Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 19

CHAPTER TWELVE

“I’m sorry,” whispered Paul, “but I just can’t go any further.” The words came in gasps, punctuated by long pauses. Drawing breath seemed to be a struggle. His face, illuminated by the sky that was growing silver with the dawn, seemed to be ashen grey. Rebecca, too, felt as if she had come to the end. There was no more running in her, and soon there would be no more shadows in which to hide.

They were hiding among the corpses of long-dead cars, in what had once been a salvage-yard but was now no more than a dump. Scavengers had long ago stripped the wrecks of anything that was worth taking, and there was nothing left now but rusted skeletons, crushed and cracked, piled up in rotting heaps. Even the soil was red-brown, too heavily impregnated with metallic oxides to allow anything but a few ragged clumps of squill and a little coarse grass to grow in it.

They were crouched beside what had once been a transcontinental bus, but which was now no longer solid enough to allow them to crawl inside.

“Leave me,” said Paul. “You don’t have to run. They don’t want you.”

“I can’t,” she said.

They could hear the sound of voices calling to one another. The streets around the yard were patrolled, now, and there were men picking their way through it. There was no way out. Rebecca huddled close to Paul, trying to keep away from the jagged shards of rotting metalwork. She wasn’t trying to escape the cold so much as making an ineffectual attempt to protect him from it.

“Why do they want me?” asked Paul. “What do they want me to do?”

“Everybody’s waiting for you,” she whispered. “They think you can tell us what to do, because nobody else can. They think you can give them reasons, because nobody else can. The government want you to put your name to their plans...half a dozen other groups would ask you to put your name to theirs. People will listen to you, but they won’t listen to anybody else. It’s as simple as that.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t dare to hurt you. I don’t know what they could do. But there might be fighting, against the Movement There could be a revolution. There are people who hate your name enough to want you dead. I don’t know.”

Her voice was thin and urgent, and she talked as if talking were the only thing that could hold back the tears. They had been running for nearly an hour, with nowhere to run to and nothing to gain. All the while she had been driven on by the terror of responsibility, by the knowledge that she had been hurled into the vortex of important events without the means to do anything that would seem, at some later time, to be what she ought to have done.

Paul was shivering now, too weak to resist. She tried to wrap her arms around him, to surround him and keep the cold at bay. There was no way to do even that.

The voices were getting closer.

“Run,” said Paul. “It’s all right.”

“I won’t leave you,” she said, as the sobs finally broke through and the tears began to flow. “I won’t...not ever.”