"Fear" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGarry Terry)

On ascension day, Bridget was the last to struggle through the bent
and scarred opening into the world. Her eyes could not resolve the blur of gray
and brown at first, and when she looked up she nearly fell, her eyes watering;
the sky was not blue with a golden sun but flat and gray and so vast she felt it
must crush her. She sat down and then lay flat, pressing into the floor--the
ground, she must remember to call it, the Irish soil--which was soft and made of
grains of earth and woven strands of growing things. She heard the shouts of the
others, some afraid to move away from the hatch, some running wildly about with
Mr. Fitzhugh ordering them to stop; but they all sounded as if muffled through
the wall hangings that decorated the nuclear-war survival capsule she and the
other members of the textiles group had just emerged from, and she began to
understand what distance was.
"Oh, God," her mother was crying, softly, repeatedly. She had fallen
to her knees and drawn handfuls of the green growth to her damp, red face.
Bridget moved closer to peer at the short-stemmed, delicate plants. "Mam?"
"The clover, Bridget. It should only have three leaves, but four was
considered lucky, and Bridget, even after the blast and a century's time, it's
still here...."
Bridget grew uncomfortable with the unexpected emotion and turned her
eyes to a row of black stumps surrounded by tufts of baby trees, recognizable
though none exactly fit the videos she had seen. The air was thick with odors,
sweet and acrid, and she opened her mouth to breathe as if she could unravel its
components with her tongue.
After her seven years in the caps below, the last seven wakes were
clearest in her mind. She clutched the leperchaun embroidery in her
pocket--leprechaun, Mrs. Simmons the schoolteacher had corrected her, telling
her gently that they were not real--and remembered the day in class when they
had discussed the coming ascension in real terms for the first time, because the
communication cap had announced that it was really going to happen. In
preparation she had rehearsed to herself the forbidden words for rain and sun
and sky--bсisteach, grian, spщir--and counted in her mind the colors in the tiny
rainbow thrown on the all by her brother David's bit of angled glass, so that
she would recognize the big ones when she saw them.
"My father says we don't know if it isn't all water above and no floor
at all anymore, that the heat melted the ice at the top of the world and flooded
our islands," David had said.
"My father said that was a bomb the IRA could understand," Jimmy
Hanlon had put in, not to be bested in father- quoting.
The words had blurred into meaningless babble to Bridget, although she
was trained to memorize instead of using limited paper and disks; when Mrs.
Simmons wasn't looking, she had slipped out a book of fairy stories and let the
stuffy workroom fade away.
The next thing she had known, David was yanking the book from her
hands. "Lesson's over and Jesus will you come out of that dreamworld of yours."
"Leave her," Glenn Fitzhugh had said softly. "She's just a wee wane,
and you're a bully, Dai."
Bridget had followed the altercation absently, her eyes still on the
yellow page. She appreciated Glenn's kindness and had been sorry when David hit
him, because Glenn couldn't fight back without hurting. David had cursed her,