"Duncan, Andy - Fortitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Andy)

brick-colored puddle that was rushing to refill itself, having just been
disturbed by something, perhaps a foot. I couldn't breathe. I was upside
down, bent double. Someone was carrying me on his shoulder. Then I
remembered.
"Angelo," I said.
"Almost there, Colonel," he said. Still no pain, though I could feel
nothing, move nothing, could barely lift my head. Now I was looking into a
big shell hole, maybe ten feet across and five feet deep, and the bottom
of it was rising to meet me. Then I saw the damnable sky again, and Angelo
was laying me down at the foot of the hole, trying to straighten me as
best he could, which wasn't very straight. When he quit fussing, I was
half sitting up like a sultan taking his ease, the back of my head
pillowed by a tuft of needle grass.
"The tanks," I said.
"Still moving," he said.
I coughed. "The men."
He looked away. "Sit tight, Colonel," he said. "Once the tanks have shut
off those machine guns, they'll be back for us."
He meant, they're all dead. "Not back," I said. "Forward." Then I blacked
out again.
When next I awoke, the first person I saw, standing atop the thrown-up
dirt at the lip of the hole, wearing his awful plaid weekend jacket over
his slate-colored courthouse uniform of vest and baggy trousers, was my
father, who was transparent but aglow within, like a reconnaissance
balloon. Papa was looking into the hole with a slight frown, vexed, as if
he'd mislaid his glasses again. He loomed over Private Angelo, who lay on
his belly and sighted along his rifle into the smoke.
I expected Papa to start patting his pockets. Instead he saw me, smiled,
and punched the air with his walking stick by way of greeting. "Tell me
something, Georgie," he called. As he headed my way, he stepped on Private
Angelo's back; his foot just seeped in, then reappeared, whole. As Papa
stepped into the pit he darkened considerably, and I saw his inward glow
had merely been a flare guttering down the sky, briefly visible through
his chest. "I'm curious. And think it over carefully before you answer."
Having reached the bottom, he sat on nothing and leaned back with his
fingers together, as he always did at his desk in the study at Lake
Vineyard. "Do you ever -- how shall I put it? I want to speak precisely,
now. See people who aren't there? Images from the past, or of the future?"
He leaned over to where his desk drawer would be, pulled on it, made
familiar motions with his empty hands. "Drink, Georgie? No, of course not.
Ah." He smacked his pale lips. "There's profit in grapes, but more
character in grain. Visions, Georgie. There, I said it. Fine Episcopalian
I am, eh, to be talking about visions. Do you believe in visions,
Georgie?"
"Paralyzed" isn't the term; rather, I felt as if I had nothing left to
move. I sensed, rather than felt, my life ebbing away through my wound,
somewhere out of sight but vital, as a child senses his parents' despair.
Yet I seriously considered Papa's question, even as I watched through his
vest a rat that clawed out of the dirt, looked around, then scrambled back
out of sight, long tail whipping about beneath Papa's watch fob. I felt I