"MD Spenser - Humano Morphs 4 Air Morph One" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spenser M D)

I guess walking bent over just made us feel more stealthy.
All of a sudden, I jumped.
I saw another flashlight beam waving around out in the field! Someone else was there!
Quickly, I turned my flashlight off. I turned around and motioned to Freddy to hold still. But he couldn't see me because, with the light off, it was pitch dark. In a second, he bumped into me.
"Shhhh!" I whispered. "I think someone else is out here."
With my heart pounding in my throat, I turned to the front again. I could feel Freddy holding tightly to my arm. I don't think either of us breathed.
I couldn't see the other flashlight. I looked all around, straining my eyes in the darkness. I saw nothing.
Whoever else was out there had turned his flashlight off, too.
I thought that maybe this was some kind of deadly game, one in which he was the hunter and we were the prey Ч only in this game, neither of us could see the other.
Or perhaps whoever else was out in the field was just trying to spook us. If so, he was doing a pretty good job.
I held my breath, kept every muscle taut and still, and listened with all my might.
I heard the patter of rain on the ground. I heard crickets humming in the grass. I heard the running of the Elkhora River behind the factory. In the distance, back in town, a car rumbled along a road to somewhere else.
I listened for a long minute, but I heard nothing else.
Then, suddenly, I understood.
I drew a deep breath and tried to settle down. Still my heart pounded wildly. I breathed in and out, deeply, and tried to relax all my muscles.
There was no one else in the field. There never had been.
What I had seen was the reflection of my own flashlight beam, sweeping back and forth across the lagoon.
The lagoon!
"We found it!" I exclaimed, loud enough to make Freddy jump. The rain was dripping off my face and I could feel myself smiling in the dark.
"Sheesh," Freddy said. "First you need everything quiet as a mouse, and then you start yelling out across the field. Make up your mind, will you?"
"Sorry," I said.
I flicked the flashlight on again. We crept forward again, staring at the wet blades of grass gleaming in the beam of light. We didn't want to rush forward without thinking and blunder right into the lagoon.
Then we saw the reflection again, the beam of my light playing across the surface of the water.
I shone the light a little closer. We saw where the grass ended. The lagoon was surrounded by a wide swath of brown dirt where nothing grew.
Three more steps and we were there.
"OK, Freddy," I said. "What now?"


Chapter Ten

"Shine the light all the way around the edge of the water," Freddy said. "I want to get a look at this dead cow."
Slowly, I directed the flashlight beam around the entire shore of the lagoon.
There was no dead cow. Nor was there any sign of a dead bird.
They were gone.
But I knew that I had seen them.
"Really, Freddy, I..."
He held out his hand to stop me. I did not need to explain further, at least not to him. He believed me without question.
"They know" he said softly. "They've removed the carcasses, the dead bodies. That means they know the lagoon is poisonous."
He set the tote bag on the ground and unzipped it.
"Stay back from the water," he said. "If it killed the bird that fast, believe me, we don't want any contact with it."
"Right," I said. "Good advice. I'd just as soon not keel over dead right here tonight. I kind of had in mind living another sixty or seventy years. Or long enough anyway to get elected president."
Freddy made no reply. He was, in general, a quieter person than I was. And he had long since grown used to my constant talk about becoming president.
One reason I liked him, actually, was that he never made fun of my ambition. The other kids did. They rolled their eyes and laughed. But Freddy only said that you never know what you can achieve until you try.
We all have the power to change ourselves into whatever we want to be, he said. It's not easy, he said. It takes work. It takes honesty. But he kept saying that, if we're willing to try, we can make ourselves better people Ч kinder, more loving, more in tune with nature.
If your motives are pure and you want to accomplish something good rather than just getting famous and powerful, it is even possible over time, he said, to transform an inexperienced young kid into a wise and caring president.
Sometimes he got tired of hearing me talk about my ambition, but he took me seriously. I appreciated that.
Out of the tote bag, Freddy took out two pairs of rubber gloves. We had taken them from the cabinet under my parent's kitchen sink. My mom wore them to wash the dishes because my dad said they kept her hands soft.
I didn't get why that made any difference to him, but my dad is weird that way.
And when it was my dad's turn to do the dishes, he wore them also. Mom said she liked his hands soft, too.
Freddy and I weren't concerned about keeping our hands soft, I can tell you that. The idea never even occurred to us. We were concerned about keeping our hands safe.