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

тАЬThereтАЩs a pay-phone inside if you want a taxi,тАЭ the bus driver called
down to him, and Heath nodded agreeably, but though he knew he must be
a sorry sight with his curved spine and awkward gait, he wanted to walk. If
he meant to feel truly at home in this place again, he must start to reclaim it,
and the only way he could think to do that was the same way he had done it
as a kid, on the ground, mapping it out for himself.

Things had changed; he saw that right away. Although he knew to
expect it, the sight of the abandoned, sagging railroad station made his
eyes sting. He picked his way over the rusted rails and found himself
skirting the commercial center, once bright and bustling, now almost as
decrepit in appearance as the station building. The few cars parked along
the street had seen better days, and at least half of the storefront
properties stood empty, their dusty windows displaying for sale or lease
signs if they displayed anything at all. The little Mom & Pop grocery store
was posted with warnings about security measures; the drugstore he
remembered, the bakery, the card and gift shop, had been displaced by a
locked-up tattoo parlor, a charity thrift shop, and a gutted shell of
fire-blackened cinder blocks. Grass grew through cracks in the pocked and
crumbling pavement underfoot. He glimpsed human figures, close by or far
away, he could not be quite sure. Some seemed vaguely familiar, but none
looked directly at him or spoke as he hobbled past. This did not surprise or
offend him. His imprisonment, those eternities spent alone in a concrete
box, had aged him. He had lost flesh and teeth, and what remained of his
hair had turned white. His skin was ashen from so long without sunlight or
decent food. He wondered if even Cara would know him.

Nevertheless, walking on as quickly as his injured leg allowed, he took
hope from the fact that life went on in this town, wounded as it obviously
had been. Heath saw no bomb craters, no corpses in the street, no
uniformed men clutching guns, looking for an excuse to shoot. His
pastтАФnot the recent past, not the slow, painful tedium of physiotherapy, not
his confinement in the hole, and not the time before the hole when he had
been a young soldier, alternately terrified and bored out of his skull, but that
time when he and the world had both been young, when he first loved
CaraтАФfell over him like a comforting blanket.

Cara, he believed, held the key to his life, his survival. Memories of
her had kept him alive, kept him from losing his mind in the hole. Squatting
on rough concrete in total darkness, he would touch his face, stroke his own
body, until his fingers became hers, and he could feel the hard floor
beneath him soften into the bed in CaraтАЩs light-filled bedroom. Then he
would look up into her beautiful face, and, finally, as he saw the pure and
utter love shining from her eyes, he had been able, truly, to love her back.

After a time, either long or short, he could not say exactly, of moving
through curiously empty streets, he found himself standing before CaraтАЩs
house in the part of town once called тАШnewтАЩ: a section of handsome brick
boxes built in neatly tended rows when a new factory had opened. The
factory soon closed, however, early victim of the wartime economy, some