"Nancy Kress - Evolution" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

There are no guerneys in Pathology. I slap him across the face,
yelling "Randy! Randy! Get up!" Even now, even here, a small part of my
mind thrills at hitting him.
His eyes open. For a second, I think he knows me. It goes away, then
returns. He tries to get up. The effort is enough to let me hoist him over
my shoulder in a fireman's carry. I could never have carried Jack, but Randy
is much slighter, and I'm very strong.
But I can't carry him down three flights of stairs. I get him to the
top, prop him up on his ass, and shove. He slides down one flight, bumping
and flailing, and glares at me for a minute. "For...God's sake...Janet!"
His wife's name. I don't think about this tiny glimpse of his
marriage. I give him another shove, but he grabs the railing and refuses to
fall. He hauls himself -- I'll never know how -- back to a sitting position,
and I sit next to him. Together, my arm around his waist, tugging and
pulling, we both descend the stairs the way two-year-olds do, on our asses.
Every second I'm waiting for the stairwell to blow up. Sean's gray face at
dinner: _Fucking vigilantes'll get us all._
The stairs don't blow up. The firedoor at the bottom gives out on a
sidewalk on the side of the hospital away from both street and parking lot.
As soon as we're outside, Randy blacks out.
 This time I do what I should have done upstairs and grab him under the
armpits. I drag him over the grass as far as I can. Sweat and hair fall in
my eyes, and my vision keeps blurring. Dimly I'm aware of someone running
toward us.
"It's Dr. Satler! Oh my God!"
A man. A large man. He grabs Randy and hoists him over his shoulder,
a fireman's carry a lot smoother than mine, barely glancing at me. I stay
behind them and, at the first buildings, run in a wide loop away from the
hospital.
My car is still in the deserted driveway across the street. Fire
trucks add their sirens to the noise. When they've torn past, I back my car
out of the driveway and push my foot to the floor, just as a second bomb blows
in the east wing of the hospital, and then another, and the air is full of
flying debris as thick and sharp as the noise that goes on and on and on.
****
Three miles along the East River Road, it suddenly catches up with me. All of
it. I pull the car off the road and I can't stop shaking. Only a few trucks
pass me, and nobody stops. It's twenty minutes before I can start the engine
again, and there has never been a twenty minutes like them in my life, not
even in Bedford. At the end of them, I pray that there never will be again.
I turn on the radio as soon as I've started the engine.
" -- in another hospital bombing in New York City, St. Clare's Hospital
in the heart of Manhattan. Beleagured police officials say that a shortage of
available officers make impossible the kind of protection called for by Mayor
Thomas Flanagan. No group has claimed credit for the bombing, which caused
fires that spread to nearby businesses and at least one apartment house.
"Since the Centers for Disease Control's announcement last night of a
widespread staphylococcus resistant to endozine, and its simultaneous release
of an emergency counterbacteria in twenty-five metropolitan areas around the
country, the violence has worsened in every city transmitting reliable reports