Thicker Than Blood - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги онлайн TXT) 📗

"That’s a bad girl," Luther told her. "Don’t you do that. You’re precious. He’s gone, and you’re never going to see him again, so what’s the use in crying?"

Luther knelt down and stroked her cheek.

He took a syringe from his pocket and jammed the needle into her arm.

"You make my insides taste like sugar," he said. "I’m gonna love you up so much."

"Guess it’s time," Rufus said.

Luther lifted Violet in his arms and the Kites walked together out of the hanging room, through the basement corridors, past the electric chair, and up the creaking stairs.

They emerged from the front door into a bible black predawn, Violet asleep now, in the arms of Luther, in the arms of the drug.

And the yellow rind of a moon was sinking into the sound, the live oaks wrenched and gleaming, frost murdering the beach grass, as they piled into the ancient pickup truck and fled their crumbling house of stone.

K I N N A K E E T

65

WHEN I came around, the odor of my death was everywhere: scorched hair, leather and gas, hot copper, cooked flesh.

I was still strapped to the chair, now in total darkness.

So many shades of pain I couldn’t pick the worst.

I strained against the leather.

The left wrist strap must’ve been partially undone because my arm broke free.

I unbuckled my right wrist, and with both hands ripped off the singed and crumbling restraints.

I staggered to my feet, fell back into the chair, stood up again.

My burns raged as I floundered through the darkness, hobbling along as fast as I could, limbs shaking, one arm outstretched to protect my face, the other tracing the stone wall.

It occurred to me that I was dead, wandering through some outlying region of hell, and still I walked on in the dark for what seemed decades, into deadends and black rooms, through corridors that turned back into themselves, all the while the pain mounting.

I leaned over and puked.

Then came the sharpest stab of dread I’d ever known.

It whispered, Welcome to eternity.

Panic eclipsed the pain, my mind beginning to splinter, when I tripped and fell into a staircase.

My frenzy abating.

Gazing up into darkness.

Still no sign of light.

I crawled up the steps, rotten and doddering beneath me.

My head collided with a wall of wood.

I groped for a doorknob.

The door squeaked open and I tumbled into the foyer of the House of Kite, draped in the sulky gray silence of early morning.

Struggling to my feet, I moved on through the narrow hallway into the kitchen, the dead quietude of the house convincing me they’d fled, taken Violet with them.

I glanced at my forearms in the weak dawnlight that spilled through the kitchen window, the undersides blistering and striated with electrical burns. My calves and the crown of my head had been similarly ravaged, all scorched where the electricity had entered and left my body.

There wasn’t a phone in the kitchen and a search of the library and living room turned up nothing.

Through the living room’s gothic windows I saw a gray Impala parked in the front yard.

Limping back into the kitchen, wreathed in a miasma of spoiled flounder, I found the lopsided ceramic bowl on the breakfast table, filled with keys.

I grabbed them all, and disowning the pain, started for the front door, for Violet.

66

I moved like a wavering drunk through the bending beach grass, crumpling finally across the hood of the rusting Impala, winded, stonewalling the pain.

The day had dawned cloudy and freezing, pellets of sleet tinkling on the metal, the sootcolored sound writhing in chop beyond the house of stone.

I climbed behind the wheel of the car, started shoving keys into the ignition. The fourth one turned and the engine hiccupped and revived to a stammering idle.

Shifting into drive, I stepped on the accelerator, the back tires slinging weeds and sand as the car surged between the elegiac live oaks and sped down the dirt road into thicket gloom.

Curtains of dying Spanish moss swept across the windshield, the Impala bumping along through puddles, over washboards that threatened to rattle the car apart.

When I reached the pavement of Kill Devil Road, I followed it east toward the ocean, past slumbering beach houses nestled among live oaks and yaupon.

I stopped at the intersection of Old Beach Road and Highway 12.

My insides quivered with nausea.

Night thawing in the eastern sky.

I knew the Kites were leaving Ocracoke by ferry.

That left me two choices.

They could either take the one departing from Silver Lake Harbor, or the ferry that embarked from the north end of the island. The ferries that left Silver Lake for Swan Quarter and Cedar Island ran less frequently and required reservations to insure passage. The ferry from Ocracoke to Hatteras was free and ran on the hour, beginning at 5:00 a.m.

The dashboard clock showed 4:49.

I scoped Highway 12, vacant at this hour, lights from the Pony Island Motel twinkling nearby.

Hatteras.

I punched the gas, accelerating through the northern outskirts of Ocracoke Village, past Jason’s Restaurant, the post office, Cafe Atlantic, and Howard’s Pub.

It was twelve lonely miles to the north end of Ocracoke and the ferry to Hatteras. I had eleven minutes to get there, in a shitty car, on the verge of losing consciousness.

The speedometer passed eighty, the engine screaming as the Ocracoke Light waned in the rearview mirror.

Gray dawnsky, dunes, and marsh blurring by.

The wild dog sea rabid and foaming.

Sleet ticking dryly on the windshield.

Pavement streamed under the car, the road reaching north into the dullblue nothingness of daybreak.

4:56.

I pushed the engine past eighty-five, the stench of hot metal seeping through the floorboards.

4:57.

For the first time I noticed my clothes—the fleece pants melted, my undershirt pocked with quarter-size, black-rimmed holes where the electricity had eaten the polyester.

4:58.

The world dimmed.

My head went light.

I slumped into the steering wheel, swerved into the other lane, tires dipping over the shoulder.

My vision sharpened.

I swung back into the road.

It ended.

Taillights ahead.

I stomped the brake, tires screeching.

In the immediate distance five cars waited in the boarding lane at one of the docks. As I steered the Impala to the back of the line, a crewman started waving vehicles onto a ferry vessel called the Kinnakeet.

First to board was a dilapidated old pickup truck, its puttering engine expelling gouts of smoke into the stonegray dawn.

67

THE Kinnakeet is a long barge, broad enough for four cars to park abreast. From the centerdeck rises a narrow three-story galley—restrooms on the first level, an observation lounge on the second, and crowned by a small pilothouse. North Carolina and United States flags hang regal from the mast.

The six vehicles on the 5:00 a.m. ferry were directed into two singlefile lines—three cars starboard, three portside.

I was parked in the back of my line, the Kites in the front of theirs, separated by the galley so that we couldn’t see each other.

As I turned back the ignition, the ferry’s engines went to work and the Kinnakeet wended slowly between the pylon bundles and away from the Ocracoke docks.

We chugged out into open water. The wind picked up, gusting now, shaking the car, sleet bouncing off the concrete deck, seagulls swarming the vacant stern, crying for a breakfast they would not receive at this hour.