"Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman - In Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

woman fades into the Alto California night. Los Lobos howl and smash the
big chrome wrenches that are their ritual weapons against the oily concrete.
But the lasers hold them.

A light. And a voice. A woman’s voice. Flashlight beams, a vision,
riding down on an extending fire escape out of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
on the U-Bend-We-Mend. Silver lamé from the peak of her baseball cap to
the tips of her boots, a jingle-jangle of ripped-off hood ornaments around
her neck, the Six Mystic Stars of Subaru.

Angel of mercy, and, incredible of incredibles, white.

Annunciato thought they had all died out in their rotting haciendas and
Tudor mansionettes years ago.

‘You come now, right now,’ she says. Her Angeleño is appalling.
‘Right now, you come. La Miranda, she cannot go on drawing this much
power from the grid for long time. Catholic engineers come, shut her down.
So you come, come now.’ He reaches toward the pure white hand and is
drawn up into heaven. Over rooftops, she leads him, through forests of
aerials and satellite dishes, past cooling towers and rotary clotheslines and
coiling serpentine airco ducts, across rooftop marijuana gardens and coca
plantations, leaping through the yawning dark over deep dark alleys while
the never-ending stream of taillights winds and wends beneath them and
the Lobos, released from luminous imprisonment, go loping along the
shining sidewalks, howling at the grapefruit moon. And the glass guitar drips
a trail of minims and crochets like the silver slime of a night snail on the side
of the basilica of Santa Barbara.

‘Down. Now.’

The big jacked-up mauve and yellow 4X4 is circling, growling in the
parking lot of Señor Barato All-Nite super-mart like a bull in the ring, pawing
at the piss-stained concrete with its monster balloon tyres. The Lobos, war
drums a-swinging, arrive in a wave of uniform pink and green as Annunciato
and the angel drop from the swinging end of the fire escape and hit the
ground.

‘In, in.’ The driver is an old old black man - more incredible even than
the silver lamé angel - already gunning the accelerator, tyres smoking on
the concrete. ‘In!’ Doors slam.

‘Caution, caution, your seatbelt is not properly engaged, please
engage your seatbelt,’ says a made-in-Yokohama chip-generated
conscience. Lowriders slam to a halt beneath Señor Barato’s flashing sign.
Grinning and gabbling like a loco, the old black man throws the beast into
four-wheel drive and up they go on those big monster wheels right over the
tops of the lowriders and out into the neon and smog of the boulevard.

****