The Shining Girls. Lauren Beukes

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СКАЧАТЬ glow. He doesn’t know why people build so close to the lake anyways – like they think the worst has already happened and there’s no downhill from here. Not like people shit in the shallows. Not like the water might swell with the rains and wash the whole goddamn stinking Hooverville away. The abode of forgotten men, misfortune saturated deep down into their bones. No one would miss them. Like no one’s going to miss Jimmy fucking Grebe.

      He wasn’t expecting Grebe to gush like that. Wouldn’t have come to it if the bastard had fought fair. But he was fat and drunk and desperate. Couldn’t land a punch, so he went for Harper’s balls. Harper had felt the sonofabitch’s thick fingers grabbing at his trousers. Man fights ugly, you fight uglier back. It’s not Harper’s fault the jagged edge of the glass caught an artery. He was aiming for Grebe’s face.

      None of it would have happened if that dirty lunger hadn’t coughed up on the cards. Grebe had wiped the bloody gob off with his sleeve, sure, but everyone knew he had consumption, hacking his contagion into his bloody kerchief. Disease and ruin and the cracking nerves of men. It’s the end of America.

      Try telling that to ‘Mayor’ Klayton and his bunch of vigilante cocksuckers, all puffed up like they own the place. But there’s no law here. Like there’s no money. No self-respect. He’s seen the signs – and not just the ones that read ‘foreclosed’. Let’s face it, he thinks, America had it coming.

      A pale streamer of light sweeps over the beach, lingering on the scars he trailed across the mud. But then the flashlight swings to hunt in another direction, and the door of the shack opens, spilling light out all over the place. A skinny rat of a woman steps out. Her face is drawn and gray in the kerosene glow – like everyone else’s around here – as if the dust storms out there in the country blew away all traces of people’s character along with their crops.

      There’s a dark sports coat three sizes too big for her draped over her scrawny shoulders, like a shawl. Heavy wool. It looks warm. He knows that he is going to take it from her even before he realizes that she is blind. Her eyes are vacant. Her breath smells like cabbage and the teeth rotting in her head. She reaches out to touch him. ‘What is it?’ she says. ‘Why are they shouting?’

      ‘Rabid dog,’ Harper says. ‘They’re chasing it down. You should go back inside, ma’am.’ He could lift the jacket right off her and be gone. But she might scream. She might fight him.

      She clutches at his shirt. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Is it you? Are you Bartek?’

      ‘No, ma’am. Not me.’ He tries to pry her fingers off of him. Her voice is rising in an urgent way. The kind to draw attention.

      ‘You are. You must be. He said you would come.’ She is verging on hysterical. ‘He said he would—’

      ‘Shhhh, it’s all right,’ Harper says. It is no effort at all to raise his forearm to her throat and push her back against the lean-to with his full weight. Only to quiet her, he tells himself. Hard to scream around a crushed windpipe. Her lips pout and pop. Her eyes bulge. Her gullet heaves in protest. She twists her hands in his shirt as if she’s wringing out laundry, and then her chicken-bone fingers fall away and she sags against the wall. He bends with her, setting her down gently, even as he lifts the coat off her shoulders.

      A little boy is staring at him from inside the hovel, his eyes big enough to swallow you whole.

      ‘What you looking at?’ Harper hisses at the boy, hooking his arms through the sleeves. It’s too big for him, but no matter. Something jangles in the pocket of the coat. Loose change, if he’s lucky. But it will turn out to be much more than that.

      ‘Get inside. Get your mother some water. She’s poorly.’

      The boy stares and then, without changing his expression, opens his mouth and lets out a screeching wail, drawing the goddamn flashlights. Beams lance across the doorway and the fallen woman, but Harper is already running. One of Klayton’s cronies – or maybe it’s the self-appointed mayor himself – shouts, ‘There!’ and the men stampede down towards the beach after him.

      He darts through the maze of shacks and tents put up without rhyme or purpose all tumbled on top of each other, with barely space for a pushcart to move between them. Insects have better judgment, he thinks as he veers in the general direction of Randolph Street.

      He is not counting on people acting like termites.

      He steps on a tarpaulin and falls straight through it into a pit the size of a piano box, but considerably deeper, hacked out of the earth where someone has set up a semblance of a home and simply nailed a cover into the ground across the top of it.

      He lands hard, his left heel smacking the side of a wooden pallet bed with a sharp twang like a guitar string snapping. The impact slams him sideways into the edge of a homemade stove that catches him under his ribcage and knocks the breath out of him. It feels like a bullet has torn clean through his ankle, but he didn’t hear a gunshot. He can’t breathe to scream and he’s drowning in the tarp, falling in on top of him.

      They find him there, flailing against the canvas and cursing the sonofabitch human driftwood who didn’t have the materials or the skills to build a proper shack. The men assemble at the top of the hidey-hole, malevolent silhouettes behind the glare of their flashlights.

      ‘You can’t come here and just do what you want,’ Klayton says in his best Sunday preacher voice. Harper can finally breathe again. Every inhalation burns like a stitch in his side. He’s cracked a rib for sure, and he’s done something worse to his foot.

      ‘You have to respect your neighbor and your neighbor must respect you,’ Klayton continues. Harper’s heard him using this line at the community meetings, talking about how they needed to try and get along with the local businesses across the way – the same ones that sent in the authorities to tack up warning notices on every tent and hovel, advising them that they had seven days to vacate the land.

      ‘Hard to do respecting when you’re dead,’ Harper laughs, although it’s more of a wheeze and it makes his stomach tighten with pain. He thinks they might be holding shotguns, but that seems unlikely, and it is only when one of the flashlights shifts away from his face that he sees they are armed with pipes and hammers. His gut clenches again.

      ‘You should turn me over to the law,’ he says, hopefully.

      ‘Nah,’ Klayton replies. ‘They got no business here.’ He waves his flashlight. ‘Haul him out, boys. Before Chinaman Eng comes back to his hole and finds this d-horner garbage squatting in here.’

      And here is another sign, clear as dawn, which is starting to creep over the horizon past the bridge. Before Klayton’s goons can climb down the ten feet to get to him, it starts to rain, slicing drops, cold and bitter. And there is shouting from the other side of the camp. ‘Police! It’s a raid!’

      Klayton turns to confer with his men. They sound like monkeys with their jibber-jabber and arm-waving, and then a jet of flame sears through the rain, lighting up the sky and putting paid to their conversation.

      ‘Hey, you leave that—’ A yell drifts across from Randolph Street. Followed by another. ‘They got kerosene!’ someone yells.

      ‘What you waiting for?’ Harper says quietly, under the drumming rain and the uproar.

      ‘You stay right there,’ Klayton jabs his pipe at him as the silhouettes disperse. ‘We’re not done with you.’

      Ignoring the СКАЧАТЬ