"Lisa Tuttle & Steven Utley - In the Hole" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuttle Lisa)

IN THE HOLE
Lisa Tuttle & Steven Utley

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Lisa has been writing professionally since selling a short story back in
1971. She believes that тАШIn the HoleтАЩ is the 99th short story sheтАЩs sold to
date. Her most recent novels, The Mysteries and The Silver Bough, are
available from Bantam Spectra in the US. Lisa was born and raised in
Texas, has also lived in New York and London, but for the past seventeen
years she has been settled in a remote and rural part of Scotland with her
family. She is currently working on a new novel.

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Steven is the internationally unknown author of the story collections Ghost
Seas (published in Australia, 1997), The Beasts of Love (USA, 2005), and
Where or When (UK, 2006). For some reason he lives in Tennessee.

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Sitting up high in the back of the bus, resting his forehead against the cold
window, Heath gazed out at the misty landscape and tried to make sense of
what he saw. Although he had grown up in this country, it had become alien
to him.

There had been rainstorms the night before, and now the late
afternoon sunlight filtered through drooping, perspiring greenery and
glistened on the boggy ground and the swollen streams. That seemed
normal, and yet here and there he also glimpsed a landscape in
agonyтАФstands of blighted, shattered trees and the blackened ruins of farm
buildings; the swollen carcasses of dead animals; piles of what might have
been bodies, or just discarded clothing; burnt-out cars abandoned at
roadsides, even something that looked like the wreckage of an airplane
scattered over a hillsideтАФall evidence that he traveled through a war zone.
But the war was over, or so somebody, or almost everybody, insisted, and,
anyway, the war, HeathтАЩs war, had been a localized conflict on the other
side of the world. How could it have reached this far into his peaceful
homeland?
 He thought then about the conversation he had had with the stranger
beside him, who got off at the last stop save one. IтАЩm looking for work, the
stranger told him, have been for months now, but thereтАЩs nothing a man can
make his living fromтАФlifeтАЩs tough these days, on account of the war. At first
Heath thought he meant that the cost of sustaining a war abroad had
crippled the domestic economy, but as he put together other, overheard
snatches of talk with the details of the ruined landscape before him, he