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

cells that powered them. They chattered and nattered, teased and tormented, goaded and nagged and
complained.

Occasionally someone screamed into the night.

CHAPTER 3

The house creaked under the pressure of the wind. A gritty noise drew Felix Webb's eye to a picture
frame, swaying, scratching against the wall. Behind a pane of dirty glass, it held the Memory of the
Webbs. At least, that was what Pa said. It had been his Pa's before him, and his Pa's, and his and his and
his back to the dawn of time.

The scratching noise awakened his rash. Something seemed to crawl across the puffy, reddened flesh of
his elbows and wrists and knees. It tingled. He crossed his arms, sliding his hands beneath the coarse
wool of his sweater to scratch his wrists and elbows in secret.

The Memory was a talisman, of course. Its implicit message was that times had been bad before, that
they had gotten better, that perhaps they could get better again. He wished he could believe it. But life
could hardly be more bleak, hope more distant, paradise more impossible to attain.

Felix wished he could believe otherwise, but how could the Webbs prosper when the species itself was
in decline? He had no brothers or sisters. Two had been born dead. Ma's other pregnancies had ended
early.
Their few neighbors had no children at all, as if something had turned off the human species' ability to
reproduce itself.

And he was almost old enough to want a wife.

Several wooden buckets were positioned on the floor to catch the water dripping through the roof. One
hung from a hook set in the ceiling. The largest sat between the ancient refrigerator and a metal sink,
where the drip was fastest, heaviest, tock-tocking like a demented clock.

Ma Webb coughed and spat into that largest bucket. Then, using a filthy thumbnail, she pried a round,
black magnet from the face of the fridge and moved it left and up and down until the dangling wishbone
hid the latest rust spot to break through the equally ancient paint. She realigned the feather her wrist had
brushed. She shifted a scrap of yellowed paper that had long ago been drawn upon with a broken brick.
She did not touch the once-crumpled tinfoil, the square of cloth that had once belonged to a silky
garment, the tiny bundles of once-fragrant leaves and blossoms, now dried and faded.

Each item had its significance, as did the soft blue shawl atop the fridge.

Pa never touched the relics, but he could follow her first example. He too coughed, hawked, spat into the
bucket. Ma peered and said, "Least yours ain't bloody yet."

"How the hell can you tell?"

"It ain't that dark in here."

"Dark enough." He jerked his head toward the nearest window. Even though it was early afternoon, the
light that entered the house was dim, the gray of thick clouds and long rain. A fat-bodied fly crawled