"Daniel Pearlman - Flies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pearlman Daniel)

Flies - a short story by Daniel Pearlman



Flies
a short story by Daniel Pearlman
Angelita Flores lay flat on her belly among a heap of decaying corpses. It
was all that remained of the village. All the people that her husband
Francisco had grown up with continued even in death to form an impregnable
wall around her, a cordon sanitaire, made up now of obscenely intertwined
limbs and loops of spilled intestine.
The bodies, feeding flies all day and now far into the night, had slumped
across her in such a way as miraculously to shield her from the first
barrage of machine-gun fire and then, later, from the bursts that
sporadically followed, laid down by the looting soldiers for insurance
sake. Sun-shriveled men who would never have dreamt of touching her, who
used to take off their caps in greeting the elegant young profesora from
the city, now pinioned her from her hips down in a variety of stiff
embraces that even her husband would never have attempted.
Angelita had gotten used to the humming of the flies and to the croak of
gases released from collapsing bowels. But now the night began to fill
with new noises, sounds that she could not place--the rapid beating of
some sort of wings, and the drone and buzz of a horde of creatures that
slowly began arriving and settling off to her right at the edge of the
hecatomb closest to where she lay.
At first she thought they must be carrion birds attracted by the smell of
blood and feces, but the chirr was too grating and the wingbeat too swift
for sounds made by birds. Then she thought they were helicopters, but no
lights accompanied their arrival. The full moon alone, it seemed, was all
the beacon they needed to guide them to a landing. To see who had come she
would have to lift her unencumbered chest above a horizon formed by bodies
piled two and three deep. But terror kept her sandwiched to the ground,
her right cheek plastered to the sticky, blood-clotted earth. The sun had
barely risen when, in five minutes flat, an ordinary village square was
transformed into a massive open-air grave.
Were these the soldiers returning to finish what they had started? she
wondered. Were they now going to pour gasoline over the dead as they had
done earlier to the houses?
A horror of dying swept over her--a biological reflex, nothing more. The
dread of dying made no more sense to her than that. Death by bullet, death
by fire--after all, what difference would it make? Often throughout the
long day and night she had wished she could be joined to all the others,
beyond pain. Singled out for some reason by fate, she had been denied the
swift extinction that would have united her with Francisco.
The sounds that emerged from the growing flock of visitors were a strange
mix--like the crackling of burning tinder, the croaking of frogs, and the
humming of a field full of crickets. Snatches of human speech seemed also
to rocket out of the din, then die before she could decode them. As hard
as Angelita tried to listen, the pounding of her own still-living blood
against her eardrums garbled the sounds these visitors uttered. And then