"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Hell on Earth (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

"Where do you think the women are?" I whispered.
"Home, minding the kids. Mormons are so damned
patriarchal."
"Arlene . . ."
We were in a good spot to see plenty, behind a
wrecked truck on a rise. As the sun crawled up the
sky, shafts of light came through the broken windows
like laser beams, one blinding me for a second. We
positioned ourselves to see more. There was plenty to
see.
The streets of this garrison town had over a thou-
sand men with guns, and to my surprise I made out a
few women and teenage girls toting heavy artillery.
Arlene gave me one of her funny looks.
I didn't make her take back anything she'd said;
when a society is threatened, it will do what it must or
go down fast.
"You don't think they might be working with the
aliens?" asked my buddy. I had the same thought. But
they didn't act zombified, and we'd learned that the
monsters preferred human lackeys in that condition.
The spidermind had made only one exception when it
needed knowledge in the human brain of poor Bill
Ritch.
We had to make contact with these people, but I
preferred doing it in a way that wouldn't get us shot.
While I was formulating a plan, Arlene tapped me on
the shoulder.
I turned and found myself staring down both bar-
rels of a twelve-gauge duck gun. It had gorgeous,
inlaid detail work running all seventy-five centimeters
of the stock and barrel. . . and it was attached to a
beefy hand connected to a large body with a grinning,
boyish face topping it off. Twenty-two, twenty-three,
tops.
"How do?" said the man. His buddy was a lot
thinner, and he held an old Ruger Mini-14 pointed at
Arlene.
He caught my expression and grinned at me as if he
could read my mind. Here was proof positive we were
facing honest-to-God, living humans: they had pride
in a good weapon.
"Hi," I said, moving my eyes from man to man.
"Good morning," said Arlene.
"Hey," said the other man by way of greeting,
noticing how my eyes kept drifting to his piece. "Took
me quite a while to get one of these," he said
conversationally.
"Beautiful weapon," I said, noticing that the beefy
guy was still calm.