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

as 50 percent crazy, so he says okay, if you throw in an extra thousand for
a new bike and supplies. The man takes out his wallet and counts out ten
hundred-dollar bills. Get your bike, he says; my lawyer will come by
tomorrow with a contract.

So the odyssey begins. Ron pedals cautiously through the rural South,
with his New York accent and shiny new bike, finding a land that is about
equal parts Southern charm and Deliverance menace. Meanwhile, the
nameless killer cruises country roads in his panel van with the big cooler
in back.


***


Hunter is returning to his trailer in the dead of night, complaining to
himself about the heat on this accursed planet and panting in its thin
oxygen as he drags the body to his kitchen worktable. The walls are
covered with Star Trek and Star Wars posters; brick-and-board
bookshelves are full of science fiction paperbacks and videotapes. So he's
either an alien with a jones for sci-fi or a human geek with a really severe
personality problem.

(He reads other things besides science fiction. In particular, he's made
an extensive study of serial killers, so that he knows what the police and
FBI will expect him to do. He's much more clever than they, of course.)

He strikes three times. The last one is particularly horrible, a trick he
got from a book about the Inquisition. He's stopped a young female
jogger, punched her senseless, and driven her deep into an abandoned
turpentine forest. He ties her to a tree, naked, her wrists and crossed
ankles duct-taped to tree limbs and trunk in a crucifixion pose, and when
she wakes up he takes a scalpel and makes a small incision in her lower
abdomen. He carefully slices through the layers of muscle and the tough
peritoneum, and eases out a couple of inches of gut. Then he goes back to
the van to fetch a cage that holds a whining, starving mongrel. He records
her begging and hysteria for a while and then holds the cage up to her
abdomen and opens it. The dog snatches its food and runs away,
unraveling her.

He follows the dog to where it sits feasting and clubs it to death. Then
he returns and videotapes the woman's face, staring at what has
happened, until the life leaves her eyes.

For the first time, he leaves all the body there. The scene has a kind of
perfect terrible beauty. His freezers are full anyhow, and he wants to see
what the newspapers will say.

He always alternates boy, girl, boy, girl. Who will be the lucky boy?