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Автор Виктор Гишлер
Victor Gischler
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse
For Anthony Neil Smith and Sean Doolittle, who both
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I need to add some names to the list of usual suspects. David Hale Smith has been one hell of an agent…Thanks for catching everything I’ve thrown at you. Thanks to Zach Schisgal, Shawna Lietzke and the team at Touchstone/Fireside for keeping me on track. And extra thanks to my wife, Jackie, and son, Emery, for putting up with me. Last but not least, many thanks to all those readers who keep coming back.
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him. ” -
I
This is how Mortimer Tate ended up killing the first three human beings he’d laid eyes on in nearly a decade:
A wreath of cloud lay smooth and still about the top of the mountain like bacon grease gone cold and white in a deep, black frying pan. The top halves of evergreens poked through the cloud, frosted from last night’s snow. The final days of winter, not too cold-Mortimer Tate estimated maybe thirty degrees. The thermometer had burst in the third year, that most bitter winter when it had gotten to twenty below or more. The thermometer had been made in America by a small company in Ohio.
Nothing was made to last anymore, Mortimer’s dad had been fond of saying.
Mortimer sat at the window of the cabin, which had been built directly in front of the cave. The cave stretched back deep into the mountain. Mortimer sipped tea brewed from ginseng and tree bark he collected and dried himself.
The coffee had run out the first year. So many things had run out that first year.Mortimer watched the men come up the mountain, had seen them rise up through the mist and had blinked at them, thinking he’d cracked up at last. But they were real, rifles in front of them, not trying too carefully for stealth, but neither shouting nor taking the mountain for granted.
He considered going back into the cave to the gun locker, maybe getting the twelve-gauge or even something deadlier, but then he’d lose sight of the men and he didn’t want to emerge from the cave again only to find they’d gone or had spotted the cabin. And anyway he had the police special in the pocket of his army-surplus parka. That should be enough. He wanted to talk, not shoot, but of course he had to be careful.
He didn’t figure they’d seen the cabin, obscured as it was by the pines and two months’ snow. It was possible he could sit right there, and the men would pass by and never be seen again. Nobody had been up this far before, at least nobody Mortimer had seen. Maybe they’d hunted the game out farther down and were up after meat. Mortimer himself had killed a big buck three weeks ago and had eaten venison four nights in a row before drying out the rest for jerky.
