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

and from the bed there was the bittersweet odour of a damp graveyard.
“Oh ...” he whispered, and he stood staring down at what was left of his
wife as his eyes began to bulge from their sockets and a pressure like his
brain was about to explode grew in his head and blood trickled down from
his lower lip where his teeth had pierced.
I’m cold, she’d said, in a voice that had sounded like a whimper of pain.
I’m cold.
And then Brad heard himself moan, and he let go of the sheet and
staggered back across the room, tripped over a pair of his tennis shoes
and went down hard on the floor. The sheet settled back over the skeleton
like a sigh.
Thunder rumbled outside, muffled by the fog. Brad stared at one
skeletal foot that protruded from the lower end of the sheet, and he saw
flakes of dried, dead flesh float down from it to the Sears deep-pile
aqua-blue carpet.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, just staring. He thought he might
have giggled, or sobbed, or made some combination of both. He almost
threw up, and he wanted to curl up into a ball and go back to sleep again;
he did close his eyes for a few seconds, but when he opened them again the
skeleton of his wife was still lying in the bed and the sound of thunder was
nearer.
And he might have sat there until Doomsday if the telephone beside the
bed hadn’t started ringing.
Somehow, he was up and had the receiver in his hand. Tried not to look
down at the brown-haired skull, and remember how beautiful his wife – a
just twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake! – had been.
“Hello,” he said, in a dead voice.
There was no reply. Brad could hear circuits clicking and humming,
deep in the wires.
“Hello?”
No answer. Except now there might have been – might have been – a
soft, silken breathing.
“Hello?” Brad shrieked into the phone. “Say something, damn you!”
Another series of clicks; then a tinny, disembodied voice: “We’re sorry,
but we cannot place your call at this time. All lines are busy. Please hang
up and try again later. Thank you. This is a recording ...”
He slammed the receiver back into its cradle, and the motion of the air
made flakes of skin fly up from the skull’s cheekbones.
Brad ran out of the bedroom, barefoot and in only his pyjama bottoms;
he ran to the stairs, went down them screaming. “Help! Help me!
Somebody!” He missed a step, slammed against the wall and caught the
banister before he broke his neck. Still screaming for help, he burst
through he front door and out into the yard where his feet crunched on
dead leaves.
He stopped. The sound of his voice went echoing down Baylor Street.
The air was still and wet, thick and stifling. He stared down at all the dead
leaves around him, covering brown grass that had been green the day
before. And then the wind suddenly moved, and more dead leaves swirled
around him; he looked up, and saw bare grey branches where living oak
trees had stood before he’d closed his eyes to sleep last night.