"Geoffrey Landis - Hot Death on Wheels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Hot Death on Wheels
Geoffrey A. Landis
originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy November 1996





Cars today, they're nothing, kid; crappy little Detroit shitboxes stamped
out of sheet-metal. A waste of your fuckin' money and so full of electronic
crap that you can't even tune 'em up without a fuckin' computer.

You like that one? Pretty, you say? Let me tell you, you couldn't afford it,
not that one. Not for sale, anyway.

Let me tell you about cars, kid, about real cars. I was a kid
too, once. Yeah, that was a while back, more miles than I care to remember.
Used to tag along behind the greasers. A grease-monkey wannabe, me, hair
slicked back with Bryl Creem and snot dripping out my nose and thought I
knew something about cars. Nah, I didn't know nothing back then, but Den
Tolbert, he tolerated me trailing around behind him, sometimes even let
me hold a wrench for him while he worked on his street-rod, let me feel
like I was part of it, something special.

Never heard of him? Kid, I'm not surprised, you wouldn't. But believe
you me, he was the best there was, maybe the best there ever was. He was a
t-shirt grease-punk back when the word punk meant something, not like
those fags today who think they're something because they got a staple
though their face. Not that anybody--anybody--would have
called him a punk to his face, no sir.

Den had a '57 Chevy, just like that one. The finest car ever made, my
opinion. He'd crammed a Cadillac flathead V-8 in it, the one that, back
then, they made special only for ambulances. He took it apart and rebuilt it,
the engine bored and stroked and milled and ported and polished, every
cam sanded and shined and rubbed and put back together the way he
wanted it. He had damn near five hundred raging broncos chained under
the hood, with fat racing slicks of Pirelli rubber two feet wide in back, and
custom hand-tooled air shocks he took off an Italian racer that crashed and
burned off Topanga Canyon one misty morning; some asshole who had the
bright idea that 'cause he could afford a pretty car, he knew how to drive it.

Den's rod had chrome so bright your eyes hurt to look at it; rubber so hot
it left sooty flames on the asphalt five hundred feet behind where he'd been,
twin quad-barrel carbs and a tuned exhaust that let him do zero to one-
eighty in nothing flat. He spent weeks fine-tuning just the aero, looking for
that perfect edge that would keep the rear-end from floating right off the
street at top speed. Other streetpunks had their cars all dolled up, with
cherry-slick enamel and white-wall tires and fancy hi-fi radios. Except for
the chrome, Den's rod was slick glossy black with only a white skull on the