"Charles L. Grant - Jackals" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

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olors mean nothing when the moon is out and a soft breeze dances with the shadows in the woods.
Sparrows get dark, and robins grow darker. Even blood on a woman turns from bright to black.
She could see it on the backs of her hands as she walked, dried there, tightening in streaks and blotches
across her skin, forming scabs, turning to stone; she flexed the left one to break the forming ragged crust,
flexed the right and inhaled sharply when fire raced across the ridge of her knuckles. She clamped her palm
to her thigh, pressing hard, grabbing harder, willing the pain to go away, her jaw tight, head trembling, left
hand slapping the air in harsh spasms.
Until the fire died, and the blood dried, and she took a stumbling step forward and slowly collapsed to her
 knees.
She barely felt the night-cool blacktop as it met her, and couldn't see much beyond it because of the
trees. She knew, since she had seen the country in daylight, that there were pastures and fields back there,
low rounded hills with spikes of oak, stands of pine, wood fences, stone fences, barbed-wire fences to keep
cows and horses from wandering off the grass. She thought she remembered a small, heart-shaped pond
with reeds and cattails along one bank.
She couldn't see it now.
The late August moon was bright, nearly full, washing the sky with dull silver, but the trees were tight
with shadows that danced, and all she could really see was the dark stretch of road ahead, the dark of it
behind where it ducked around a curve, curved again, and crossed a creek.
Her head bowed wearily between her rigid arms; she took a breath that hurt her lungs, and another that
shud-dered when her ribs protested, and she looked up through dark hair that dangled wetly over her eyes.
The road topped a low rise long after the trees had fallen away. A house on the other side, she knew it was
there. A small place. No luxuries. She didn't care. She wanted a roof above her.
She wanted to bury the goddamned moon.
Vision blurred suddenly, and suddenly snapped back into focus, and when she shook her head to clear it,
an explosion inside made her whimper and filled her stom-ach with bile. She gasped. She closed her eyes
tighdy. A finger touched her brow over her left eye, and she sucked in a breath at the fire there, at the
dampness.
Doesn't matter; just a bump; doesn't matter.
Her feet were bare.
Her jeans were torn at both knees and in a slit across her buttocks.
The shirt she had bought only the day before had ripped along the left shoulder seam, gaped down the
left side, and across the front were smears and smudges of dirt and blood, blades of dead grass when she'd
fallen before, burrs, and over her right breast a clear handprint made of ash.
She felt the breeze, and it was cool.
She felt the tarmac's grit against her palms, against her knees, and she tried to rock back, to force
herself to stand; it wasn't that far to the top of the rise, a hundred yards, it couldn't be more. But she
couldn't move. She was frozen. Nothing worked.
She wanted to run.
Nothing worked.
Her head lowered again and she licked her lips, wiped a forearm over her mouth to get rid of the dirt.
Her elbows quivered with the effort to keep her arms locked.
Stand up; but she couldn't.
A truck's going to come, you'll get run over, stand up.
She tried; she couldn't.
And she hadn't seen a car for hours, and that one had been just a flare of headlamps slashing over a
hilltop and swerving sharply south and fading. She hadn't even heard the sound of its engine.
Get up.
I can't.
Crawl, then; and she did.