"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

We should have talked, spread the pain around; I think all of us realized
it. But we couldn't; we were made awkward by our own special intimacy.
At one time or another, every one of us had reached a point where he had
to talk or die, even Heynith, even Ren. So we all had talked and all had
listened, each of us switching roles sooner or later. We had poured our
fears and dreams and secret memories upon each other, until now we
knew each other too well. It made us afraid. Each of us was afraid that he
had exposed too much, let down too many barriers. We were afraid of
vulnerability, of the knife that jabs for the softest fold of the belly. We were
all scarred men already, and twice-shy. And the resentment grew that
others had seen us that helpless, that vulnerable. So the walls went back
up, intensified. And so when we needed to talk again, we could not. We
were already too close to risk further intimacy.

Visions returned, ebbing and flowing, overlaying the darkness.

The magma churning, belching a hot breath that stinks of rotten eggs.

The cadet, his face inhuman in the death rictus, blood running down in
a wash from his smashed forehead, plastering one eye closed, bubbling at
his nostril, frothing around his lips, the lips tautening as his head jerks
forward and then backwards, slamming the ground, the lips then growing
slack, the body slumping, the mouth sagging open, the rush of blood and
phlegm past the tombstone teeth, down the chin and neck, soaking into
the fabric of the tunic. The feet drumming at the ground a final time,
digging up clots of earth.

I groped for understanding. I had killed people before, and it had not
bothered me except in sleep. I had done it mechanically, routine backed
by hate, hate cushioned by routine. I wondered if the night would ever
end. I remembered the morning I'd watched from the mountain. I didn't
think the night would end. A big idea tickled my mind again. The city
swallowed by stone. The cadet falling, swinging his arms wide. Why always
the cadet and the city in conjunction? Had one sensitized me to the other,
and if so, which? I hesitated. Could both of them be equally important?
One of the other section leaders whistled. We all started, somehow grew
even more tense. The whistle came again, warbling, sound floating on
silence like oil on water. Someone was coming. After a while we heard a
rustling and snapping of underbrush approaching downslope from the
mountain. Whoever it was, he was making no effort to move quietly. In
fact he seemed to be blundering along, bulling through the tangles,
making a tremendous thrashing noise. Goth and I turned in the direction
of the sound, brought our guns up to bear, primed them. That was
instinct. I wondered who could be coming down the mountain toward us.
That was reason. Heynith twisted to cover the opposite direction, away
from the noise, resting his gun on the saddle rim. That was caution. The
thrasher passed our position about six feet away, screened by the shrubs.
There was an open space ten feet farther down, at the head of a talus bluff
that slanted to the valley. We watched it. The shrubs at the end of the
clearing shook, were torn aside, A figure stumbled out into starlight.