Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  There was absolute silence for a moment, a silence with no time and no feeling. I could hear the world ticking inside my head—tick, tick, tick…

  And then Jess said to Red, “Is your boyfriend going to give me that rabbit or what?”

  And that was it. Everything just erupted. It was all so cold and quick and dull that at first I didn’t know what was happening. Nate’s arm came up and I saw something shoot through the air and smack into Jess’s face with a muffled thump, and then she was staggering backward with blood on her face, and the dead rabbit was lying on the ground at her feet. Before I could tell if the blood was hers or the rabbit’s, Skinny had stepped over and leveled his shotgun at my head.

  “On the ground, boy,” he hissed.

  As I lowered myself to the ground, I looked over at Jess and saw her setting her dogs on Red and Nate. Red had turned around and was snatching the shotgun out of Nate’s hands, and as the two dogs raced toward them, Red pushed Nate in front of him and shouted in his ear—“Get the bastards!” Nate swung a booted foot at Finn, and as the lurcher yelped and jumped to one side, Tripe zipped through Nate’s legs and went for Red’s ankles. Red swung the shotgun and cracked the barrel into Tripe’s head, and the little dog went down. It whined a little and tried to get up, but Red hit it again, harder this time, and I heard something crack…and this time it didn’t get up.

  Jess screamed.

  It was a terrible sound, the scream of a torn heart, and it ripped the air to ice.

  Nate was grinning now, stomping after Finn, and Jess was screaming at him and screaming at Finn to get away and screaming at Red that she’d kill him…

  And I couldn’t do anything. I was kneeling on the ground with a shotgun barrel pressed between my eyes. Skinny was shoving it into my head, trying to push me right down into the ground, trying to buckle me, trying to bury me…

  But I wasn’t going down there.

  I strained my head against the pain and kept my eyes fixed on Red as he walked up to Jess with the shotgun in his hands. He had his smile back now. It was tight and hard and flecked with spit. Jess was still screaming at him.

  “You bastard! You shitty red bastard! You’re gonna—”

  “What?” said Red. “I’m gonna what?”

  “You’re dead,” she spat.

  “I don’t think so.” He smiled. “I think you’ll find that crippled rat over there’s the dead one—”

  Jess lunged at him, but he quickly raised the shotgun and aimed it at her head. She stopped right in front of him, staring down the barrel of the gun, and I could feel her torn between fear and anger. She wanted to rip Red to pieces, and she was almost sure he wouldn’t use the gun…but she wasn’t quite sure enough.

  “Go on,” he said to her, “try me—see if I’ve got the guts.”

  She stared at him for a long time, staring painfully into his eyes, and then finally she took half a step back. “I’ll see your guts soon enough,” she said quietly. “I’ll see them ripped from your belly and thrown in the dirt.”

  Red just smiled at her. “Pick up the rabbit,” he said.

  “What?”

  He waved the shotgun at the dead rabbit on the ground. “Pick it up.”

  Jess looked at the rabbit. She wiped some blood from her face, then looked back at Red. “Go to hell,” she told him.

  He smiled at her again, then looked over at Nate. He was stomping around in a patch of tussock grass away to the left of the stone circle.

  Red called out to him, “You got that dog yet?”

  “I think he’s gone,” Nate called back, still looking around. “I lost the bastard.”

  Red shook his head and looked over at Skinny and me. I was hurting now. The barrel of the gun had broken my skin and I could feel a trickle of blood running down my nose. My legs were numb from kneeling in the dirt.

  “Hey, kid,” Red said to me. “What d’you reckon your life’s worth?”

  Even with a gun at my head, I thought it was a pretty strange question, and for a moment I actually found myself thinking about it—What is my life worth?—but the thought didn’t last for long.

  Red said to Jess, “What do you think his life’s worth?”

  Jess shook her head. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you just—”

  “Shoot him,” Red said to Skinny.

  Skinny looked at him. “What?”

  “Shoot the mongrel bastard.”

  Skinny hesitated a moment, then turned back to me and slowly cocked both barrels of the shotgun—click, click. I felt the faint vibrations echoing through my skull.

  “Don’t be stupid—” Jess started to say.

  “Pick up the rabbit,” Red told her.

  “What?”

  “Just do it. Pick up the rabbit and I’ll let the kid keep his head.”

  She looked over at me. We were only a few meters apart, but it seemed like a thousand miles. Our eyes met for a moment, and in that moment neither of us knew anything. Jess looked away and I saw her bend down and pick up the rabbit.

  She held it out to Red. “There—satisfied now?”

  “Eat it,” he told her.

  “What?”

  “Eat it.”

  “I’m not going to—”

  “It’s only raw meat.” Red smiled. “I’m sure you’ve eaten worse. Come on…it’s not a lot to ask for the sake of a little kid’s life, is it?”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I’ll count to three.”

  “Listen—”

  “One…”

  Jess was sweating now, the moisture mingling with the dried blood on her face. Her eyes were sick and confused. As she looked over at me and tried to speak, I suddenly felt my brother’s heart inside me. I couldn’t feel him, but I could feel what made him, and I just didn’t care anymore.

  “It’s all right,” I said calmly to Jess. “Just tell him to piss off. He won’t do anything.”

  Red smiled. “Two…”

  I smiled back at him, then looked up at Skinny and said, “Three.”

  Skinny blinked once, then his finger tightened and he pulled the trigger and a deafening blast ripped through my head.

  Ten

  “The blast came from Red’s gun,” I told Cole later that night. “Skinny’s wasn’t loaded. Red fired his shotgun into the air just as Skinny pulled the trigger.” I paused then, reliving the memory of the moment—the dull metallic click, the simultaneous crack of Red’s shotgun, the nothingness…and then the trickle of warm liquid running down my leg…

  “Christ, Rube,” breathed Cole, “what were you thinking? You could have been killed.”

  “I knew Skinny’s gun wasn’t loaded.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Come on, Cole—they weren’t going to shoot me, were they? They might be dumb, but they’re not stupid. Skinny didn’t have the guts for it, anyway. He couldn’t have killed me to save his life. I could see it in his eyes.”

  “That’s it?” Cole said incredulously. “You could see it in his eyes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit, Ruben…”

  “What?”

  He looked at me, shaking his head. I tried to smile at him, but the look in his eyes was too much for a smile, and I felt instead the moist tingle of tears welling up in my eyes.

  I hadn’t felt anything at the time—not consciously, anyway. I suppose my body must have been shocked at the sudden blast of Red’s gun—otherwise I wouldn’t have wet myself—but there was nothing going on in my mind. Nothing at all. I didn’t have time to think or feel anything. There was no time. No time for flashing lives or final regrets, no time for fears or prayers…

  No time at all.

  Just—BAM!—and everything stopped—the air, the world, the hour, the day—and then moments later everything suddenly started again. I was Ruben Ford. I was kneeling on the ground. My mouth was dry and my pants were wet and my head was bloody and I wasn’t dead. I could see the blu
e sky, the white grass, the granite-gray tor in the distance. I could see the red maniac. I could hear his gunshot echoing around the moor and the sound of his laughter staining the air as he walked away up the hill without even bothering to look back.

  And then Jess was there, kneeling down beside me, tearfully asking me if I was all right, and I was telling her not to worry about me, that I was fine, that she ought to go and see to her dog. And then she was running over to Tripe’s lifeless body and picking it up and crying herself to death.

  We’d walked back in silence. Down the hill, down the Lychway, down the Road of the Dead—adding to its sadness and longing—then through the forest’s cathedral light and out through the stone gateway at the side of the road where our journey had first begun. Here, Jess had gently laid her dog on a sunlit boulder and we’d embraced each other in the dying shadows of the afternoon.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered into my ear. “I should have kept my big mouth shut. I just didn’t—”

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I told her. “There’s nothing to say.”

  She’d kissed me then, touching her lips to the shotgungraze on my forehead, and then she’d turned around and picked up Tripe and walked away down the road with Finn trailing sadly behind her. I’d watched her until she’d disappeared around a corner, then I’d turned around and started walking back to the farmhouse.

  As I headed down the lane, the image of the dead dog began haunting my mind—his sad little body splayed out on the moor, his three legs limp, his mouth hanging open, his dog-brown eyes staring at nothing. The picture was clearer to me then than it had been at the time. In my mind I could see one of his ears moving, and for a witless moment I’d thought of miracles—He isn’t really dead, he’s only stunned, knocked out, in a coma—but of course it was only the wind, breezing over the hill, ruffling his fur.

  I wished I’d done something.

  All I could imagine was putting my hand on his body and feeling the cold stillness of death, and that made me shiver and cry.

  By the time I’d gotten back to the farmhouse, the sun was starting to cloud over and there was a faint scent of rain in the air. The house and the yard looked quiet. There were fresh tire tracks in the yard, but no sign of the Land Rover, so I guessed Vince had come back and gone out again. The front door of the farmhouse was unlocked. I let myself in and went quietly upstairs, not wanting to bump into Abbie, and I’d found Cole waiting for me in the bedroom.

  “Where’ve you been?” he said impatiently as soon as I opened the door. Then almost immediately he saw the cut on my head, and suddenly his voice went cold. “Who did that?”

  I’d told him everything then—what happened with Abbie, how I’d met Jess, what she’d told me about the village and the hotel and John Selden, and then all the stuff about Red and Nate and Skinny—and now here we were, sitting together on the bed, my eyes filling up with tears and Cole’s filling up with a cold, calm rage.

  “Did they do anything else?” he asked me. “Did they hurt you or anything?”

  I shook my head. “They were just trying to scare us. I don’t think anything much would have happened if Jess hadn’t started making Red look stupid. He’s a psycho, Cole. He killed her dog without even thinking about it.”

  Cole nodded. “But he didn’t hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “Did they say anything about Rachel?”

  “Not really. Red made a crack about ghosts or something, but that was about it. They were just doing the usual stuff, you know—dumb threats, scary looks, taking the piss. Jess got the worst of it. I mean, they really laid into her.”

  “Yeah, well”—Cole shrugged—“she’s a gypsy. She’ll have been through it all before.” He looked at me. “If she’s anything like the rest of the Delaneys, she’s tough enough to deal with it.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “The Delaneys? Only by name. Dad knew some of the Essex Delaneys a few years back—I think they lived on the same site for a while. They’re a big clan, though, so I’m not sure how close they are to Jess’s family.”

  He got up and went over to the window and lit a cigarette. I watched him for a while, wondering if I ought to tell him what Jess had said about Dad and the Dochertys and Billy McGinley, but I decided that we both had enough to think about just now without delving back into the past and stirring up all the bad stuff again. It wasn’t all history, though—and I knew we’d have to talk about it sometime soon. But not right now.

  “How did it go in the village?” I asked Cole.

  “It didn’t,” he said, puffing moodily on his cigarette. “No one’s talking. No one would even come near me, let alone talk to me. It was like I was a leper or something. I managed to ask a few questions in the post office, but it didn’t do me any good.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “It was like talking to a bunch of bloody zombies.”

  “Did you go up to the gypsy camp?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, it was OK. They didn’t talk much, but I didn’t really expect them to. They knew all about us, though—me, you, Rachel, Dad. They know who we are.”

  “Jess told me that her uncle used to watch Dad fight,” I said. “He told her you punched like a Ford.”

  “Yeah, I know—I talked to him.” Cole frowned. “Well, actually, he did most of the talking. I just listened.”

  “What did he talk about?”

  “Fighting, mostly. I kept trying to ask him stuff about Rachel, but all he wanted to talk about was bare-knuckle fighting—the good old days, the big fights, the famous names…all that kind of stuff.” Cole shook his head. “There’s something a bit weird about him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know—I couldn’t work it out. I mean, he’s all right…I’m not saying he’s whacko or anything. There’s just something a bit strange about him. It’s like he hasn’t got any grip on reality.”

  “Jess said he used to fight.”

  “Yeah, I know. He told me all about it.”

  “Maybe he took too many punches.”

  “Maybe…”

  “So what’s so strange about that? He’s just a punchy old guy with a few screws loose—there’s plenty of them around.”

  “Yeah, I know—but he’s the guvnor, Rube. He’s the one they all look up to. When I first got to the camp and started asking around, all I kept getting was—‘Best see the guvnor, mate…best ask Reason about that…’—and they all kept looking over at the old man’s trailer. Then, when he finally came out and invited me in, they all backed off and left us alone.” Cole looked at me. “He’s not quite right in the head, Rube. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd for a ‘guvnor’?”

  “Maybe that’s why they’re here,” I suggested.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said it yourself—there’s nothing here for them, is there? No work, nowhere to sell anything, no fairs. Maybe that’s what happens when you listen to a whacked-out old fighter like Reason—you end up in the middle of nowhere.”

  “No,” said Cole, “there’s more to it than that.”

  “Like what?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure there was something he wasn’t telling me.”

  “About Rachel?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure…”

  “Do you think the rest of them know anything?”

  “I’d be surprised if they didn’t, but I don’t think they’re going to tell us. They don’t want to get involved. I don’t blame them. They’ve got enough crap of their own to deal with, without getting dragged into ours.”

  We were silent for a while then, both of us just thinking things over, weighing things up, trying to work out if anything meant anything.

  After a couple of minutes, Cole lit another cigarette and started gazing out the window again. I went over and stood beside him. The afternoon light was beginning to pale now, the lowering sun casting fade
d shadows across the distant hills. The yard below was empty and quiet.

  “So,” I said to Cole, “you didn’t find out anything in the village, then?”

  “Only that it stinks.”

  “No one said anything about this hotel complex?”

  “No.”

  “Or Henry Quentin?”

  “No…”

  “And no one mentioned John Selden?”

  Cole looked at me. “Yeah, all right, Rube—I get the point. You found out everything and I found out nothing.”

  I smiled at him. “Don’t feel bad about it.”

  His face remained blank, but I could see a half-smile in his eyes. “How’s your head?” he asked me.

  “It’s all right…” I started to say, brushing the graze on my forehead, but then I realized what he meant. And I guessed he was right: I might have found out a lot more than he had, but it’d cost me a lot to find it. “Yeah, well,” I told him, “at least I didn’t come back empty-handed.”

  “You nearly didn’t come back at all.”

  I lowered my eyes as the sudden realization hit me again—that I might not have come back, that I could have ended up as another cold body on the moor, another Tripe…another Rachel. The thought was so frightening it made me feel sick. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was knowing how close I’d come to putting my family through hell again. I knew what that hell was like, and I couldn’t bear thinking of anyone going through it for me—because of me.

  “Hey,” said Cole, resting his hand on my shoulder, “don’t worry about it. You did all right.”

  I looked at him.

  He smiled at me. “If I wasn’t such a heartless bastard, I’d be proud of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  We looked at each other then, and something passed between us—something that hadn’t been there for a long time. It was an intimacy, a closeness beyond our everyday closeness, and it reminded me of when we were kids, when all we had was each other. It was a good feeling.