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

“Our house,” she answered, her lower lip trembling. Her face looked like
it was about to collapse. “Over there.” She pointed through the fog at a
shape with a roof, then her eyes came back to Brad.
“Anyone else alive?” Your mother or father?”
The little girl just stared.
“What’s your name?”
“Kelly Burch,” she answered dazedly. “My tel’phone number is ... is ...
633-6949. Could ... you help me find ... a p’liceman, please?”
It would be so easy, Brad thought, to curl up in the leaves on Baylor
Street and let himself lose his mind; but if there was one little girl still left
alive, then there might be other people too. Maybe this awful thing had
only happened on Baylor Street ... or maybe only in this part of town;
maybe it was a chemical spill, radiation, something unholy in the
lightning, some kind of Army weapon that had backfired. Whatever it was,
maybe its effects were only limited to a small part of town. Sure! he
thought, and when he grinned the child abruptly took two steps back.
“We’re going to be all right,” he told her. “I won’t hurt you. I’m going to
walk to Main Street. Do you want to go with me?”
She didn’t reply, and Brad thought she’d truly gone over the edge but
then her lips moved and she said, “I’m looking for ... for my Mommy and
Daddy. They’re gone.” She caught back a sob, but new tears ran down her
cheeks. “They just ... they just ... left bones in their bed and they’re gone.”
“Come on.” He held out his hand to her. “Come with me, okay? Let’s see
if we can find anybody else.”
Kelly didn’t come any closer. Her little knuckles were white where she
gripped the smiling blue Smurf. Brad heard thunder roaming somewhere
to the south, and electric-blue lightning scrawled across the crimson sky
like a crack in time. Brad couldn’t wait any longer; he started walking
again, stopped and looked back. Kelly stopped too, dead leaves snagged in
her hair. “We’re going to be all right,” he told her again, and he heard how
utterly ridiculous he sounded. Sarah was gone; beautiful Sarah was gone,
and his life might as well be over. But no, no – he had to keep going, had
to at least try to make some sense out of all this. He started off once more,
east towards Main Street, and he didn’t look back but he knew Kelly was
following about fifteen or twenty feet behind.
At the intersection of Baylor and Ashley Streets, a police car had
smashed into an oak tree. The windshield was layered with leaves, but
Brad saw the hunched-over, bony thing in the police uniform sitting
behind the wheel. And the most terrible thing was that its skeletal hands
were still gripping that wheel, trying to guide the car. Whatever had
happened – radiation, chemicals or the Devil striding through the streets
of his town – had taken place in an instant. These people had been
stripped to bones in the blink of a cold eye, and again Brad felt himself
balanced precariously on the edge of madness.
“Ask the p’liceman to find Mommy and Daddy!” Kelly called from
behind him.
“There’s a police station on Main Street,” he told her. “That’s where
we’re going to go. Okay?”
She didn’t answer, and Brad set off.
They passed silent houses. Near the intersection of Baylor and Hilliard,