"David Gerrold - [SS] The Strange Disappearance of David Gerrold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

There’s nothing here. No animals, no birds, nothing swimming in the water.
It’s beyond desolate. It’s terrifying. The grass is dry and dead. Even the occasional
bit of dry scrub looks like a desiccated remnant. There are no ghosts here, Gordon.
Everywhere else, you can hear them whispering. But not here. You can’t even hear
your own ghost.

And then, for one strange and paralyzing moment, I realize that I am dead.
This is Hell, my eternity. I never even noticed the moment. I never even felt the
impact of the cold dirt of the desert on my face when I fell. It will be weeks or
months before my body is found.

When I return, when I recover, I am back behind the wheel of the car and a
Nevada State Patrolwoman is asking for my vehicle registration. I fumble through the
glove box, I scrabble into the console—Auto Club maps and service receipts, an
instruction book for a now-useless CB radio (nobody’s on the air anywhere
anymore, either that or my antenna needs tuning), and a variety of coupons from
places as distant as Telluride and Texas. Oh—and the recharger cord for the music
player, I thought I’d lost it. Eventually she gives up and goes and runs my plates to
see if the camper really belongs to me. She gives me a $491 ticket for not noticing a
speed limit sign that isn’t there anymore. I have no intention of paying it, I have
enough trouble paying for California—so they’ll issue a warrant, big deal, I can stay
out of Nevada for the rest of my life; what am I going to miss? The most expensive
tourist traps in the world. While she writes, I plug in the music player. The noise in
my head is finally getting to me. Maybe the music will drown it out.

She finishes, I sign, she goes, and I crawl through Carson like it’s a funeral
procession. The sun goes down and I climb up a dark mountain road to a glittering
nightmare called Tahoe. I coast down a long long slope of darkened forest and
eventually crash in the parking lot of a place called Kyburz. Wherever that is. A
half-cup of paint thinner and a BLT later (yeah, it’s a motif; deal with it), my blood
sugar is high enough that I can now recognize how tired I am. I crawl into the back
of the camper and this time my snoring is loud enough to scare away bears. Of
which, there might actually be some in this neighborhood. Their problem, not mine.

Sometime on the third day—is it the third day already?—I’m still staying off
the Interstates—I find myself heading into Red Bluff. How I got here, I’m not even
sure. But the place is actually big enough to have a Taco Bell. I don’t know if I
should be grateful or depressed, if this is what passes for civilization on this
continent.

Okay, so look—obviously, this trip isn’t working. Or maybe I’ve picked the
wrong roads. Maybe the places I’ve landed are simply the very worst possible
locations for exorcising a post-holiday malaise. The realization that I am now old
enough to legally retire isn’t exactly a cheerful thought either. No wonder I can’t get
work, I’m already dead in the eyes of the producers. That’s another rant. The
fetuses-in-suits who run the studios. If I can ever find a worthwhile story in that, I’ll
sit down at the keyboard and open a vein—one of theirs, not mine. But over here, I
still feel like I’m eighteen—only with forty-four years experience.

Anyway, maybe what happened after Red Bluff was just another hallucinatory