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

MIASMA
TERRY MCGARRY

The generator blossomed into fragments. Its steel petals bloomed over the construction site, consuming
unwary workers. The explosion thrust mangled trick-or-treaters and bloodied parents across GrangerтАЩs
path as harbingers of his own fate. He stood transfixed, watching the death wind billow toward him
bearing its plague of shrapnel. He imagined, in the timeless moment, each jagged metal piece embedding
in his skin, pulping his eyeballs, slicing the critical arteries in throat and thigh.
But the fragments did not reach him. The phantom bloom subsided back into a hulking, humming
machine, a garish blur of childrenтАЩs costumes, a streak of passing car.

He was safe. He had kept his distance.

Were those parents insane, herding children through the streets in their flammable costumes and
smothering masks? Suppose a toddler was snatched by some cruel madman? Or darted in front of a car?
Or bit into a razored apple? Granger loved the trappings of Halloween, the objectifying of terror. But it
was the most dangerous day of the year.

What kind of mother would take her child out on a day like this?

At least they hadnтАЩt waited till dark to go on their rounds. Shaking his head, he moved onтАФkeeping well
back from the curb in case someone lost control of a truck and ran up on the sidewalk, but also far
enough away from the building behind him that nothing falling from it would hit him. Even a penny
dropped from high enough could kill you.

He never took the subway, with its narrow platforms and lurking lunaticsтАФwatching for their chance to
push you into the tracks, the way that flutist had beenтАФand its escala-tors that might collapse from
underneath you and grind your legs to bits in their machinery, like that woman in the department store.
The autumn streets were the lesser evil. He took only jobs he could walk to.

During the week he worked as a typist for a big firm. He liked the way the words went into his eyes and
came out of his fingers, leaving his conscious mind entirely free. He filled the empty weekend afternoons
by sorting mail for a sweepstakes house. Because he had, in the blessed numb-ness induced by the
tedious filling of cubbyholes with top sections, bottom sections, address changes, magazine orders,
emptied more boxes than anyone else, he had been promoted to envelope-slitter.

But after an hour of watching the envelopes prepared like dead fish for evisceration, hearing the hum of
the slic-ing and the whispers of the shreds piling into their coffin-like boxes, he began to feel dizzy, then
faint.

What would it feel like, to be an envelope, to be cut open so that all your guts spilled outтАФand anything
might come in?

Perhaps there were no guts inside him at all. Perhaps he was devoid of visceraтАФfilled with air, or gas,
some noxious vapor of cowardice. If the long-dreaded mugger were to slit him open, what would be
released but a breath of stagna-tion, a final, mortal sigh of fear?

The machine caught a paper clip in its razor teeth and squealed. Startled, he jerked his hand back in the
midst of grabbing the next bunch of envelopes, and cut his thumb on a staple. His blood made a small
smear on the beige paper, like a squashed mosquito.