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

spun like a high-strung cat and leveled the shotgun right at me. Maybe I didn't
really sense her finger tightening about the trigger, but I sure thought I did,
and for a single frozen heartbeat I couldn't see a thing but the enormous barrel
of that shotgun, hateful and deadly as a borehole to hell.

Then she kind of nodded. "Kemp," she said, and all the air went out of me in a
woosh.

"What's going on?" I said. "Who's--"

Already she'd swung the shotgun away from me. "Shut up, Kemp," she said, and
someone else added, conversationally,

"Yes, lad, do shut the hell up, would you?"

I glanced into the yard and that's when I got my first look at Shamus Smee. He
looked like nothing more than a drowned sewer rat, thin faced and delicate
boned, with a three-day beard running to gray, and furtive eyes the color of
lead. He wore combat boots and a sweat-stained camo jumper, and his corded hands
hung at his thighs, flexing with nervous tension. He projected a sense of
contained energy, like a coiled steel spring, and when he spoke again, his
clipped northern accent sounded wheedling and hostile:

"Now then, you were saying--"

"I was explaining to you and your slut how you had taken a wrong turn in Scary,"
Mama said. "Less you have i.d."

Said slut--a waif-like twenty-something with a close-cropped head of dirty
blonde and a torso-hugging mood shirt--gasped. "Shamus--" she began, the T-shirt
flaring an angry red, but Smee interrupted.

"Shut up, Lush. True is true. Back to the car with you."

"Shamus--"

"Back to the car with you, I said!" He turned on her and something electric
passed between them. I could feel it, sizzling in the August heat.

The blonde edged toward the humvee, parked carelessly fifteen meters from the
house. Its doors stood open, internal alarms bleating like a sickly cow. Smee
stood his ground.

"As I was telling you," Smee said, "BioGene has--"

"Nobody informed me that you were coming."

"I have come to relieve you. And frankly, I couldn't give two shits whether you
were informed."