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

around the bend, who had worked late the night the Locusts first started to fall
and who had first staggered into our makeshift shelter incapable of speaking
more than half a dozen coherent words at a time, emerged from beneath the
tarpaulin, his bovine eyes as black and uncomprehending as any other dumb animal
delivered to the slaughterhouse. Bob was even worse off than Peter, he'd
regressed almost all the way to infancy. Oh, he managed sentences sometimes --
but never anything clear enough to explain what had happened to him, or how the
Johnsons had died, or where he'd picked up the disquieting bums that made rags
of his paint-speckled overalls. He just shuffled around waiting for us to tell
him what to do next . . .

That left only one figure still rocking back and forth under the tarpaulin --
the one Nancy clearly held responsible for Claudette's death. Jane. I fixed
Nancy with the kind of look I hoped would frighten her off. "Forget it."

"The little freak almost got us all killed," Nancy said. "It's time we got rid
of her."

The figure under the tom tarpaulin moaned with five separate voices, none even
remotely human, all begging wordlessly for a release that wouldn't come. I'd
never been able to accept that as what had become of the woman I'd married. It
didn't matter that I'd fallen out of love with her years ago, that I'd cheated
on her frequently, that we'd discussed divorce often, and that we'd stayed
together mostly out of inertia and misplaced concern for the children, she was
still Jane . . . barely. I faced Nancy dead-on. "We don't throw anybody out.
That's the role. But we won't stop you from leaving if you can't live with it."

Nancy searched the room for somebody willing to join her in taking offense. But
Peter was slipping into catatonia, Bob was not much better, and Sharon was
staring at her with open hostility that once upon a time I never would have
dreamt I'd see on her beautiful face. Disgusted, Nancy treated me with one last
glare of compressed hate -- the kind of look that leaves men afraid of having
their throats slit while they sleep -- then turned away and stomped up the
stairs to the front yard.

Sharon and I met each other's eyes, recognizing there both the understanding
that Nancy might be right, and the agreement that it didn't matter. We'd all
lost everything: our children, our families, our civilization, the rational
world, even, to varying degrees, our humanity. If we started evicting people to
take their own chances with the Locusts, we'd be giving up the only part of
ourselves that still made survival matter. The only part that separated us from
somebody like Nancy.

Bob blinked plaintively. "Eat?"

"Yeah," Sharon said, in a tone weary of everything. "Eat." 3.

About two weeks ago, there'd been a night of red fire that turned all the canned
food within travelling distance to an inedible foul-smelling black tar. By then,
of course, we'd already known that food was going to be a problem, sooner or