"James Van Pelt - A Flock Of Birds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pelt James Van)

his gear into the truck. He checked the straps that held his motorcycle in
place. They were tight. The tie-down holding the extra batteries for the truck
and motorcycle were secure too. From his spot on the hill he could see the
dirt road he'd taken from the highway and the long stretch of I-25 that
reached north toward Denver and south to Colorado Springs. No traffic. The air
above the Denver skyline was crystalline. He strained his ears, tilting his
head from one side then the other. He hadn't heard a car on the highway behind
him all afternoon. Grass rustle. Moldy-leaf smells, nothing else, and when he
finally opened the truck's door, the metallic click was foreign and loud.
Back at his house in Littleton, he checked the photoelectric panels' gauges
inside the front door. It had been sunny for the last week, so the system was
full. The water tower showed only four hundred gallons though. He'd have to go
water scavenging again in the next few days.
"I'm home," he called. His voice echoed off the tiled foyer. "Tillie?"
The living room was empty, and so were the kitchen and bedrooms. Carson
stepped into the bathroom, his hand on his chest where his heart beat fast,
but the sleeping pills in the cabinet looked undisturbed. "Tillie?"
He found her sitting in the back yard beneath the globe willow, still in her
robe. The nightgown beneath it was yellowed and tattered. In her dresser he'd
put a dozen new ones, but she'd only wear the one she had in her suitcase when
he'd picked her up, wandering through the Denver Botanical Gardens two years
ago.
He sat on the grass next to her. She was fifty or so. Lots of gray in her
blond hair. Slender wrists. Narrow face. Strikingly blue eyes that hardly ever
focused on anything.
"How's that cough?" he asked.
"We never play bridge anymore, Bob Robert."
Carson stretched out. A day with binoculars pressed to his face and his elbows
braced on his knees hurt his back. "Tough to get partners" he said. Then he
added out of habit, "And I'm not Bob Robert."
She picked at a loose thread in the robe, pulling at it until it broke free.
"Have you seen the garden? Not a flower in it. A single geranium or a daisy
would give me hope. If just one dead thing would come back."
"I've brought you seeds," he said. "You just need to plant them."
She wrapped the thread around her fingertip tightly. "I waited for the pool
man, but he never came. I hate skimming." She raised her fist to her mouth and
coughed primly behind it twice, grimacing each time.
Carson raised his head. Other than the grass under the tree, most of the yard
was dirt. The lot was longer than it was wide. At the end farthest from the
house a chicken wire enclosure surrounded the poultry. A couple hens sat in
the shade by the coop. No pool. When he'd gone house hunting, he'd toyed with
the idea of a pool, but the thought of trying to keep it filled and the
inevitable problems with water chemistry made him decide against it. The house
on the other side of the privacy fence had a pool as did most of the houses in
the neighborhood, now empty except for the scummy pond in the deep end. In the
spring he'd found a deer, its neck bent unnaturally back, at the bottom of one
a block over. Evidently it had jumped the fence and gone straight in.
"Are you hungry?" Carson asked.
Tillie tilted her head to the side. "When will the garden grow again?"
He pushed himself off the ground. "I'll fix eggs."