"Barry N. Malzberg - The Third Part" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

never grew here. Maybe in the Pacific States and Hawaii and Italy. Or Krakatoa. Now ther
was a name. Grew like Krakatoa.
Grew. He still remembered that word. As if a volcano were a living thing like a tree or
ear of corn that could be planted. Mary Lu had stopped crying, he and Tommy Lee had gone
back to staring at her boomers, and Miss had returned to the blackboard, her hands shaking
lava burbling in the core of a volcano.
He had not thought about that schoolroom or Mary Lu all these years. She had run off w
some traveling salesman decades before the trouble, and there were rumors she was dead.
Old Maid though was probably still alive in the nursing home upstate. Maybe she was look
at the volcano right now through the cracked windows and realizing how wrong she had be
And she was wrong, because Main Street had been engulfed by the lava. A volcano had
grown in Georgia after all. And not just anywhere in Georgia: not in Atlanta, the city too bu
to hate; not in Milledgeville, with the museum; not in Macon, where Herman Talmadge had
walked the earth to the statehouse; but right here in Edgetown, where the cows still walked
through the streets and Reverend Smith's hellfire could graze the dead in the two cemeteries
had happened in Edgetown three weeks ago, and no one could say where or how it had star
it was just there. A mountain appeared from nowhere, jutting out of the earth, grotesque as a
monstrous boil. Then the birth, as the mountain heaved and convulsed her vile poisons onto
landscape and the town. The circle and the fire had cut them off from the world, left Jeb and
three hundred others in this carcass of a damned town, shut away where now Clayton and
Damascus, a stretched black man and a lumpish one, had staggered from the woods, crying
water.
Once word came that they were here, it was clear what would happen. Beware the
darkness, the Reverend had screamed in the fire's first advance, and here, here was the
darkness itself, settled on the big man and little man before him.
 Maybe it was they who had brought it.
Jeb fixed his full attention on the two men, trying to perceive real faces behind the smoo
and blank features, but there still was nothing distinct, only his savage and difficult repulsio
Now both were on the ground, jackknifed toward one another, and Jeb thought, watching the
struggle from awkwardness and thirst, soon someone is going to die. But he could not move
from this astonishment and fixity until it was broken suddenly by the voices on the hill.
They were the voices he had feared, the voices behind him from the town in pursuit of J
But it was not Jeb, but the blacks they must have seen or somehow known would be there. T
must have known because as that cloud of pursuers half-resolved into individual and famili
faces, Jeb could measure their purpose, a purpose which at the beginning of their flight mig
have been diffuse but was now utterly focused as all of them melded into a single entity wit
single intent.
Before Jeb could speak, before he could warn them, Damascus looked up and saw them
One moment Damascus had been looking at the ground and muttering something about dust t
dust to ashes, and then, with his recognition, the blank face suddenly erupted like the very e
itself, the rutting terror transversed, then shifting to a molten, swollen stream, a stream true
burning.
Damascus kneeling, reached up toward Clayton, his mouth open in fierce prayer or entr
or warning, but no sound came out: all he could do was tug at the other's sleeve and point.
"Mister," Clayton said. His voice was the peep of baby birds engulfed by smoke in thei
nests, abandoned by avian parents of strong wing and greater terror. "Don't let them hurt us
"We didn't have nothin' to do with—with what happened," Damascus said. His voice h
returned but sounded like the rusty groaning of the old well bucket handle.
Jeb said, "Then who did?"
"The Lord," Clayton whispered.