Gray Rain Exodus

Начало книги

The woman in the armored suit is driving, trembling. Her gloved hands are salt-flecked by the sweat shaken from her eyelashes, from out of her languid hair. She sips from the plastic tip of a well-gnashed straw. Outside her vehicle’s windshield, glimpsed through gaps gashed in the lead-lined curtains taped up against the glass, there looms a world of nightmares.

The canyon walls slide by, streaked with gray water and scalded runnels where the snowmelt from earlier weeks has boiled away in firestorm. Reddish shadows dance across the road like filaments of spirit, unreflecting memories of dismembered phantoms, tumbling along in a hallucinatory glaze. A pilgrimage of those no longer breathing.

She squints, she beholds and disbelieves. She drives on. She can barely dare to see the canyon as it is.

And what of the byways beneath the mountain and on beyond the canyon, the labyrinth of Ruin, she wonders? What of the underworld, torn apart and risen over all that was?

Читать дальше →