"Alex Irvine - Volunteers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

and order. I later found out that the Lodge was born at about the same time, when Julio Furcal and
Sharon Pelletier and a couple of other people started to see that Grant City was on its way to deep
trouble. They started meeting to plot out ways to slow the colony's slide into delusion, and when it
became clear that they couldn't do anything overtly, they started infiltrating organizations like the PTA and
the city council as fast as those bodies sprang up.

Problem was, that infiltration went both ways, and about a week after Milt Bahrani told me I needed to
see a shrink, Chad Latta went to the school to arrest Julio Furcal. Julio demanded to know what the
charge was, to which Chad answeredтАФI'm not kiddingтАФcontributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Chad had lost his sense of humor long before, and when Julio told him to fuck off in front of his riveted
home-room students, Chad hauled off and decked Julio. Then Julio got up and went after him, and in the
struggle Chad's gun went off.

I wasn't in Julio's home room, and by this time most of the other kids in the school had me pegged as the
kind of kid you shouldn't let adults see you talking to, but I heard third- or fourth-hand that Chad shot
Julio three times while Julio was on the floor. It might be true, in fact I'm pretty sure it is, but it's also
exactly the kind of thing that a bunch of traumatized kids might say to transform their fear into some kind
of ghoulish thrill. I was in my computer classтАФcalled ElectronicsтАФwhen I heard the shots, and the next
thing I knew the school was evacuated, and the next thing after that I was back in Bahrani's office with
Chad Latta standing inside the door. He'd had some kind of work done, sharpening his chin and giving
his hairline a sharp widow's peak. Another James Dean, I thought to myself. I would have rolled my eyes
if Latta wasn't looking at me.

Bahrani reached across his desk, and I figured out at the last second he was after my spex. Before I
could think about it, I slapped his hand away.

He was standing, maybe to hit me, and I was standing definitely to hit him, when Chad cracked me in the
back of the head and I went down, banging my forehead on Bahrani's desk on the way. I stayed on my
hands and knees, trying to focus my eyes. Bahrani came around his desk.

"Give me your glasses."

"They're not mine," I said. "They're my dad's."

"Give them to me."

"My dad needs them."

Bahrani tapped my head, exactly where Chad had hit me. When the black spots were all gone from my
vision, he said, "Why do you go to those meetings? They're dangerous."

I hadn't yet heard that Julio Furcal was dead. "You've got a cop busting my head and you tell me a
meeting is dangerous? What's he going to do next, kill me? Or do I get the bamboo slivers under my
fingernails first?"

"I'd hate to have to put you in a hospital, Wiley," Bahrani said.

I didn't know whether he meant having Chad Latta hurt me or putting me in some kind of mental ward.
Either possibility terrified me.