"Kress, Nancy - Evolution" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

"Right." He goes down the narrow hallway into our bedroom. In three minutes he's snoring.
I let the car coast in neutral down the driveway. Our bedroom faces the street. The curtains don't stir.
The West River Road is deserted, except for a few eighteen-wheelers. I cross the river at the interstate and start back along the east side. Three miles along, in the middle of farmland, the smell of burned flesh rolls in the window.
Cows, close to the pasture fence. I stop the car and get out. Fifteen or sixteen Holsteins. By straining over the fence, I can see the bullet holes in their heads. Somebody herded them togther, shot them one by one, and started a half-hearted fire among the bodies with neatly cut firewood. The fire had gone out; it didn't look as if it was supposed to burn long. Just long enough to attract attention that hadn't come yet.
I'd never heard that cows could get human diseases. Why had they been shot?
I get back in my car and drove the rest of the way to Emerton Memorial.
This side of town is deathly quiet. Grass grows unmowed in yard after yard. One large, expensive house has old newspapers piled on the porch steps, ten or twelve of them. There are no kids waiting for school buses, no cars pulling out of driveways on the way to work. The hospital parking lot has huge empty stretches between cars. At the last minute I drive on through the lot, parking instead across the street in somebody's empty driveway, under a clump of trees.
Nobody sits at the information desk. The gift shop is locked. Nobody speaks to me as I study the directory on the lobby wall, even though two figures in gowns and masks hurry past. CHIEF OF MEDICINE, DR. RANDOLF SATLER. Third floor, east wing. The elevator is deserted.
It stop at the second floor. When the doors open a man stands there, a middle-aged farmer in overalls and work boots, his eyes red and swollen like he's been crying. There are tinted windows across from the elevators and I can see the back of him reflected in the glass. Coming and going. From somewhere I hear a voice calling, "Nurse, oh nourse, oh God..." A guerney sits in hallway, the body on it covered by a sheet up to the neck. The man in overalls looks at me and raises both hands to ward off the elevator, like it's some kind of demon. He steps backward. The doors close.
I grip the railing on the elevator wall.
The third floor looks empty. Bright arrows lead along the hallways: yellow for PATHOLOGY and LAB SERVICES, green for RESPIRATORY THERAPY, red for SUPPORT SERVICES. I follow the yellow arrow.
It dead-ends at an empty alcove with chairs, magazines thrown on the floor. And three locked doors off a short corridor that's little more than an alcove.
I pick the farthest door and pound on it. No words, just regular blows of my fist. After a minute, I start on the second one. A voice calls, "Who's there?"
I recognize the voice, even through the locked door. Even after seventeen years. I shout, "Police! Open the door!"
And he does. The second it cracks, I shove it hard and push my way into the lab.
"_Elizabeth_?"
He's older, heavier, but still the same. Dark hair, blue eyes...I look at that face every day at dinner. I've looked at it at soccer matches, in school plays, in his playpen. Dr. Satler looks more shaken to see me than I would have thought, his face white, sweat on his forehead.
"Hello, Randy."
"Elizabeth. You can't come in here. You have to
leave -- "
"Because of the staph? Do you think I care about that? After all, I'm in the hospital, right, Randy? This is where the endozine is. This place is safe. Unless it gets blown up while I'm standing here."
He stares at my left hand, still gripping the doorknob behind me. Then at the gun in my right hand. A seventeen-year-old Smith & Wesson, and for five of those years the gun wasn't cleaned or oiled, hidden under my aunt's garage. But it still fires.
"I'm not going to shoot you, Randy. I don't care if you're alive or dead. But you're going to help me. I can't find my son -- " _your son_ " -- and Sylvia Goddard told me he's mixed up with that group that blew up the bridge. He's hiding with them someplace, probably scared out of his skull. You know everybody in town, everybody with power, you're going to get on that phone there and find out where Sean is."
"I would do that anyway," Randy says, and now he looks the way I remember him: impatient and arrogant. But not completely. There's still sweat on his pale face. "Put that stupid thing away, Elizabeth."
"No."
"Oh, for..." He turns his back on me and punches at the phone.
"Cam? Randy Satler here. Could you...no, it's not about that...No. Not yet."
Cameron Witt. The mayor. His son is chief of Emerton's five cops.
"I need a favor. There's a kid missing...I know that, Cam. You don't have to lecture _me_ on how bad delay could...But you might know about this kid. Sean Baker."
"Pulaski. Sean Pulaski." He doesn't even know that.
"Sean Pulaski. Yeah, that one...okay. Get back to me...I told you. _Not yet._" He hangs up. "Cam will hunt around and call back. Now will you put that stupid gun away, Elizabeth?"
"You still don't say thank you for anything." The words just come out. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
"To Cam, or to you for not shooting me?" He says it evenly, and the evenness is the only way I finally see how furious he is. People don't order around Dr. Randy Satler at gun point. A part of my mind wonders why he doesn't call security.
I said, "All right, I'm here. Give me a dose of endozine, just in case."
He goes on staring at me with that same level, furious gaze. "Too late, Elizabeth."
"What do you mean, too late? Haven't you got endozine?"
"Of course we do." Suddenly he staggers slightly, puts out one hand behind him, and holds onto a table covered with glassware and papers.
"Randy. You're sick."
"I am. And not with anything endozine is going to cure. Ah, Elizabeth, why didn't you just phone me? I'd have looked for Sean for you."
"Oh, right. Like you've been so interested and helpful in raising him."
"You never asked me."
I see that he means it. He really believes his total lack of contact with his son is my fault. I see that Randy gives only what he's asked to. He waits, lordly, for people to plead for his help, beg for it, and then he gives it. If it suits him.
I say, "I'll bet anything your kids with your wife are turning out really scary."
The blood rushes to his face, and I know I guessed right. His blue eyes darken and he looks like Jack looks just before Jack explodes. But Randy isn't Jack. An explosion would be too clean for him. He says instead, "You were stupid to come here. Haven't you been listening to the news?"
I haven't.
"The CDC publicly announced just last night what medical personnel have seen for weeks. A virulent strain of staphylococcus aureus has incorporated endozine-resistant plasmids from enterococcus." He pauses to catch his breath. "And pneumococcus may have done the same thing."
"What does that mean?"
"It means, you stupid woman, that now there are highly contagious infections that we have no drugs to cure. No antibiotics at all, not even endozine. This staph is resistant to them all. And it can live everywhere."
I lower the gun. The empty parking lot. No security to summon. The man who wouldn't get on the elevator. And Randy's face. "And you've got it."
"We've all got it. Everyone...in the hospital. And for forcing your way in here, you probably do, too."