"Onopa-Traffic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Onopa Robert)

ROBERT ONOPA

TRAFFIC

*
"He must go by another way who would escape this wilderness, for that mad beast
that fleers before you there, suffers no man to pass. She tracks down all, kills
all, and knows no glut, but, feeding, she grows hungrier than she was."

Inferno I

What follows, like a snaking line of cars, is the story of the first time I ever
set foot inside a Nomad vehicle. It was one of those days: traffic was a bitch.
I was late for my analyst's, and the usual ground-level routes through Studio
City were tangled by buses and vans. The sidewalks along Moorpark were either
stacked with illegal parking or in use as right turn lanes. I was creeping along
in my Saturn, an old electric bomb, behind a silver Benz, a replica diesel; the
Benz belched black smoke so dense I didn't notice the gridlock at Coldwater
until I was part of it. I backed through an alley only to find my path
obstructed by an articulated trash hauler so huge, so sinister, I thought of
Dante at the beginning of the Commedia, his way blocked by the she-wolf of
appetite. And then, approaching the gridlock at Coldwater again via the
drive-through lane of the Marcos Whiplash Clinic, I saw in the fluorescent blue
haze blanketing the intersection a vision from Hell itself: out of the sea of
traffic a red intake port began to surface, snout-like, lupine. The glistening
black pickup on whose hood it was mounted was customized with enormous soft
tires twice the height of a man. Sounding an airhorn, it surged forward
mightily, first bumping the Lexus ahead, then climbing the slope of its trunk
and the Hyundai's in the next lane, cresting over both cabins, bumping,
gyrating, crushing its way forward.

Then it turned in my direction.

Only in L.A, I told myself, could it come to this.

So I swung through the telltale camp of shabby cardboard huts, the Nomad camp
everybody was pretending not to see. I blew my horn, scattering two poor Nomad
families in their earth-colored rags, then punched through to one of the
abandoned ramps of what used to be called the Ventura Freeway. I was trying, as
you may have guessed, to bypass the Coldwater mess by getting on a Nomad
Interface, a section of urban roadway Nomads are permitted to cruise when they
drop down off the Interstate, what they call The Way.

Usually Residents like me, even Residents like the madman in the truck, avoid
the Nomad Interface. I had a pirated ambulance chip mounted on my firewall to
get me through even undocumented barriers like this one -without the chip, of
course, you fry. At the end of the trash-strewn lane of crumbling concrete I
felt my old Saturn vibrate through the electronic membrane; I merged onto the