"RobertRMcCammon-Mine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

Mary let her breath go, and she smiled.
Her heart was beating hard, driving the sweet adrenaline through her body. She returned the pistol to its place beneath the sweaters, and she slid the drawer shut. Now she felt so much better, and Robby was just a bad memory. But she couldn't survive long without a baby to care for. No, she was a natural mother. An earth mother, it had once been said. She needed a new baby. She'd found Robby in a Toys 'R Us in Douglasville. She knew better than to go to the same store twice; she still had eyes in the back of her head, and she was always watching for any sign of the pigs. So she'd find another toy store. No sweat.
It was almost time to get ready for work. She needed to relax, and put on the face she wore beyond these walls. It was her Burger King face, smiling and friendly, no trace of steel in her eyes. She stood before the mirror in the bathroom, the harsh incandescent bar of light switched on, and she slowly let the face emerge. "Yes ma'am," she said to the person in the mirror. "Would you like fries with that, ma'am?" She cleared her throat. The voice needed to be a little higher, a little dumber. "Yes sir, thank you sir! Have a nice day!" She switched her smile off and on, off and on. Cattle needed to see smiles; she wondered if the people who worked in slaughterhouses smiled before they smashed the skulls of cattle with big wooden mallets.
The smiley face stayed on. She looked younger than her forty-one years, but there were deep lines at the corners of her eyes. Her long hair was no longer as blond as the summer sun. It was a mousy brown, streaked with gray. It would go up in a tight bun when she got to work. Her face was square and strong-jawed, but she could make it look weak and afraid, like a cow who senses the breaking of skulls in the long line ahead. There wasn't much she couldn't do with her face if she wanted. She could look old or young, timid or defiant. She could be an aging California girl or a backwoods hick with equal ease. She could slump her shoulders and look like a frightened schmuck, or she could stand at her full Amazonian height and dare any sonofamotherfuckingbitch to cross her path. It was all in the attitude, and she hadn't gone to drama school in New York City for nothing.
Her real name was not the name on her Georgia driver's license, her library card, her cable TV bills, or any of the mail that came to her apartment. Her real name was Mary Terrell. She remembered what they used to call her as they passed the joints and the cheap red wine and sang songs of freedom: Mary Terror.
She had been wanted for murder by the FBI since the spring of 1969.
Sergeant Pepper was dead. G.I. Joe lived on. George Bush was president, movie stars were dying from AIDS, kids were smoking crack in the ghettos and the suburbs, Muslims were blowing airliners from the skies, rap music ruled, and nobody cared much about the Movement anymore. It was a dry and dusty thing, like the air in the graves of Hendrix, Joplin, and God. She was letting her thoughts take her into treacherous territory, and the thoughts threatened her smiley face. She stopped thinking about the dead heroes, the burning breed who made the bombs full of roofing nails and planted them in corporate boardrooms and National Guard armories. She stopped thinking before the awful sadness crushed her.
The sixties were dead. The survivors limped on, growing suits and neckties and potbellies, going bald and telling their children not to listen to that satanic heavy metal. The dock of the Age of Aquarius had turned, hippies and yippies had become preppies and yuppies. The Chicago Seven were old men. The Black Panthers had turned gray. The Grateful Dead were on MTV, and the Airplane had become a top-forty Starship.
Mary Terror closed her eyes, and thought she heard the noise of wind whistling through the ruins.
_I need_, she thought. _I need_. A single tear coursed slowly down her left cheek.
_I need something to call mine._
She opened her eyes and stared at the woman in the mirror. Smile! Smile! Her smile ticked back on. "Thank you, sir. Would you like an ice-cold Pepsi with that burger?"
Her eyes were still hard, a chink in the disguise. She'd have to work on that.
She took off her plaid robe, stained by the applesauce that a convulsive jerk of her wrist had spilled upon it, and she looked at her nude body in the mean light. Her smile faded and went away. Her body was pale and loose, flabby around the belly, hips, and thighs. Her breasts sagged, the nipples grayish-brown. They looked empty. Her gaze fixed on the network of old scars that crisscrossed her stomach and her right hip, the ridges of scar tissue snaking down into the dark brown nest between her thighs. She ran her fingers over the scars, and felt their cruelty. What was inside her, she knew, were worse scars. They ran deep, and they had ravaged her soul.
Mary remembered when her body had been young and tight. He hadn't been able to keep his hands off her. She remembered the hot thrust of him inside her, when they were both flying on acid and the love went on forever. She remembered candles in the dark, the smell of strawberry incense, and the Doors -- God's band -- on the record player. Long time past, she thought. The Woodstock Nation had become the Pepsi Generation. Most of the outlaws had surfaced for air, had served their time in the cages of political restitution, put on the suits of the Mindfuck State, and joined the herd of cattle marching to the slaughterhouse.
But not him. Not Lord Jack.
And not her, either.
She was still Mary Terror down beneath the soft fastfood-puffed flesh. Mary Terror was sleeping inside her body, dreaming of what was and what might have been.
The alarm clock went off in the bedroom. Mary silenced the jangle with a slap of her palm, and she turned on the cold water tap in the shower and stepped into the bitter flood. When she had finished showering and drying her hair, she dressed in her Burger King uniform. She'd been working at Burger King for eight months, had reached the level of assistant day manager, and beneath her was a crew of kids who didn't know Che Guevara from Geraldo Rivera. That was all right with her, they'd never heard of the Weather Underground, or the Storm Front either. To those kids she was a divorced woman trying to make ends meet. That was all right. They didn't know she could make a bomb out of chicken shit and kerosene, or that she could fieldstrip an M16 or shoot a pig in the face with as little hesitation as flicking a fly.
Better that they stay dumb than be dead.
She turned off the TV. Time to go. She picked up a yellow Smiley Face button from atop her dresser and pinned it to the front of her blouse. Then she put on her brown overcoat, got her purse with its credentials that identified her as Ginger Coles, and opened the door into the cold, hated outside world.
Mary Terror's rusted, beat-up blue Chevy pickup was in the parking lot. She caught a glimpse of Shecklett, watching her from his window, pulling back when he realized he'd been seen. The old man's eyes were going to get him in trouble someday. Maybe real soon.
She drove away from the apartment complex, merged with the morning traffic heading into Atlanta from the small country towns around it, and none of the other drivers guessed she was a six-foot-tall time bomb ticking steadily toward explosion.









I
SCREAM OF THE BUTTERFLY









1

A Safe Place


THE BABY KICKED. "OH!" LAURA CLAYBORNE SAID, AND touched her swollen belly. "There he goes again!"
"He'll be a soccer player, I'm telling you." Across the table, Carol Mazer picked up her glass of chardonnay. "So anyway, Matt tells Sophia her work is shoddy, and Sophia hits the roof. You know Sophia's temper. I swear, honey, you could hear the windows shake. We thought it was Judgment Day. Matt ran back to his office like a whipped puppy, but somebody's got to stand up to that woman, Laura. I mean, she's running the whole show over there, and her ideas absolutely -- pardon my French -- but they absolutely _suck_." She took a sip of wine, her dark brown eyes shining with the pleasure of a gossip well told. Her hair was a riot of black ringlets, and her red fingernails looked long enough to pierce to the heart. "You're the only one she's ever listened to, and with you off the track the whole place is falling to pieces. Laura, I swear she's out of control. God help us until you can get back to work."