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

them together in a way that would hold. The older ones had frayed hooks and pulls.
He tossed those in the truck bed and removed the newer ones from the new toilet. If
someone drove up on this deserted road and stole the damn thing, so be it. His
employers would have to understand.
It took him a minute to hook the cords together, but they seemed stable
enough to get a small woman up a crumbling hillside. Not that he had any way of
measuring this.
Still, he wasn’t sure his back could take the weight. He unhooked the bungees
at the back of the truck, then he lowered the gate. He eased the new portable off,
using his back and knees like he always did when he put a new toilet in place.
It looked kinda funny next to the old toilet, but he couldn’t worry about that.
He raised the gate, then hooked it in place. He got in the truck and backed
toward the guard rail.
He tried not to think about the cracking asphalt. He told himself that the
broken guard rail had happened when the station wagon went through it, not when
the ground fell away, but he didn’t lie that well, not even to himself.
He stopped the truck several yards from the guard rail. He couldn’t quite
bring himself to get as close as possible: The last thing he wanted to do was save her
and then have the entire cliffside crumble beneath her, him, and the truck.
He didn’t want to hook the cords to the back gate—it was too unstable—so
he found a thick piece of metal near one of the wheel wells. Then he unspooled the
cords and hurried to the guard rail.
As he looked over, he prayed that she was still there. The movement of the
truck could shake earth this unstable, and that would be the last straw for that ledge.
But she was still there, crouched against the side, the blue ocean beneath her,
crashing into the rocks and spraying foam up the grass and sand hillside.
He held up the cord, but before he tossed it, he mimed tying it around his
stomach.
“Knot yourself in,” he shouted. “You got that? Tie this around you. Don’t
rely on your hands to hold it.”
He wasn’t sure how much she got of that, but she nodded. He swallowed
hard and tossed the cords, listening to them clang as the metal hooks hit rock on the
way down.
The cords curved over the guard rail because he couldn’t think of any other
way to do it. She reached up, missed, then reached again. He kept feeding cord to
her. As he did, he studied the guard rail.
This part looked safe enough. The base was embedded into the earth, and the
ground looked solid—not that he could tell, really, but he had to trust something.
He’d try to pull her up himself first, and if that didn’t work, then he’d use the
truck. If he just used the truck by itself, he was afraid he’d use too much speed, or it
wouldn’t work and she’d fall and he wouldn’t know until the cord came up empty,
bouncing on the asphalt.
He almost wrapped the loose back end of the cord around himself before it
tightened in the woman’s hands, but at the last minute, he decided not to. What if
she was heavier than he expected? What if she pulled him over the edge?
Then they’d both be screwed.
He wiped his hands on his pants, then gripped the cord tightly. She was
balanced precariously on that ledge, trying to make a half hitch with the cord and her
own body. She seemed to have some kind of wilderness experience, or maybe she
was just one of those really competent people who knew how to do things like hitch