"BAILEY-AnencephalicFields" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

came to an end when Mama accidentally left a gate open and a couple of the kids
got a glimpse into one of the growing sheds.

Me, I've never been superstitious, so the meat didn't bother me one way or the
other. That was the word I used around the house, meat, mainly to bug Mama, who
mostly used another term. I used to see it in the reports she sent to BioGene
every month or two: anencephalic. Mama had an education--a lot of education--and
I suppose that was one of the things I held against her. Mama never let me join
up at the school in Scary; she said she wasn't paying her hard-earned dollar to
see some second-rate hillbilly corrupt her son with nonsense. I didn't see how
she reckoned her dollar hard-earned; she never did anything but tend the meat
and zombie down the cyber-highways as far as I could see. But the long and short
of it was that I was pretty much stuck out there in the corpse gardens with six
acres of meat and one ball-busting bitch who didn't have a use for any man, much
less one that sprang from the loins of her dear departed.

The way I figured it, Daddy had a lot to answer for.

THE MAN NAMED SMEE came to our little corner of paradise in my twelfth summer. I
watched the dust trail draw near from a ridge not far outside the fence-line.
Most of the vehicles that came that way--and there weren't many in those
days--took the branch that leads by an old logging road south to Beauty. But
this one came straight on, and by the time I glimpsed the humvee itself, a dull
metal flash motoring along through the trees below, I had worked out exactly
what that meant.

Once upon a time Mama and I had entertained our fair share of visitors. There
had been her friends from the college where she used to teach for one, and a
worse bunch of cackling hens I never hope to see, but that pretty much came to
an end during the crash, when it wasn't a good idea for a woman to travel alone.
BioGene reps had stopped in three or four times a year as well, high profile
corporate drones most of them, with faces impervious as glass and their big-city
dollymops along for a squeeze. But that petered out during the crash, too. Mama
said that BioGene had shifted into bio-warfare research big time by then, and we
figured they'd forgotten all about their little experiment--though I suppose
someone must have remembered because corporate continued to download Mama's
check regular as clockwork.

Mama thought we were safer in Scary than we might be in lots of other places, so
we stayed put and tended the meat because that's what we'd always done--or at
least since Daddy had left, which was as close to always as I could figure when
I was twelve years old. But BioGene hadn't sent one of their drones around for
over four years at this point, so when I saw the humvee rumbling through the
trees below I figured the stranger to be a bandit, and I lit out for home.

Mama was a bitch all right, but I'd long since decided that if anyone was going
to kill her, it was going to be me.

I nearly got myself killed instead. Mama stood on the front porch with Daddy's
old Mossberg in her arms and as I cornered the last of the growing sheds, she