"Mckinley,.Robin.-.Sunshine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)
Also, I said that the antiglam tech makes sucker voices sound funny on TV and radio and the globenet. They sound even funnier in person. Funny peculiar. Funny awful.
Maybe thereТs something about the Breath. I woke up, as I say, sick and wretched and scared, but I should have been freaked completely past thought and I wasnТt. I knew this was the end of the road. Suckers donТt snatch people and then decide theyТre not very hungry after all and let them go. I was dinner, and when I was finished being dinner, I was dead. But it was like: okay, thatТs the way it goes, bad luck, damn. Like the way you might feel if your vacation got canceled at the last minute, or youТd spent all day making a fabulous birthday cake for your boyfriend and tripped over the threshold bringing it in and it landed upside down on the dog. Damn. But thatТs all.
I lay there, breathing, listening to my heart race, but feeling this weird numb composure. We were still by the lake. From where I half-lay I could see it through the trees. It was still a beautiful serene moonlit evening.
УDo we take her over immediately?Ф This was the one who had noticed I was awake. It was a little apart from the others, and was sitting up straight on a tree stump or a rockЧI couldnТt see whichЧas if keeping watch.
УYeah. Bo says so. But he says we have to dress her up first.Ф This one sounded as if it was in charge. Maybe it was the Breather.
УDress her up? What is this, a party?Ф
УI thought we had the party whileЕФ said a third one. Several of them laughed. Their laughter made the hair on my arms stand on end. I couldnТt distinguish any individual shapes but that of the watcher. I couldnТt see how many of them there were. I thought I was listening to male voices but I wasnТt sure. ThatТs how weird sucker voices are.
УBo says ourЕguest is old-fashioned. Ladies should wear dresses.Ф
I could feel them looking at me, feel the glint of their eyes in the firelight. I didnТt look back. Even when you already know youТre toast you donТt look in vampiresТ eyes.
УSheТs a lady, huh.Ф
УDonТt matter. SheТll look enough like one in a dress.Ф They all laughed again at this. I may have whimpered. One of the vampires separated itself from the boneless dark slithery blur of vampires and came toward me. My heart was going to lunge out of my mouth but I lay still. I was, strangely, beginning to feel my way into the numbnessЧas if, if I could, I would find the center of me again. As if being able to think clearly and calmly held any possibility of doing me any good. I wondered if this was how it felt when you woke up in the morning on the day you knew you were going to be executed.
One of the things you need to understand is that IТm not a brave person. I donТt put up with being messed around, and I donТt suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that IТm a bitch. Trust me, I can produce character references. But thatТs something else. IТm not brave. Mel is brave. His oldest friend told me some stories about him once I could barely stand to listen to, about dispatch riding during the Wars, and MelТd been pissed off when he found out, although he hadnТt denied they happened. Mom is brave: she left my dad with no money, no job, no prospectsЧher own parents had dumped her when she married my dad, and her younger sisters didnТt find her again till she resurfaced years later at CharlieТsЧand a six-year-old daughter. Charlie is brave: he started a coffeehouse by talking his bank into giving him a loan on his house back in the days when you only saw rats, cockroaches, derelicts, and Charlie himself on the streets of Old Town.
IТm not brave. I make cinnamon rolls. I read a lot. My idea of excitement is Mel popping a wheelie driving away from a stoplight with me on pillion.
The vampire was standing right next to me. I didnТt think IТd seen it walk that far. IТd seen it stand up and become one vampire out of a group of vampires. Then it was standing next to me. It. He. I looked at his hand as he held something out to me. УPut it on.Ф I reluctantly extended my own hand and accepted what it was. He didnТt seem any more eager to touch me than I was to touch him; the thing he was offering glided from his hand to mine. He moved away. I tried to watch, but I couldnТt differentiate him from the shadows. He was just not there.
I stood up slowly and turned my back on all of them. You might not think you could turn your back on a lot of vampires, but do you want to watch while they check the rope for kinks and the security of the noose and the lever on the trap door or do you maybe want to close your eyes? I turned my back. I pulled my T-shirt off over my head and dropped the dress down over me. The shoulder straps barely covered my bra straps and my neck and shoulders and most of my back and breasts were left bare. Buffet dining. Very funny. I took my jeans off underneath the long loose skirt. I still had my back to them. I was hoping that vampires werenТt very interested in a meal that was apparently going to someone else. I didnТt like having my back to them but I kept telling myself it didnТt matter (there are guards to grab you if the lever still jams on the first attempt and you try to dive off the scaffold). I was very carefully clumsy and awkward about taking my jeans off, and in the process tucked my little jackknife up under my bra. It was only something to do to make me feel I hadnТt just given up. What are you going to do with a two-and-a-half-inch folding blade against a lot of vampires?
IТd had to take my sneakers off to get out of my jeans, and I looked at them dubiously. The dress was silky and slinky and it didnТt go with sneakers, but I didnТt like going barefoot either.
УThatТll do,Ф said the one who had given me the dress. He reappeared from the shadows. УLetТs go.Ф
And he reached out and took my arm.
Physically I only flinched; internally it was revolution. The numbness faltered and the panic broke through. My head throbbed and swam; if it hadnТt been for those tight, terrifying fingers around my upper arms I would have fallen. A second vampire had me by the other arm. I hadnТt seen it approach, but at that moment I couldnТt see anything, feel anything but panic. It didnТt matter that they had to have touched me beforeЧwhen they caught me, when they put me under the dark, when they brought me to wherever we wereЧI hadnТt been conscious for that. I was conscious now.
But the numbnessЧthe weird detached composure, whatever it wasЧpulled itself together. It was the oddest sensation. The numbness and the panic crashed through my spasming body, and the numbness won. My brain stuttered like a cold engine and reluctantly fired again.
The vampires had dragged me several blind steps while this was going on. The numbness now noted dispassionately that they were wearing gloves. As if this suddenly made it all right the panic subsided. One of my feet hurt; IТd already managed to stub it on something, invisible in the dark.
The material of the gloves felt rather like leather. The skin of what animal, I thought.
УYou sure are a quiet one,Ф the second vampire said to me. УArenТt you going to beg for your life or anything?Ф It laughed. He laughed.
УShut up,Ф said the first vampire.
We didnТt go far, and we went slowly. For whatever reason the two vampires holding me let me pick my shaky, barefoot, human way across bad ground in the dark. It must have seemed slower than a crawl to them. There was still a moon, but that light through the leaves only confused matters further for me. I didnТt think this was an area I was familiar with, even if I could see it. I thought I could feel a bad spot not too far away, farther into the trees. I wondered if vampires felt bad spots the way humans did. Everyone wondered if vampires had anything to do with the presence of bad spots, but bad spots were mysterious; the Voodoo Wars had produced bad spots, and vampires had been the chief enemy in the Wars, but even the globe-net didnТt seem to know any more. Everyone in the area knew about the presence of bad spots around the lake, whether they went hiking out there or not, but thereТs never any gossip about sucker activity. Vampires tend to prefer cities: the higher density of human population, presumably.
The only noises were the ones I made, and a little hush of water, and the stirring of the leaves in the air off the lake. The shoreline was more rock than marsh, and when we crossed a ragged little stream the cold water against my feet was a shock: IТm alive, it said.
The rational numbness now pointed out that vampires could, apparently, cross running water under at least some circumstances. Perhaps the size of the stream was important. I observed that my two guards had stepped across it bank to bank. Perhaps they didnТt want to get their shoes wet, as they had the luxury of shoes. It would be bad business for the electric moat companies if it became known that running water didnТt stop suckers.
I could feel theЕwhat?Еincreasing. Oppression, tension, suspense, foreboding. I of course was feeling all these things. But we were coming closer to wherever we were going, and my escorts didnТt like the situation either. I told myself I was imagining this, but the impression remained.
We came out of the trees and paused. There was enough moonlight to make me blink; or perhaps it was the surprise of coming to a clear area. Somehow you donТt think of suckers coming out under the sky in a big open space, even at night.
There had been a few really grand houses on the lake. IТd seen pictures of them in magazines but IТd never visited one. They had been abandoned with the rest during the Wars and were presumably either burned or blasted or derelict now. But I was looking up a long, once-landscaped slope to an enormous mansion at the head of it. Even in the moonlight I could see how shabby it was; it was missing some of its shingles and shutters, and I could see at least one broken window. But it was still standing. Where we were would once have been a lawn of smooth perfect green, and I could see scars in the earth near the house that must have been garden paths and flower beds. There was a boathouse whose roof had fallen in near us where we stood at the shore. The bad spot was near here; behind the house, not far. I was surprised there was a building still relatively in one piece this close to a bad spot; there was a lot I didnТt know about the Wars.
I felt I would have been content to go on not knowing.
УTime to get it over with,Ф said BoТs lieutenant.
They started walking up the slope toward the house. The others had melted out of the trees (wherever theyТd been meanwhile) and were straggling behind the three of us, my two jailers and me. My sense that none of them was happy became stronger. I wondered if their willingness to walk through the woods at fumbling human speed had anything to do with this. I looked up at the sky, wondering, almost calmly, if this was the last time I would see it. I glanced down and to either side. The footing was nearly as bad here as it had been among the trees. There was something oddЕI thought about my parentsТ old cabin and the cabins and cottages (or rather the remains of them) around it. In the ten years since the Wars had been officially ended saplings and scrub had grown up pretty thoroughly around all of them. They should have done the same around this house. I thought: itТs been cleared. Recently. ThatТs why the ground is so uneven. I looked again to either side: now that I was looking it was obvious that the forest had been hacked back too. The big house was sitting, all by itself, in the middle of a wide expanse of land that had been roughly but thoroughly stripped of anything that might cause a shadow.
This shouldnТt have made my situation any worse, but I was suddenly shuddering, and I hadnТt been before.
The house was plainly our destination. I stumbled, and stumbled again. I was not doing it deliberately as some kind of hopeless delaying tactic; I was merely losing my ability to hold myself together. Something about that cleared space, about what this meant aboutЕwhatever was waiting for me. Something about the reluctance of my escort. About the fact that therefore whatever it was that waited was more terrible than they were.
My jailers merely tightened their hold and frog-marched me when I wobbled. Suckers are very strong; they may not have noticed that they were now bearing nearly all my weight as my knees gave and my feet lost their purchase on the ragged ground.
They dragged me up the last few stairs to the wide, once-elegant porch; the treads creaked under my weight as I missed my footing, while the vampires flowed up on either side of us with no more sound than they had made ranging through the woods. One of them opened the front door and stood aside for the prisoner and her guards to go in first. We entered a big, dark, empty hall; some moonlight spilled in through open doors on either side of us, enough that my eyes could vaguely make out the extent of it. It was probably bigger than the whole ground floor of Mom and CharlieТs house. At the far end a staircase swirled up in a semicircle, disappearing into the murk overhead.
We turned left and went through a half-open door.
This had to be a ballroom; it was even bigger than the front hall had been. There was no furniture that I could see, but there was a muddle overheadЧits shadow had wrenched my panicky attention toward itЧthat looked rather like a vast chandelier, although I would have expected anything like that to have been looted years ago. It seemed like acres of floor as we crossed it. There was another muddle leaning up against the wall in front of usЧa possibly human-body-shaped muddle, I thought, confused. Another prisoner? Another live dinner? Was waiting to be eaten in company going to be any less horrible than waiting alone? Where was the Уold-fashioned guestФ who liked dresses rather than jeans and sneakers? Oh, dear gods and angels, let this be over quickly, I cannot bear much moreЕ
The muddle was someone sitting cross-legged, head bowed, forearms on knees. I didnТt realize till it raised its head with a liquid, inhuman motion that it was another vampire.
I jerked backward. I didnТt mean to; I knew I wasnТt going to get away: I couldnТt help it. The vampire on my leftЧthe one who had asked me why I didnТt beg for my lifeЧlaughed again. УThereТs some life in you after all, girlie. I was wondering. Bo wouldnТt like it if it turned out we caught a blanker. He wants his guest in a good mood.У
BoТs lieutenant said again, УShut up.Ф
One of the other vampires drifted up to us and handed its lieutenant something. They passed it between them as if it had been no more than a handkerchief, but itЕclanked.
BoТs lieutenant said, УHold her.Ф He dropped my arm and picked up my foot, as casually as a carpenter picking up a hammer. I would have fallen, but the other vampire held me fast. Something cold closed around my ankle, and when he dropped my foot again it fell to the floor hard enough to bruise the sole, because of the new weight. I was wearing a metal shackle, and trailing a chain. The vampire who had brought the thing to BoТs lieutenant stretched out the end of the chain and clipped it into a ring in the wall.
УHow many days has it been, Connie?Ф said BoТs lieutenant softly. УTen? Twelve? Twenty? SheТs young and smooth and warm. Totally flash. Bo told us to bring you a nice one. SheТs all for you. We havenТt touched her.Ф
I thought of the gloves.
He was backing away slowly as he spoke, as if the cross-legged vampire might jump at him. The vampire holding me seemed to be idly watching BoТs lieutenant, and then with a sudden, spine-unhinging hisssss let go of me and sprang after him and the others, who were dissolving back into the shadows, as if afraid to be left behind.
I fell down, and, for a moment, half-stunned, couldnТt move.
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