[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]had mentioned the name of an artist who specialized in portraying everyday
life in the United States before it became Deathlands.
"Rockwell," he said.
There were rows of little figures, their straight backs toward the two men,
faces toward the blackboard and the rigid statue of the teacher.
He was a very tall, skinny man, in his mid-thirties, with gold-rimmed
pince-nez perched on the end of his beaky nose. His hand was folded around a
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creased book of grammar, and there was a whippy cane on the desk behind him.
Ryan saw yet again the incredible attention to detail that the mysterious
embalmer used. There was a faint dusting of chalk on the cuffs of the faded
blue pin-striped suit, and a pottery apple rested on a table in the corner, by
a globe of the planet.
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Axler, James - Deathlands 23 - Road Wars (v1.0) (htnl)
There were about eighteen children in the classroom, all of them wearing
antique clothes, making them look like visitants from Victorian times. All of
them, boys and girls alike, wore cotton caps on their heads.
Ryan turned the handle on the box on the wall, by a poster showing the
location of the centers of the wheat belt across the Midwest.
After a few seconds of hissing static, piping voices, overlaid, chanted their
number tables. "Eight sevens are fifty-six and nine sevens are sixty-three and
ten sevens are seventy."
J.B. walked slowly to the front, his boots squeaking on the waxed and polished
floor. He turned and looked at the children, hesitated and peered more
closely.
"Ryan& " He gestured with the muzzle of the Uzi. "See what I see?"
"The kids?" He joined his friend. "Oh, fire-blast!"
At a first glance, all of the eighteen children looked roughly the same size
and age, roughly ten years old. But that wasn't the reality. Now that he could
see beneath the caps, Ryan realized the truth. Only four or five of the class
were actually human. The rest of them were&
"Dogs," J.B. said, unable to conceal his disbelief and disgust.
All of the other corpses that they'd seen had been skillfully preserved,
arranged with great cunning into acceptable facsimiles of normal behavior. But
the embalmer had been less successful with the dog-children.
You could see where vulpine jaws had been pushed back and muzzles extended,
bristling hair shaved off and the sharp teeth filed and drilled. The peaked
ears were hidden under the caps, but some of the silent rows of creatures
showed mutilated paws, resting on pencils and primers.
And the clothes had been clumsily pinned and sewn together to try to fit
around the misshaped bodies of the variety of canine breeds.
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Axler, James - Deathlands 23 - Road Wars (v1.0) (htnl)
In the background, the tape was still grinding on. "Six eights are
forty-eight.
Seven eights are fifty-six. Nine eights are seventy-two."
"Let's get the fuck out of here," J.B. said. "Place is a nightmare."
"I'll go with that."
Ryan was ready to go. Before leaving he glanced up at the blackboard. There
was a line and a half of roughly scrawled writing chalked on it, that simply
ended, as though the person had lost interest.
Once upon a midnite dreery, while I pondered week and weery, Over many a&
"What's it mean?" J.B. asked. "Looks like some sort of a poem."
"Rings a kind of bell with me. But the spelling's all up the creek."
They both felt the slightest breath of air as the door opened behind them.
They started to turn, aware that they were going to be too slow and too late.
The voice was mild and gentle. "I fear that spelling was always my weak
point."
Chapter Twenty-Three
"Sure looks good," Ryan said, returning from washing his hands at the pump out
back.
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J.B. was just behind him, wiping his fingers on the leg of his pants. "Surely
does."
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Axler, James - Deathlands 23 - Road Wars (v1.0) (htnl)
Malachi Gribble smiled at them from his seat at the head of the table. "If
only it was real, gentlemen. But I fear the bread and the venison alone are
fit to be eaten.
The rest are the products of my humble skill."
"You're greasing our wheels," Ryan said. "You mean all that other stuff is
faked?"
"Sorry." He smiled thinly, the eyes staring at them, magnified by the
enormously thick lenses of his spectacles. "Like I said in the schoolroom, I
have talents in that line. Though spelling has, sadly, never been among them.
As a child I was whipped by my father for that failing. I can read well
enough. Always could. But when I try and scratch the black marks on the page,
they become muddled and jumbled."
"We noticed that," J.B. said, sitting where Gribble indicated.
"That was why I abandoned my attempt to copy Mr. Poe's wonderful verses about
the raven onto the board. I knew things had run away from me."
Ryan sat down and looked at the groaning table, hardly able to believe that so
little of it was real. Until he spotted that imperfection meant reality.
The bread was burned on one side and looked underbaked in its heart. The bowl
of venison was thick with grease, a clotted scum floating on its top.
Everything else was flawless.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plkajaszek.htw.pl
