"Robert McCammon - Gone South" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

shoulders; haircuts were not high on his list of priorities. He had
light brown eyes and a closecropped beard that was almost all gray. On
his left wrist was a Timex and on his feet was a sturdy pair of brown,
much-scuffed workboots. On his right forearm was the bluish-green
ghost of a snake tattoo, a reminder of a burly kid who'd had one too
many cheap and potent zombies with his buddies on a night of leave in
Saigon. That kid was long gone, and Dan was left with the tattoo. The
Snake Handlers, that's what they'd been. Not afraid to stick their
hands in the jungle's holes and pull out whatever horror might be
coiled up and waiting in there. They had not known, then, that the
entire world was a snake hole, and that the snakes just kept getting
bigger and meaner. They had not known, in their raucous rush toward
the future, that the snakes were lying in wait not only in the holes
but in the mowed green grass of the American Dream. They got your legs
first, wound around your ankles, and slowed you down. They slithered
into your guts and made you sick and afraid, and then you were easy to
kill.
In the years since that Day-Glo memory of a night in Saigon, Dan
Lambert had shrunken. At his chest-thumping, Charlie-whomping best
he'd stood six-two and carried two hundred and twelve pounds of Parris
Island-trained muscle. Back then, he'd felt as if he could swallow
bullets and shit iron. He weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds
now, and he didn't think he was much over six feet. There was a
gauntness in his face that made him think of some of the old Vietnamese
people who'd huddled in their hootches with eyes as terrified as those
of mongrel dogs expecting a boot. His cheekbones jutted, his chin was
as sharp as a can opener under the beard. It was the fact that he
rarely ate three meals a day, and of course a lot of his shrinkage was
due to the sickness, too.
Gravity and time were the giant killers, he thought as he drove
along the sun-washed highway with the back of his

sweat-wet shirt stuck to the seat. Gravity shrank you and time
pulled you into the grave, and not even the Snake Handlers could beat
such fearsome enemies as those.
He drove through pale smoke that had drifted from the chimney of
Hungry Bob's Barbecue Shack, the cook getting all that meat good and
black for the lunch crowd. A tire hit a pothole, and in the truck's
bed his box of tools jangled. They were the hammers, nails, levels and
saws of a carpenter.
At the next intersection he turned right and drove south into an
area of warehouses. It was a world of chainlink fences, loading docks,
and brick walls. Between the buildings the heat lay trapped and
vengeful. Up ahead a halfdozen pickup trucks and a few cars were
parked in an empty lot. Dan could see some of the men standing around
talking.
Another man was sitting in a folding chair reading a newspaper,
his CAT hat throwing a slice of shade across his face. Standing near
one of the cars was a man who had a sign hanging around his neck, and
on that sign was hand-lettered WILL WORK FOR FOOD.