"Rosenblum-CaliforniaDreamer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenbaum Benjamin)

"I'm Beth. Our car ran out of gas and we got lost. Please hurry."

Ellen blinked at the girl. Eleven? Twelve? Gawky and blonde, but you noticed her
eyes first. They were a strange color; depthless blue, like the sky after
sunset.

"All right." Ellen sighed and stepped out onto the porch. "Take me to your mom."

The girl turned unhesitatingly inland, trotting up through the scraggly spring
grass toward the forested ridge above the cottage. "Wait a minute," Ellen
called, but the girl didn't slow down, didn't even look back. Ellen hesitated,
then ducked her head and broke into a ran, was panting after only a dozen uphill
yards, because Rebecca had nm every morning and Ellen hadn't.

The girl crouched in the tree shadows, cradling a woman in her arms. The woman's
face was flushed and she breathed in short, raspy breaths. Her hair stuck to her
face, dark and stringy, as if she had been sweating, but when Ellen touched her
cheek, her skin felt hot and dry.

"How long has your mother been sick?" Ellen asked the girl.

"A couple of days. It rained on us and it was cold. Mom let me wear her jacket,
but then she started shivering."

"We've got to get her down to the house somehow." This was a crisis and Ellen
could handle crises. She'd had fifteen years of practice, because Rebecca didn't
handle them. She squatted beside the sick woman, shook her gently. "Can you wake
up?"

Miraculously, the woman's eyelids fluttered.

"Come on, honey. Got to get you on your feet." Ellen slid her arm beneath the
woman's shoulders.

Another miracle. The woman mumbled something incoherent and struggled to her
feet. Ellen kept her arm around her, frightened by her fierce heat, supporting
her. Step by step, she coaxed the woman down the slope, staggering like a drunk
beneath her slack weight.

It took forever to reach the house, but they finally made it. Ellen put the
woman into Rebecca's empty (forever, Oh God) bed. The rasp of her breathing
scared Ellen. Pneumonia? In the old days, before antibiotics, people had died
from flu and pneumonia. The Quake had smashed the comfortable present as it
smashed through the California hills. It had warped time back on itself, had
brought back the old days of candles and no roads and death from measles or
cholera. Seal Cove had no doctor. Big chunks of the California coast had fallen
into the sea and you couldn't get there from here.

"I'll walk down to the store." Ellen poured water into a bowl from the kitchen
jug, got a clean washcloth down from the shelf. "Jack can call Eureka on the