"Guy N. Smith - Throwback" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

damp linen, it wasn't. It was concrete, real concrete. Reality!

She slumped against the wall, cried out with pain as a passer-by trod on her
outstretched foot, kicked it in blind anger before stumbling on. She was
trembling, pushing hard in an attempt to make her brain work, a motorist
jamming his finger on the starter-button on a frozen winter's morning. Come
on, for God's sake come on, you bastard!

It hurt, like a darning needle penetrating her brain, bringing with it
blinding migraine pains, darkness streaked with crimson, a crazy reflection of
the workings of her own mind, loose wires that did not connect. Fusing.

Then, without warning, everything came right again. You're ill and you're
lying in a street, Shrewsbury. You came here shopping like you do every week
but something went wrong. She could see, painful in the bright sunlight, but
she could see all right. Oh Jesus, what was the matter with everybody?

Crowds everywhere, a shambling disorientated throng which surged one way then
the other like mobs of rival soccer hooligans charging one another, climbing
over the tangled heap of crushed metal where the police car and the ambulance
had shunted the traffic jam, uniformed figures sitting motionless inside the
vehicles seemingly oblivious to everything around them; they might even have
been dead, held upright by their seat-belts. Fighting, falling, being crushed
by motiveless feet.

Jackie pressed herself back against the wall, took a deep breath but did not
close her eyes in case her vision went again. Try to think logically. It
wasn't easy; a man with a blistered face came gambolling down the pavement,
saw her and checked. Stooping, peering, tongue licking festered lips, eyes
bright orbs that glowed with primordial lust. A hand reached out, would have
grabbed her had not somebody bumped into him, sent him staggering. A shriek
like that of a wounded animal at bay came from those diseased lips and then
he, too, was swept up by the tide of relentless, purposeless movement, and was
gone for ever.

Jackie scanned faces; wild and fevered all of them, a hopelessness about their
expressions. Some fought, but only because others got in their way. A kind of
exodus but nobody was going anywhere in particular.

They're ill, she thought, like me. But how can everybody be ill? Her brain
threatened to blank out again, a flickering hesitating light bulb in a
thunderstorm, a transformer that could not take the additional load. A
helmetless policeman in the midst of a bunch of teenagers, his headgear a
football, the game being played under elementary rules. Kick it, watch it
bounce, kick it again. The officer joined in, booted it high into the air but
nobody went after it; everybody was too busy going nowhere in particular.

She told herself she could not stop here. I have to go home. Where's home?
Thinking again, overloading her delicate aching thought-mechanism so that it
bleeped and gave off a mass of red floaters in front of her eyes. Her home was