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

"Hey! Hi, Lizz and Magdalene!" the little boy calls. Magdalene smiles at him.
The kids are all wearing tired-looking clothes: faded jeans, old tops washed many times, sneakers
sometimes wrapped with tape or decorated with colored markers. Thomas Umbral and his tall brothers favor
fairly clean shades of deep blue, and subsequently stand out in the jumble of paled fabrics. Sissy Strath sits
on a crate, looking tired and hot. Some of the other girls are giggling and drifting here and there, eyeing the
boys. Not Sissy. Her two-year-old, Malcolm, tugs insistently at her sleeve and the worn girl meets
Magdalene's eyes-with a look that speaks volumes about the sad alleys of life.
"They have lots," Lizz says, releasing Magdalene's hand and pointing her gloved finger.
A jumbled pile of rocket-shaped plant pods, each about five inches long, sits on the upturned lid of a
plastic garbage can. Despite herself, Magdalene is impressed; the boys must've gone pretty far into the
shifted woods to collect that many pods. Some of the younger kids still look a bit scared-as they try to strut
before the giggling girls.
The whistle ends its screamed declaration. Scattered like armored mushrooms all across the state, mills
prepare to pump medicinal ash into the waiting sky. They say that the ash suppresses chimeric mutations.
Sober-faced biologists are constantly tinkering with the proportions and composition of the silvery gray
substance. The recipe for the ash seems to mutate as rapidly as the creatures it is intended to quell.
Magdalene stares at the lush edge of the shifted woods. Does it keep you calm? she wonders. Or are we
the ones being treated?
The thick elaborate greenery doesn't answer her thoughts, though those vivid trees and whispering swirls
of foliage seem to return Magdalene's gaze. A watchful breeze stirs the shifted forest that surrounds the
trailer park.
Bad Animals are in here, the sound seems to vaguely hiss.
Magdalene shivers in the day's heat. Staring at the artfully bizarre forest, she shakes her head at the fact
that the boys would go in there just for pop pods. The news continually warns about the extremities of life
found in places like the woods. Along with everyone else, Magdalene had watched the footage of the vast,
internally illuminated air fish, birthed from that forest in Pennsylvania. She'd seen videos of the blood roses
forming and re-forming just under the still, algae-streaked surface of a swamp in the Everglades, watched
firefighters pumping great streams of ash at thousands of static worms, as the glimmering creatures ate the
metal from power lines in Houston.
Far more haunting, were the stories people in the trailer park talked about at night: things they'd seen
hovering at the edge of the forest... or heard from within. Shapes in the deep green, pale limbs glimpsed
briefly among glassy-black, elaborately thorned tree trunks. The oddly-modulated sounds-sounds that might
have been voices, whispering from the emerald gloom.
Magdalene shivers again and goes over to sit with Sissy, while Lizz floats around Thomas Umbral like a
slow motion butterfly.
"Hi Sissy," Magdalene says. "How have you been?"
The girl smiles at Magdalene and sighs. "Um, okay. How 'bout you, Mag? It's nice out today, isn't it? I
mean," she inhales, looking up at the wide deep sky, "I mean it's so open. You know?"
Magdalene nods. Both of them watch little Malcolm scamper around with the older kids. Thomas Umbral
bends and carefully plays the small flame from a plastic lighter over the base of one of the pop pods. The
violet colored tube is propped up on some rocks and faces skyward. As the fire licks smoothly around the
pop pod's base, the color brightens and the pod swells. Thomas steps back grinning. Lizz's eyes shine as
she watches him.
A sudden boom shocks the lot. Everyone shouts and laughs. The pop pod jets up into the vivid air on a
thin line of smoky white. From high in the sky comes a sharp crack, as the pod bursts.
"That's as high as it goes..." Sissy Strath murmurs, her face turned to the clouds. The boys fire another
pod. Sissy's eyes are shimmery, like the surface of a lake at dusk. The forest sighs and groans.
"Pop pods, eh?" Mr. Lucien's boarder says.
The tall man strolls into the vacant lot, craning back his head to watch the latest pod jet into the sky. Fat
old Grant Lucien rents part of his trailer to travelers. The tall man is the latest to pass through, on his slow