"Evans,.Linda.-.Far.Edge.Of.Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Linda)

winced and glanced through the driver's window, the one that
would roll neither up nor down all the way. The air trickling through
was cooler than the inside of her car, but not much. Sweat dripped
down the back of her neck and prickled under her bra strap. Hot as
it was, it was little wonder the inevitable afternoon storm promised
to be a dilly. The hotter the day, the crazier the storm, that's what
Granny Johnson had always said.

Industrial Light & Magic, Inc., would have been proud to claim this
storm. Greasy black clouds boiled across the sky, just clear of the
treetops. Nonstop lightning—not bolts, but fantastic, sky-arching
pink columns—jabbed the blackness to strike beyond the hill crest.
Nuggie's headlights barely dented the gloom. Although it wasn't yet
four in the afternoon, cattle egrets had already started to roost.
Their wings flashed white against the backdrop of black clouds and
dusty, cringing trees.

Sibyl Johnson had lived through a lot of Florida thunderstorms. But
she'd never seen one like this and she still hadn't hit the worst of it.
She hadn't even hit the leading edge of rain yet.

Her car wheezed and lost acceleration. "C'mon, Nuggie," she
muttered again as she downshifted. Gears clashed and groaned
somewhere in the VW's battered innards. The dying car wouldn't
survive the summer. She wasn't even certain it would survive the
trip to campus. She growled under her breath. Campus . . . Sibyl
knew confronting those smug, lily-white fat cats wouldn't do any
good. It was just something she had to do, to retain what was left
of her battered self-respect. She would do it, get it over with, and
leave the rest to fate.

Another sky-cracking column of lightning set roadside trees
aflame, backlit with mad, pink light. She gripped the steering wheel
harder and tried to ignore a frosty prickle of fear, left over from
childhood tornadoes and the death of her parents. I am not afraid
of thunderstorms. I am not. Really, I'm not . . .

She tried to focus on practicalities to distract herself from
unreasoning fear. Driving straight into the storm like this, she didn't
have much hope of avoiding the rain. Once it cut in . . . Nuggie's
tires were balder than her department chairman. Eight-year-old
tires just wouldn't cope with blinding rain on a washboarded dirt
road. And there wasn't money—not now—to buy new ones or fix
the roof on the house, either. She savaged her lower lip and
blinked rapidly.

Car . . . house . . . career . . . Sibyl wanted to bawl like a baby. But
with a gullywasher in the making, she couldn't afford to cry about it
now. So she pushed the Beetle as fast as she dared and eyed the
storm for tell-tale funnel shapes. She found herself muttering a