"Michael Swanwick - Dogfight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

Michael SWANWICK and William GIBSON
Dogfight
[from LIB.RU]



He meant to keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up
conscripted into some ratass rebel army down in the war zone. Or maybe, with that ticket good as long
as he didn't stop riding, he'd just never get off Greyhound's Flying Dutchman. He grinned at his faint
reflection in cold, greasy glass while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus swaying on tired
shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in the terminal lot, concrete lit
gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching himself starve, maybe in some
snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same bus window, and seeing his
remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded coveralls. One way or the other, he
decided, it didn't mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to have died already. And the driver called a
twenty-minute stopover Tidewater Station, Virginia. It was an old cinder-block building with two
entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous century.

Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl behind it
was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended on it. Probably
does, Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered GAMES, the
word flickering feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local kickers clustered
around a pool table. Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck his head in. And saw a
biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright orange flame. Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it
vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.

"Tha's right, Tiny," a kicker bellowed, "you take that sumbitch!"

"Hey," Deke said. "What's going on?" The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh Peterbilt
cap. "Tiny's defending the Max," he said, not taking his eyes from the table.

"Oh, yeah? What's that?" But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like a Maltese
cross, the slogan Pour le Merite divided among its arms.

The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged
into a fragile-looking chrome-tube chair. The man's khaki work shirt would have hung on Deke like the
folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the buttons threatened to tear away at
any instant. Deke thought of southern troopers he'd seen on his way down; of that weird, gut-heavy
endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they'd been borrowed from some other body. Tiny
might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale a forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a
woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all for
now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike
about the man's face, an appalling suggestion of youth and even beauty in features almost buried in fold
and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny,
had bushy sideburns and a thin mouth. He seemed to be trying to push something with his eyes, wrinkles
of concentration spreading from the corners....

"You dumbshit or what?" The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke's Indo proleboy denims,
the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. "Why don't you get your ass lost, fucker. Nobody wants
your kind in here." He turned back to the dogfight.