"Brian Lumley - E-Branch 2 - Invaders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

CHAPTER ONE See The Creechur
It was hot as hell, and flies the size of Jake Cutter's little fingernails had been committing
suicide on the vehicle's windscreen for more than a hundred and fifty miles now, ever since they'd
left Wiluna and 'civilization' behind.
'Phew!' Jake said, sluicing sweat from his brow and out of the open window of their specially
adapted Land Rover. The top was back and the windows wound down, yet the hot wind of passage that
pushed their wide-brimmed Aussie hats back from their foreheads, tightened their chinstraps around
their throats and ruffled their shirts still made it feel like they were driving headlong into a
bonfire. And the 'road' ahead - which in fact was scarcely better than a track - wavered like a
smoke-ghost in the heat haze of what appeared to be an empty, ever-expanding distance.
Behind the vehicle, a mile-long plume of dust and blue-grey exhaust fumes drifted low over the
scrub and the wilderness.
'That's your fifth "phew",' Liz Merrick told him. 'Feeling talkative today?'


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'So what am I supposed to say?' He didn't even glance at her, though most men wouldn't have been
able to resist it. 'Oh dear, isn't it hot? Christ, it must be ninety! "Phew" is about all I'm up
to, because if I do more than open my mouth a crack - ugh!' And he spat out yet another wet fly.
IT

Liz squirmed and grimaced. 'What the hell do they live on, I wonder? Way out here, I mean?' She
swatted and missed as something small, black and nasty went zipping by.
'Things die out here/ Jake answered grimly. 'Maybe that's what they live on.' And just when she
thought that was it, that he was all done for now: 'Anyway, the sun's going down over the hills
there. Another half-hour or so, it'll be cooler. It won't get cold - not in this freaky weather -
but at least you'll be able to breathe without frying your lungs.' Then he was done.
She turned her head to look at him more fully: his angular face in profile, his hard hands on the
wheel, his lean outline. But if Jake noticed her frowning, curiously intent glance, well, it
scarcely registered. That was how he was: hands off. And she thought: We make a damned odd couple!
She was right, they did. Jake hard yet supple, like whip-cord, and Liz soft and curvy. Him with
his dark background and current ... condition, and Liz with her-
-Which was when they hit a pothole, which simultaneously brought Liz's mind back to earth while
lifting her backside eight inches off her seat. 'Jake, take it easy!' she gasped.
He nodded, in no way apologetically, almost absent-mindedly. He had turned his head to look at her
- no, Liz corrected herself - to look beyond her, westward where the rounded domes of gaunt,
yellow- and red-ochre hills marched parallel with the road. They were pitted, those hills,
pockmarked even from here. The same could be said of the desert all around, including the so-
called road. 'These old mine workings,' Jake growled. 'Gold mines. That was subsidence back there,
where the road is sinking into some old mine. I didn't see it because of this bloody heat haze.'
'Gold?' Squirming down into her seat, Liz tried to get comfortable again. Hah! she thought. As if
I'd been comfortable in the first place!
'They found a few nuggets here/ he told her. 'There was a bit of a gold rush that didn't pan out.
There may be gold here - there

probably is - but first you have to survive to bring it up out of the ground. It just wasn't worth
it ...'
'Because even without this awful El Nino weather, this was one hell of an inhospitable place to