The Deep
Скачать
Начало книги
THE OLD MAN’S HEAD was covered in mantises.
At first Luke thought it was a wig or some weird toupee—but he was at the southern tip of Guam, a few miles from the Pacific, and the man was wearing tattered clothes and what looked like strips of old radial tires lashed to his feet. Why bother with a toupee?
The driver saw the old man, too. He hissed between his teeth—an uneasy tssshk! He said something under his breath: a curse, maybe a prayer? Luke didn’t speak the local dialect.
“I’ll do it,” Luke told the driver. “You wait here.”
He elbowed the Jeep’s door open. Sweet Jesus, the heat. It’d hit him like a fist when he stepped onto the runway at the Agana airport. It hit him again now—the tropical air, laden with the nectar of heliotropes, caused beads of sweat to pop along his brow.
The old man stood facing the wall of a one-story workshop. The ground was strewn with hubcaps and crankcases snarled in rusted wiring. Wrist-thick vines snaked out of the greenery to twine around the industrial junk; with nobody around to hack it back, the jungle would reclaim this spot in a matter of months.