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

тАЬWhat's happening?тАЭ
тАЬI think it's nuclear war.тАЭ
тАЬTake I-44. The Cherokee country is as desolate as it gets.тАЭ
Then I drove. Did I mention the coat? I had just bought a full-length fur
coat on sale at Saks. Tannin had bought some jeans and a summer
sweater at The Gap. That is a store we used to have, when Oklahoma was
here. Eight months ago. When you were born. If you were born. I'm
getting tired. I tire easily now. There's so little sun. So little food. I'll write
more tomorrow. When there is light.
The sun came out for a while this morning. Tannin thinks the clouds
are growing thinner. I think so too, in the day. In the afternoon it all seems
so hopeless. We think we should go southwest, but in the desert is where
we had the silos for our missiles. It might be worse there. Probably it's the
air currents that matter most. We have drawn what we remember from
television weather maps on the wall of a dry part of the cave. The currents
changed all the time, of course, and the force of the explosions could have
caused more changes. Not to mention the heat. We used to have clinical,
rational discussions about such things. A few months ago. But now we are
just trying to survive. We haven't given up. We just quit pretending to be
left-brained.
This morning we had a chicken. Tannin catches them in the woods now
and then. Traps them. There must have been chicken houses around here
because the woods are full of chickens. They have grown very large and are
quite noisy, nesting in the pine trees. It makes us sad to kill them. Also, we
boil the meat until it is almost tasteless. I don't know what all this boiling
is about. Radiation is not bacteria, but we are twentieth-century
primitives and boiling is all we know to do. Tannin thinks we should stay
inside as much as possible and cover our skin when we go out. His father
and brother are physicists at Vanderbilt, or were. We don't talk about our
families. We're going to talk about them, but not yet. But anyway, we boil
those chickens to smithereens.
If we had been exposed to radiation we'd be dead by now, If we were
exposed why would those chickens still be alive? Here is where we were
after the sirens went off. In a convertible for an hour and forty minutes
going east. Then in a stone church near Lincoln, Arkansas, for ten days.
Then in the car for an hour. Then we were in the cave. But I need to go
back to the beginning.
Tannin threw the sack of groceries in the car and I started driving.
Most of the other cars had stopped. People were running into steel
buildings. We drove I-44 to the Cherokee Turnpike. By then the radio
stations were all static. We had been listening to NPR. I thought that
meant that New York and the east coast had been hit. There was never
any reception after the sirens went off. Only static. тАЬDon't drive too fast,тАЭ
was the only thing Tannin said. тАЬWe don't want to use up all the gas.тАЭ
тАЬWhere should we go?тАЭ
тАЬI don't know.тАЭ
тАЬWho is bombing us?тАЭ
тАЬI don't know. North Korea. China.тАЭ
тАЬIf we aren't at ground zero we want to get away from the prevailing
winds. I think south is the best way to go.тАЭ