"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Incident at Lonely Rocks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

So far, he’d been lucky. But a few times, he had come across crumbled
asphalt on the far end of the wayside about a hundred yards past his delivery spot.
Then he’d turn around and go the ten miles out of his way on the highway, heading
to the next wayside. He’d call the deteriorating road into both the State Police and
the Oregon Department of Transportation, figuring that he would be the first to
discover it, even if the slide had happened in a storm three or four days before.
In the winter, hardly anyone used this road. In the summer, he mostly saw
folks he called “environmental tourists,” people with PROTECT THE EARTH
bumper stickers or bikes or camping gear on the back of their car. The SUVs or the
families whose kids had iPods hardly came here.
This morning, the road had seemed stable. There hadn’t been serious storms
or high surf in the past week, so he gave the road only a cursory inspection. Then he
drove up alongside the portable toilet and started his ritual.
He put the truck in park and left it idling. He set the emergency brake and got
out. He paused, mostly because he couldn’t help it, and took a big sniff of the fresh
ocean air. A touch of salt and a bit of brine all mixed with the chill that suggested the
water itself. He loved it.
Just like he loved the view: the Lonely Rocks, all five of them, standing (that’s
how the brochures described them) in the surf, looking forever like people in a
semicircle with their backs to each other. He would’ve named it the Angry
Rocks—he could almost imagine their fronts, the scowling faces, the crossed
arms—but he supposed people would want something more dramatic with a name
like that, instead of one of those silent stand-offs his ex-wife used to give him in the
last few years of their marriage.
Then he squared his shoulders and headed to the portable toilet.POTStoilets
were a light green. The company got its start renting toilets to logging companies,
and for some reason, some designer thought it would best to have the toilets blend
into the scenery.
 Here, the light green looked slightly out of place. The trees along this cliff face
were scraggly, wind-raved pine, with needles so dark they almost looked black.
Against the asphalt, the green seemed festive, and more than once, he’d found one
of those see-through Oregon Ducks stickers pasted onto the door. If the company
hadn’t minded, he would’ve left the sticker on—he understood team spirit; it had
taken him through that glorious season when the football team he’d played for
couldn’t do anything wrong—but he had to follow regs. Nothing but the company
logo on the outside (a big P with a toilet-bowl-shaped O, a T behind that in a way
that kinda looked like a toilet, and an S that seemed to brace the entire mess up) and
a spotless, pine-fresh interior.
This toilet looked relatively new. It had the new curved door handle that
informed someone outside whether the toilet was occupied or not, and it didn’t have
a lot of scratches or polished-off graffiti marks.
He walked around the toilet first, making sure nothing had happened to the
outside. He braced a hand on the side of the toilet and accidentally shoved it, which
made it rock.
Something banged inside.
In fact, it banged so hard, he nearly toppled over. Weight had shifted.
Someone had planted something inside his portable toilet.
Then his breath caught. Had he interrupted a customer? A hiker maybe?
Someone frightened by the required beep-beep-beep of the truck as it backed up?
He could just imagine some scrawny hiker in his Birkenstocks, huddled inside,