"James Maxey - To the East, A Bright Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maxey James)

To The East, A Bright Star
by James Maxey

The author tells us, тАЬIf you google the name James Maxey, youтАЩll turn up a British
attorney, a vice-president of a Missouri accounting firm, and a geeky guy in Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, whose links lead to rants about comic books, circus freaks, and
tequila.тАЭ The relevant James Maxey is the last one. His debut novel, the superhero
adventure Nobody Gets the Girl, is available from Phobos Books. His first story for
us takes a sharp look at the future, and lends a stark interpretation to the phrase...

A word of warning: there are brief scenes in this story that may be disturbing
to some readers.
****
There was a shark in the kitchen. The shark wasnтАЩt huge, maybe four feet
long, gliding across the linoleum toward the refrigerator. Tony stood motionless in
the knee-deep water of the dining room. The Wolfman said that the only sharks that
came this far in were bull sharks, which could live in either salt or fresh water, and
were highly aggressive. Tony leaned forward cautiously and shut the door to the
kitchen. He had known the exact time and date of his death for most of his adult life.
With only hours to go, he wasnтАЩt about to let the shark do something ironic.
Tony waded back to the living room. Here in the coolest part of the house,
always shaded, he kept his most valuable possession in an ice-chest stashed beneath
the stairs. He pulled away the wooden panel and retrieved the red plastic cooler.
Inside was his cigar box, wrapped in plastic bags. He took the box, then grabbed
one of the jugs of rainwater cooling in the corner and headed up the stairs to the
bathroom. He climbed out the bathroom window onto the low sloping roof over the
back porch.
Everything was damp from yesterdayтАЩs rain. He took out the silver case with
his last three cigarettes. He went through five matches before he got one lit. He
sucked down the stale smoke, while a tiny little voice in the back of his head chided
him about his bad habits. Tony wished the tiny little voice would consult a calendar.
It was a bit late to worry about cancer.
The sky shimmered with brilliant blue, not a cloud in it. The Wolfman had
thought Tony was crazy to gamble on this day being clear. It had rained two
hundred days the previous year. A decade ago a comet had hit Antarctica, melting
half the ice cap, pumping countless tons of water vapor into the atmosphere.
Cloudless skies were only a memory. And yet, in TonyтАЩs imagination, the sky of the
last day had always been crystal clear. It pleased him that reality and imagination
overlapped at last.
A slight breeze set waves gently lapping at the tumbled roofs and walls that lay
in all directions. This had been a nice old neighborhood, full of Victorian houses,
before the earthquakes started. Now only a few homes stood, twisted and strangely
beautiful, half submerged in a shallow green ocean, surrounded by the salt-poisoned
skeletons of trees still stretching toward that amazing blue sky.
тАЬHereтАЩs to a gorgeous day,тАЭ he said, raising his water jug toward the sun. He
brought the jug to his lips and chugged down half a gallon, quickly, in careless gulps,
with water running from the corners of his mouth, dripping down to soak his shirt.
He no longer saw any point in being careful with fresh water. It felt good to be
wasteful again.
His thirst sated, Tony capped the jug, walked to the edge of the roof, and