"Peter F. Hamilton - Softlight Sins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

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Softlight Sins
a short story by Peter F Hamilton

Ghosts drifted through Douglas McEwan's mind as he drove down the long
road towards the execution. There were four spectres, the family of Adrian
Reynolds, his mother, his abominable father, and his two lovely young
sisters. The forensic team's in situ video had shown them in their beds,
captured in a frozen pose that feigned sleep: eyes closed, lips relaxed,
fingers splayed like albino starfish. In each case their throats had been
slit open, black yawning gashes that had sprayed thick jets of blood
across the sheets.
The phosphene mirage was broken when Douglas's police escort switched on
their lights and sirens. The five-car convoy was motoring along a thin
ribbon of road that cut through the heavily wooded Ling common to the
north of King's Lynn. Tall pines and slim silver birch trees stood
sentinel duty on either side, their small yellowed leaves swirling through
the air like a rusty snowstorm, settling on the grass verges where they
formed a soggy mantle. Twin lines of parked press vehicles were backed up
a hundred metres from the entrance of the Clinical Rehabilitation
Institute.
A dense knot of people was blocking the road ahead. The media circus. And
to Douglas's eyes they did look like clowns, dressed in their bulky
garishly coloured parkas, noses and cheeks raw from the chill morning air.
A double rank of police in blue-grey riot tunics had linked arms, creating
a barrier to hold them back from the road.
A hundred shouted questions merged into a single unintelligible bawl as
Douglas drove past. Cameras zoomed in.
Protesters had taken up the prime sites on either side of the Institute's
gate, their stamping feet pounding the mown grass strips into rucked
quagmires. The police were three deep here, forming a funnel down to the
gate, both lines visibly wavering from the pressure of the protesters'
bodies.
On Douglas's right was the LIFE! group, opposing any form of capital
punishment. From what he could see a majority of them were women. They
held hundreds of white candles aloft, ranging from small nightlights to
elaborately carved half-metre columns of wax. A ragged chorus of defiant
voices sang Abide With Me.
Gobs of mud pelted the car. Douglas switched his wipers on, smearing the
windscreen with brown streaks. It was the TRUE JUSTICE group on the other
side launching the deluge. Trim young men in the main; hair cut close to
the skull, wearing olive-green military-style sweaters, a red crucifix
stitched on the breast. And so much hatred leaking from their hard young
faces. They were carrying a forest of placards; obscene demands for Adrian
Reynolds to be hung, fried, shot, gassed, guillotined, poisoned... The
gallows erected next to the Institute fence had a straw-stuffed effigy of
Adrian dangling in a noose. As soon as Douglas's car swept through the
gates someone put a torch to the wooden structure. A well planned optical
bite for the cameras.