"Greg Egan - Steve Fever" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

The toolshed was locked securely, but Lincoln was still skinny enough to crawl through the hole in the
back wall; it had been hidden by junk for so long that it had fallen off the end of his father's repair list.
This time he risked the flashlight and walked straight to the welding torch, rather than groping his way
across the darkness. He maneuvered it through the hole and didn't bother rearranging the rotting timbers
that had concealed the entrance. There was no point covering his tracks. He would be missed within
minutes of his parents' rising, no matter what, so the important thing now was speed.

He put on his boots and headed for the irrigation ditch. Their German shepherd, Melville, trotted up and
started licking Lincoln's hand. Lincoln stopped and petted him for a few seconds, then firmly ordered him
back toward the house. The dog made a soft, wistful sound but complied.

Twenty meters from the perimeter fence, Lincoln climbed into the ditch. The enclosed section was still a
few meters away, but he crouched down immediately, practicing the necessary constrained gait and
shielding himself from the sensors' gaze. He clutched the torch under one arm, careful to keep it dry. The
chill of the water didn't much bother him; his boots grew heavy, but he didn't know what the ditch
concealed, and he'd rather have waterlogged boots than a rusty scrap of metal slicing his foot.

He entered the enclosed concrete cylinder; then a few steps brought him to the metal grille. He switched
on the torch and oriented himself by the light of its control panel. When he put on the goggles he was
blind, but then he squeezed the trigger of the torch, and the arc lit up the tunnel around him.

Each bar took just seconds to cut, but there were a lot of them. In the confined space the heat was
oppressive; his T-shirt was soon soaked with sweat. Still, he had fresh clothes in his pack, and he could
wash in the ditch once he was through. If he was still not respectable enough to get a ride, he'd walk to
Atlanta.

"Young man, get out of there immediately."

Lincoln shut off the arc. The voice, and those words, could only belong to his grandmother. For a few
pounding heartbeats, he wondered if he'd imagined it, but then in the same unmistakable tone, ratcheted
up a notch, she added, "Don't play games with me--I don't have the patience for it."

Lincoln slumped in the darkness, disbelieving. He'd dreamed his way through every detail, past every
obstacle. How could she appear out of nowhere and ruin everything?

There wasn't room to turn around, so he crawled backward to the mouth of the tunnel. His grandmother
was standing on the bank of the ditch.

"What exactly do you think you're doing?" she demanded.

He said, "I need to get to Atlanta."

"Atlanta? All by yourself, in the middle of the night? What happened? You got a craving for some special
kind of food we're not providing here?"

Lincoln scowled at her sarcasm but knew better than to answer back. "I've been dreaming about it," he
said, as if that explained everything. "Night after night. Working out the best way to do it."

His grandmother said nothing for a while, and when Lincoln realized that he'd shocked her into silence he
felt a pang of fear himself.