"Bishop, Michael - The Quickening" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bishop Michael)

From deep within the city came the brittle noise of gunshots. The Bluebird's driver, in response to this sound and to the vegetable carts and automobiles that had been moved into the streets as obstacles, began wheeling and cornering like a stock-car jockey. The bus clanked and stuttered alarmingly. It growled through an intersection below a stone bridge, leapt over that bridge like something living, and roared down into a semi-industrial suburb of Seville, where a Coca-Cola bottling factory and a local brewery lifted huge competing signs.

On top of one of these buildings Lawson saw a man with a rifle taking unhurried potshots at anyone who came into his sights. Several people already lay dead.
And a moment later the Bluebird's windshield shattered, another bullet ricocheted off its flank, and everyone in the bus was either shouting or weeping. The next time Lawson looked, the bus's windshield appeared to have woven inside it a large and exceedingly intricate spider's web.
The Bluebird careened madly, but the doctor from Ivanhoe kept it upright and turned it with considerable skill onto the highway to San Pablo. Here the bus eased into a quiet and rhythmic cruising that made this final incident in Seville except for the evidence of the windshield-seem only the cottony aftertaste of nightmare. At last they were on their way. Maybe.
"Another good reason for trying to get home," Lawson said.
"What makes you think it's going to be different there?" -
Irritably, Lawson turned on the Welshman. "1 thought your idea was that this change was some kind of improvement."
"Perhaps it will be. Eventually."
Lawson made a dismissive noise and looked at the olive . orchard spinning by on his left. Who would harvest the crop? Who would set the aircraft factories, the distilleries, the chemical and textile plants running again? Who would see to it that J seed was sown in the empty fields?
Maybe Secombe had something. Maybe, when you ran for home, you ran from the new reality at hand. The effects of . this new reality's advent were not going to go away very soon, no matter what you did-but seeking to reestablish yesterday's order would probably create an even nastier entropic pattern 1 than would accepting the present chaos and working to rein it in. How, though, did you best rein it in? Maybe by trying to get back home . . .
Lawson shook his head and thought of Marlena, Karen, Hannah; of the distant, mist-softened cradle of the Blue
Ridge. Lord. That was country much easier to get in tune with than the harsh, white-sky bleakness of this Andalusian valley. If you stay here, Lawson told himself, the pain will never go away.
They passed Santa Clara, which was a housing area for the officers and senior NCOs who had been stationed at Moron. With its neatly trimmed hedgerows, tall aluminum streetlamps, and low-roofed houses with carports and picture windows, Santa Clara resembled a middle-class exurbia in New Jersey or Ohio. Black smoke was curling over the area, however, and the people on the streets and lawns were definitely not Americans-they were transplanted Dutch South Africans, Amazonian tribesmen, Poles, Ethiopians, God only knew what. All Lawson could accurately deduce was that a few of these people had moved into the vacant houses maybe they had awakened in them-and that others had aimlessly set bonfires about the area's neighborhoods. These fires, because there was no wind, burned with a maddening slowness and lack of urgency.
"Little America," Secombe said aloud.
"That's in Antarctica," Lawson responded sarcastically.
"Right. No matter where it happens to be."
"Up yours."
Their destination was now San Pablo, where the Americans had hospital facilities, a library, a movie theater, a snack bar, a commissary, and, in conjunction with the Spaniards, a small commercial and military airfield. San Pablo lay only a few more miles down the road, and Lawson contemplated the idea of a flight to Portugal. What would be the chances. supposing you actually reached Lisbon, of crossing the Atlantic, either by sea or air, and reaching one of the United States' coastal cities? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? Less than that?
A couple of seats behind the driver, an Englishman with a crisp-looking mustache and an American woman with a distinct Southwestern accent were arguing the merits of by-

passing San Pablo and heading on to Gibraltar, a British possession. The Englishman seemed to feel that Gibraltar would have escaped the upheaval to which the remainder of the world had fallen victim, whereas the American woman thought he was crazy. A shouting match involving five or six other passengers ensued. Finally, his patience at an end, the Bluebird's driver put his elbow on the horn and held it there until everyone had shut up.
"It's San Pablo." he announced. "Not Gibraltar or anywhere else. There'll be a plane waiting' for us when we get there."

V1

Two aircraft were waiting, a pair of patched-up DC-7s that had once belonged to the Spanish airline known as Iberia. Mrs. Alexander had recruited one of her pilots from the DPs who had shown up at Export Dora; the other, a retired TAW veteran from Riverside, California, had made it by himself to the airfield by virtue of a prior acquaintance with Seville and its American military installations. Both men were eager to carry passengers home, one via a stopover in Lisbon and the other by using Madrid as a steppingstone to the British Isles. The hope was that they could transfer their passengers to jet aircraft at these cities' more cosmopolitan airports, but no one spoke very much about the real obstacles to success that had already begun stalking them: civil chaos, delay, inadequate communications, fuel shortages, mechanical hangups, doubt and ignorance, a thousand other things.
At twilight, then, Lawson stood next to Dai Secombe at the chainlink fence fronting San Pablo's pothole-riven runway and watched the evening light glimmer off the wings of the DC-7s. Bathed in a muted dazzle, the two old airplanes were almost beautiful. Even though Mrs. Alexander had informed the DPs that they must spend the night in the installation's movie theater, so that the Bluebird could make several more
shuttle runs to Exportadora, Lawson truly believed that he was bound for home.
"Good-bye," Secombe told him.
"Good-bye? . . . Oh, because you'll be on the other flight?"
"No, I'm telling you good-bye, Lawson, because I'm leaving. Right now, you see. This very minute."
"Where are you going?"
"Back into the city."
"How? What for?"
"I'll walk, I suppose. As for why, it has something to do with wanting to appease Mrs. Alexander's `they,' also with finding out what's to become of us all. Seville's the place for that, 1 think."
"Then why'd you even come out here?"
"To say good-bye, you bloody imbecile." Secombe laughed, grabbed Lawson's hand, shook it heartily. "Since I couldn't manage to change your mind."
With that, he turned and walked along the chainlink fence until he had found the roadway past the installation's commissary. Lawson watched him disappear behind that building's complicated system of loading ramps. After a time the Welshman reappeared on the other side, but against the vast Spanish sky, his compact, striding form rapidly dwindled to an imperceptible smudge. A smudge on the darkness.
"Good-bye," Lawson said.
That night, slumped in a lumpy theater chair, he slept with nearly sixty other people in San Pablo's movie house. A teenage boy, over only a few objections, insisted on showing all the old movies still in tins in the projection room. As a result, Lawson awoke once in the middle of Apocalypse Now and another time near the end of Kubrick's The Left Hand of Darkness. The ice on the screen, dune like sastrugi, ranged from horizon to horizon, chilled him, touching a sensitive spot in his memory. "Little America," he murmured. Then he went back to sleep.

Vll

With the passengers bound for Lisbon, Lawson stood at the fence where he had stood with Secombe, and watched the silver pin wheeling of propellers as the aircraft's engines engaged. The DC-7 flying to Madrid would not leave until much later that day, primarily because it still had several vacant seats and Mrs. Alexander felt sure that more English-speaking DPs could still be found in the city.
The people at the gate with Lawson shifted uneasily and whispered among themselves. The engines of their savior airplane whined deafeningly, and the runway seemed to tremble. What woebegone eyes the women had, Lawson thought, and the men were as scraggly as railroad hoboes. Feeling his jaw, he understood that he was no more handsome or well groomed than any of those he waited with. And, like them, he was impatient for the signal to board, for the thumbs-up sign indicating that their airplane had passed its latest rudimentary ground tests.
At least, he consoled himself, you're not eating potato chips at ten-thirty in the morning. Disgustedly, he turned aside from a jut-eared man who was doing just that.
"There're more people here than our plane's supposed to carry," the potato-chip crunchier said. "That could be dangerous."
"But it isn't really that far to Lisbon, is it?" a woman replied. "And none of us has any luggage."
"Yeah, but-" The man gagged on a chip, coughed, tried to speak again. Facing deliberately away, Lawson felt that the man's words would acquire eloquence only if he suddenly volunteered to ride in the DC-7's unpressurized baggage compartment.