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

between the Winnebago's front seats and microscopic bathroom. There wasn't even space to walk.
Lisa slid to the edge of the table and put her feet carefully on the crates. Leathery-looking ovals with
reddish speckles were packed inside, separated by sheets of bubble wrap, visible through the wooden
slats. She'd seen engravings of breadfruit in the Beagle's lithograph plates, and these were not breadfruit.
Lisa put her weight on the top of the closest crate. The leathery things crunched like eggs. A kerosene
smell drifted out of them. She crunched her way to the camper's side door, limping through debris from
the ceiling. She saw the cell phone hanging in a pouch from the back of the passenger seat, grabbed it
and eased out the door. Outside, she ducked under the eaves where the floodlights didn't reach and
hobbled for the deeper darkness of the back yard and Bob's alien-proof shack.
The front door of the shed was padlocked, but there was a back entrance with a sort of
Chinese-puzzle lock, which Bob had invented himself, and which she'd had to master before he'd give
her any presents for her tenth birthday. She fumbled with the works, holding the phone in her armpit,
snow sticking in her hair and eyelashes. The lock gave and she blundered into the pitch blackness inside.
Lisa crouched on the cold dirt floor with the phone and soaked sneakers and punched in her
mother's number. She unblocked the peephole in the shack's padlocked front entrance and peered out,
teeth chattering, the phone pressed hard against the side of her face. All she could see was falling snow,
campers, and the floodlights shining in the tracks she'd left. The phone rang and rang and rang.
She hung up on her mother's empty apartment and dialed 911. The line clicked once and connected.
"Hello?" she whispered, "hello?"
You have reached Emergency Assistance. Because of inclement weather the number of
emergency calls has increased. Your call may not be answered immediately. Please stay on the
line. An operator will assist you. You have reached Emergency Assistance. Because of inclement
weather ...
She clenched her teeth, trying not to scream.
Please stay on the line ...
She paced back and forth in the tiny space, freezing. There were candles and matches on a shelf.
Would Bob be able to see it if she lit one? Did it matter? He would figure out where she was anyway.
She squeezed the phone between her shoulder and her ear and struck a match. The flame wavered over
more crates stacked in the corner. Breadfruit Especiale.
You have reached Emergency Assistance ...
She lit a candle, stuck it into a clear space on Bob's workbench and tried warming her hands over it.
Bob kept his craziest crap in this shedтАФthe stuff her mother had no patience for. All of it was familiar.
Here was a jar of withered, bony things floating in formaldehyde that Bob said were alien fingers
amputated from the rest of the alien hand. Here were the videos Bob had taken of the house, night after
night for a month. She'd watched them with him, searching for suspicious objects in the sky, but he'd run
out of tapes two weeks before the aliens had actually landed on the roof. After that, in the wildest frenzy
Lisa could remember, Bob had set up motion detectors in the back yard and a still-camera on a tripod.
The result of that was his "proof," the photo blown up to eleven by fourteen inches, and nailed to the wall
of the shed like a trophy: the house in the middle of the night, luminesced in a hazy green aura, globs of
light hovering in a triangular formation over the chimney. Lisa eyed the photo, thinking of the developing
errors she'd seen her friends make in photography class.
The cell phone crackled. Emergency 911. Do you need police, fire or ambulance?
A real human being. She wanted to scream into the receiver, All three!
"My dad's trying to kidnap me!" Her voice came out in a weird shriek. "He's divorced from my
mom, and I'mтАФ"
I'll connect you with county police.
There was a blank sound on the line. Lisa peered through the peephole again. Bob was outside, a
silhouette under the floods. He turned and the glare of a huge flashlight lanced over the shed. The dog in
the Airstream barked louder, more insistent.
County police. Give me your address and phone number please.