"David Prill - Rocket Fall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Prill David)

shift that night at the Hofbrau Drive-in. She didn't know why her mother was making such big fusses.
Maria had heard that Those Who Wear Darkness Like Lederhosen only took virgins, so what was to
worry?

As it turned out, plenty, because before the holy water was dry, the trailer shook and the back wall of the
closet opened like a can of tuna packed in spring water and Those Who Wear Darkness Like
Lederhosen were there, only the darkness they were wearing was more like the darkness of a walk
through Gator Swamp at midnight.

They made her sleep, then trundled her out of the mobile home to a waiting coach. The black horses
snorted and launched into a muscular, fearful gallop even before the door to the coach slapped shut.

It took only moments for the coach to pass by the last trailer park on the fringes of Goldstadt, sallow
scared faces staring out from behind reclaimed freight windows. Then the coach was shooting up the
mountain pass, riding on the rims as they cut curves, the trees becoming more tense now, the castle
battlements and gantries coming into view through the snaking fog.




┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖



When she woke, Maria found herself in a small room with stone walls and straw floor and bars on the
impossible door. They fed her infrequently and did painful things to her with regularity and all the time she
really didn't understand why. She hadn't lived that long, always stayed pretty close to home, both in body
and in mind.

She knew there were others like her. When the guards weren't around she tried calling out to them, heard
the frail replies. She figured they had been locked up longer, their hope hustled away to some
unreachable realm. She wanted to communicate with the others, plan their escape or their funerals. She
was a people person; she couldn't help it.

And then the guards released her and the other tormented souls.

A microphone was thrust into her face.

"So, where do you call home?"




┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖



Maria was lashed to the gantry with the other Ethyls. Above her loomed the terrible glory of PainshipHe
Never Called Back, a great nausea-green glow-in-the-dark hulking spectral mass, a hive, almost alive
itself, the skeleton of a hull encasing the vital organs of their journey.