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

waiting for civilization to go away.
“Hey!” he said. “C’mon out. It’s okay.”
He almost banged on the reinforced plastic wall, then thought the better of it.
That would probably scare Mr. Birkenstock even more.
So he went around front and stopped as he peered at the door. It wasn’t
latched from the inside. The little red sign that changed as the handle latched read
VACANT.
He felt a little relief at that. Never once, in all his years as aPOTScustomer
service representative had he ever tried to clean a toilet with someone in it.
Although that didn’t explain the weight shift. He might have to amend his
record to never cleaning a toilet with someone obviously in it. There was no way to
tell this thing was occupied. The parking lot was empty, there was no backpack or
camping gear outside (not that there was a place to camp anywhere near Lonely
Rocks, although there was a great hiking trail—if you didn’t mind that it could
crumble out beneath you at any minute), and the door wasn’t latched.
 He couldn’t be blamed for making this kind of mistake.
“Hey!” he said again. “My name’s Rollston. I service these toilets. No need to
be scared of me. Are you okay?”
No one answered. And he had the odd feeling that no one would.
Then he frowned. Kids. Kids were the only downside of this job. Not little
kids, who actually loved outdoor toilets, seeing them as an exotic novelty. Not even
the local high school crowd, which mostly found the toilets gross, if they thought of
them at all.
No, the kids that bothered him were the college kids. Old enough to come to
the coast unsupervised for the weekend, but young enough to forget that the word
“responsibility” applied even here.
Those kids would get drunk, build fires on the beaches, and toddle up to the
nearest portable toilet to get rid of the excess beer. Then they’d get the bright idea in
their head that they needed to mess with the toilet somehow. Sometimes that messing
was just a team sticker. But most often, it manifested in the urge to turn the toilet
turtle.
Oscar never understood why. Did the kids think there was a hole underneath
it? The toilet just had a receptacle under the seat, a receptacle filled with chemicals to
dissolve the waste and get rid of the smell. The things were designed so that they
could be turned on their side and not spill (too much) unless they were overfull—and
he never let his get overfull. So the irritation was just that he had to right the toilet
before he could clean it.
An extra five minutes, which bothered him in the summer and usually didn’t
disturb him at all in the winter.
But sometimes the kids were creative. Sometimes they stashed things inside
the toilet. The worst was the bearhide wrapped around a wooden frame. The hide
still had a head, and damn if that thing didn’t look real when he opened the door the
first time, and damn if he didn’t let out a little scream as he slammed the door
shut—not something he’d want his old football buddies to know. But not many of
his old football buddies would’ve opened the door again either.
He had, and he’d been fine. (He’d half expected that bear to lunge out at him,
but it hadn’t. It hadn’t moved at all, which was the thing that tipped him off to its
fakeness.)
He expected something like that here. Some kind of prank—a log, maybe, or a
mannequin. He’d come across things like that before, things people had intentionally