Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  I looked at Cole. “He called you breed.”

  “What makes you think he meant me?”

  “He said he’ll see us both later.”

  “I expect he will.”

  As we moved on down the hill, I realized that we had another audience now. Over by the rutted track that led across to the gypsy camp, three figures were watching us quietly: a stocky old man with a broken nose, a wide-eyed little girl of about twelve, and an older girl with a baby in her arms. Two dogs were sitting beside the girl with the baby—a lurcher and a three-legged Jack Russell. The girl was about the same age as Cole. Pale green eyes, raven hair, silent and still and beautiful. I looked at Cole. He was staring intently at her, and I could feel something moving inside him. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it didn’t feel right to feel it, so I quickly left it alone and got out of his head.

  As we approached the three gypsies, they continued watching us. Their eyes were impossible to read.

  “Did they see you hitting the big guy?” I asked Cole.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think they know who we are?”

  “Probably.”

  We were just about level with them now. I could hear the baby making quiet gurgling noises. I could see the shine of the girl’s jet-black hair. I could feel her eyes studying Cole as he nodded his head almost imperceptibly at the stocky old man. The old man didn’t move for a second, then he, too, nodded his head.

  And that was that.

  We passed them by without a word and continued on down to the village.

  The way Cole said it, it sounded quite simple. “We’ll check in to this Bridge Hotel, get something to eat, then first thing in the morning we’ll start looking around the village.”

  I thought about asking him what we were supposed to be looking around for, but I decided to keep my mouth shut. I was too tired and hungry to think about it now. All I wanted was to get some food inside me and go to bed.

  Unfortunately, things didn’t quite work out that way.

  The trouble started on the narrow stone bridge that led into the village. We were about halfway across, and I was just telling Cole how the bridge was made from huge slabs of granite, and how it had probably been here since the fourteenth century, and he was doing his best not to yawn, when suddenly we heard the sound of a car roaring up fast behind us. We both turned around and saw the Toyota pickup racing toward us across the bridge. The big guy was slumped in the passenger seat and Red Suit was at the wheel, grinning like a lunatic as he put his foot down and headed straight for us. My belly lurched and my legs turned to ice, and for a fleeting moment I thought we were dead. I really thought we’d had it. And the weird thing was, it didn’t seem to bother me. I might have been petrified, but I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t anything, really. It wasn’t until Cole grabbed my arm and yanked me back onto one of the stone supports at the edge of the bridge, and the car flashed past us in a hail of laughter and shouting voices…it wasn’t until then that I started to feel anything at all. And even then I didn’t know what it was.

  It might have been fear, or shock, or sickness…

  Or it might have been some kind of love.

  Cole had his arms around me, and we were balanced on the very edge of a narrow pillar of granite about ten meters above a fast-flowing river. The shallow waters looked cold and coppery. Cole had his back to the river and was struggling to keep his balance. I went to step back onto the bridge, intending to give him some room, but he suddenly grabbed hold of me again and pulled me back.

  “What—?” I started to say.

  But then I heard it—the sound of motorbike engines—and I looked up to see the two metalheads screaming their bikes down the hill toward us.

  Cole started edging around me, his eyes fixed coldly on the approaching bikes.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  He didn’t answer me, but it didn’t matter. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to get back on the bridge. He was going after the bikes. I shuffled around to block his way. He shuffled back. I blocked him again. He stopped shuffling and looked at me, his eyes telling me to get out of the way.

  “Don’t be stupid, Cole,” I said. “Stopping them’s not going to help us, is it?”

  The bikes were starting to cross the bridge now. Cole looked up at them. I watched his eyes as they roared toward us, swerved halfheartedly, then straightened up and sped off into the village.

  After a couple of long seconds, Cole turned back to me.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You can let go of me now.”

  I hadn’t even realized I was holding him.

  Five minutes later we were standing outside the Bridge Hotel. It was a big old stone building about halfway up the main street. White paint was flaking off the walls, revealing large patches of dull gray granite underneath, and the windows were thick with dust. The sign over the door showed a faded picture of the bridge we’d just come across. THE BRIDGE HOTEL, it said, FINE WINES & BEERS, FAMILY DINING, ACCOMMODATION AVAILABLE. A blackboard in the window advertised LIVE FOOTBALL!!, and a sign on the door said NO TRAVELERS.

  “Looks nice,” I said.

  Cole grunted.

  The streetlights were on now, but there wasn’t much to see. The village was deserted. The streets and the pavements were empty. A lot of the houses had boarded-up windows and doors, and the only shop we’d seen so far was a closed-down newsagent’s with a whitewashed window.

  “You ready?” Cole asked me.

  I looked at him. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “We need somewhere to stay,” he said simply.

  “I know, but have you seen what’s over there?”

  He glanced over at the Toyota pickup and the two motorbikes parked in front of the hotel.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “What about that?” I said, nodding at the NO TRAVELERS sign on the door.

  Cole just shrugged. “What about it?”

  I looked at him.

  “We’re not Travelers, are we?” he said. “We’re halfbreeds. It doesn’t say anything about half-breeds, does it?”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Nothing…nothing at all.”

  “Good—let’s get going, then.”

  The main door of the hotel led us through into the stagnant air of a dimly lit corridor. A door on our right went through to the bar, and a pair of double doors on the left opened up to a dining room—or what used to be a dining room. There were still a few tables dotted around, and one or two dusty chairs, but apart from that, the room was as empty as everything else around here—the cigarette machine behind the door, the reception desk at the end of the corridor, the leaflet rack on the wall. All empty. Even the noise from the bar next door sounded empty—the loud voices, the chinking glasses, the drunken laughter. It was a noise filled with nothing, and I didn’t like the sound of it at all. But when Cole opened the door and we both walked in, and everything suddenly went quiet, I liked that even less.

  It was a narrow rectangular room with a high white ceiling and a grimy red carpet. A long wooden bar spanned the length of the wall to our left, and the rest of the room was taken up with a dozen or so tables and chairs. Sky Sports flickered on a widescreen TV fixed high on the wall at the back. The bar was packed, and most of the tables were full. There was no emptiness in here. Just a room full of staring faces, all of them staring at us. Old men, young men, old-looking young women—there were all sorts. All different, but all the same—sour and dead and unwelcoming.

  I scanned the faces and spotted Red Suit almost immediately. He was sitting at a window table with a couple of hoods in tight T-shirts and an older man with amber eyes and a Quaker’s beard. Red was smiling at us. The bearded man looked as if he’d never cracked a smile in his life.

  All in all, it was a pretty scary situation. The only good thing about it was the presence of a uniformed policeman sitting at the end of the
bar. He didn’t look like much of a policeman—his face was flushed, his eyes were glassy, he was smoking a cigarette and guzzling beer—but I guessed he was better than nothing.

  I’d soon find out I was wrong.

  The staring faces didn’t bother Cole. He just stood there for a moment or two, casually looking around, then he unbuttoned his jacket and started moving across to the bar. I followed closely behind him. There wasn’t a lot of room at the bar, and the people standing there didn’t make any effort to get out of our way, but Cole somehow managed to find his way through without having to push too hard. He even said “Excuse me” once. Behind the bar, a man in a white shirt was leaning against the till, drinking whiskey and smoking a cigarette.

  “We need a room,” Cole said to him.

  “You what?” the man said.

  “We need a room.”

  Across the bar, someone laughed.

  “Who’s we?” the barman asked Cole.

  “Me and my brother.”

  The barman glanced at me, then back at Cole. “Is that him?”

  Cole nodded.

  The barman shook his head. “We don’t take kids.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Cole said slowly. “That’s why I’m asking.”

  The barman drained the whiskey from his glass, took a drag on his cigarette, then stabbed it out in an ashtray. Along the bar, someone called out to him. “When you’re ready, Will—couple of pints.”

  Will nodded and started filling a glass. As Cole stared at him, I realized that the bar was beginning to fill up with noise again. People were talking. People were drinking. People were laughing.

  I moved up behind Cole and whispered in his ear. “Come on,” I said, “let’s get out of here.”

  He didn’t move, just kept on staring at Will the barman. He watched him fill the beer glasses and pass them over. He watched him take the money and put it in the till. He watched him pass over the change.

  Then he said, “Hey, mister—I’m talking to you.”

  As Will stopped and stared at him, the room went quiet again. The only thing I could hear was the sound of my thumping heart.

  Will said to Cole, “Listen, boy, I just told you—we don’t take kids. You want a room, that’s fine. But the squit over there ain’t staying here.”

  He looked at me again, and for some strange reason I smiled at him. I don’t know why…maybe it was because I’d never been called a squit before. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I kind of liked it.

  “How old are you, kid?” Will said to me.

  “What?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty-six,” I heard myself say. “I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ve got a very rare glandular condition that makes me look perpetually young. It’s a genetic disorder—been in the family for years.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then shook his head and turned back to Cole. “Go on,” he said, jerking his head at the door. “Out—both of you.”

  “I want a drink,” Cole said.

  “Try somewhere else.”

  “I kind of like it in here. There’s a nice atmosphere.” He pulled a £20 note from his pocket and dropped it on the counter. “I’ll have a pint of Stella.” He turned to me. “What do you want, Rube?”

  “A pint of Malibu.”

  Cole turned back to Will. “Pint of Stella and a pint of Malibu.” He pushed the £20 note across the bar. “And have one yourself.”

  Will didn’t move. I saw his eyes flick to one side, and I looked over to see the uniformed policeman rolling along the bar toward us. He was bald and fat—fat head, fat mouth, fat belly. His face was glowing with sweat, and he had a cigarette clamped in his mouth. As he stopped in front of us, I could smell the beer and smoke on his breath.

  “All right, son,” he said to Cole, “how about stepping outside for a minute?”

  Cole turned around and looked him up and down. “Who the hell are you?”

  The policeman put his hand on Cole’s shoulder. Cole looked at it. The policeman said, “You’re not much of a one for listening, are you?”

  “Get your hand off—”

  “Shut up. What were you told this afternoon?”

  “What?”

  “What did Pomeroy tell you?”

  “He didn’t—”

  “I’ll tell you what he didn’t tell you. He didn’t tell you to come down here and start kicking the shit out of people, did he? He didn’t tell you to come in here and start taking the piss, either. No, what he told you was to keep out of trouble and leave everything to us. That’s what he told you. Remember?”

  Cole said nothing.

  The policeman smiled at him. “Now, I know you’re under a lot of strain right now, what with your sister and everything, but you’ve already been warned against taking things into your own hands, haven’t you?” Still staring at Cole, he took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of his mouth. “So, listen,” he said, “here’s what I want you to do. There’s a phone box at the end of the High Street. You take your little brother down there and you call yourself a taxi. You wait at the phone box, you get in the taxi, you tell the driver to take you to Plymouth. When you get to the station, you get on the train and go back to London. You do all that for me and I’ll forget about everything else—OK?”

  Cole looked at him for a long time, weighing all the options. I knew what he wanted to do—he wanted to beat the shit out of him, crack his fat head open, smash his smiling face to a pulp—but Cole wasn’t stupid. He knew there was a time and a place for everything. And this wasn’t it.

  He stared at the policeman for a little while longer, letting him see the truth, and then he just nodded.

  “Good,” said the fat man, letting go of his shoulder. “Off you go, then.”

  As we walked out of the bar, I could feel the man with the Quaker’s beard watching Cole closely. Everyone was watching him closely—but the man with the beard was different. He knew what Cole was. He knew what he was bringing. He could already feel the storm coming down.

  Outside the hotel, I watched in silence as Cole checked his cell. From the way he stared at the display and snapped the phone shut, I guessed he didn’t have a signal. He looked at me. I got my phone out of my bag, looked at it, and shook my head.

  “Shit,” he said.

  We started walking toward the phone box at the end of the street. It wasn’t far. Nothing was far around here. You could walk the entire length of the village in about half a minute. The terraced cottages on either side of the street were gray and cold and lifeless, and I counted three more that were boarded up. The large stone house at the end of the street wasn’t boarded up, though. It wasn’t that big, but it seemed to tower over everything else, glowering down at the rest of the village like a stern gray sentinel in the dark.

  I followed along behind Cole, gazing around at the night. It had really come down now. I could almost feel it, draping itself over the world. It was a different kind of night from the nights I was used to—colder, darker, bigger. It invaded your senses. I could smell the drifting odors of the surrounding moorland. I could hear the secret sounds of the hills. And when I looked up, all I could see was an ocean of stars in a pure black sky, like a million gleaming eyes. I’d never seen so many stars. I wanted to show Cole. I wanted to stand together with him and look up in silence, wondering at the meaning of it all…

  But I knew better than that. Cole doesn’t hold with that kind of thing. Stars are just stars to him—they’re there, and that’s it. What’s there to wonder about? And besides, even if he had wanted to look, he wasn’t in the mood for stars right now. He was boiling up inside. I could tell by the way he was walking—his jaw set tight, his eyes burning holes in the air. It was best not to disturb him. He’d controlled himself in the bar just now, but it wouldn’t take much for him to turn around and go storming back in and rip the place apart.<
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  So I watched the stars on my own.

  When we got to the phone box, Cole reached into his pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper that Vince had given him earlier. As he unfolded the paper and stared at the phone number, I could feel his anger simmering down and a sense of resentment stumbling up. He didn’t want to have to do this. He didn’t want to ask for anything. And I guessed if I hadn’t been there, he probably wouldn’t have bothered. If he’d been on his own, he would have just stolen a car and driven off somewhere and spent the night asleep in the back.

  “Do you want me to do it?” I asked him.

  He looked at me.

  “Here,” I said, taking the scrap of paper from his hand. “Have you got any change?”

  He dug some coins from his pocket and passed them over. I went into the phone box and dialed the number. Vince answered the phone. He sounded really abrupt at first, but as soon as I’d told him who I was and what had happened at the hotel, his tone quickly changed and he suddenly became really friendly.

  “Where are you now?” he asked.

  “In the phone box at the village.”

  “All right—just wait there. I’ll come and pick you up. I’ll be about five minutes—OK?”

  “Yeah, thanks…that’s really kind—”

  He hung up the phone before I could finish.

  I looked out at Cole. He was just standing there, smoking a cigarette, looking at nothing. I put some more money in the slot and called home. Mum answered almost immediately.

  “How’s it going?” she asked. “Is everything OK?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. We’re staying at Abbie Gorman’s place tonight. We met her in Plymouth.”

  “How’s Cole?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “No—”

  “Don’t lie to me, Ruben.”

  “I’m not—honestly. Everything’s fine. He’s being really good.”

  I heard her sigh. She knew him better than that.

  “How are you?” I asked her.

  “I’m OK.”

  “Is Uncle Joe there?”

  “Yeah, he’s staying over for a couple of days. When do you think you’ll get back?”