"Chalker, Jack L. - Dancing Gods 01 - The River of the Dancing Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

Chalker, Jack L - The River of the Dancing Gods
CHAPTER I
ENCOUNTER ON A LONELY ROAD
People taken from other universes should always be near death.
ЧThe Books of Rules, XX, 109, 234(a)
JUST BECAUSE YOUR WHOLE LIFE IS GOING TO HELL DOESN'T
mean you have to walk there.
She was walking down a lonely stretch of west Texas freeway
in the still dark of the early morning, an area where nobody
walked and where there was no place to walk to, anyway. She
might have been hitching, or not, but a total lack of traffic
gave her very little choice there. So she was just walking,
clutching a small overnight bag and a purse that was almost
the same size, holding on to them as if they were the only two
real things in her life, they and the dark and that endless stretch
of west Texas freeway.
Whatever traffic there was seemed to be heading the other
wayЧan occasional car, or pickup, or eighteen-wheeler with
someplace to go and some reason to go there, all heading in
the direction she was walking from, and where, she knew too
well, there was nothing much at all for anybody. But if their
destinations were wrong, their sense of purpose separated the
night travelers from the woman on the road; people who had
someplace to go and something to do belonged to a different
world than she did.
She had started out hitching, all right. She'd made it to the
truck stop at Ozona, that huge, garish, ultramodern, and plastic
heaven in the middle of nowhere that served up anything and
everything twenty-four hours a day for those stuck out here,
going between here and there. After a time, she'd gotten another
ride, this one only twenty miles west and at a cost she
was not willing to pay. And so here she was, stuck out in the
middle of nowhere, going nowhere fast. Walk, walk, walk to
nowhere, from nowhere in particular, because nowhere was all
the where she had to go.
Headlights approached from far off; but even if they had
2 THE RIVER OF DANCING GODS
held any interest for her, they were still too far away to be
more than abstract, jerky round dots in the distance, a distance
that the west Texas desert made even more deceptive. How far
off was the oncoming driver? Ten miles? More? Did it matter?
It was at least ten, maybe fifteen minutes before the vehicle
grew close enough for the woman to hear the roar of the big
diesel and realize that this was, in fact, one of those haunters
of the desert dark, a monster tractor-trailer truck with a load
of furniture for Houston or beef for New Orleans or, perhaps,
California oranges for the Nashville markets. Although it had
been approaching her from the west for some time, its sudden
close-up reality was startling against the total stillness of the
night, a looming monster that quickly illuminated the night and