"Ken MacLeod - The Highway Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

“Not far at all,” she said. “Up behind Strathcarron.”

Now I know for a fact there’s nothing up behind Strathcarron. There’s
nothing at Strathcarron, except the old railway station, some empty houses
and the ruins of a restaurant. Up the hills behind it there’s waste howling
wilderness. It was empty even before the freeze. There’s bugger-all people
between here and Kintail. Bugger-all beasts for that matter. You’d be
hard-pressed to find enough dead sheep to feed a crow.

I kept my trap shut about all this and I glared at Murdo to do the same.

We crossed the Carron bridge and pulled up just before the site
road-end, two or three hundred metres from the old station.

“Thanks,” said Ailiss. She hopped out, hauled her bag after her,
waved, shut the door and strode off along the road. The end of the loch
was to her right and the site to her left. She didn’t look to either side, or
back.

“Well,” said Euan as he climbed down from the lookout bucket to the
running board, “there goes a girl who is not afraid of bandits.”

Murdo and I both laughed.

“What?” said Euan. He handed the shotgun in through the cab
window. I clipped it to the rack behind the seats.

“She’s armed,” I said. “At least a knife, and maybe a gun as well. And
she lives up in the hills behind Strathcarron.” I waved at the range in front of
us.

“And she has no food in that bag,” said Murdo, “except some sugar
and a packet of Rich Abernethy biscuits. It’s all stuff like batteries and
disinfectants.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” demanded Euan.

I started the engine again and began the turn, over an earth-covered
culvert and on to the site. As the security guard waved a scanner at us I
glanced up the road for traffic. There was none. The girl was a couple of
hundred metres away, walking fast.

“She’s a bandit,” I said.

****

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