"Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

came to the surface in the middle of a kelp bed, his massive head breaking
though strands of kelp like a zombie pickup truck breaking sod as it rises
from the grave.
Then he heard it. A hated sound. The sound of an enemy. It had been half
a century since the Sea Beast had left the water, and land was not his natural
domain, but his instinct to attack overwhelmed his sense of self-preservation.
He threw back his head, shaking the great purple gills that stood out on his
neck like trees, and blew the water from his vestigial lungs. Breath burned
down his cavernous throat for the first time in fifty years and came out in a
horrendous roar of pain and anger. Three of the protective ocular membranes
slid back from his eyes like electric car windows, allowing him to see in the
bitter air. He thrashed his tail, pumped his great webbed feet, and torpedoed
toward the shore.


Gabe

It had been almost ten years since Gabe Fenton had dissected a dog, but
now, at three o'clock in the morning, he was thinking seriously about taking a
scalpel to Skinner, his three-year-old Labrador retriever, who was deep in the
throes of a psychotic barking fit. Skinner had been banished to the porch that
afternoon, after he had taken a roll in a dead seagull and refused to go into
the surf or get near the hose to be washed off. To Skinner, dead bird was the
smell of romance.
Gabe crawled out of bed and padded to the door in his boxers, scooping up
a hiking boot along the way. He was a biologist, held a Ph.D. in animal
behavior from Stanford, so it was with great academic credibility that he
opened the door and winged the boot at his dog, following it with the
behavior-reinforcing command of: "Skinner, shut the fuck up!"
Skinner paused in his barking fit long enough to duck under the flying L.
L. Bean, then, true to his breeding, retrieved it from the washbasin that he
used as a water dish and brought it back to the doorway where Gabe stood.
Skinner set the soggy boot at the biologist's feet. Gabe closed the door in
Skinner's face.
Jealous, Skinner thought. No wonder he can't get any females, smelling
like fabric softener and soap. The Food Guy wouldn't be so cranky if he'd get
out and sniff some butts. (Skinner always thought of Gabe as "the Food Guy.")
Then, after a quick sniff to confirm that he was, indeed, the Don Juan of all
dogs. Skinner resumed his barking fit. Doesn't he get it, Skinner thought,
there's something dangerous coming. Danger, Food Guy, danger!
Inside, Gabe Fenton glanced at the computer screen in his living room as
he returned to bed. A thousand tiny green dots were working their way, en
masse, across the map of the Pine Cove area. He stopped and rubbed his eyes.
It wasn't possible.
Gabe went to the computer and typed in a command. The map of the area
reappeared in wider scale. Still, the dots were all moving in a line. He
zoomed the map to only a few square miles, the dots were still on the move.
Each green dot on the map represented a rat that Gabe had live-trapped,
injected with a microchip, and released into the wild. Their location was
tracked and plotted by satellite. Every rat in a ten-square-mile area was