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

reaped by rubber belts and pulleys and metal fins.
Elise stumbled into a garbage heap, knocking over a trash can in her
blindness. She fell face-first into greasy cloth and rotten paper and
moldering food scraps. She felt a sting at her knee as she rolled into
broken glass.
She turned on her back, resigned to her fate. She would die quietly, but
she wanted to see its face. Not the face it showed to human eyes, the one
of glass panes and cornerstones and sheet metal. She wanted to see its
true face.
She saw a silhouette, a blacker shape against the night. A splinter of
silver catching a stray strand of distant streetlight, flashing at her
like a false grin. A featureless machine pressing close, its breath like
stale gin and cigarette butts and warm copper.
Its voice fell from out of the thick air, not with the jarring clang of a
bulldozer or the sharp rumble of tractor trailer rig, but as a harsh
whisper.
"Gimme your money, bitch."
So the city had sent this puny agent after her? With all its great and
awesome might, its monumental obelisks, its omnipotent industry, its
cast-iron claws, its impregnable asphalt hide, its pressurized fangs, it
sends this?
The city had a sense of humor. How wonderful!
She thought of that old children's story, the "Three Billy Goats Gruff,"
how the smaller ones had offered up the larger ones to slake the evil
troll's appetite. She laughed, filling the cramped alley with her cackles.
"A skinny thing like me would hardly be a mouthful for you," she said, the
words squeezing out between giggles.
She felt the city's knife press against her chest, heard a quick snip, and
felt her handbag being lifted from her shoulder. The straps hung like dark
spaghetti, and the city tucked the purse against its belly. The city,
small and dark and human.
Now she saw it. The human machine had a face the color of bleached rags,
dingy mopstrings dangling down over the hot sparks of eyes. Thin wires
sprouted above the coin-slot mouth. Why, he was young. The city eats its
young.
"You freakin' city folks is all nuts," the city said, then ran into the
street, back under the safe sane lights.
Its words hung over Elise's head, but they'd come from another world. A
world of platinum and fiberglass, locomotives and razor blades. The real
world. Not her world.
As the real city awoke and busied itself with its commerce and caffeine,
it might have seen Elise sprawled among the rubble of a rundown
neighborhood, flanked by empty wine bottles and used condoms and milk
cartons graced with the photographs of anonymous children. It might have
smelled her civet perfume, faint but there, which she had dabbed on her
neck in an attempt to smell like everyone else. It might have heard the
wind fluttering the collar of her Christian Dior blouse, bought so that
she could blend in with the crowd. It might have felt the too-light weight
of her frail body, wasted by a steady diet of fear. It might have tasted
the human salt where tears of relief had dried on her cheeks.