"John Kessel - The Pure Product" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

JOHN KESSEL
The Pure Product

Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives in Raleigh, North
Carolina, where he is a professor of American literature and creative writing
at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975, and
has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as
to many other magazines and anthologies.

Kessel’s novel Good.News from Outer Space was released in 1989
to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre
primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories… the
best of which, to date, is the taut, hard-edged, casually and cold-bloodedly
horrifying story that follows, one of the most adroit and chilling examinations
of its theme ever to appear anywhere.

Kessel won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his superlative novella
“Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has just
been released as a Tor Double. His other books include the novel
Freedom Beech, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, and,
coming up, a collection of his short fiction, from Arkham House.

****

I arrived in Kansas City at one o’clock on the afternoon of the thirteenth of
August. A Tuesday. I was driving the beige 1983 Chevrolet Citation that I
had stolen two days earlier in Pocatello, Idaho. The Kansas plates on the
car I’d taken from a different car in a parking lot in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake
City was founded by the Mormons, whose God tells them that in the future
Jesus Christ will come again.

I drove through Kansas City with the windows open and the sun
beating down through the windshield. The car had no air-conditioning and
my shirt was stuck to my back from seven hours behind the wheel. Finally I
found a hardware store, “Hector’s” on Wornall. I pulled into the lot. The
Citation’s engine dieseled after I turned off the ignition; I pumped the
accelerator once and it coughed and died. The heat was like syrup. The
sun drove shadows deep into corners, left them flattened at the feet of the
people on the sidewalk. It made the plate glass of the store window into a
dark negative of the positive print that was Wornall Avenue. August.
 The man behind the counter in the hardware store I took to be Hector
himself. He looked like Hector, slain in vengeance beneath the walls of
paintbrushes—the kind of semi-friendly, publicly optimistic man who would
tell you about his good wife and his ten-penny nails. I bought a gallon of
kerosene and a plastic paint funnel, put them into the trunk of the Citation,
then walked down the block to the Mark Twain Bank. Mark Twain died at the
age of seventy-five with a heart full of bitter accusations against the
Calvinist God and no hope for the future of humanity. Inside the bank I went
to one of the desks, at which sat a Nice Young Lady. I asked about starting