"A Dying Breed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richardson Carrie)

George caught up with us as we turned onto the unpaved county road that ended at Englethorpe's place. I stopped for a moment to let Angelina transfer to the patrol car so she could explain things to George. I hoped he would believe her; I expected to have a hard enough time just managing Kyle.
We pulled to a stop at Englethorpe's gate and shut off the engines. I listened. The silence was broken only by the strident monotone of cicadas and the distant squawking of a scrub jay. To the northeast creamy white clouds were bubbling up into a potential thunderhead. Our blistered land was desperate for rain; I felt like a traitor as I wished the storm away. It would make finding and preserving evidence more difficult.
Englethorpe's ranch looked unkempt, but the drought had had that effect on even the best-maintained spreads this year. The hayfield was unmowed and the late-season feed corn unharvested. The lodged stalks rustled against one another in the occasional puff of air. It sounded like Jesse.
The house sat only a hundred feet from the gate; a barn and a loafing shed stood further away from the road. The curtains on the house were drawn and I couldn't see any lights inside. There was an old hulk up on blocks in the driveway and a battered red pickup parked behind it. An ancient Farmall tractor was parked in the loafing shed. The gate in front of us was closed with a heavy chain and sturdy padlock.
The red pickup matched the description Jesse had given us. I wondered if Englethorpe had heard us arrive, if he was watching from behind one of the curtains. I wondered if he would surrender peaceably, or if someone would get hurt. I wondered if I was doing the right thing.
George fetched boltcutters from the trunk of the patrol car and applied them to the chain. Angie caught the cut ends and eased them to the ground. The hinges bleated mournfully as George pushed the gate open just enough for the four of us to slip through. George and I took the two shotguns; Angie and Kyle drew their revolvers. Some instinct told me the house was vacant. I didn't want to waste time on it, but I didn't dare skip checking it out. I waved George and Angelina around to the back. Just as I started up the steps someone spoke behind me. "He is not in the house." The sibilant whisper was familiar by now. I slapped a hand over Kyle's mouth to keep him from screaming and turned around.
There were three of them, of various sexes, ages, and states of disrepair. As I watched, a fourth came striding slowly out of the cornfield. The cornfield. Of course.
My glare told Kyle he could join the ranks of the freshly dead if he squealed. I sent him around back to fetch George and Angelina. He could get his vomiting over with, quietly, before he returned. He was white to the gills, but he managed to keep it under control until he was out of sight.
The three of them caught up with me and my entourage of the dead a few yards into the cornfield. Dry stalks had been uprooted and tossed aside to form a small clearing, invisible from the edge of the plot. The dead and the living clumped at separate sides of the clearing. Perhaps the deceased regarded us with the same wonder, revulsion, and lack of understanding we felt for them. George was almost as white as Kyle. He must not have believed Angelina after all, but he held his ground like a Spartan when the crude grave at my feet began to open.
First a fissure spread along its center, as though an invisible hand had scooped a trough through the clods. Grains at the edge of the crack tumbled inside, then suddenly began to leap out again as the dirt started to flow and ripple away from the centerline. The five open trenches beside it were outlined with standing waves that looked like the result of the same process. The body that rose up from that hole, dirt cascading from its shoulders, was very fresh -- and very young.
At first I thought he was still alive. Then I saw the marks on his body, and he turned his ruined eyes toward me. I knelt so he wouldn't have to stare upward. Maybe it made a difference.
"Hello, son. What's your name?"
"Jeffrey. Jeffrey Thornton." Missing persons bulletin out of San Antonio, two days ago. "Are you a policewoman?"
"A kind of policewoman, Jeffrey. I'm a sheriff, and these are my deputies." He didn't react to the dead bodies standing about. "Do you know how you got here?"
"I was at the store with my mama. A man made me get in his car. He brought me here. He did things that hurt me." A thoughtful pause. "I'm dead now. Your face is wet."
"I know. I'll be okay in a minute." A dead little boy who missed his mama. I hugged him, very gently. "Do you know where this man is now?"
He turned and pointed. "He's in the barn. He has a lady in there now."
Oh Christ.
We stormed the barn like an assault team. I pumped two shotgun loads into the door at bar level, and George and Kyle threw an old feed trough through what was left of it. We hurtled inside -- and were just moments too late.
I don't know ... maybe if I'd believed sooner, or spent less time deposing Jesse, or less time comforting Jeffrey, or .... I've spent every night since then second-guessing myself, and I'll take my guilt to my grave. Along with the vision of Hell that Robert Englethorpe had created in that barn.
He leaped off her as we burst in. He must have slashed her throat just as he climaxed. I knew we were going to lose her when I saw how her head lolled on her neck; he'd damn near cut all the way through to the spine. But she was still conscious, for a last few seconds, and the look in her eyes as she struggled to scream past the blood and the froth....
Angelina headed for the victim; the rest of us bracketed Englethorpe. He was babbling, scrambling back into the shadows, trying to yank up his pants with one hand and waving that great bloody knife at us with the other. We were all yelling at him to drop it, but I'm sure he couldn't even understand what we were saying. Any moment someone was going to blow him away, and I didn't want that. No, not that.
Then little Jeffrey Thornton walked into the middle of the chaos, and Englethorpe just went to pieces. He threw the knife away, dropped to his knees, and crawled to my feet, crying and begging us to protect him. I wanted to kick him in the face. I turned away in disgust.
To see Kyle raise his service revolver and pull back the hammer. The click echoed like a gong in the suddenly silent barn.
* * *

Night. A street sweating with fog and fear. A body lies sprawled in the dim circle of light from a corner streetlamp. One arm is outflung; the hand lies in shadow. Something dark seeps from the chest to add to the stains of old sins on the sidewalk.
A young, uniformed police officer edges toward the body. Her weapon is fixed upon the still figure, but her hands are shaking. The revolver's barrel is hot; it fumes faintly in the wet air.
Question: How many guns can you count in this picture?
Answer: Every shooting, no matter how justified, has two victims.
* * *

I blinked my way back to the choking stink of blood and fear-sweat and semen in the barn. In an instant it would be joined by the reek of burnt powder. We all wanted Englethorpe dead, but I couldn't let Kyle destroy himself like that. Angie was gathering herself to jump him. I waved her off as a horrible inspiration struck.
"Kyle, how would you like him to rise from the dead to accuse you of murder?"
For a long moment nothing changed. Then a tremor started in Kyle's hand and moved up his arm until his whole body vibrated. I reached for the gun, lowered the hammer, and took it away from him. Tears -- shame? rage? -- spilled down his cheeks. For the first time in far too long, I felt tenderness rather than exasperation. Surely he deserved at least as much of my compassion as what I had been handing out to dead folks lately. I thought about Jeffrey Thornton, and his mother, and hugged my son fiercely.
I sent him back to the front gate to fetch the patrol car. He would have to walk the gauntlet of the dead, but it was better than being in that barn. I helped George handcuff Englethorpe and shackle him to the stanchion of a hayrick. Then I forced myself to cross the bloody straw to where Angelina knelt by Englethorpe's last victim.
The woman was dead; nothing Angie could have done would have saved her. It did occur to me to wonder if, or how long, she would stay dead. We searched through the clothing scattered about, but didn't find anything to identify her. We did find a number of implements that Englethorpe had used on her.
* * *

There were hours and hours of depressing, tedious details to complete after that. Angelina and George began identifying and interviewing the risen victims while I made some calls. San Antonio loaned us a portable crime lab and some investigators, and the FBI got into the act. Every last one of them had to have the fact of walking, talking dead people proved over and over again. And every last one of them freaked, in his or her own fashion, when confronted with the reality. One FBI asshole wanted to grab one of the dead and ship him off for an immediate autopsy. I managed to dissuade him, but I wondered how we would handle that later. A pathologist's report would be needed for Englethorpe's trial.
As soon as I could, I sent Kyle back to the station. We had left a jailed prisoner unattended far too long, and I wanted to know what Jesse was doing. Kyle was getting better at handling the new order of things. His voice was steady when he radioed that everything at the station was under control. Jesse was sitting in my office, waiting for no one knew what. Soon the world would have to know about his existence, and that of the other animated corpses we were working around at Englethorpe's ranch. The local and San Antonio press had sniffed something afoot from the amount of radio traffic. George was having to beat them off the crime scene with a stick.
The heavens withheld their mercy from the thirsty land. The storm clouds evaporated and blew away in ragged dark shreds. We worked on through the one-hundred-degree heat of the afternoon, while squadrons of confused buzzards circled overhead. Dozens of feet stomped the caliche soil into white dust that floated into the air, coated our clothes and contaminated our samples, gritted in our eyes, and left us all sneezing furiously. When I finally gave up, turned everything over to Angelina and George, and went back to the station, I caught hell from one of the county commissioners who had been trying to call me all day.
It was time to break the news. I managed to persuade him to call the other commissioners together for an emergency meeting at the station. It was quite a scene. Jesse was patient, whispery, and indubitably there. The only one who handled it well was the young mother of three who had won the last election by a fluke. Two of the good ol' boys fainted and a third had chest pains. We had to call the EMS in, so of course they got to see Jesse, too. The news was going to be all over the county in an eyeblink. I had to call Jesse's parents before they heard about it through the grapevine. I called Tamara while I was at it.
There was no way we could guarantee Englethorpe's safety in our little jail. We transferred him to a high-security lock-up down in San Antonio. The county commissioners had recovered: they were already arguing about the cost of jailing him and of a heavy-duty murder trial.
* * *

The flak fell pretty heavily on our county at first: screaming tabloid headlines, condescending reports in the national media of a mass hallucination in a Texas backwater, patronizing analyses by hoards of "experts." But within days, more of the dead were appearing in other towns and large cities. Soon it was happening all over the world.
Why now? Why in my jurisdiction? What made this little Texas county so special? These questions get lost in the larger mystery. Perhaps some threshold of mayhem was finally reached and whoever runs the cosmos decided to teach us a lesson. Or perhaps it is our own collective conscience that has brought our sins back to confront us.
Perhaps the restless dead have been with us for a long time, bony fingers plucking at our sleeves, pleading for our attention, a hearing, justice. Maybe we were just willfully blind and deaf, until now. But everyone deserves to be listened to, even if he is dead. Maybe especially if he is dead. On a blistering August day Kyle, Angie, George and I listened, and the world tilted into a new orbit.
And still it continues. Everywhere the dead make their slow, deliberate, terrifying ways to the local constabulary, to demand justice. Coffins exhume themselves, vaults and crypts spring open. The cremated are reconstituted as swirling clouds of gray ash and blackened bone. The remains display a tremendous physical integrity. In Atlanta, a religious zealot, convinced that the risen dead were instruments of Satan, broke through a police cordon and hacked one apart with an axe. It reassembled its scattered limbs while the police cuffed the attacker (who was charged with abuse of a corpse).