"Severna Park--The Breadfruit Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

She pushed herself up in the seat and peered out the window. Snow and construction barriers; trash
and hard asphalt. She got a good grip on the door handle. He was going fifty-five, sixty, but with the
door wide open, he might hit the brakes in a panic and she might be able to jump out. At the very least he
might think twice about abducting her like this. She yanked the handle. The door made a clunking sound
and swung open about four inches. The dark, salt-crusted highway rushed below. Cold wind swept in
and lifted the trash in the footwells. Bob saw what she was doing, leaned over the wheel and mashed the
accelerator to the floor.
The car lunged forward, pitching like a boat as Bob swerved between lesser vehicles. The door
swung back and forth with every lurch and Lisa hauled it shut, heart pounding. Bob slowed down to
fifty-five, sixty.
"Look," he said, "I'm sorry, but I can't leave you with your mother."
"You're fucking kidnapping me," she said.
"Watch your mouth, young lady."

He pulled off at the Ruxton exit. Lisa stared out the passenger window, letting furious emanations
rise off her body and drift over to Bob's side of the car. As soon as he stopped she would get out and
run. She would call a cab. She would hitchhike. She would hide in someone's garage until morning. She
would never let him take her away, like her mother had let him take her from Guatemala.
The Riviera floundered to the left and scraped in familiar gravel. Lisa let herself glance ahead into the
uninterrupted dark of the half-mile driveway that led to the house where she'd grown up. In daylight, it
was a two-story, unpainted Victorian in the middle of three acres of forest, remarkably isolated
considering how close it was to the city. Normally, there would have been a gleam of light from the front
porch through the bare trees, but now there was nothing except snow dropping softly through black
branches, melting when it touched the hood of the car. Maybe Bob had torn the house down, she
thought, and the idea nearly made her cry. Even before the divorce, Bob had turned the house into a fort.
He'd wired in alarms against intruders on the roof and booby-trapped the basement. The old
chicken-shack in the back part of the yard became his secret domain, with plywood over the windows
and combination locks. Lisa's mother stood by for most of this, but she drew the line at boarding up the
first-floor windows of the house. Curtains, Bob had said with savage conviction, won't protect you from
anything, but her mother put her foot down, finally screaming in banshee Spanish until he backed off and
settled for the mail-order motion detectors, which were ugly and blocky and made the curtains hang
wrong, but that was just the way it was going to be.
Bob stopped the car and Lisa peered out. The house was still there, a flat silhouette against the
pinkish snow-sky.
"Why's it so dark?" she said.
"It's not all that dark," said Bob. He reached over to open the glove compartment and gave her a
flashlight. "Watch your step."
Lisa pulled her backpack out of the car and followed him up to the front porch, waiting while he
tapped buttons on a remote, deactivating whatever he'd installed on the first floor. She aimed the
flashlight up to her old bedroom window, expecting to see her childhood escape routeтАФthe arching limbs
of ancient oak trees which should have been lying over the low slope of the roof. The branches were
gone. The window was framed by empty pink sky and falling snow. She turned the flashlight on the trees.
Bob had mutilated them. Every branch was cut back to the black trunk. The trees looked amputated and
helpless.
 "Here we go." Bob pushed the door open into the dense, high-security darkness of the house. She
didn't need to ask what he was protecting her from. It wasn't the IRS or the CIA, or the far more likely
Immigration and Naturalization Service coming after her mother. It was the aliens, who'd first landed on
the roof when she was nine.
The proof was in the patched-over bullet holes through the second floor ceiling. Daddy must be
shooting at something, her mother had told her over the echoing thunder of gunfire, either to make Lisa