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

CATASTROPHE PLANET
Chapter One
I held the turbo-car at a steady hundred and forty, watching the strip
of cracked pavement that had been Interstate 10 unreel behind me,
keeping a sharp eye ahead through the dust and volcanic smog for any
breaks in the pavement too wide for the big car to jump. A brand-new
six-megahorse job, it rode high and smooth on a two-foot air cushion. It
was too bad about the broken hatch lock, but back in Dallas I hadn't had
time to look around for the owner. The self-appointed vigilantes who called themselves the National
Guard had developed a bad habit of shooting first and checking for explanations later. True, I had
been doing a little informal shopping in a sporting goods storeтАФbut the owner would not have
cared. He and most of the rest of the city had left for points north quite a few hours before I
arrivedтАФand I needed a gun and ammunition. A rifle would probably have been the best choice, but
I had put in a lot of sociable hours on the Rod and Gun Club thousand-inch range back at San Luis,
and the weight of the old-style .38 Smith and Wesson felt good at my hip.
There were low volcanic cones off to my right, trickling black smoke and getting ready for the
next round. It was to be expected; I was keeping as close as the roads allowed to the line of tectonic
activity running along the Gulf Coast from the former site of New Orleans to the shallow sea that
had been northern Florida. Before I reached Atlanta, sixty miles ahead, I would have to make a
decision; either north, into the relative geologic stability of the Appalachians, already mobbed with
refugees and consequently drastically short on food and water, to say nothing of amusementтАФor
south, across the Florida Sea to the big island they called South Florida, that took in Tampa, Miami,
Key West, and a lot of malodorous sand that had been sea bottom until a few months before.
I had a hunch which way I would go. I have always had a fondness for old Scotch, sunshine,
white beaches, and the company of sportsmen who did not mind risking a flutter at cards. I would
be more likely to find them south than north. The only station still broadcasting dance music was
KSEA at Palm Beach. That was the spirit for me. If the planet was going to break upтАФall right. But
while I was alive I would go on living at the best speed I could manage.
The map screen had warned me there was a town ahead. Just a hamlet which had once had ten
thousand or so inhabitants, it would be a better bet for my purposes than a big city. Most of the
cities had been stripped pretty clean by now, in this part of the country.
The town came into view spread out over low hills under a pall of smoke. I slowed, picked my
way around what was left of a farmhouse that had been dropped on the road by one of the freak
winds that had become as common as summer squalls. A trickle of glowing lava was running down
across a field from a new cone of ash a quarter of a mile off to the right. I skirted it, gunned the
turbos to hop a three-foot fissure that meandered off in a wide curve into the town itself.
It was late afternoon. The sun was a bilious puffball that shed a melancholy light on cracked
and tilted slabs of broken pavement. In places, the street was nearly blocked by heaps of rubble
from fallen buildings; hoods and flanks of half-buried vehicles, mud-colored from a coating of dust,
projected from the detritus. The downtown portion was 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,