Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  Cole was about to ask her something else, but before he could speak I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “I think we’re nearly there.”

  He looked at me, then looked out the window. Boundless acres of empty moorland stretched out into the distance. “Nearly where?” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

  “We just passed a sign,” I told him.

  “What sign?”

  “Lychcombe.”

  “He’s right,” Abbie said, getting to her feet. “It’s the next stop. Just around the corner.”

  As she walked off down to the front of the bus, Cole continued looking out the window. His eyes took in the barren slopes and the scattered boulders and the lonely gray road winding its way into the fading hills, and I could feel him thinking to himself—This is no place to die.

  We got off the bus and watched it pull away, and then we just stood there for a while, mesmerized by the unworldly silence of the moor. I’d never heard anything like it before. It wasn’t a soundless silence—there was the soft rush of wind in the grass, the lonely bleating of distant sheep, the call of crows in a nearby forest…but somehow that made it all the more quiet. There were no human noises. No traffic. No voices.

  It was the silence of another age.

  Another time.

  Another bus stop. Another day. Another night. I could feel it—the sky black with rain, Rachel getting off the bus, trying her cell, then hurrying across the road to the telephone box, trying to call Abbie. But the phone’s out of order. Broken, busted, jammed. No signal. No answer. She can’t hear me. She’s hundreds of miles away. She’s all alone. She’s cold and wet and it’s dark and windy and there’s something out there, something that shouldn’t be there…

  “Don’t think about it.”

  Cole was standing beside me, his hand on my shoulder.

  “I can’t help it,” I told him.

  “I know.”

  He gave my shoulder a squeeze, then looked over at Abbie. She was waiting for us at the side of the road.

  “Don’t push her too hard,” I said quietly to Cole. “She’s frightened of something. If you try to force it out of her, she’ll just clam up. Go easy for a while—OK?”

  Cole nodded. Still looking at Abbie, he said, “Do you really think she looks like Rachel?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Other times I’m not so sure. Her face keeps shifting. Sometimes she looks like an anti-Rachel.”

  Cole looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  We walked over to Abbie and she led us across the road to a V-shaped junction where a hillside lane branched off the main road and headed down into a valley.

  “This is the road to Lychcombe,” she told us. “The village is just down there.”

  I looked down the narrow road and saw a scattering of dull gray buildings at the bottom of the valley. Apart from a lone twist of smoke coiling from a cottage chimney, there was no movement at all. The village lay mute and still in the early evening light.

  We set off toward it.

  The road led steeply all the way down to a small granite bridge that crossed a shallow river into the village. We could see for miles all around us. On either side of the road, the open moor was broken up with jutting stones and clumps of stricken oak trees, and away to our right I could see fat little ponies standing motionless in fields of dry grass. I could smell their horse-sweet breath in the air. I could smell other smells, too: earth, heather, gorse. A faint breeze of gasoline was wafting up from an old-fashioned filling station halfway down the hill, and on the right-hand side of the road, opposite the gas station, wood smoke was drifting over a stretch of spindly woods.

  The road led down through it all—down the hill, over the bridge, into the village, and out the other side. A large stone house stood at the far end of the village, and it was here that the road turned sharply to the left before wandering up through the densely packed gloom of a pine forest and away into the hills beyond.

  I was lagging behind Cole and Abbie now. They were about ten meters ahead of me, walking side by side. I could see they’d started talking again but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. So I picked up my pace and caught up with them.

  As I walked up behind them, Abbie was just explaining something to Cole, pointing down at the village, and Cole was nodding his head.

  “So where do you live, then?” he asked her.

  “Just over there.” She moved her hand to the left, pointing beyond the village. “You can’t see it from here. It’s about half a mile from the edge of the forest.”

  Cole nodded again. “Are you walking all the way back?”

  She shook her head. “Vince is coming to pick me up.” She looked at Cole. “Do you want a lift anywhere? He’ll be happy to drive you—”

  “No, that’s all right. We’ll walk, thanks.”

  Abbie nodded. “What are you going to do?”

  He shrugged. “Not much.”

  “The last bus leaves at eight-thirty. You’re not going to have much time. You could probably get a taxi back—”

  “We might stay over.”

  “What—here? In Lychcombe?”

  “Maybe. We’ll see how it goes. Is there anywhere to stay? What about that pub you mentioned?”

  Abbie looked at him. The fear in her eyes had resurfaced. “The pub?”

  “Yeah,” said Cole. “Or a B-and-B, something like that.”

  “I don’t know,” she said hesitantly. “I suppose the Bridge might have a room…”

  “The Bridge?”

  “The Bridge Hotel. It’s the village pub. It’s not really a hotel anymore—”

  “We just need a room.”

  Abbie seemed about to say something, but then she changed her mind and just shrugged, and we continued walking in silence for a while.

  The lane was bounded on either side by low stone walls topped with stunted shrubs. The stones were encrusted with scabs of lichen, and when I looked closer I could see little white stalks with bloodred tips growing among the scabs—Devil’s Matchsticks. I left them alone and gazed down at the village. It was directly below us now, about 200 meters away. It still didn’t look like much, but now that we weren’t so far away I could see there was more to it than just a scattering of buildings. There was a main street, a couple of side streets…cars and shops and people, bits of movement.

  There was movement over at the gas station, too. It was a run-down old place that looked as if it was closing down. The two ancient gas pumps were sealed off with tape, and the forecourt buildings were all boarded up. It was far from deserted, though. A grubby white gasoline tanker was parked by the pumps, and across the forecourt a group of men were hanging around an old green Land Rover. In the background I could see a couple of motorbikes and a Toyota pickup truck. A man in blue overalls was lowering a heavy hose from the tanker into a fuel tank in front of the pumps, and the men at the Land Rover were watching him. At the back of the tanker, a generator was quietly chugging away.

  “There’s Vince,” said Abbie, looking over at the group of men.

  I didn’t know which one she meant, but I already knew I wasn’t going to like him.

  They all looked as bad as each other.

  “What are they doing here?” Cole said.

  I thought he was asking Abbie about the men at the gas station, but when I glanced over at him I realized he wasn’t even looking at them. He was looking instead at a gathering of trailers in a wasteground field near the spindly woods on the other side of the road.

  “They’re gypsies,” said Abbie.

  Cole glanced at her. “I kind of guessed that.”

  “Oh, right,” she said, slightly embarrassed, “of course. Sorry.” She looked over at the camp. “I don’t really know anything about them. They’ve been living there for about six months now.”

  Cole just nodded, staring at the camp. It was set back from the road, away to our right, at the end of a rutted track. There were eight trailers in all, parked in a r
agged semicircle, and the rest of the field was dotted with cars and trucks—BMWs, Shoguns, pickups, vans. The camp was quietly busy. There was a little kid playing with a dog, a bonfire smoking in the wind, a piebald pony tethered by a trough…

  I liked it.

  It made me feel good.

  I heard a car starting up, and when I looked over at the gas station I saw the Land Rover pulling out of the forecourt and heading up the road toward us. From the way Abbie was watching it, I guessed the driver was Vince. He was a big man. Heavy-headed, like a farmer. His face was ruddy and his hair was thick and brown.

  Abbie turned to Cole. “Are you sure you don’t want a lift?”

  “No thanks.”

  The Land Rover pulled up beside us. Vince rolled down the window and slowly gave Cole a good looking over. When he was done with that, he turned his attention to me. He didn’t seem too impressed.

  “It’s all right, Vince,” Abbie explained quickly as she walked toward the car. “They’re Rachel’s brothers—Ruben and Cole.”

  Vince looked at her.

  She smiled tightly. “It’s OK. They’re just…”

  Her voice trailed off as she realized that she didn’t actually know what we were doing here. Vince frowned at her for a moment—none too pleased—then he looked around and nodded gruffly at Cole. Cole held his gaze and nodded back. Vince glanced at me, this time trying to appear sympathetic, but it didn’t work.

  The truth was still plain to see: He wanted to say the right thing about Rachel but he didn’t know how to do it, and he wanted to know what we were doing here but he didn’t want us to know it.

  He looked back at Cole again. “You staying in Plymouth?” His voice was deep, burred with a West Country accent.

  Before Cole could answer him, Abbie opened the passenger-side door and climbed up into the Land Rover.

  “They’re thinking of staying the night at the Bridge,” she told Vince.

  A flicker of surprise crossed his face as he looked at her. She looked away and fastened her seat belt.

  Vince said to Cole, “The Bridge ain’t up to much.”

  Cole shrugged. “Neither are we.”

  “I don’t know if they’ll have any rooms…” He glanced over his shoulder as a clanging sound rang out from the gas station, followed by a lazy laugh. I looked down and saw the man in blue overalls holding his hand as if he’d bashed it on something. The others were pointing and laughing at him. As Vince turned back and put the Land Rover in gear, his face seemed suddenly welcoming. “Jump in the back if you want,” he said to us. “I’ll give you a lift down the Bridge. If they don’t have any rooms you can come back to our place.”

  Abbie’s eyes widened.

  “Thanks,” said Cole, “but I think we’ll just walk.”

  “You sure?”

  Cole nodded.

  Vince reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a pencil and scrap of paper. “I’ll give you our number,” he said, scribbling on the paper. “Just call us if you need anything—OK?” He passed the scrap of paper to Cole. “There’s plenty of room at our place if you change your mind. No one’ll bother you.”

  Cole slipped the paper in his pocket and thanked him again. Vince gave us a final nod, then glanced over his shoulder, reversed the Land Rover across the road, and sped off down the hill.

  Five

  The light was beginning to fade as we headed down the hill toward the village. There wasn’t any real darkness to the sky, just a peculiar absence of light. It felt as if the day was dying but the night had forgotten to come down.

  In the valley below us, the village was still empty and dead. We’d watched the Land Rover passing through it and disappearing around the corner at the end of the main street, and once it had gone the world had seemed to stop moving again. The gypsy camp was lifeless. The gas station was still. I wasn’t even sure that we were moving. I knew we were—I could hear our footsteps. But even they were shrouded in stillness.

  Sound, silence, light, dark…there was something about this place that deadened everything.

  “What do you think?” Cole said eventually.

  “About what?”

  “Anything.”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I think there’s something weird going on, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “What about Abbie?” he asked.

  “She’s frightened. She doesn’t like us being here. I think she feels guilty about something.”

  “Rachel?”

  “Maybe…I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t mention the raincoat.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “What d’you think of her husband?”

  “What do you think?”

  Cole shrugged. “I don’t trust him. Don’t like him, either…not that it matters.”

  He lit a cigarette and we continued walking in silence.

  As we approached the filling station, I looked over at the gasoline tanker parked by the pumps. It was an old rigid-chassis Bedford from the 1970s, similar to one that Dad used to keep at the yard—small and squat, four wheels at the back, two at the front, laddered steps leading up to the cab. The man in the blue overalls was still struggling with the fuel hose, but the group of men had stopped watching him now—they were watching us instead. There were four of them: a couple of metalheads, a crazyeyed guy about eight feet tall, and a skinny little man in a ratty red suit.

  “Keep walking,” Cole said to me.

  “What?”

  “Just keep walking and don’t look at them.”

  I did as he said, trying not to think about them, looking straight ahead—but I could still feel their eyes on us. They were the kind of eyes you can never get away from: redneck eyes, hillbilly eyes, Neanderthal eyes. Humanimal eyes.

  “What are they doing?” I asked Cole.

  “Nothing…just watching. Don’t worry about it.” He touched my arm. “What do you know about gas tankers?”

  “What?”

  “I was just wondering what that old tanker’s doing over there. It’s not delivering…the place is all closed up. It must be siphoning the tanks, I suppose. What do you reckon?”

  “I know what you’re trying to do, Cole,” I said.

  “I’m not trying to do anything—”

  “Yeah, you are. You’re trying to take my mind off those freaks at the gas station.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Not really.” I glanced up. “You know they’re coming over to us?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

  “No.”

  The four men were crossing the road now, heading straight for us—Red Suit in front, the other three in a line behind him. Cole touched my arm again and we both stopped walking. I knew I shouldn’t stare—it was the worst thing I could possibly do—but I just couldn’t help it. I’d never seen a skinny little man wearing a ratty red suit in the middle of Dartmoor before.

  How could I not stare at that?

  Red Suit was smiling now—smiling at me. His closecropped hair was almost as red as his suit. His teeth were sharp, and his eyes were wrong. I didn’t know how they were wrong, but they were. Everything about him was wrong.

  He stopped in front of us and put his hands in his pockets. The others stopped behind him.

  “All right?” he said, staring at me.

  I didn’t answer. I knew if I said anything my voice would come out all shaky, so I just kept my mouth shut and waited for Cole to do his stuff. I didn’t have to wait very long.

  “You want something?” he said to Red Suit.

  Red looked at him, still smiling. “I’m sorry?”

  “You heard me.”

  Red’s smile began to tighten. “Just saying hello.” He shrugged. “Saw you talking to Vince just now—”

  “Is that it?”

  Red looked confused.

  Cole stepped
toward him. “Is that all you want?”

  “What do you—?”

  “You’re in the way.”

  The smile dropped from Red’s face and his eyes went cold. Behind him, the big guy started blinking like a madman and shuffling forward. Cole ignored him and moved closer to Red, staring hard into his eyes.

  “You’re in the way,” he said again, very quietly. “If you don’t do something about it right now, you’re going to get hurt.”

  Before Red could say anything, the big guy pushed past him and reached out for Cole. Cole hardly moved. He just dropped his shoulder and slammed his fist into the big guy’s throat. The big guy staggered back, his mad eyes bulging, and then Cole hit him again—a short right hook to the head—and he dropped to the ground like a sack. As he went down, choking and moaning and gasping for breath, Cole turned back to Red.

  Red was already raising his hands and backing away, his shocked eyes flicking between the big guy and Cole. “Shit, man,” he said, shaking his head, “you didn’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” Cole muttered, flicking a look at the two metalheads. They were just standing there, staring at the big guy on the ground. His face was turning a weird shade of blue. The metalheads looked up at Cole, saw him watching them, and moved out of the way.

  “Come on, Rube,” Cole said quietly, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  As he led me past them, Red Suit and the metalheads shuffled backward to give us more room. Cole didn’t look at them. I don’t think he was even aware of them anymore. I was, though. As we headed off down the hill, I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my neck.

  “You promised you wouldn’t do anything stupid,” I said to Cole.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You could have killed him.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t, did I?”

  “Christ, Cole. Why do you always have to—?”

  I was interrupted by a sudden shout ringing out from behind us. “Hey! HEY! You listening, breed?” It was Red. We both ignored him and kept on walking. “I’ll see you later,” he called out. “You hear me? Both of you—I’ll see you later…”