"Robert McCammon - Doom City" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

DOOM CITY

by

Robert R. McCammon



He awakened with the memory of thunder in his bones.
The house was quiet. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Late for work! he
realised, struck by a bolt of desperate terror. But no, no ... wait a minute;
he blinked the fog from his eyes and his mind gradually cleared too. He
could still taste the onions in last night’s meatloaf. Friday night was
meatloaf night. Today was Saturday. No office work today, thank God. Ah,
he thought, settle down ... settle down ...
Lord, what a nightmare he’d had! It was fading now, all jumbled up and
incoherent but leaving its weird essence behind like a snakeskin. There’d
been a thunderstorm last night – Brad was sure of that, because he’d
awakened to see the garish white flash of it and to hear the gut-wrenching
growl of a real boomer pounding at the bedroom wall. But whatever the
nightmare had been, he couldn’t recall it now; he felt dizzy and
disorientated, like he’d just stepped off a carnival ride gone crazy. He did
recall that he’d sat up and seen that lightning, so bright it had made his
eyes buzz blue in the dark. And he remembered Sarah saying something
too, but now he didn’t know what it was ...
Damn, he thought as he stared across the bedroom at the window that
looked down on Baylor Street. Damn, that light looks strange. Not like
June at all. More like a white, winter light. Ghostly. Kind of made his eyes
hurt a little.
Brad got out of bed and walked across the room. He pushed aside the
white curtain and peered out, squinting.
What appeared to be a grey, faintly luminous fog hung in the trees and
over the roofs of the houses on Baylor Street. It looked like the colour had
been sucked out of everything, and the fog lay motionless for as far as he
could see up and down the street. He looked up, trying to find the sun. It
was up there somewhere, burning like a dim bulb behind dirty cotton.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Brad Forbes said, “Sarah? Honey?
Take a look at this.”
She didn’t reply, nor did she stir. He glanced at her, saw the wave of her
brown hair above the sheet that was pulled up over her like a shroud.
“Sarah?” he said again, and took a step towards the bed.
And suddenly Brad remembered what she’d said last night, when he’d
sat up in a sleepy daze to watch the lightning crackle.
I’m cold, I’m cold.
He grasped the edge of the sheet and pulled it back.
A skeleton with tendrils of brittle brown hair attached to its skull lay
where his wife had been sleeping last night.
The skeleton was wearing Sarah’s pale blue night-gown, and what
looked like dried-up pieces of tree bark – skin, he realised, yes ... her ...
skin – lay all around, on and between the white bones. The teeth grinned,