"Castro, Adam Troy - Locusts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Castro Adam Troy)

ADAM TROY CASTRO

LOCUSTS 1.

One got in just before dawn. That's when they always got in. That's when the
skies just opened up with billions of them, and the thumpthumpthump of their
tiny forms smashing against the house became the only sound in the known
universe. That's when the few of us still left alive huddled together in
Sharon's basement under an old canvas tarpaulin, spending the night as we always
did, breathing each others' breath, smelling each others' sweat, feeling each
others' sanity wither beneath the constant tattoo of little bodies smashing
against brick walls.

Then the pounding meant nothing, because all of a sudden there was a Locust
flying around in the room with us, her gossamer wings making soft whispery
sounds as they feather-dusted the soot from the ceiling. She made a low pass
over our heads, chittering in the high-pitched rhythmic tones I'd always
imagined a form of sonar, showing no sign that she sensed us as anything other
than a shapeless mound below her.

We might have been able to hide from her forever, had my poor deaf, blind, and
mad wife Jane not chosen that moment to start screaming again, with all five of
her mouths at once.

"Stu!" Claudette hissed. "Stop her --"

She didn't get to say anything else. The Locust strafed us, her glittering
rainbow-trail neatly slicing the tarpaulin, and Claudette's neck, like tissue
paper. Her blood geysered against the underside of the canvas, splattering the
rest of us like hot rain.

Jane just went on screaming. But by then her multiple voices were just a small
part of the choir, because we were all screaming. Peter was screaming because
Claudette had been his wife, and Sharon was screaming for everybody to stay calm
dammit, and Bob was screaming because his shellshocked brain wasn't capable of
anything else, and Nancy was screaming because she wanted everybody to know it
was all Jane's fault, and I was screaming because I was scrabbling out from
under the mined tarpaulin, aerosol bug spray in hand, to face the Locust before
it killed the rest of us.

It wasn't as dark in the basement as it should have been. The lights weren't
working anymore; they hadn't worked in weeks, because nothing electrical worked
anymore, not even flashlights -- but the Locust emitted a soft white halo that
lit up the whole room. Her rainbow trail was already fading into intangibility
where it had sliced through Claudette, but the freshest sections, immediately
behind her, shimmered and sparkled like a symphony of color, lending the room
around us the trippy lighting of a fever dream. It was magical and ageless and
Disneyesque and deadly.