"Russo, Richard Paul - Just Drive, She Said" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

until we were back up near eighty. The woman punched buttons, then again
jammed the big switch on the front of the console.
We lurched sideways without moving again, and this time I thought I was
really going to be sick. Everything in my vision began to tilt, and I had
a hell of a time keeping the car on the road. I hit the brakes and brought
the car to a stop, no longer caring what she would do to me.
I left the engine running, put my head on the steering wheel, and breathed
slowly, deeply, until the spinning stopped. I straightened and looked at
the woman. She now held the gun in her lap.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Sure," I said. "Terrific."
"We won't have to go so hard now," she said. "Just coast along at twenty,
twenty-five miles an hour."
"Does that mean I start driving again?"
She nodded.
I looked down at the gun in her lap, and nodded back. "Give me another
minute or two, will you?" I held up my hand, which was shaking. "I can't
drive like this."
"All right."
I sat there, trying to relax, trying to cut down the shakes. The street
was nearly deserted; only a few cars drove by, and there were no
pedestrians. The cars looked odd, but there wasn't enough light for me to
figure out why. Then I leaned forward over the steering wheel and looked
at the front end of the Mazda. It was still an ugly brown, but the nose
had become more elongated, sharper. The retractable headlights were gone,
replaced by conventional stationary lights.
"What the hell is going on?" I asked.
"If it was daylight, you'd see even stranger things," she said.
Which made me look more closely at our surroundings. The nearby
streetlight was mounted on an unusually thick metal pole, and gave off a
sharp, emerald glow I'd never seen before. The lights in the buildings
were brighter, harsher than I would have expected.
"Let's go," the woman said.
I breathed deeply a few more times. Then I put the car into gear, let out
the clutch, and swung back onto the road.
We drove slowly, and I kept searching for changes in my surroundings, but
it was too dark to see much. The woman directed me through several turns,
then onto a freeway.
On the freeway there were differences I could identify. The overhead signs
were blue rather than green, lit from below by rose-tinted lights. And the
street and city names were completely unfamiliar--definitely not English.
I didn't think I could pronounce half of them.
"You going to tell me what the hell is happening here?"
"Just look for a motel," she said.
"And how am I supposed to recognize one?"
She smiled. "Spelled just the same here as where you're from. It's
practically a trans-universal word."
We drove on, and I wanted something to break the silence, to ground me.
"Will that thing play music?"
The woman just laughed and shook her head, and I wondered what was so