, and I need water,” Isaac thought.
“Well then?” Mr. Elvis was certain what he’d said was convincing, even though Isaac hadn’t grasped a single thing.
A sharp pain in Isaac’s shoulder woke him up completely and he concentrated.
“And only by tearing out the devil’s heart and destroying it, can I complete my mission. What you have in your hands is absolute evil, destroy it, burn it.”
Only now did Isaac finally realize that everything happening was real and he was holding an object that looked like a piece of a microcircuit. Of course! It was from that computer, a piece of the board with some kind of circuits and chips on it.
“Henri Cavalier, get out here.”
“My name’s Mr. Elvis!” the crazy messiah growled, then he turned to Isaac and added in a whisper: “Remember what I told you. Burn the heart of the devil. Promise me. And then the victory will come.”
Isaac nodded, and his thoughts immediately flew to Vicky. “Oh, God! The surgery, the money for the surgery. Oh, God! I’ll be too late. Where am I? Oh, God! Vicky!”
It was a nightmare: the jail cell, the policemen running around, Elvis. Isaac hammered desperately on the bars several times with his hands, but no one took any notice of him. Only once did a doctor come, examined Isaac’s head, shone a little torch into his eyes and said indifferently that it was