Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

] And it would be quite impossible in any case to inject even a safe drug through a fine needle designed for humans into a horse as wild as this.

�Get a carving knife or something from the galley,’ I said. �Anything long and sharp. And quick.’

He turned away, stumbling in his haste. The colt’s hind feet smashed one broken half of the back wall clean out. He turned round balefully, thrust his head between the top and centre banding bars, and tried to scramble through. The panic in his eyes was pitiful.

From inside his jerkin Billy calmly produced a large pistol and pointed it towards the colts’ threshing head.

�Don’t be a bloody fool,’ I shouted. �We’re thirty thousand feet up.’

The co-pilot came back with a white handled saw-edged bread knife, saw the gun, and nearly fainted.

�D… don’t,’ he stuttered. �D… d… don’t.’

Billy’s eyes were very wide. He was looking fixedly at the heaving colt and hardly seemed to hear.

All his mind seemed to be concentrated on aiming the gun that could kill us all.

The colt smashed the first of the lynch pins and lunged forwards, bursting out of the remains of the box like flood water from a dam. I snatched the knife from the co-pilot and as the horse surged towards me stuck the blade into the only place available, the angle where the head joined the neck.

I hit by some miracle the carotid artery.[140 - I hit by some miracle the carotid artery. – (разг.

) Каким-то чудом я попал в сонную артерию.] But I couldn’t get out of his way afterwards. The colt came down solidly on top of me, pouring blood, flailing his legs and rolling desperately in his attempts to stand up again.

His mane fell in my mouth and across my eyes, and his heaving weight crushed the breath in and out of my lungs like some nightmare form of artificial respiration. He couldn’t right himself over my body, and as his struggles weakened he eventually got himself firmly wedged between the remains of his own box and the one directly aft of it.

The co-pilot bent down and put his hands under my armpits and in jerks dragged me out from underneath.

The blood went on pouring out, hot sticky gallons of it, spreading down the gangways in scarlet streams. Alf cut open one of the hay bales and began covering it up, and it soaked the hay into a sodden crimson brown mess.