"Jeff Vandermeer - Flight Is For Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

Flight Is For Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over
a short story by Jeff VanderMeer

The only sounds inside the prison are the drip of water, the weeping of
prisoners, and the chink-chink of keys on Gabriel de Anda's belt as he
limps through his 2:00 a.m. rounds of the third floor. The prison walls
glow with green phosphorescence and, from far below, Gabriel can hear
the
ocean crashing against the rocks. A storm builds out in the Gulf, where
sargasso clings to drowned sailors and does not allow them to sink into
the formless dark of deep waters. Gabriel feels the storm in the
pressure
of air pushing against his face and it makes him wary.
He has been a guard at the prison for so long that he can see it in his
mind like a slowly-turning, dark-glittering jewel. The Indians call the
prison "Where Death Walks Blind of Justice." It is a block of
badly-mortared concrete, surrounded by barbed wire, electric fences,
and
jungle. Resembling nothing less than the head of a tortured, anguished
beast at sleep, a twenty-four hour lamp at the front entrance its
solitary
eye, it hunkers three stories tall, with tiny barred windows checkering
a
brackish, badly-lit interior where bare bulbs shine down on graffiti,
guard, and prisoner alike. No one has ever escaped, for the prison, its
foundations rotting, dominates the top of a cliff on the eastern coast
of
that country known more for its general, El Toreador, than for its
given
name, a name once Indian, then Spanish, but now forgotten.
Gabriel's rumpled uniform scratches his back and fits poorly at the
crotch. He shuffles over the filthy catwalk that leads from one side of
the third floor to the other. Muttering to himself, he fights the urge
to
spit over the side, into the central courtyard, where the secret police
hose down the violent prisoners. His gimp leg throbs.
When only twenty-two, Gabriel was visiting Merida, Mexico, his brother
Pedro driving and jabbering about some girl he knew in Mexico City
"with
thighs like heaven; no better than heaven." Enraptured, Pedro took a
curve
too quickly and careened into oncoming traffic. Gabriel remembers only
a
high-pitched scream and the pain that shattered his left leg, the bone
breaking in two places.
It gave him a limp. It gave him grist to chew as he navigates the
catwalk.
The janitors have not cleaned the catwalk from the last food riot.
Dark,
scattered lumps form an obstacle course, exude the stench of rotted