"Scott Nicholson - Metabolism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nicholson Scott)

at the bank. It was important to keep up appearances. But, once home, she
locked herself in and pulled the windowshade. She turned on the radio,
just in case the city was using its ears, but she always tuned to
commercial-free classical stations. Music to eat sweets by.
Her workmates had expressed concern.
"You're nothing but skin and bones. You feeling okay?"
"You're getting split-ends, girl."
"You look a little pale. Maybe you should go to the doctor, Elise."
As if she were going to listen to them, with their new forty-dollar
hairstyles every week and retirement accounts and lawyer husbands and City
Council wives and panty hose and wristwatches and power ties and
deodorant. Elise only smiled and shook her head and pretended. Took care
of the customers and kept her accounts balanced.
And she had plotted. Steeled herself. Got up her nerve and slung her
handbag over her shoulder and walked out of the bank after work and headed
downtown. She kept reminding herself that she had nothing to lose.
And now she was almost free. She could taste the cleaner air, could feel
the pressure of the hovering structures ease as she drew nearer to the
outskirts. But now darkness descended, and she wasn't sure if that brought
the city to keen-edged life or sent it fat and dull into dreamy slumber.
She passed the maw of a subway station. A few people jogged down the steps
into the bright throat of the tunnel. She thought of human meat packed
into the smooth silver tubes and shot through the intestines of the city.
She walked faster now, gaining confidence and strength as hope spasmed in
her chest like a pigeon with a broken wing. She could see the level
horizon, a beautiful black flatness only blocks ahead. Buildings skulked
here and there, but they were short and squat and clumsy.
The road was devoid of traffic, the dead-end arms of the city. The
streetlights thinned, casting weak cones of light every few hundred feet.
Her footsteps echoed down the empty street, bouncing into the dark canyons
of the side alleys. The hollowness of the sound enhanced her sense of
isolation. She felt exposed and vulnerable. Easy meat.
Her ears pricked up, tingling.
A noise behind her, out of step with her echo.
Breathing.
The spiteful puff of a forklift, its tines aimed for her back? A fire
hydrant, hissing in anger at her audacity? The sputtering gasp of a
sinuous power cable?
Footsteps.
A rain of lightbulbs, dropping in her wake? The concrete slabs of the
sidewalk, folding upon themselves like an accordion, chasing her heels? A
street sign hopping after her like a crazed pogo stick?
Not now. Not when she was so close.
But did she really expect that the city would let her simply step out of
its garden?
She ducked into an alley, even though the walls gathered on three sides.
Instinct had driven her into the darkness. But then, why shouldn't the
city control her instinct? It owned everything else.
And now it moved in for the kill, taking its due. Now she was ripe fruit
to be plucked from the chaotic fields the city had sown, a harvest to be