"Mary Rosenblum - California Dreaming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

her eyes first. They were a strange color; depthless blue, like the sky after sunset.

“All right.” Ellen sighed and stepped out onto the porch. “Take me to your
mom.”

The girl turned unhesitatingly inland, trotting up through the scraggly spring
grass toward the forested ridge above the cottage. “Wait a minute,” Ellen called, but
the girl didn’t slow down, didn’t even look back. Ellen hesitated, then ducked her
head and broke into a ran, was panting after only a dozen uphill yards, because
Rebecca had nm every morning and Ellen hadn’t.

The girl crouched in the tree shadows, cradling a woman in her arms. The
woman’s face was flushed and she breathed in short, raspy breaths. Her hair stuck
to her face, dark and stringy, as if she had been sweating, but when Ellen touched
her cheek, her skin felt hot and dry.

“How long has your mother been sick?” Ellen asked the girl.

“A couple of days. It rained on us and it was cold. Mom let me wear her
jacket, but then she started shivering.”

“We’ve got to get her down to the house somehow.” This was a crisis and
Ellen could handle crises. She’d had fifteen years of practice, because Rebecca
didn’t handle them. She squatted beside the sick woman, shook her gently. “Can
you wake up?”

Miraculously, the woman’s eyelids fluttered.

“Come on, honey. Got to get you on your feet.” Ellen slid her arm beneath the
woman’s shoulders.

Another miracle. The woman mumbled something incoherent and struggled to
her feet. Ellen kept her arm around her, frightened by her fierce heat, supporting her.
Step by step, she coaxed the woman down the slope, staggering like a drunk beneath
her slack weight.

It took forever to reach the house, but they finally made it. Ellen put the
woman into Rebecca’s empty (forever, Oh God) bed. The rasp of her breathing
scared Ellen. Pneumonia? In the old days, before antibiotics, people had died from
flu and pneumonia. The Quake had smashed the comfortable present as it smashed
through the California hills. It had warped time back on itself, had brought back the
old days of candles and no roads and death from measles or cholera. Seal Cove had
no doctor. Big chunks of the California coast had fallen into the sea and you
couldn’t get there from here.

“I’ll walk down to the store.” Ellen poured water into a bowl from the kitchen
jug, got a clean washcloth down from the shelf. “Jack can call Eureka on the radio.
They’ll send a helicopter to take your mom to the hospital. I’m going to give her
some aspirin and I want you to wipe her all over while I’m gone.” She handed the
washcloth to Beth. “We need to get her fever down.”