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

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


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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