The Fly-By-Nights

Начало книги

They wore no uniforms, the people of this deceptively raggle-taggle convoy where they rode, drove, or were trundled through a rubble-strewn wasteland in the dead of night. Yet despite the lack of khaki and badges of rank: the chevrons, shoulder pips, crowns and crossed swords—military insignia in general, the like of which Garth Slattery had seen illustrated in the brown, brittle pages of a battered volume he’d returned to one of the few dusty bookshelves that had passed for a library in the now abandoned Southern Refuge—still the careworn folk of the column, where they trekked a debris and broken-brick wasteland in the light of benign-seeming constellations, were far more akin to soldiers than civilians.

That was because this mobile community, of which Garth was a junior member, was at war; as were humanity’s rags and scattered remnants world-wide so far as was known, and the very word “civilian” was almost obsolete among the clans of a handful (at best) of moribund refuges whose people—all but the youngest—answered the roll-calls as regular combatants as necessary.

Читать дальше →