Basement of death

A common leitmotif of many articles on Habré is the search for errors - inaccuracies, stretches, and sometimes even outright nonsense in books and movies. There are no exceptions, and my articles, in which I, all in white, laugh at the gnawing authors.

Since I, among other things, am a writer, I will honestly grant the right of retaliation: in the sense of giving me the opportunity to laugh at my work. Based on this, I decided to publish a plug-in short story from the series “I am an engineer by my mother” - good, on the subject it closely adjoins the habrotem.

A couple of explanations: The hero of the novel - and the author - different people. We have different positions on many issues. I do not always agree with Comrade Chief Hero and argue with him through the replicas of other characters. And - the persons mentioned in the novel, whose names coincide with real-life people - no more than their reflections in another reality. Like Zander in "Jumping into Nothing" by Belyaev, if you understand what I mean.
So:

Fading fire lit only a tiny patch of beach. The cat sitting opposite the fire, just like me, was looking at the fire, beaming with eyes that reflect the light of the eyes. There was something cozy in this scene.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and, sitting down on the folding chair, patted the knee, inviting Belyash to join. His pompous majesty deigned to accept the invitation. Almost invisible in the dark, Nixel was reclining on a tourist foam, but did not sleep. Of course, you fall asleep here.

- Is it time for amazing stories? - I asked. - Since I still do not sleep.
Nixel was silent. Beliash spun on my lap, getting comfortable.

- Well, since there are no objections, I will start: there is an office center near my house, which has a basement of death under the parking lot.

- What is it like? - quietly asked the girl.

- The basement in which people enter and disappear. Seriously. There, over 30 years of Russian independence, thirty people have disappeared. According to man per year, takszat . I'll tell you better in order.

At the very beginning of the USSR, a special alloy plant was built on the outskirts of Moscow. Under the Union, he existed quietly and calmly, releasing some sort of crap for the national economy.

And at the end of perestroika the director died there. The old man already was. And in the yard perestroika. Publicity. Acceleration. The team of the plant in the spirit of the time made the election director of the plant. The industry leadership did not protest - they already had anyway. This is how one of the young specialists, immediately after the institute, became the director. Why? He spoke beautifully, that's because. He didn’t really go into business - he didn’t need it. Spetsplavy by that time no one was needed.

Then the nineties came. Our director dodged and privatized the plant in one booth. He forged the protocols, collected the vouchers from the collective, giving out meaningless papers in return - and became the sole owner of the factory at the end of all the machinations. The usual story - all of our billionaires, if you dig in the biography of something like that.

At first, he, as befits the "genius of entrepreneurship," simply sold the plant. Cheaply, naturally - because he did not know how differently. But in the year so in 94 it even dawned on him that the resource he inherited was not infinite. And that something needs to stir up.

The exit lay on the surface. Turning the plant management office center, the director will receive a stable source of income. This is where our story began. The building itself was old - built under Stalin, plans in the archive really did not survive, so that the area under the rent had to be measured manually.

So this door and found. Steel. Old What is behind it - no one in the plant did not know. Maybe the old workers knew that for a couple of years they were all fired. It is clear that the door goes to the basement - but what's in it?

It was decided to open the door. There were no workers at the factory by that time. So the former chief engineer was cutting the locks with a grinder. He is the first and gone. He took a flashlight, said that he was going down to the basement - and he was gone. With the ends.

The director waited a couple of hours for him, and sent a secretary for him.

- Is she missing too? - Excitedly asked Nixel.

- Of course not. She just did not go. She didn’t go to the secretaries to climb the basements. I went down a couple of steps and returned, saying that it was dark and scary. They sent an electrician. But he - just gone.

- I don’t understand one thing, why the director didn’t go down himself?

- So I say - it was a new Russian director. He would not even go to the toilet himself, if he had the opportunity to send a secretary there.

So that day no one else went to the basement. Subordinates ran out.

The wife of the chief engineer called in the evening. I was looking for a husband. The director had lied as usual - that he was not in the business, her husband had gone home. Electrician's wife did not call. The electrician lived alone. Just after a couple of years, the court found him missing the court, the neighbors took the room in a communal flat and threw things out into the street.

- Why didn’t the Director of the Ministry of Emergency Situations just cause?

- Yeah. Shassss . I forgot why he measured the area? I wanted to take a loan on the security of a building. The money was very necessary for the factory management office to finish. So any trial with the Ministry of Emergency Situations was not his topic. What if something dangerous and poisonous will be found and the building will have to be demolished?

- And what, no one was looking for the missing? Asked Nixel, chewing on something in the dark.

- Of course not. In the courtyard were the blessed nineties. The police did not even have time to take into account the missing, not what to look for. The engineer's relatives agreed, at the request of the director, that their father and husband had been stolen — to demand ransom. Everything calmed down in general.

The director took the loan, spent the repairs, drove into the office center of the company. A new lock was hung on the door, with the director's key, and for some time the basement didn’t show itself. And that the two workers, while they were building the office center, disappeared - so, perhaps, they left home.

Then the bandits ran into the basement. First, the group of jock racketeers rolled up to our director. He, of course, had garters at the top. Selling off who needs to be carried. But the trick is that the pitching was here and now - and the patrons are in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and tomorrow.

Pitching wanted money from the rental. But they didn’t dare to roll up right away, so for a start they demanded that the director, as a sign of helping the weak and sick athletes, allow them to arrange a rocking chair in the basement. Do not forget - we are talking about the nineties.

The director began to mumble, darken, throw up his hands ... In general, he behaved, from the point of view of the bandits, terribly suspicious. And the more the bandits crushed, the more the director mumbled.

I don’t know what a treasure, according to the gang, the director kept in the basement. Maybe the gold of the CPSU, maybe the library of Ivan the Terrible. In general, the director’s gangsters split. And here all fell over. On the floor. Laughing. The whole story with the basement of death seemed to them a stupid joke. As you understand, I was not there, but I am well aware of this situation. Healthy, juggling and slim, slender director on bending legs.
In general, they laughed and went to the basement. Together. The directors were led to open the door for them. Well, at the same time, to make sure that the worst thing in the world is they, and not the unknown thing that sits in the basement.

The early director was a little behind at first, then, when he opened the doors to the basement, he politely passed the brothers ahead, and downstairs, he first fell a couple of steps down, then even more, and then completely escaped.

So it survived. Because the others are gone. All four.

The director then said that before running away, he saw at the bottom, at the end of the stairs, another metal door. The first thug opened it and whistled in surprise.

- And what was there? The interested Nixel asked.

- Dark. Behind the door at the bottom of the stairs the darkness was splashing, which the brothers and swallowed.

- I did not get that.

- No one understood. The director saw this darkness briefly, fleeing upstairs on all fours - the poor thing tripped when strategically retreating.

But then, reaching the door to the basement and locking it, he managed to listen. At first, he still heard voices, then surprised exclamations, then grind as if something metallic was being dragged, sounds of falling ... And then a low gurgling roar, as if something huge was screaming. Then a couple of pistol shots and silence.

- So what? Brothers, too, no one was looking for?

- Brothers just looking for. Other brothers. The director came up with a cunning scheme - left the keys on the table in his office, with the scheme of how to find the right door and went to Italy. Negotiations on the phone led - on the phone and from Italy, he was very brave. Arriving in the search for comrades to the parties of the brothers, he said that their colleagues went to the basement and did not return, listened to the on-duty threats and, after waiting for a fixed period of time and depicting fear, reported where the keys to the basement lay.

The secretary who remained in Russia went into the building a couple of hours later, closed the basement and returned the keys to the place. Brothers came first in batches of two or three, then in small groups. For the last time, a whole crowd came to them. About ten people, with automatic rifles and in bulletproof vests. However, this did not affect the outcome.

All gone.

The office center at the same time worked as usual. In those years, walking on the floors in search of the owner of a bandit was no surprise. People survived as best they could - and one of the conditions for survival was ignoring other people's fights.

But back to our jocks. Their grouping, by the way, the loss of so many fighters has dramatically bled, and in the end, crippled. The remnants of their gang slaughtered the Chechens, who entered the MSC as a force.

So the next time, the Director has already received a tribute collector from the Chechens. Directly to his villa in Italy. The announcer studied the text, memorized, acting according to a well-established scheme, but was suddenly heard.

And the point here is not that the Chechens were smarter than the group of jocks — anyone, including Belyash, smarter than the bandits of the jocks, but that the Chechens are younger people. The children of the mountains, not so long ago descending from these very mountains, and still remembering the time when all the terrible tales about monsters, demons and dragons were not tales, but a documentary chronicle of current events.

So the Chechens simply announced that the basement was “haram” and made no attempt to go down there. The director paid tribute to them, but nothing else interested them. They had no curiosity.

So this story was mothballed for another fifteen years.

But all good things come to an end. He came and stability. After the crisis of 2008, our Director was acutely short of money. Some tenants moved out, some went bankrupt. The director tried to compensate for the loss of money by raising the rental price for the remaining tenants. After that, they also fled - it is good, in a crisis Moscow that year many offices were empty.

In general, it was necessary to change something. Fortunately, the situation contributed - over the Russian money, which our elite kept in the West, was threatened with dispossession. And shy moneybags began to invest not only in Swiss banks, but also in Russian real estate.

Walkers were sent to the Director with a proposal to demolish it, unremarkable, except for the location, an office center, and build a shopping center. What should have been - in the future - to be a more profitable investment of capital. (For the development vector showed that every year Muscovites work less and consume more and more).

The director was sitting on bread and water (in the sense of being forced to sell a yacht). That's just in the deal there was some roughness. The fact is that the Investor was going to pay for the land not with money, but with trading space in the new shopping center.

Do you understand where I'm going? The director could not get the money and hide in Italy, allowing the new owner himself to deal with a bad basement. The basement remained - partially, of course - including its property. And his headache.

So the Director, Brace Heart, spoke about the problem to the Investor. Immediately after the conclusion of the transaction - he was not an idiot. However, it turned out that the Investor knew about the problem. Security Service tried. But did not attach much importance. In those years, in Moscow, any real estate object had similar skeletons in the closet — a third was entered in the real estate register for bribes, a third was privatized with false documents. Against this background, a building with a basement in which thirty people disappeared is right, a diamond of almost pure water.

It remained to decide what to do with the basement. Immediately run builders was dangerous. The Turks should have built a shopping center, and if their technical staff begins to disappear without a trace in the basement, it will be embarrassing.

They tried to solve the problem by the security forces - they hired a Ukrainian migrant worker security guard and asked to check the basement. Guest worker was gone. Sitting in the basement something for fifteen years has not gone away.

After that, the security service withdrew. For guards who work not for the first year, the backside acquires a special sensitivity to trouble — as soon as it starts to smell fried, the guards, like rats, are the first to run from the ship.

Left on the beans, the Director and Investor approached the business creatively. They appealed to the designer with a request to change the design of the office center under construction in such a way that the basement of the building remained intact and unchanged. The designer, having waited for the customers to leave, was cursing for a long time and turning his finger to his temple, but he did as requested. He has long been accustomed to unusual requests.

Then the building of the shopping center was built. The basement, when the building was dismantled, fell asleep with construction debris, but there were no more changes. On the floor plan, the basement was designated as “Floor - 3”, parking was arranged for customers' cars above it, then three floors of the shopping center itself went.

Five years after this, things were going fine and the basement was not audible. In the underground parking lot, sometimes abandoned cars were found, the drivers and passengers of which disappeared somewhere, but this also happened in other shopping centers.

The trouble crept, from where they did not wait. When the president collapsed the ruble, the Director and Investor residing in Italy were confronted with the fact that their dollar-based earnings were half as much. The director decided to raise the rental price three times for the remaining tenants (to compensate for the losses from the collapse of the ruble and the flight of some tenants), but the smarter Investor dissuaded him from this suicidal act.

Instead, they changed the manager of the shopping center. Prior to that, the manager was a girl from their circle - whether the daughter of a general, or a mistress ... In general, a completely brainless creature, who had only a little mind to collect rent. Not all and not on time.

Instead, a true land crocodile, a young Armenian Ashot, was appointed as manager. He was famous for the fact that he could squeeze out half a glass of vodka even from an empty bottle.

And he began to press the juice from the mall. Yes, so famously, that pleasure to watch. For a start, he installed on the building an Internet jammer, so that tenants would not connect to cheap Internet from cellular operators, and buy internet at an exorbitant price from owners of shopping centers. Then he made all the toilets in the mall paid. Even for the staff of the shopping center.

Then he turned his attention to the basement.

Found the keys, went down. Not in the basement of death, of course. And on the rubble-lit minus the second floor, in one of the corridors of which there was a door to the basement of death.

Locked, of course. This is the manager and saved.

While he walked and looked for — either the keys or the Uzbek with the grinder — the guards oriented and reported to the owners of the shopping center about the situation. The owners were alarmed and forbade the manager to stick his nose into the basement. After all, it is terrible to think what will happen if the manager disappears. His entire Moscow diaspora, all two million people will be looking for.

But then she found a scythe on a stone. Did I mention that the manager was a land crocodile? In general, one way or another, he found out the whole story. And for the first time in this whole story, I made an attempt to research the phenomenon. He sat on a percentage of the funds collected from the shopping center, and it was possible to turn in an empty basement.

He ordered a research drone on wheels from an electronics engineer who soldered the Internet jamming system to them. Mobile platform with a camera, flashlight and tail control through wires. To remotely explore the basement without risking anything.

The electronics engineer, as one would expect, was strong in electronics, and not in mechanics.

The mechanical part of this coffin on wheels, he ordered his friend. And that Einstein was Albert Einstein, ”I said, standing up and bowing.

In a sense, the mechanical part was given to me. For design and assembly. Of course, nothing was said to me or the electronics engineer about the purpose of the device. Yes, we did not ask. We collected it, got paid and forgot.

Well, as they forgot ... The manager every day came to us again and pinned down and demanded money backwards.

The device, they say, did not work. The device was released on the stairs, it descended the stairs, conscientiously removing everything, reached the metal door at the bottom of the stairs, which it rested on with a horn. Figuratively speaking. Open the door it is not skillful. I will say more - he did not even have pens.

But, here, as they say, she found a scythe on a stone.

If the electronic engineer Vander, the manager of the shopping center, started off, then with me a bummer came out. My name is in certain circles: "Where you sit there and dismount." Shouting at me is useless - I myself know how to shout.And I didn’t talk with boorish customers for the first day - I had a task in my hands, which should have been able to make a device. And the opening of the door did not appear in it.

Of course, I can redo the device - by adding the option “Opening doors” - but for separate money and a week of time. This is not an easy task. In general, as I said.

The customer agreed. I immediately demanded an advance payment - in the amount of the total cost of alteration. Once the customer showed himself to be so clever, it was pointless to hope for an honest calculation. The customer predictably refused, and we parted, like ships at sea.
And as soon as he left, Vander and I looked at each other and rushed to write to the Anarchist. In the sense, to the third participant of our trio, who wrote the program stuffing for the Coffin On Wheels. He is always building in his own handicrafts backdoors. In case the customer refuses to pay. Or out of curiosity. Or from natural hazards.

Painfully, we were interested in the task assigned to our drone researcher. That is, from the very beginning we guessed that the matter was not pure - but they put forward more reasonable versions. I, for example, believed that our Grobik Russian government ordered a billion rubles from the institute of Russian Unique Robots, ordered the institute for 100 million from subcontractors, the subcontractors ordered for 10 million from a lured company, they found a suitable desk profile for Avito, whose director I had to order a drone from us for 100 thousand, but personally stole two thirds. Then our drone will be called with great fanfare the “ROBOT EXPLORER OF KUKUSIMA” and the next Rogozin will hand it over to the Japanese ambassador. Vander also believed that the drone would explore the ventilation of the women's locker room of a fitness center.

- Lord, Vander, naked women! - I said. - Eka no great. Who needs naked women now? Half an hour walk legs from the subway - and you're on the beach in Serebryany Bor. There, of course, these naked women are much smaller than men — but they are also abundantly enough. Look - I do not want. This I tell you as an eyewitness. To which Vander replied that a man needs not just a naked woman, but some particular naked woman. Which, obviously, did not please with the flowers of her crotch of some man specifically sunk on her.

So we flipped listlessly while the video was downloading via Wi-Fi.

Seen we did not like. Strong.

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The most common, the Soviet landing. Littered with dusty debris - banners, pots of dried flowers, boxes with folders. There was, of course, no lighting, but our coffin on wheels was made conscientiously - and immediately turned on powerful shadowless lamps. The door at this time, judging by the grunting and scratching sounds, propped up by something heavy.

Then the drone, obeying commands from the console, eagerly moved down the steps. At the bottom, another metal door, steel, massive, like that of an anti-nuclear shelter, was equipped with a barbarous self-closing mechanism made of a rusty kettlebell suspended from a steel cable passed through a system of blocks.

At the same time, Vander and I both held out our hands to the laptop's keyboard, pausing the video. Then they began, with indignant howls, to poke their fingers on the screen. Vander was surprised by Stechkin's automatic pistol lying on the floor, in the dust, standing like a good car, but I was surprised by the strange construction of the door bolts - they were installed to lock the bomb shelter outside. Which is pretty stupid. We are closing in a bomb shelter, and not locking the people sitting in it, is it?

Then we looked at each other. “This is some kind of stalkerian,” the Anarchist watching us through the camera in a laptop printed in ICQ, as if summing up our silence. "Then you can not watch - the drone will drive around and near the door for half an hour, apparently hoping that it will be opened, and then it was pulled back by the tail."

- And then the Manager ordered your droid with your hands? Nyxel asked. It was evident that the story interested her and scared a little - she, like a little turtle, pulled her arms and legs under the rug.

- Not.I did not see the manager any more. The story of the cellar told us the Anarchist. He hacked the accounts of the Director and Investor and read their correspondence.

- And what, the Manager is just so calm?

- Do not underestimate the power of human greed. The droid with his hands seemed too costly to the Manager, and he simply sent one of his debtors there, with the Coffin on Wheels in his hands. This video we received much later.

- And what was there?

- Almost nothing. It can be seen as a man in a gas mask descends the stairs, then with difficulty opens the metal door, behind which there is a huge empty room with columns. The floor of the room is located lower than the door, from which, a small metal bridge departs without a railing, but with steps down.

The man leans down to put the drone on the bridge, and falls from the walkway to the side. Suddenly.Nothing in his behavior foreshadowed such an outcome. A second after him, the drone flies off the bridge - the man did not have time to lay out the supply of the droid's control cable rolled up by the rings, and pulled him along. After another second, the broadcast from the drone was interrupted. Either the cable broke, or the drone was damaged. At that moment there someone shouted.

- Debtor? Nyxel asked.

“Listen to it yourself,” I said, handing the phone to Nixel. - I saved the record.

There seemed to be nothing human in the bass roar that sounded in the silence. And it was not a meaningless cry of an animal - it seemed that if you listen to it, you can discern words. So could shout killed in a computer toy Diablo. Only it was not a game.

- And the video? What was on the video? - asked noticeably frightened Nixel. “Hasn’t the drone ever filmed anything?”

- Almost nothing. You see, it was designed for independent work, and not for a journey in the hands of a forced kamikaze. He pressed the drone to himself so that the lamp was closed. So we had less than a second video, and then almost black, with noise and artifacts.

- And what, what on them?

- It is seen quite a bit. In some frames you can see that there is a slight haze in the room. It looks like a light mist, creeping along the bottom. Like icy air flowing into the room. Then, when the drone was pulled from the bridge to something, he managed to transfer a couple more shots. Also not very clear ...

- Well, well, do not pull, say what was there - Nixel interrupted me. I, keeping a dramatic pause, picked up a mug and took a deep sip of hot coffee.

- Dead people. A lot of dead people. Heaped up, right under the metal walkways. No skeletons, no - the body, with almost no signs of decomposition, only unnatural, gray. I suppose there are all those who descended to the basement over the last quarter of a century.

“This is Thomas,” Nixel said in reverent whisper. - Spontaneous curse, sucking the life of the people entering the basement. I read about him in My Life, Syromyatnikova.

“Yeah,” I said. Four times Thomas and one Erema. If curses worked in our world, it would be a completely different, cleaner and more beautiful world.

Gas it was. Heavy and suffocating.

The plant, after all, was a special alloy, didn't you forget? In the basement they stored the noble gases used in the work. Krypton and xenon. This sweet couple is heavier than air, so if which of the cylinders leaks, then the leaked gas will run along the floor like a liquid. And they can easily suffocate. To begin with, their inhalation causes a narcotic effect, then anesthetic, then suffocating, then convulsive, and then death from lack of oxygen. People entered the basement as if they were trapped, inhaled gas and fell from the walkway down to the bottom of the tank. Alone and in batches.

- A scream? I myself heard - a person cannot shout like that.

- In normal conditions there. That's just the conditions there were unusual. Filling with heavy gases of the lungs and exhalation during a conversation leads to a significant decrease in the tone of the voice. In general, the same effect as inhalation of helium, just the opposite.

- And it's all? Whole mystery Leaking inert gas cylinder?

- ... and capitalism. Without this ingredient, the trap would not have worked.

- Just don't bother me here. This was under the Communists. I read.

“She read,” I said, turning to Belyash, who was sleeping on my lap while I was telling this story. The awakened cat with a crunch stretched out into a string, and again curled up into a ball, closing its eyes and ears with its paws, showing with all its appearance that it did not want to participate in the discussion.

- Do not leave the answer. The social system does not kill on its own, specific people are always to blame for any problem. Here you are, why did not you report the murder to the police?

“What kind of murder?”

- At least - the debtor and the security guard from Ukraine. They were sent to certain death.

- How do you prove it? How not to turn, nobody pushed them into the hall with gas. Themselves come.

“They were sent for certain death,” said, as Nixel had cut off. In general, I agreed with her, so I tried to justify myself.

- Do you know why all the superheroes in the USA in masks are heroes?

- And this is with it?

“And this is despite the fact that the United States lives longer under capitalism.” And the people understand that the hero, whose name will be known to his rich enemies, will live painfully, but not for long. He will be killed, the children with the household will be killed and the house will be burned. And the ashes with salt will be sprinkled - so that everyone will know their place.

- and?

- And that the only thing I would have achieved by declaring a basement hecatomb is that Vander and I would have been killed. Simple and simple. In this very basement and thrown. So that the water is not muddied. A shopping center is a multi-million dollar business, from which dozens of people are fed. And no one will give you this business to stop just like that.

- But you need to do something? You can't leave it like this! - Nixel was indignant.

- Sorry. I am not Batman. Yes, even if I decide to suddenly become Batman, my hands will not reach revenge on these people soon. They are not even included in the Top 100 Most Atrocious Reptiles, Until Now Deforming the Earth with Their Presence. So, small rag-tag.

“Yes, you are not Batman in any way,” Nixel agreed, and shivered, staring in fright at the darkness around us. Despite the fact that she only repeated what I said a minute earlier, it sounded unexpectedly offensive.