"Nick Pollotta - Full Moonster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pollotta Nick)

With fond memories and warmest regards to the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, and the Sunday
afternoon gang of crazies at Chestnut Hall: Oz Fontecchio, Barbara Higgins, Luke Thalmeyer, Frank
Richards, JoAnne Lawler, Larry Gelfand, Joyce Carrol, John Prentis, T-Burn, John and Laura Symms,
and especially to the vivacious Debbie Malamut.

Okay, who brought the pizza?

INITIATION

PROLOGUE


The scream came from out of nowhere.

Steadily, the howl of pain grew in volume until it split the forest night like an endless explosion. Rapidly
increasing, the raw-throated cry of anguish wavered and wassailed until it abruptly ended in a meaty
thump. In perfect harmony, the mountain cabin shook; pictures and diplomas went lopsided, mugs
danced off bookshelves and the glass door of a surgical instrument cabinet cracked.

Quickly rising from her easy chair by the fireplace, Dr. Joanne Abernathy threw aside the medical
journal and hobbled over to a window. Dear God, what was that horrible noise? Had somebody fallen
off Deadman's Cliff?

As she drew back the lace curtains, the panels of thermal tempered glass segmented her view of the
Canadian forest into tiny squares. Pressing her nose flat against the glass, the veterinarian frantically
glanced about. Illuminated by the full moon overhead, the trees were frosted by the silver light, making
green seem black and black turn invisible. Completely filling the northern horizon was the ragged gray
expanse of the MacKenzie Palisades, an irregular series of sheer angular foothills that bisected this
isolated area of the Yukon wilderness like an insane granite wall.

Then the howl sounded again, closer this time, and faintly overhead could be heard a jetliner streaked off
into the distance. An odd thought came to Abernathy. The old woman promptly dismissed it as nonsense.
Anybody falling out of a plane would be dead before they hit the ground from cranial blood loss. And
afterwards? Well, you'd simply fill in the impact crater with a bulldozer and put a tombstone any olтАЩ damn
place that seemed proper.

However, if the noise of the passenger jet had frightened some poor bastard into tumbling off the cliff...

Hurriedly, the retired vet retrieved her teeth from a glass of water set on the stone hearth, pulled on her
walking shoes and grabbed a flashlight. After forty years of birthing calves, inoculating sheep and fixing
broken bones for both man and beast, there was little she couldn't patch. If the luckless son-of-a-bitch
was still alive when she got there, he had a good chance of staying that way. As the closest thing to a
doctor in these parts, Abernathy was duty bound to heal even incompetent hunters who tumbled off
mountains. Darn fool was probably drunk. Frightened by a plane, indeed. Hurmph!

Pulling on a light cloth coat, she paused for a moment at the gun rack. This wasn't downtown
Whitehead. There were pumas and grizzly in this area, neither of which gave a hoot about her Hellenic
oath, but only how tasty old folk were. Bypassing the big bore 30.06 Winchester as too cumbersome to