"McCammon Robert R. - They Thirst" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

Papa took his son's hand. The man's flesh was hard and welted with rope burns.
And so terribly cold. The man drew his son nearer. The fire undulated like a
serpent uncoiling. "Yes," he whispered, "that's right." His gaze found the
woman. "You've let it get very cold in my house!"
"I'm . . . sorry," she whispered. She began to tremble now, and her eyes were
deep pits of terror._
"Very cold," Papa said. "I can feel ice in my bones. Can't you, Andre?" The boy"
nodded, looking into his father's shadowy firelight-sculpted face and seeing
himself suspended within eyes that were darker than he remembered. Yes, much
darker, like mountain caverns, and rimmed with eruptions of silver. The boy
blinked, dragged his gaze away with an effort that made his neck muscles throb.
He was trembling like Mama. He was beginning to be afraid but didn't know why.
All he knew was that Papa's skin and hair and clothes smelled like the room
where Grandmother Elsa had gone to sleep forever.
"We did a bad thing," Papa murmured. "Me, your uncle Josef, all the men from
Krajeck. We shouldn't have climbed into the mountains . . ."
Mama gasped, but the boy couldn't turn his head to look at her.
". . . because we were wrong. All of us, wrong. It's not what we thought itI was
. . ."
Mama moaned like a trapped animal.
". . . you see?" And Papa smiled, his back to the flames now, his white face
piercing the shadows. His grip tightened on his son's shoulder, and he suddenly
shivered as if a north wind had roared through his soul. Mama was sobbing, and
the boy wanted to turn to her and find out what was wrong, but he couldn't move,
couldn't make his head turn or his eyes blink. Papa smiled and said, "My good
little boy. My good little Andre . . ." And he bent down toward his son.J
But in the next instant the man's head twisted up, his eyes filled with bursts
of silver. "DON'T DO THAT!" he shrieked. And in that instant the boy cried out
and pulled away from his father, and then he saw that Mama had the shotgun
cradled in her shaking arms, and her mouth was wide open and she was screaming,
and even as the boy ran for her, she squeezed both triggers..
The shots whistled high over the boy, striking the man in the face and throat.
16
Papa screamed-a resounding scream of rage-and was flung backward to the floor,
where he lay with his face in shadow and his boots in red embers.
Mama dropped the shotgun, the strangled sobbing in her throat turning to
stutters of mad laughter. The recoil had nearly broken her right arm, and she
had fallen back against the door, her eyes swimming with tears. The boy stopped,
his heart madly hammering. The smell of gunpowder was rank in his nostrils as he
stared at the crazed woman who'd just shot down his father-saw her face
contorting, lips bubbling with spittle, eyes darting from shadow to shadow.
And then a slow, scraping noise from the other side of the room.
The boy spun around to look.
Papa was rising to his feet. Half of his face was gone, leaving his chin and jaw
and nose hanging by white, bloodless strings. The remaining teeth glittered with
light, and the single pulped eye hung on one thick vein across the ruined cavern
where the cheekbone had been. White nerves and torn muscles twitched in the hole
of the throat. The man staggered up, crouched with his huge hands twisted into
claws. When he tried to grin, only one side of the mouth remained to curve
grotesquely upward.