The Killing Game. J. Kerley A.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ followed Ema to the kitchen, too bright for his eyes, sun streaming painfully through the window. He looked to the table and saw tomato slices, onion slices, link sausages, biscuits from a can, and a blue porcelain bowl full of thick yellow goo. He stared, feeling his stomach begin to foam.

      “Is that mamaliga?” he whispered. The pendant glistened between Ema’s fat breasts as she picked up the bowl and brought it near, as if offering Gregory a gift. He smelled fumes coming from the pile of cheap, filthy and inescapable Romanian porridge.

      He turned away. “Get rid of it. I can’t look at that shit.” Gregory’s hands clenched into fists and blood roared in his ears. He slapped the bowl from Ema’s hands. It spun to the floor and shattered, the thick cornmeal porridge breaking into pieces.

      “IF YOU WANT ME TO STAY YOU’LL GET THAT SHIT AWAY FROM ME!”

      “I’m s-sorry,” Ema said, her voice trembling. “S-so sorry, Grigor. I only wanted to make you happy. I only w-want—”

      “STOP WITH THE FUCKING GRIGOR!”

      Bawling as if her world had exploded, Ema turned and ran from the kitchen. Her toe caught in the rug and she stumbled to the floor and lay there crying.

      “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry …”

      Gregory ran his options. He had to tell her he was sorry. Ema had made the sickening slop, but now he was the one who would have to apologize. The Moron World went by rules that were inside-out.

      He walked to his sister and leaned to touch her back. “Are you all right, Ema?”

      A shiver ran through her body. “I’m so sorry I made you mad. I always do stupid things. I’m so ashamed.”

      “I’m the one that’s sorry, Ema,” Gregory said, his expression blank since Ema’s face was in the carpet. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry.”

      “Hold me, Gregory,” Ema wailed, trying to roll to sitting, the pendant flapping across her skin, into the folds of her breasts. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Please hold me, Gregory. No one ever holds me.”

      Gregory felt his skin crawl, but lowered himself to the rug and wrapped his arms around his sister as far as they would reach. Her body heaved with sobs and her odor rose to his nose and mingled with the smell of the mamaliga splattered across the kitchen floor. The smells turned to the stink of shit and Gregory fought the urge to retch.

      “I never want to hurt you,” Ema wailed in English, then the same in Romanian, the old native tongue rising unbidden through tears and fear. “Hold me, Grigor,” Ema bawled, clutching at Gregory’s surrounding arms and making him wish he could disappear into the air.

      What happened next?

      Gregory escaped after a depressing half-hour. The smell of Ema and the mamaliga and all the female odors of the house had fired up a shrieking pain that pounded his temples. He returned to his house to try again to clean his car, but grew livid with anger once more: the stains had set and the smell had gotten worse in the heat of the garage.

      There was no sign of the porn magazine the cops had found and brandished, as if it never existed except as a whip to flay him with. That seemed odd, and Gregory looked beneath the seats, in the glove box. The fucking thing was nowhere to be seen, nothing in the car but a stench as thick as cold mamaliga.

      He had to sell the car, his beautiful creamy Avalon. He could never get the stink out. A thirty-five-thousand-dollar car turned to dross by the morons. The two cops were subhumans from the robot caste and Gregory would grind them beneath his heel as if he was stepping on ants.

      Striving for calm in his writhing guts, he made himself walk to the utility sink in the corner to soak his hands in de-greasing soap. No, Gregory revised as his palms rubbed beneath the water. It wasn’t the ants. The real problem was the anthill. It wasn’t the two morons who had savaged him, it was the process that had created them, made them feel invincible. They were a Blue Tribe. Their own form of dress, symbols, rituals, special pledges and codes … all tribal.

      Gregory returned to the cool of his house and recalled lessons from history. When one tribe wanted to inflict great hurt on another tribe, they killed its chief, a symbolic beheading of the entire tribe. Behead your enemy and jam his head on a pike, a dripping and fly-encrusted trophy that said I Win, You Lose.

      Gregory suddenly felt a delicious calm in his tormented belly. He would humiliate the police, the Blue Tribe. It would take work, it would take planning, but he would behead the Mobile Police Department.

      He would kill its Chief.

      Moarte. Death.

       Chapter 12

      “I think I have all the information I need for my article, Dr Szekely,” the young reporter said. She clicked off her recorder and closed her pocket-sized notepad. “Is there anything else you want to add?”

      Dr Sonia Szekely stared across her paper-strewn desk at her questioner: blonde, blue-eyed, skin the hue of a spring peach. The reporter wore a loose and flippy miniskirt, tank top, pink running shoes over short white socks, and represented the newspaper of a local university. I’ve got plenty to add, Szekely considered saying. If you’ve got the stomach for it, which I doubt. Instead, Szekely looked down at her age-wrinkled hands, fought her need to light a cigarette, and regarded the reporter with bemusement.

      “How old are you, my dear?” Szekely asked. Her eyes wandered past the reporter to her overloaded bookshelves holding such titles as Ceauşescu’s Orphanages: a History of Hell, The Pathology of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Psychic Damage in Early Childhood. Other titles were in Romanian.

      “I’m twenty, Doctor. Almost twenty-one. Why?”

      “The worst of what I’m telling you happened before you were born. The wretched Ceaușescu regime in Romania, the plight of the orphans, the decades of horror and human wreckage—”

      “I got that, Doctor. About how Cacesku—”

      “Ceaușescu,” Szekely corrected. “Nicolae Ceaușescu.”

      “Sure,” the reporter nodded, flipping open her notepad to glance inside. “Ceaușescu wanted to grow the country’s workforce so he outlawed birth control and demanded large families, but the country was so desperately poor the children couldn’t be cared for and were placed in state-run orphanages.” The reporter wrinkled her button nose. “Nasty places.”

      “Yes,” Szekely nodded, thinking, They were more than nasty, miss, they were hell on earth, a dark bloom of evil that poisons to this day.

      “But what does my age have to do with that nasty moment in history, Doctor?”

      Szekely felt her legs propel her to standing. Heard her voice grow loud.

      “It’s not history!”

      The reporter’s eyes went wide. Szekely waved her hand in apology and sat down again. Took a deep breath.

      “Forgive me. СКАЧАТЬ