"Tom Easton - Unto the Last Generation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

"So I'd like some company." He began to walk across the clearing, gesturing with his stick. His cloak
swayed with the motion. "Somebody to talk to, you know?"

The householder grunted. He was no cleaner or better dressed than the man in his yard, but he did not
leave his doorway.

"Hey," said the stranger. He stabbed his stick into the ground and waved a hand toward the house's
chimney, from which trailed a telltale wisp of smoke. "You've got a fire. I've got meat. Snared a rabbit
this morning. Hit a pigeon with a rock." He stepped forward, hand outstretched, smiling behind his beard.
"I'm Ron."

The householder was shifting his grip on the handle of his axe when a voice behind him said, "Don't let
him in!"

"You've got a woman?" Suddenly a knife was in the stranger's hand, the bushes behind him were rattling
as two other men came into view, and the householder was staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

The axe came up, but by then it was already too late for defense. A hand as hard as fate seized and held
it, frozen in mid-strike.

The householder screamed in frustration and fear. Then he screamed in pain, as the stranger's knife
reached out and tore his shirt and chest and heart.

***

One of the house's four rooms was full of firewood. That meant it would burn well when the rain finally
stopped and the house's shelter was no longer needed.

Another was just as full of boxes and bags of books and old clothes and assorted knick-knacks the
couple or their predecessors had salvaged from the remnants of the world that had been. More fuel for
the fire. There was very little worth stealing.

There was no sign that the house had ever held a child.

The third room held a sink and a table and a rusty woodstove that gave off heat. An open cupboard
revealed a cloth bag that held a pitiful few withered potatoes. Another bag, open to show dried apples,
sprawled on the table, surrounded by the bones of the rabbit and pigeon the stranger had mentioned. A
bottle supported the candle that was the room's only source of light. The stranger himself sat in one of the
two chairs and listened to the noises from the last room, the bedroom: grunts, moans, whimpers,
bedsprings, the bang of a headboard against a wall.

"She ain't as young as he was." The man on the other side of the table was pinching the sides of his thin
mustache between his fingers, trying to train them into wings. His dark hair was pulled back into a short
braid. The youngest of the three, he seemed barely out of adolescence. The plumpness of his cheeks,
however, was not that of youth, not babyfat. His companions were also fleshier than the householder had
been, a sign that people like them ate better than their more sedentary prey.

"He probably got her same way we did," said Ron.

"You want her again?"