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

everything but him.
But if that were so ... then who – or what – had dialled the telephone?
What had been listening on the other end? What ... oh dear God, what?
He didn’t know, but he suddenly realised that he’d told whatever it was
that he was still on Baylor Street. And maybe Death had missed him last
night; maybe its scythe had cleaved everyone else and missed him, and
now ... and now it knew he was still on Baylor Street, and it would be
coming after him.
Brad fled the house, ran through the dead leaves that clogged the
gutters of Baylor Street, and headed east towards the centre of town. The
wind moved again, sluggishly and heavily; the wet fog shifted, and Brad
could see that the sky had turned the colour of blood. Thunder boomed
behind him like approaching footsteps, and tears of terror streamed down
Brad’s cheeks.
I’m cold, Sarah had whispered. I’m cold. And that was when the finger
of Death had touched her, had missed Brad and gone roaming through the
night. I’m cold, she’d said, and there would never be any warming her
again.
He came to two cars smashed together in the street. Skeletons in clothes
lay behind the steering wheels. Further on, the bones of a large dog were
almost covered by leaves. Above him, the trees creaked and moaned as the
wind picked up, ripping holes in the fog and showing the bloody sky
through them.
It’s the end of the world, he thought. Judgement Day. All the sinners
and saints alike turned to bones overnight. Just me left alive. Just me, and
Death knows I’m on Baylor Street.
“Mommy!”
The sobbing voice of a child pierced him, and he stopped in his tracks,
skidding on leaves.
“Mommy!” the voice repeated, echoing and warped by the low-lying fog.
“Daddy! Somebody ... help me!”
It was the voice of a little girl, crying somewhere nearby. Brad listened,
trying to peg its direction. First he thought it was to the left, then to the
right. In front of him, behind him ... he couldn’t be sure. “I’m here!” he
shouted. “Where are you?”
The child didn’t answer, but Brad could still hear her crying. “I’m not
going to hurt you!” he called. “I’m standing right in the middle of a street!
Come to me if you can!”
He waited. A flurry of brown, already-decaying leaves fell from overhead
– and then he saw the figure of the little girl, hesitantly approaching him
through the fog on his right. She had blond hair done up in pigtails with
pale blue ribbons, and her pallid face was streaked with tears and
distorted by terror; she was maybe five or six years old, wearing pink
pyjamas and clasping a Smurf doll tightly in her arms. She stopped about
fifteen feet away from him, her eyes red and swollen and maybe insane
too.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
“Where’d you come from?” he asked, still shocked at hearing another
voice and seeing someone else alive on this last day of the world. “What
house?”