"James Patrick Kelly - Monsters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

else he'd just suck on the gun himself, take a huge bloody gulp of death. He
sagged against Jim Jones, laughing so he wouldn't scream.

"Why me, God?" he said, rubbing the barrel along the stubble on his chin.
"Let me pass on this, okay?" But He wasn't listening. Just because He could
be everywhere, didn't mean He'd want to be. He wouldn't stoop to this place,
not while Henry was celebrating slaughter.

When the music ended, he fit the pistol back into its velvet cradle. He felt
split into two different Henrys, both of them moist and expended. Part of him
suspected this was nothing more than a bughouse riff, like old Jagger prancing
across some stage playing Lucifer. The Beretta wasn't even loaded; he'd
hidden the ammo under the sink behind the paper towels. But if this were
nothing but pretend, why did it give him more pleasure than a mushroom pizza
and a jug of Carlo Rossi Pink Chablis and a new stroke flick? It may have
started as a game, but it felt real now. Under the influence of the gun, he
was solid as a brick. The rest of his life was smog.
He locked the shrine behind him and went back to the mirror, the only thing
he'd kept when he closed dad's house. The creature leered at him. He stuck
out his thumb and smudged his reflected eye. The hair on the back of his neck
prickled. He thought then he knew what was going to happen. It wanted to
touch someone else and he was going to let it.

The new bus driver was a plush moon-faced woman. She didn't even bother to
look at him as he slid a dollar onto her outstretched hand, brushing
fingertips quickly across the ridges of her skin. He was nobody to her,
another zero. The monster's looping murderous rage was building like an
electric charge as she jabbed at the coin dispenser for his change. Notice
me, pay attention. She dropped the quarter into his palm and he curled his
fingers suddenly, grazing her palm. The unholy spark of madness crackled
between them. She yipped, jerked her hand away and stared at him. "Oops," he
said. "Sorry." She gave him an uneasy laugh, like someone who has just
suffered through a sick joke she didn't want to hear. She'd think it was just
static -- what else could it be? She couldn't know how good it felt to give
away pain. He was still grinning when he swung into an empty seat and saw her
watching him in the rear view mirror.

***

Another monster worked at Kaplan's Cleaners. Celeste Sloboda pressed and
folded shirts across the room. Only she didn't count. She hadn't made the
choice; she'd been born a hunchback. Besides, she wore her thick black hair
down to her belt when she wasn't working, trying to cover her deformity.

She would've had better luck hiding a chainsaw in her purse. What made it
worse was that Celeste was tiny, barely five feet; she looked like a
twelve-year-old going on forty, complete with sags and wrinkles and a hump the
size of a turkey. She smiled too much and hummed to herself and yattered
about her cats as if they were smarter than she was. Jerry said she was kind
of cute if you pretended she wasn't lopsided but Henry didn't have that kind