"Keith Laumer & Eric Flint - Future Imperfect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

bad. Not a building over two stories was left standing, and the streets were strewn with
everything from bedsteads to bags of rotted potatoes. It looked as though the backlash
from one of the tidal waves from the coast had reached this far, spent its last energy
finishing up what the quakes and fires had started.
Clotted drifts of flotsam were caught in alley mouths and doorways, and along the
still-standing storefronts a dark line three feet from the ground indicated the highest reach
of the flood waters. A deposit of red silt had dried to an almost impalpable dust that the
ragged wind whirled up into streamers to join the big clouds that rolled in endlessly from
the west.
Three blocks east of the main drag I found what I was looking for. The small street
had failed even before the disaster. It was lined with cheap bars, last-resort pawnshops,
secondhand stores with windows full of rusted revolvers, broken furniture and stacks of
dog-eared pornography, sinister entrances under age-blackened signs offering clean beds
one flight up. I slowed, looked over what was left of a coffee and 'burger joint that had
never made any pretense of sanitation, spotted a two-customer-wide grocery store of the
kind that specialized in canned beans and cheap wine.
I eased off power, settled to the ground, gave a blast from the cleaner-orifices to clear
the dust from the canopy and waited for the dust to settle. The canopy made crunching
noises as I cycled it open. I settled my breathing mask over my face and climbed out,
stretching stiff legs. A neon sign reading Smoky's Kwik-Pick was hanging from one
support and creak, creaking as the wind moaned around it. I heard the distant soft buroom
of masonry falling into the dust blanket.
As I reached the curb, the dust lifted, danced like water, settled back in a pattern of
ridges and ripples. I spun, took two jumps and the street came up and hit me like a missed
step in the dark. I went down. Through a rising boil of dust, a clean-cut edge of concrete
thrust up a yard from my nose with a shriek like Satan falling into Hell. Loose gravel fill
cascaded; then raw, red clay was pushing up, a foot, two feet. There was a roaring like an
artillery bombardment; the pavement hammered and thrust like a wild bronco on a rope.
The uplifted section of street jittered and danced, then slid smoothly away, squealing like
chalk on a giant blackboard. I got to hands and knees, braced myself to jump. Then
another shock wave hit, and I was down again, bouncing against pavement that rippled
like a fat girl's thigh.
The rumble died slowly. The tremble of the ground under me faded and merged with
a jump of my muscles. There was not much I could see through the dust. A little smoke
was curling up from the new chasm that had opened across the street; through the mask I
caught a whiff of sulphur. Behind me, things were still falling, in a leisurely, ponderous
way, as though there were no hurry about returning what had once been the small city of
Greenleaf, Georgia, to the soil it had sprung from.
***
The car was my first worry; it was on the far side of the fissure, a ragged two-yard-
wide cut slicing down into the glisten of wet clay far below. I might have been able to
jump it if my knees had not been twitching like a sleeping hound's elbow. I needed a
plank to bridge it; from the sounds of falling objects, there should be plenty of loose ones
lying around nearby.
Through the smashed front of a used-clothing emporium two doors down, I could see
racks of worn suits of indeterminate color, powdered with fallen plaster. Behind them,
collapsed wall shelves had spilled patched shirts, cracked shoes, and out-of-style hats
across a litter of tables heaped with ties and socks among which tones of mustard and
faded mauve seemed to predominate. A long timber that had supported the ends of a row
of now-exposed rafters had come adrift, was slanted down across the debris. I picked my