1 Someone thought up, guessed, found out about jumping through the iron ghost, and crossed an impassable, deadly, cruelly killing railroad. Someone risked it first. And stuck the pole into a bush of black wormwood. Pole three hundred and twenty-three. The first one on this side. And also, probably, was puking… Most likely Senior Ensign Petrovich personally knows this genius, hero and psycho. Or maybe it was he himself? How it rinses him out! Similar to Vadim himself yesterday on the “neutral” when the Zone was welcoming and evaluating him.
Time was passing, whether a dozens or hundreds of seconds went by, but Bashkalo's vocabulary exhausted itself and Petrovich no longer sobbed weepingly spewing out his afternoon snack, and soon there only were two raucous breaths on the left and right. And the smells, unexpectedly strong as if they were in a small enclosed space. Then everything completely subsided, and Vadim noticed that Petrovich is sitting on the ground in Shukshin's pose32, barefoot, and attentively looking at him from under the long visor of a blue American cap. Looking unkindly, wiping the mouth and under it with a green handkerchief. Vadim straightened up immediately, raised his “forty-seventh”43 by the strap which was clamped in his fist, and fixed it at the prescribed place, ungovernable in ordinary life. Petrovich did not say a word, looked away, folded and removed the handkerchief, quickly stood up and began to shovel wet clay with a heel, covering the eruption. He picked up his “stick” – a broken pole without a disc, also poking the mud onto a puddle of vomit with it. For some reason, he needed to – to clean up the dirt, to cover his shit. But maybe it was necessary? Among Mother-Trouble it is necessary to clean up, always and inevitably, to cover the results of bodily functions, including metabolic products, either rear and front, to hide them, to bury, as nobody knows what could happen to these results and products. What could be the outcome? Not even because they, scouts, can be tracked down, but because the vomit can come to life and eat them, having found and caught them from below.
What Vadim had already understood was that Petrovich does not act in the Zone in vain or for nothing. So he nipped a chuckle “Vomit follows the trail!” in a bud. Everything is real in the Zone.