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

later, we were running out of everything in our combined larder, and we'd
learned the hard way that raiding the local supermarkets was a Very Bad Idea.

The only thing left to eat, now, was the same thing killing us.

The Locusts.

Every single morning, now, we staggered from Sharon's house -- one of only three
brick-masonry homes on the street -- and into a once-fashionable suburban
neighborhood now a landscape right out of hell. The wood-frame houses were all
skeletal rains, so honeycombed with Locust tunnels that only stubbornness kept
them standing. The parked cars were all twisted, misshapen, semi-melted hulks,
like sick compromises between Dali and Detroit. The sky was a multicolored haze
of dissolving rainbow-trails. And the trees had all turned to something
crystalline that made jarring music in high winds. But the worst thing around us
remained the corpses of last night's Locusts, they'd fallen by the billions, and
their smashed little bodies were ankle-deep in all directions. They were all
naked, they were all dead, and they all looked like little winged people, but in
the hours before the diamond-shaped sun burned them away, they were also all
flesh and they could all be eaten. They even tasted nice; their skin had a tangy
spice that tasted a lot like barbecued chicken.

But just because they tasted good, that didn't necessarily mean they were good
to eat.

Sometimes the special sauce just didn't agree with you.

Today, as I knelt alongside the others picking through the grisly buffet, one
hand keeping a tight grip on Jane's leash, I found myself thinking of Eddie for
the first time in days. Eddie had been Sharon's husband, a security consultant
by trade, and midlist crime novelist by inclination, who had first taken charge
of our survival. It had been his idea for us to pool our resources defending one
house instead of ten. He'd been responsible for dubbing them Locusts. He'd been
the first one to take a bite out of one and pronounce them edible, and
unfortunately, the first to find out the hidden risks . . .

. . . we'd all had Reactions. Some of us had experienced three or four or five,
one on top of the other, each one transforming us a little, each one taking us a
little bit further away from humanity. Some of the changes were funny, in a way:
Bob had unnaturally big brown Keane-painting eyes, Peter was now covered by a
layer of bright yellow fuzz, Sharon had cat's whiskers and three extra fingers
on each hand, I had a ridge of jagged spines along both shoulders, and Nancy had
a forked tongue and featureless slit where she'd once sported lips. We were all
lucky, if you considered what had happened to Eddie, or what had happened to our
children . . . or what had happened to Jane.

We all grazed anyway -- albeit by and large separately, afraid to meet each
other's eyes. It wasn't like we had any choice.

After about twenty minutes, Sharon worked her way over to me, pretending to be