Reamde полностью

From the axles up, it was simply a pickup truck, albeit of the biggest and heaviest class: the kind that, on her visits back home, she saw driving around in farm country, carrying bags of cement and towing fifth-wheel trailers. From the axles down, though, it looked like nothing she’d ever seen. The wheels had been removed and replaced with contraptions that looked like miniature tank treads. At each corner of the vehicle, where her eye expected to see a round wheel, it was instead baffled by the impossible-looking spectacle of a large triangular object, consisting of a system of bright yellow levers and wheels circumscribed by a caterpillar tread made up of black rubber plates linked together into an endless conveyor belt about a foot and a half wide. This ran along the ground for several feet beneath each axle and then looped up and around the yellow framework that held it all together, which, she perceived, was bolted onto the truck’s axle using the same lug nut pattern as would be used to mount a conventional wheel. So it seemed that these things were a direct bolt-on replacement for conventional tires, made to spread the vehicle’s weight out over a much larger contact area. Just the thing for an environment that was covered with snow for six months out of each year, and mud for another two. And indeed as the day grew brighter, she saw that the truck’s rearview mirrors and upper body were spattered with dried mud. Conditions might be snowy up in this valley, but this truck had been stolen from some place where spring was well advanced.

The whole time that she was tending to food, Jones’s crew were spreading out all the gear that they had brought with them, and everything that they had scavenged from the plane and from the mining camp, and making decisions about what to take and how to pack it. Guns and ammunition seemed to get first priority, followed by warm clothing and blankets. Blue tarps and ropes were deemed of inestimable value; perhaps they’d be camping? They seemed to have a passion for shovels, a detail that she could not help but interpret in the most morbid way possible.

The truck was a crew cab model, meaning that it had a second row of seats. They put Zula in the back, sandwiched between Sharif on her left and Mahir on her right. She felt strangely awkward coming between them, as if committing a social faux pas. But perhaps Jones was fed up with their clinginess and wanted them apart. Ershut rode shotgun and Abdul-Wahaab was squeezed into the middle of the front seat. Jones drove. Zula couldn’t help but think that they would be just a little conspicuous rumbling around British Columbia in this contraption with that particular lineup of faces glaring out the windshield.

But that wouldn’t even be an issue until they actually made it down to a road; and this did not look like it was happening any time soon. During whatever escapades that he and Abdul-Wahaab had enjoyed yesterday, Jones had learned how to drive the thing and had satisfied himself that if he shifted it into a sufficiently low gear (and this truck had some extremely low gears), it would go anywhere. Once the truck was packed, they headed up the valley, avoiding its sloped walls and sticking to its bottom, which was flat, but sinuous and multiforked. Jones seemed to be playing a connect-the-dots game on the map. Every few hundred meters was a cleared area, and these were strung together by a road. Or at least by a lane that had been bulldozed through the trees. The road and the cleared sites were marked on a survey map, which Abdul-Wahaab had spread out on his lap, the better for Jones to follow it. Zula caught glimpses of it during their frequent and voluble disputes as to its interpretation. At one point Jones pointed out the windshield into the sky and glared expectantly into the face of Abdul-Wahaab, and Zula understood that he was pointing out the location of the sun, as a trump card.