"Ellen Gilchrist - Black Winter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilchrist Ellen)

ELLEN GILCHRIST

BLACK WINTER
First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1995


I am writing this from the cave, grandchild of mine, baby boy I left
behind. If you live, if you are alive, over there, in Germany, where I pray
the skies are clear. Strange, it began the day you were to be born.
February 27, 1996, as we measured time. Will there be time when you
read this? Is Europe there? Is anybody there?
I must not waste paper. We have ten bank envelopes and the notepad
that was in the car and the grocery bag and The Tulsa World. We will
learn to make paper, if we survive. We swore that last night, Tannin and I,
when we divided up the paper that we have. I love you, James Ingersol
Martin. If she really named you that, after what has happened. If you were
born, if there is a world and you are in it. It is so dark here. There is light
in the middle of the day for five or six hours sometime. We have a watch.
A Timex I put on for a joke that morning. I never wore a watch. We almost
bough t a watch at Saks in Utica Square, also for a joke. We wish we had.
And we wish we had bought the coffee we looked at there. Godiva Coffee,
Hazelnut, not to mention the candy we didn't buy, We might have had a
pound of Godiva chocolates with us instead of the junk we did finally grab,
in that last ten minutes, in the convenience store by the filling station.
We had gone to Tulsa to see Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, which was
playing at Eton Square. I adore Stockard Channing. So does Tannin.
Tannin McCaslin, from Nashville, Tennessee, age twenty-six, your
grandmother's protege and best friend in this her sixtieth year to heaven. I
am writing to you, James Ingersol, because I think you are my best bet to
be alive. The other ones are, or were, in the state of Mississippi. From the
one conversation we have had in the last months, I don't think Mississippi
is there anymore.
We still have a small amount of gasoline but we are afraid to use it, even
to keep the battery in the car running. It's a terrible problem, trying to
decide what to do about the gasoline. We're in Oklahoma, for God's sake.
Surely we could find some gasoline if we looked for it. Unless it all blew up.
We don't think the clouds look like they came from gasoline fires. They are
thick and nearly cover the sky but have no smell.
We were about five miles from downtown Tulsa. We had stopped to get
gasoline, on our way home from the movie. The sirens were going off
everywhere. They didn't stop and I knew what they were. I had been
watching the news. I knew what was going on in Russia, in North Korea,
in Iran, in the Ukraine. Tannin had been writing all week. He wasn't
well-informed. тАЬGo in there and get some food,тАЭ I said.
I'll say this for him. He didn't question me. тАЬGet what?тАЭ he asked.
тАЬAnythingтАЭ I answered. тАЬRun.тАЭ
He ran. He came back in a few minutes with a sack of food. There had
been no one to pay for it. Cars were driving strangely everywhere. I wanted
Tannin to drive but I was behind the wheel. тАЬGet out the map,тАЭ I said.
тАЬTell me how to go to the most desolate place outside of town.тАЭ