annabet: переводы

→Mostly.

→“See? I told you she was a genius, didn’t I?’” Monica sat down in one of the padded leather seats that lined the van, and crossed her legs. She had on cute platform shoes that matched her orange tank top, and she inspected her nails—also done in orange—for signs of chipping. “You know what, genius? You’re right. I was following you. See, I wanted to bring you in quietly, but no, you and Zombie Girlfriend had to make it all difficult. Why aren’t you in class, anyway? Isn’t that, like, against your religion or something, cutting class?’”

→“You were following us,’” Claire said. She felt nauseated, probably from smacking her head into the dashboard, and she was deeply worried about Eve. A little cut. Monica wasn’t the type to do anything halfway.

→Gina pinched Claire again, and Claire gritted her teeth and managed to keep it to just a whimper this time. Easier, since she was already prepared for the pain. Gina looked disappointed. Maybe she should scream her lungs out no matter what, save herself the trouble of Gina having to work harder for it….

→Gina pinched Claire, hard. Claire yelled, and Monica grinned in response. “Well,’” she amended, “maybe hurt a little. But a tough chick like you can take it, right, genius?’”

→“Daddy. What, you don’t have one of those? Or do you just not know which john was the sperm donor?’” Monica sneered. She was wearing a tight pair of blue jeans and an orange top, and she looked as glossy as a magazine page. “Oh, don’t bother, mouse. Just stay down—you won’t get hurt.’”

→And as her head began to clear up again, except for a monster-sized headache centered right over her eyes, she remembered the van, too. She’d seen it before. She’d been in it before.

→After that, things got a little distant and fluffy around the edges. She remembered being taken out of the car. Remembered Eve yelling and fighting, then going quiet.

→Claire grabbed the phone triumphantly, finished pushing buttons for 911, and pressed SEND just as a hand reached in from the backseat and slammed her face-first into the dash.

→It was locked. She wasn’t a total idiot. But two seconds later, it didn’t matter, because a crowbar hit the window behind her, smashing it into a million little sparkly pieces, and Claire reflexively jerked forward, hands over her head. She fumbled the phone into the floorboards, and tried frantically to find it. Eve was cursing breathlessly.

→Eve started the car. They were parked in the tiny photo-store parking lot, next to a big industrial-sized Dumpster. They were the only car in the parking lot, although a white van was just turning into the lot and squealing to a stop in the space next to them. It was still pretty early—before nine a.m.—and what passed for traffic in Morganville was slowly filtering around the streets. The photo-processing place claimed to be open twenty-four hours; now, that was a job Claire figured she didn’t want. Did vampires take pictures? What kind? Maybe the trick was not to look at what came spitting out of the machine, just shuffle the prints into an envelope and hand them over…but then, that was probably the trick outside of Morganville, too.