"John W. Randal - Bad Animals" - читать интересную книгу автора (Randal John W)

"But what do they eat?" Jimmy asks, his smeared little hands splayed around the cool glass. "They don't
have mouths. Look, they don't!"
"No," says Magdalene, "They don't have mouths."
 "But how they eat then?"
Magdalene sniffs the lid. She purses her lips and closes her eyes for a long sensuous moment. Then she
smiles:
"They eat heat. They soak it up with their wings. That's why they hang in big clouds around the tops of the
mill chimneys."
Jimmy's eyes are big, glimmers of reflected color flickering in those brown depths. The girls leave him
staring into his jar of light.
"I like him."
"He's going to be a man someday. I can smell it in him... like a stew."
"A stew."
They giggle back to the trailer.

As I passed along the sear and dusty way to Abolition, MS, I came upon a gray man, kneeling by the side of
the razor-straight road. He was rubbing ashes in his hair, great fistfuls of smooth gray, from a pile on the
ground. I could not discern what language he wailed in.
Magdalene touches the tips of her pink tongue to her lips and closes the book, and her eyes, for a
moment.
Jenner has fallen asleep in his lounge chair-white tee-shirt glimmering in the dark of the living room. He
doesn't even snore; he just goes out. One day, Magdalene knows, Jenner's skin is going to be whiter than his
shirt... or anything else in the world. So white that it goes away, and the hard-eyed man with it.
In the bedroom that Magdalene shares with Lizz, a tiny TV is playing a static-laced black and white movie
called Frankenstein. The story makes Magdalene think of all the stuff the labs spilled in their race for a Wet
War that never happened-and of Ventus. She can identify with the dreamers who built that bright ring in the
sky. The desire to Travel, to go somewhere Else, that she understands so very well.
They had hoped to fold a small piece of space in the dark pupil of Ventus. An elegant origami trick that
would also let them move through a slice of time-back before the bio lab mistakes, or maybe further into
future, to when things had settled down. That dream had died hard, in treachery and in a golden flash. For a
brief moment it was as if time had been traversed: midnight shifted to morning-glow. Then the explosion faded
and the debris, and exotic radiation, poured down.
Magdalene imagines all the people sleeping in their perfectly faded buildings in the city. Now dreaming
long dreams to fizzing satellite TV-the promise of escape forgotten years ago. Perhaps they weren't even
afraid anymore. Her graceful hands caress the worn cover of the book.
Milius Harlow: Travels in This Altered Land.
"Perfect buildings," Magdalene breathes. "Bathed in perfect light."
"I want to go there... to sleep there, breathe there. In the heat and light."
Magdalene flushes, opening her eyes and fussing in her bed. She didn't know Lizz was still awake. "Go to
sleep."
"One of the Umbral boys has this big red rusty truck that he drives into the city," Lizz whispers. "He'd
take me. His eyes are sweet."
Magdalene stares hard at her sister, vaguely illuminated by the TV's ghostly flicker. Their room is small,
mostly filled with tattered books they find in the dumps, or that others have given them. Jenner has even
tossed the girls a few battered paperbacks, a textbook or two, and on rare occasions, a hardback novel.
These stand as tokens of his better moods.
"Don't you talk that way, Lizz," Magdalene says, her low words hissing slightly. "Don't be STUPID."
Lizz says nothing. Magdalene's hands are tight on her book.
The younger girl turns away from her sister and snuggles back into her worn covers. "He likes me."
"Go to sleep," Magdalene says.