"Joe Haldeman - Roadkill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

ROAD KILL
Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman has an abiding passion for telescopes and astronomical
equipmentтАФhe's one of the few guys who can talk about Nagler
eyepieces, splitting double stars, and Schmidt-Cassegrain versus
Maksutov-Cassegrain.

His fiction is pretty damned fancy, tooтАФif, for instance, you haven't
read "Forever War" and "Forever Peace," both of which won Hugo and
Nebula Awards, it's time you bought a telescope and forget about
readingтАФyou're no good at it anyway!

Joe has compressed an entire movie into a few pagesтАФno mean feat.



Hunter is a serial murderer with an interesting specialty. He goes after
solitary joggers and bicyclists on lonely country roads. He doesn't just run
them down or shoot them from the car. He abducts them and slowly
tortures them on videotape. Sometimes we see him at home, while he goes
through his videotape collection and the rest of his rigid daily routine.

He's a big man, over three hundred pounds, most of it fat. His arms and
hands are very strong, though; he works out with dumbbells and
GripMasters. He lives on pizza and fried chicken and beer, and every day
scarfs down three Big Macs, two large shakes, and a pint of Jim Beam, for
lunch. On special days he likes to cook at home.

He lives in a single-wide trailer on an isolated lot in a pine forest in
Georgia. His house creaks and sways when he walks through it. The power
goes out all the time, but that's all right; he has a big Honda generator
that switches on automatically. He needs it not just for his videotapes, but
for the two big top-loading freezers full of his victims' remains, cut into
steaks and chops and stew meat. The livers are carefully sliced, the slices
separated with waxed paper. He doesn't like kidneys. The thymus glands,
sweetbreads, are collected in a plastic bag until he has enough for a meal.
 Sometimes he brings the victims home, but usually he videotapes them
out in the woods, and when they are dead, or almost dead, he field-dresses
them like deer. He prides himself on having provided the police with a
useless clue; he's never actually been a hunter. He learned how to do it
from a video.


***


Hunter is on the prowl. He parks his special van on a dirt road and
labors a couple of hundred yards uphill to a place he's scouted out earlier:
part of a jogging trail that offers him ample cover but also an adequate