"Wilson, F Paul - Midnight Mass - ss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson F. Paul)

"First light. And who should I say sent me?"
The woman turned away and shook her head. "No one."
"You won't tell me your name?"
"It's not important."
"But you seem to know him."
"Once, yes." Her voice grew thick. "But he wouldn't recognize me now."
"You can be so sure?"
She nodded. "I've fallen too far away. There's no coming back for me, I'm afraid."
She'd been through something terrible, this one. So had everyone who was still alive, including Zev, but her experience, whatever it was, had made her a little meshugeh. More than a little, maybe.
She started walking away, looking almost silly dragging that little red wagon behind her.
"Wait..."
"Just find him," she said without turning. "And don't mention me."
She stepped into the shadows and was gone from sight, with only the squeaks of the wagon wheels as proof that she hadn't evaporated.
Father Joe Cahill and a prostitute? Zev couldn't believe it. But even if it were true, it was far less serious than what Joe had been accused of.
Maybe she hadn't sold herself in the old days. Maybe it was something she had to do to survive in these new and terrible times. Whatever the truth, he blessed her for being here to help him tonight.
But who is she? he wondered. Or perhaps more important, who was she.

CAROLE . . .

Carole hid the red wagon behind the bushes along the side of the house, then climbed the rickety stairs to the front porch, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. That was when the voice spoke. It had been silent the whole long walk home. Now it started in again.

"Quiet," Carole muttered. "I need to listen."
She'd been in this house two weeks now, and she'd made it as secure as possible. As secure as anything could be since her world ended last month.
Last month? Yes... six weeks this coming Friday. It seemed a lifetime ago. She never would have believed everything could fall apart so fast. But it had.
Despite her security measures, she held her breath, listening for the sound of someoneЧor somethingЧelse in the house besides her. She heard nothing but the breeze stirring the curtains in the upstairs bedroom. It had been warm when she'd left but the night had grown chilly. May was such an untrustworthy month.

She fished the flashlight out of her shoulder bag and turned it on, then off againЧjust long enough to orient herself. She wasn't worried about the light being seen from outsideЧthe blankets draped over the windows would prevent that. She wanted to save her batteries, a rare and precious commodity. When she reached the stairs she flicked the light on again so she could step over the broken first tread. She noticed little splatters of blood on the banister and newel post. She'd clean them up in the morning, when she could use natural light.
When she reached the bedroom she closed the window and quickly undressed.

Carole had no illusions about that. She pulled on a baggy gray sweatsuit and slipped beneath the covers, praying the voice would let her sleep tonight. The night's labors had exhausted her.
She thought of Rabbi Wolpin, and that made her think of Father Cahill, and that led to thoughts of St. Anthony's and the school where she'd taught, and the convent where she'd lived...
She thought of her last nights there, less than six weeks ago, just days before Easter, when everything had been so different...

GOOD FRIDAY ...

The Holy Father says there are no such things as vampires," Sister Bernadette Gileen said.
Sister Carole Hanarty glanced up from the pile of chemistry tests on her lapЧtests she might never be able to return to her sophomore studentsЧand watched Bernadette as she drove through town, working the shift on the old Datsun like a long-haul trucker. Her dear friend and fellow Sister of Mercy was thin, almost painfully so, with large blue eyes and short red hair showing around the white band of her wimple. As she peered through the windshield, the glow of the setting sun ruddied the clear, smooth skin of her round face.
Sister Carole shrugged. "If His Holiness said it, then we must believe it. But we haven't heard anything from him in so long. I hope ..."
Bernadette turned toward her, eyes wide with alarm.
"Oh, you wouldn't be thinking anything's happened to His Holiness now, would you, Carole?" she said, the lilt of her native Ireland elbowing its way into her voice. "They wouldn't dare!"
Momentarily at a loss as to what to say, Carole gazed out the side window at the budding trees sliding past. The sidewalks of this little Jersey Shore town were empty, and hardly any other cars were on the road. She and Bernadette had had to try three grocery stores before finding one with anything to sell. Between the hoarders and delayed or canceled shipments, food was getting scarce.
Everybody sensed it. How did that saying go? By the pricking in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes...
Or something like that.
She rubbed her cold hands together and thought about Bernadette, younger than she by five yearsЧonly twenty-sixЧwith such a good mind, such a clear thinker in so many ways. But her faith was almost childlike.
She'd come to the convent at St. Anthony's two years ago and the pair of them had established instant rapport. They shared so much. Not just a common Irish heritage, but a certain isolation as well. Carole's parents had died years ago, and Bernadette's were back on the Auld Sod. So they became sisters in a sense that went beyond their sisterhood in the order. Carole was the big sister, Bernadette the little one. They prayed together, laughed together, walked together. They took over the convent kitchen and did all the food shopping together. Carole could only hope that she had enriched Bernadette's life half as much as the younger woman had enriched hers.
Bernadette was such an innocent. She seemed to assume that since the Pope was infallible when he spoke on matters of faith or morals he somehow must be invincible too.
Carole hadn't told Bernadette, but she'd decided not to believe the Pope on the matter of the undead. After all, their existence was not a matter of faith or morals. Either they existed or they didn't. And all the news out of Europe last year had left little doubt that vampires were real.
And that they were on the march.
Somehow they had got themselves organized. Not only did they exist, but more of them had been hiding in Eastern Europe than even the most superstitious peasant could have imagined. And when the communist bloc crumbled, when all the former client states and Russia were in disarray, grabbing for land, slaughtering in the name of nation and race and religion, the undead took advantage of the power vacuum and struck.
They struck high, they struck low, and before the rest of the world could react, they controlled all Eastern Europe.
If they had merely killed, they might have been containable. But because each kill was a conversion, their numbers increased in a geometric progression. Sister Carole understood geometric progressions better than most. Hadn't she spent years demonstrating them to her chemistry class by dropping a seed crystal into a beaker of supersaturated solution? That one crystal became two, which became four, which became eight, which became sixteen, and so on. You could watch the lattices forming, slowly at first, then bridging through the solution with increasing speed until the liquid contents of the beaker became a solid crystalline mass.