"Zelazny, Roger - Damnation Alley" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

He opened and explored the two near compartments but could find no cigars. So he crushed out his cigarette on the floor and lit another.
The forward screen showed vegetation, and he slowed. He tried using the radio but couldn't tell whether anyone heard him, receiving only static in reply.
He stared ahead and up. He halted once again.
He turned his forward lights up to full intensity and studied the situation.
A heavy wall of thorn bushes stood before him, reaching to a height of perhaps twelve feet. It swept on to his right and off to his left, vanishing out of sight in both directions. How dense, how deep it might be, he could not tell. It had not been there a few years before.
He moved forward slowly and activated the flamethrowers. In the rearview screen, he could see that the other vehicles had halted a hundred yards behind him and dimmed their lights.
He drove till he could go no farther, then pressed the button for the forward flame.
It shot forth, a tongue of fire, licking fifty feet into the bramble He held it for five seconds and withdrew it. Then he extended it a second time and backed away quickly as the flames caught.
Beginning with a tiny glow they worked their way up. ward and spread slowly to the right and the left. Ther they grew in size and brightness.
As Tanner backed away, he had to dim his screen, foi they'd spread fifty feet before he'd backed more than hundred, and they leaped thirty and forty feet into the air.
The blaze widened, to a hundred feet, two, three . . . As Tanner backed away, he could see a river of fire flowing off into the distance, and the night was brighi about him.
He watched it burn, until it seemed that he looked upon a molten sea. Then he searched the refrigerator, but there was no beer. He opened a soft drink and sipped it while he watched the burning. After about ten minutes the air-conditioner whined and shook itself to life. Hordes of dark, four-footed creatures, the size of rats or cats, fled from the inferno, their coats smoldering. They flowed by. At one point they covered his forward screen, and he could hear the scratching of their claws upon the fenders and the roof.
He switched off the lights and killed the engine, tossed the empty can into the waste box. He pushed the "Recline" button on the side of the seat, leaned back, and closed his eyes.

He was awakened by the blowing of horns. It was still night, and the panel clock showed him that he had slept for a little over three hours.
He stretched, sat up, adjusted the seat. The other cars had moved up, and one stood to either side of him. He leaned on his own horn twice and started his engine. He switched on the forward lights and considered the prospect before him as he drew on his gloves.
Smoke still rose from the blackened field, and far off to his right there was a glow, as if the fire still continued somewhere in the distance. They were in the place that had once been known as Nevada.
He rubbed his eyes and scratched his nose, then blew the horn once and engaged the gears.
He moved forward slowly. The burned-out area seemed fairly level, and his tires were thick.
He entered the black field, and his screens were immediately obscured by the rush of ashes and smoke which rose on all sides.
He continued, hearing the tires crunching through the brittle remains. He set his screens at maximum and switched his headlamps up to full brightness.
The vehicles that flanked him dropped back perhaps eighty feet, and he dimmed the screens that reflected the glare of their lights.
He released a flare, and as it hung there, burning, cold, white, and high, he saw a charred plain that swept on to the edges of his eyes' horizon.
He pushed down on the accelerator, and the cars behind him swung far out to the sides to avoid the clouds that he raised. His radio crackled, and he heard a faint voice but could not make out its words.
He blew his horn and rolled ahead even faster. The other vehicles kept pace.
He drove for an hour and a half before he saw the end of the ash and the beginning of clean sand up ahead.
Within five minutes he was moving across desert once more, and he checked his compass and bore slightly to the west. Cars one and three followed, speeding up to match his new pace, and he drove with one hand and ate a corned-beef sandwich.
When morning came, many hours later, he took a pill to keep himself alert and listened to the screaming of the wind. The sun rose up like molten silver to his right, and a third of the sky grew amber and was laced with fine lines like cobwebs. The desert was topaz beneath it, and the brown curtain of dust that hung continuously at his back, pierced only by the eight shafts of the other cars' lights, took on a pinkish tone as the sun grew a bright red corona and the shadows fled into the west. He dimmed his lights as he passed an orange cactus shaped like a toadstool and perhaps fifty feet in diameter.
Giant bats fled south, and far ahead he saw a wide waterfall descending from the heavens. It was gone by the time he reached the damp sand of that place, but a dead shark lay to his left, and there was seaweed, seaweed, seaweed, fishes, driftwood all about.
The sky pinked over from east to west and remained that color. He gulped a bottle of ice water and felt it go into his stomach. He passed more cacti, and a pair of coyotes sat at the base of one and watched him drive by. They seemed to be laughing. Their tongues were very red.
As the sun brightened, he dimmed the screen. He smoked, and he found a button that produced music. He swore at the soft, stringy sounds that filled the cabin, but he didn't turn them off.
He checked the radiation level outside, and it was only a little above normal. The last time he had passed this way it had been considerably higher.
He passed several wrecked vehicles such as his own. He ran across another plain of silicon, and in the middle was a huge crater, which he skirted. The pinkness in the sky faded and faded and faded, and a bluish tone came to replace it. The dark lines were still there, and occasionally one widened into a black river as it flowed away into the east. At noon one such river partly eclipsed the sun for a period of eleven minutes. With its departure, there came a brief dust storm, and Tanner turned on the radar and his lights. He knew there was a chasm somewhere ahead, and when he came to it he bore to the left and ran along its edge for close to two miles before it narrowed and vanished. The other vehicles followed, and Tanner took his bearings from the compass once more. The dust had subsided with the brief wind, and even with the screen dimmed Tanner had to don his dark goggles against the glare of reflected sunlight from the faceted field be now negotiated.
He passed towering formations which seemed to be quartz. He had never stopped to investigate them in the past, and he had no desire to do it now. The spectrum danced at their bases, and patches of such light occurred for some distance about them.
Speeding away from the crater, he came again upon sand, clean, brown, white, dun, and red. There were more cacti, and huge dunes lay all about him. The sky continued to change, until finally it was as blue as a baby's eyes. Tanner hummed along with the music for a time, and then he saw the Monster.
It was a Gila, bigger than his car, and it moved in fast. It sprang from out the sheltering shade of a valley filled with cacti, and it raced toward him, its beaded body bright with many colors beneath the sun, its dark, dark eyes unblinking as it bounded forward on its lizard-fast legs, sable fountains rising behind its upheld tail, which was wide as a sail and pointed like a tent.
He couldn't use the rockets, because it was coming in from the side.
He opened up with his fifty-calibers and spread his "wings" and stamped the accelerator to the floor. As it neared, he sent forth a cloud of fire in its direction. By then, the other cars were firing, too.
It swung its tail and opened and closed its jaws, and its blood came forth and fell upon the ground. Then a rocket struck it. It turned, it leaped.
There came a booming, crunching sound as it fell upon the vehicle identified as car number one and lay there.
Tanner hit the brakes, turned, and headed back.
Car number three came up beside it and parked. Tanfler did the same.
He jumped down from the cab and crossed to the Smashed car. He had the rifle in his hands, and he put six rounds into the creature's head before he approached the car.
The door had come open, and it hung from a single hinge, the bottom one.
Inside, Tanner could see the two men sprawled, and there was some blood on the dashboard and the seat.
The other two drivers came up beside him and stared within. Then the shorter of the two crawled inside and listened for the heartbeat and the pulse and felt for breathing.
"Mike's dead," he called out, "but Greg's starting to come around."
A wet spot that began at the car's rear end spread and continued to spread, and the smell of gasoline filled the air.
Tanner took out a cigarette, thought better of it, and replaced it in the pack. He could hear the gurgle of the huge gas tanks as they emptied themselves upon the ground.
The man who stood at Tanner's side said, "I never saw anything like it. . . . I've seen pictures, but... I never saw anything like it . . ."