"Carroll Brown - The Borderlands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Carroll)

CAROLL BROWN

THE BORDERLANDS

I caught the zombie weeping in the middle aisle, between breakfast cereals and
cookies, staring at an empty patch of moonlit wall near the ceiling. The broom
rested lightly in his hands, cradled in his dead fingers with its bristles still
flared at the bottom, as though he had stopped his sweeping in mid-stroke. That
lack of sound, the sudden hush, had drawn me down the stairs, as someone who
lived by the sea would have been surprised one night if the waves had suddenly
stopped their gentle shushing and broken in silence on the sand.

I had stopped my silent pacing in the hall above the store; an art that I had
mastered out of necessity and long practice, I spaced my footfalls carefully to
thread the maze of loose boards that would wake Gwen, tell her instantly that I
was out of bed again. If she found me here she would yell, plead, sulk in
silence, coerce me to return to bed, to sleep. To the visions that still came
every night, and that I still could not bear.

So at night I walked, measuring over and over the corridor that ran the length
of the building, from one end of the apartment to the top of the stairs that led
to the store below, until I collapsed from sheer exhaustion into utter darkness,
too tired to dream.

Until the night the broom stopped.

"Albert?"

I didn't realize at first that he was weeping, I'd never heard of such a thing,
and what could make a dead man weep? My first thought as I came down the stairs,
seeing him motionless and striped with light and shadow falling through the
shuttered window, was that something was wrong, that perhaps he had simply shut
down, as sometimes they did, falling over in their tracks at their employers'
feet, dropping their garden tools or the packages they were carrying, uncommon
as such incidents were, it was the possibility of them that had kept from the
zombies the right to drive.

But Albert was still standing, and it wasn't until I stepped closer that I saw
the trails, silver ribbons in the moonlight, that ran down his cheeks.

"Albert, are you all right?"

His jaw hung slack, his shoulders slumped, and his gaze never wavered from that
spot high on the wall. I followed it with my own eyes, straining to see what he
was seeing, but whatever he watched was visible only to a zombie's eyes. I
touched him lightly on the shoulder; I had never touched a zombie before, never
had to handle Albert in the year that he'd been working for me. The flesh of his
arm was unnaturally soft and pliant, like dough, and I shuddered.