"Breeding Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Montague Madelaine)

interest either.

Then he saw her.

Intrigued, he settled to watch her and he discovered that the longer he watched
her, the more absorbed he was. This one was different.

* * * *

УLook out!Ф

УRock slide!Ф

УRun!Ф

The ominous sound of colliding, rolling, bouncing rocks rapidly built from a
warning rumble to a deafening roar punctuated by the shouts that first drew her attention
and the screams of fear and pain that quickly followed the first shouts. Gabrielle
LaPlante lifted her head like an animal sensing danger at the first rumble, freezing as her
gaze swept the dig site and finally focused on the threat. Her eyes widened as she saw
the wave of dirt and rocks racing down the mountain side like a black tide, but everything
inside of her seized, even her breath in her lungs.

It was over almost before anyone had realized what was happening. Through the
cloud of dust that rose from the foot of the mountain where the debris settled, Gabrielle
saw a twisted human arm jutting skyward. Coated with dirt from the soil dislodged by
the falling rocks, she stared at it for many moments before her brain finally registered that
it actually was an arm, not a bizarre, twisted tree root that resembled a human arm.

Released finally from the shock that had rooted her to the spot, she surged
forward, launched into a run as the workers that had scattered halted and turned to race
back. She was among the last to reach the downed worker, but it wouldnТt have
mattered, she saw, if sheТd been the first. The man hadnТt suffocated. A rock twice the


BREEDING GROUND Madelaine Montague

size of his head had crushed his skull.

As short as she was, the native South Americans that made up the bulk of the
laborers for the dig were as short, or shorter, and she had no trouble seeing over the men
that clustered in front of her. She was sorry that was the case. The image seemed to burn
itself inside her mind. Nausea rolled over her. She stumbled back, turned, looked
numbly around the dig site for several moments and fled to the tent that had been
assigned to her as her temporary home away from home.

A forensic anthropologist on loan from the Dade Museum of Human History to
investigate the first, and only, skeletal remains found at the scene, which turned out to be
the body of a two hundred year old Indian whoТd died while hunting not an ancient settler
of the area, she had never considered herself superstitious. SheТd learned to appreciate