-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
The night air was thick with ashes and smuts and the fire leapt and swallowed
with nothing to stand in its way. Beneath the noise of the blast furnace,
adults shouted and cried out, children wailed, dogs barked and howled wildly,
and the horses in the field screamed out their terror. Anne thought once she
heard a siren in the distance, but nothing came near, and none of the
residents caught shivering in the dancing light had any way of knowing that
some of the popping glass they heard was actually gunfire, as Change guards in
camouflage suits, unaware of what was happening, took potshots at the
emergency vehicles gathering at the gates.
Anne was more interested in the absence of the only two people who meant
anything to her. She pushed her way frantically up and down through panicked
clusters of people, demanding if anyone had seen the two American kids. She
found Sara, who looked at her uncomprehendingly from beneath a bloody scalp
wound, and Dierdre, who was herself unscathed, although the woman she was
with, probably her mother, was curled on the ground clutching her leg,
white-faced with pain. Neither had seen Jason and Dulcie. Some of the adults
were gathering the children together at a distance from the buildings. Two
women ran up with an armload of first aid kits they had retrieved from the
Change vehicles, dodging three white-eyed horses that pounded through the yard
and vanished, freed with the other animals from the burning barns. Men and
women staggered up to the place of refuge laden with horse blankets, buckets
of water, and a couple of highly unnecessary kerosene lanterns, but their
paltry attempts at organization amid the maelstrom of heat and the battering
confusion of noise and panic was like a nest of ants working dumbly to restore
order as the ground was being uprooted around their heads.
Anne dodged through the chaos of running adults in night-wear, past clusters
of terrified children, around strange heaps of possessions that had been
rescued and then abandoned a sofa, three closed suitcases, a bedsheet wrapped
around a tangle of clothing and framed photographs looking for Dulcie and
Jason. The cacophony of noise beat at her, the heat was a blaring, monstrous
force, the bright, leaping illumination alternating with black, stretched-out
Page 234
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
shadows created a surrealist vision from hell, and Anne would have given five
years of her life for a single deep breath of cool, smoke-free air.
And still she could find no sign of them. She stood for a moment in the lee
of a wide, scorched-smelling oak tree and tried to gather her thoughts. Other
than the house, which possibility Anne's mind refused to consider, there was
only one place they could be. She wiped the edge of her white T-shirt across
her filthy face and prepared to turn her back on the moaning adults and the
screaming children only to be grabbed by the shoulders and shaken furiously by
a maddened figure shouting and spitting in her face. It took a moment to see
Marc Bennett beneath the soot and the distorting terror and fury, and to
interpret his words as a demand to know where Jonas was.
Her own fury glared to meet his. She shook off his grasping hands and slapped
him hard, and when he took a surprised step backward she leaned into him, ten
inches shorter and ready to tear him to pieces.
"You stupid piece of shit," she spat at him. "Your beloved tin-pot god went
nuts. He went and sat in your alembic and set the place on fire around him, to
see if he could make himself immortal,"
"What are you talking about? What alembic?"
"The steel alembic you have in your basement. The one you use to lock boys in
when they misbehave." God, she didn't have time for this. She tried to push
past him, but he grabbed her right shoulder again and pulled her back to face
him.
"You're the mad one here, you bloody woman. That's Steven's alembic you're
thinking of. Now, where the hell is Jonas?"
Anne gaped at him, and her own hand came out to grasp his upper arm. The two
of them stood as if they were hanging on to each other for support in the
flaring, feverish light of the fire.
"Are you telling me you don't have an alembic?" she demanded.
"You think you know the first thing about us, all the high secrets, don't
you? You don't know shit. We don't have an alembic for initiates. We don't
need one. The whole place is an alembic." He freed his hand to gesture at the
house, and she followed his fingers to see the stepped-up pear-shaped wall of
the front of the house, now devoured in flames, and the chimneys at the top
gathered together like a stem or like a plug at the neck of a vessel. As she
watched, one of the chimneys teetered, then fell away into the flames.
She swung her gaze back to his face, and when he saw her eyes, he tried to
retreat. Her fingers dug in and held him.
"Where would Jonas go?" she demanded.
"What do you mean?"
"His 'power nexus&' where is it?"
But she knew. Before Bennett opened his mouth, she knew. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- matkadziecka.xlx.pl