"Stephen King. The Girl who loved Tom Gordon." - читать интересную книгу автора

She walked to the bushes, thought about picking a few berries just to
cheer herself up, but didn't. She wasn't hungry, and had never felt less
capable of cheering up. She inhaled the spicy smell of the waxy green
leaves (also good to eat, Quilla had said, although Trisha had never tried
them-she wasn't a woodchuck, after all), then looked back at the pine. She
ascertained that she was still traveling in a straight line, and picked out
a third landmark-this time a split rock that looked like a hat in an old
black-and-white movie. Next came a cluster of birches, and from the birches
she walked slowly to a luxuriant nestle of ferns halfway up a slope.
She was concentrating so fiercely on keeping each landmark in view (no
more looking back over your shoulder, sweetheart) that she was standing
beside the ferns before she realized she was, you should pardon the pun,
overlooking the forest for the trees. Going landmark to landmark was all
very well, and she thought she had managed to keep on a straight line ...
but what if it was a straight line in the wrong direction? It might be the
wrong direction just by a little, but she bad to have gone wrong. If not,
she would've come to the trail again by now. Why, she must have walked ...
"Cripes," she said, and there was a funny little gulp in her voice
that she didn't like, "it must be a mile. A mile at least."
Bugs all around her. Minges and noseeums in front of her eyes, hateful
mosquitoes seeming to hang like helicopters by her ears, giving off that
maddening warble-whine. She slapped at one and missed, succeeding only in
making her own ear ring. And still she had to restrain herself from
smacking again. If she started doing that, she'd end up whacking away at
herself like a character in an old cartoon.
She dropped her pack, squatted, undid the buckles, turned back the
flap. Here was her blue plastic poncho, and the paper sack with the lunch
she had fixed herself-, here was her Gameboy and some suntan lotion
(wouldn't need that, with the sun now completely gone and the last patches
of blue overhead filling in); here was her bottle of water and a bottle of
Surge and her Twinkies and a bag of chips. No bugspray, though. Wouldn't
you know it. So Trisha put on the suntan lotion instead-it might keep at
least the minges away-and then returned everything to her pack. She paused
just a moment to look at the Twinkies, then dumped
the package in with the rest. As a rule she loved them when she got to
be Pete's age her face would probably be one great big pimple if she didn't
learn to lay off the sweets-but for the time being she still felt totally
unhungry.
Besides, you may never get to be Pete's age, that disquieting inner
voice said. How could anyone have such a cold and scary voice inside them?
Such a traitor to the cause? You may never get out of these woods.
"Shut up, shut up, shut up," she hissed, and buckled the pack's flap
with trembling fingers. That done, she started to get up ... and then
paused, one knee planted in the soft earth beside the ferns, her head up,
scenting the air like a fawn on its first expedition away from its mother's
side. Only Trisha wasn't smelling; she was listening, focusing on that one
sense with all of her concentration.
Branches rattling in a faint breath of breeze. Whining mosquitoes
(rotten, nasty old things). The woodpecker. The far-off caw of a crow. And,
at the furthest outpost between silence and audition, the drone of a plane.