"Gardner Dozois & Michael Swanwick - Ancestral Voices" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

of alpha and beta rhythms….
Suddenly, it was hungry.
The hunger rose in a bitter, biting flood, driving away fear, overwhelming
everything. For a moment it didn’t know what to do, and then instinct took over, a
deep cellular knowledge that sent it rippling silently forward, deeper into the shadow
cast by the wall of garbage bags, its mantle stiffening and rising.
It melded itself flat against the cold surface of the bags.
It waited….
The wino had stubbed his toe and was cursing in a low, racking undertone.
Then he stumbled forward again. “Wham-bam, thank you ma’am,” he muttered. “
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” He lurched against the garbage bags, almost toppling them, then
ripped one open with both hands and began rummaging clumsily, spilling tin cans
and bottles and soggy old paper bags to the ground. “You don’t know how lucky
they aarrrree, boys…back in the—back in the—shit!” An empty pint crashed to the
ground, breaking with a flat, pinpoint spray of glass. He chuckled. “Dead soldier.
Don’t make no nevermind. What I should of told her, what I shoulda told her….”
He fished an old sneaker out of the trash, examined it, wriggling his fingers through
the large hole in the sole. “Oh yeah.” He threw the sneaker aside, leaned forward into
the shadow.
The wino’s face filled its field of vision, huge, terrifying, slathered in bristly
black whiskers, eyes as big and bloodshot red as harvest moons, the stink of
corruption breathing from the slackened lips….
“Molly stays at home and does her fucking face.” He dug his arms more
deeply into the trash. “Oblah—”
 It struck.
The derelict jerked convulsively, as if he had walked into a high-tension line,
jerked again, and toppled to the ground, bringing the trash can clattering down with
him.
It stretched its body into a rope to follow him down, maintaining contact,
feeding, feeding voraciously….
On the ground, the wino twitched and quivered, already dead, his eyes rolled
horribly up into his head, the whites gleaming in the starlight. It too quivered as it
fed, its long flat body pulsing and swelling like a fire hose with a high-pressure head
of water working through it.
Then—stillness. The wino’s body had shrunken, collapsed in upon itself,
sucked dry of all nourishment. Only the blood and bone and flesh was left behind. It
spread its own body out, relaxing, allowing itself to form into a flat, almost-oval,
molecule-thin carpet about five feet across.
But with the blunting of its hunger, fear returned.
Something huge and rank drifted past the alley-mouth, bellowing in a
tremendous voice, making a terrible iron crash and clatter—
It started, contracting its body into a narrow ribbon again. The disturbance
was only a garbage truck—but it didn’t know that, and through its mind flashed
again the torrent of fire! fear! pain! horror!
Without thinking, it rippled to the back of the alley and flowed straight up a
wall. When it regained its composure, it found itself on a high place, empty space
everywhere around it, open to the frighteningly alien sky.
Something swooped at it from that sky, shining a dazzling light. Something
dark and enormous that seemed to skim by just a few feet overhead. The airport was
just beyond, and to the residents of that particular flophouse hotel, it often seemed