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

home.

Home. He tried to remember where that was, exactly, and what it
meant.

Precisely how long he had been away he did not know. He had asked,
and received a reply, but numbers, dates, precise information floated
around his head like a cloud of gnats, as impossible to grasp as the
incomprehensible names of the countries the enemy controlled. He felt as
if he had been away forever, тАЬforever and a day,тАЭ words from an old song
Cara had liked to sing. How did it go?

IтАЩll love you though you stay away, forever and a day.

She had told him on the day he left, though she was furious with him
for leaving, that she would wait.

He knew she meant it, but he knew also that nobody could wait
forever. Not really. He had written to her anyway from the hospital, because
the people who rescued himтАФour side, he kept reminding himselfтАФtold
him, practically ordered him, to get in touch with his family, and though they
were not blood-kin and had never married, Cara was the closest thing to
family he had left, the only family he really wanted. My warтАЩs over, he had
written to her, IтАЩm coming home.

He sent the letter to her fatherтАЩs house, praying the old man still lived
and would pass it on to her, wherever she might be, and his prayers were
answered. Cara, amazingly, still lived there, in the town where they had both
grown up. She had not forgotten. I love you, she wrote, again, as in her very
first letter to him. Come back to me as soon as you can.

As soon as I can, he thought, and slept slumped in his seat high in the
back of the bus, on his way home.

****

The bus braked with a noisy exhalation, startling Heath awake. He
looked out at the dull concrete and glass box of a small-town bus station,
old and dirty. He stared, frowning, at the faded board bearing the name of
the town, trying to trace the distant chord the name struck within him. His
gaze moved to peeling advertisements for goods he could not imagine that
anybody sold, services surely nobody provided. He sat, unmoved and
unmoving until the bus driver sang out the name of the stop. Then he stood
as though jerked erect by a hook wedged between his ribs and caught in
his heart, and pain shot up his left leg, the legacy of a kneecap smashed
long ago by a bored, smiling guard. He limped slowly down the aisle and
made his way carefully down the steps. He stood for a long time beside the
bus, regarding the stationтАЩs sagging eaves, as the full import sank in. This
was CaraтАЩs town. This had been his town. This was home. He was home.