"Gardner Dozois - Flash Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

killed the baby, slit its throat, and they'd hung it up to bleed like a hog. Into cups. When we got there,
they'd just cut its heart out, and they were starting in on dismembering it. HellтАФthey were tearing it apart,
never mind that 'dismembering' shit. They were so frenzied-blind they hardly noticed us come in. Mrs.
Bradshaw hadn't been able to take it, she'd cracked completely and was sitting in a corner screaming her
lungs out, with Mr. Sewell trying to shut her up. They were the only two that even tried to run. The boys
hung Gibson and Bradshaw and Sewell, and stomped Ed Patterson to deathтАФI just couldn't stop 'em. It
was all I could do to keep 'em from killing the other ones. I shot Steve Girard in the arm, trying to stop
'em, but they took the gun away, and almost strung me up too. My God, Ben, I've known Steve Girard
a'most ten yeahs. I've known Gibson and Sewell all my life." He stared at them appealingly, blind with
despair. "What's happened to people up heah?"

No one said a word.

Not in these pa'ts, Jacobs mimicked himself bitterly. There are decent limits.
 Jacobs found that he was holding the pipe-cleaning knife like a weapon. He'd cut his finger on it, and
a drop of blood was oozing slowly along the blade. This kind of thingтАФthe Satanism, the ritual murders,
the sadismтАФwas what had driven him away from the city. He'd thought it was different in the country,
that people were better. But it wasn't, and they weren't. It was bottled up better out here, was all. But it
had been coming for years, and they had blinded themselves to it and done nothing, and now it was too
late. He could feel it in himself, something long repressed and denied, the reaction to years of frustration
and ugliness and fear, to watching the world dying without hope. That part of him had listened to Lucas'
story with appreciation, almost with glee. It stirred strongly in him, a monster turning over in ancient mud,
down inside, thousands of feet down, thousands of years down. He could see it spreading through the
faces of the others in the room, a stain, a spider shadow of contamination. Its presence was suffocating:
the chalky, musty smell of old brittle death, somehow leaking through from the burial pit in Vienna. Bone
dustтАФhe almost choked on it, it was so thick here in his pleasant parlor in the country.

And then the room was filled with sound and flashing, bloody light.

Jacobs floundered for a moment, unable to understand what was happening. He swam up from his
chair, baffled, moving with dreamlike slowness. He stared in helpless confusion at the leaping red
shadows. His head hurt.

"An ambulance!" Carol shouted, appearing in the parlor archway with Amy. "We saw it from the
upstairs windowтАФ"

"It's right out front," Sussman said.

They ran for the door. Jacobs followed them more slowly. Then the cold outside air slapped him, and
he woke up a little. The ambulance was parked across the street, in front of the senior citizens' complex.
The corpsmen were hurrying up the stairs of one of the institutional, cinderblock buildings, carrying a
stretcher. They disappeared inside. Amy slapped her bare arms to keep off the cold. "Heart attack,
mebbe," she said. Everett shrugged. Another siren slashed through the night, getting closer. While they
watched, a police cruiser pulled up next to the ambulance, and Riddick got out. Riddick saw the group in
front of Jacobs' house, and stared at them with undisguised hatred, as if he would like to arrest them and
hold them responsible for whatever had happened in the retirement village. Then he went inside too. He
looked haggard as he turned to go, exhausted, hagridden by the suspicion that he'd finally been handed
something he couldn't settle with a session in the soundproofed back room at the sheriff's office.

They waited. Jacobs slowly became aware that Sussmann was talking to him, but he couldn't hear