Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  “You all right, Rube?” Cole asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Here,” he said, passing me the pistol, “watch them for a second—OK?”

  As I took the pistol from his hand and aimed it unsteadily at the back of Nate’s head, Cole turned around and reached over the backseat. I heard him fumbling about in the dark, and then a moment later he turned around again with a shotgun gripped in his hands. I’d spent enough time staring into its barrel to recognize it as Skinny’s. Cole broke it open, checked it was loaded, then snapped it shut again. Skinny flinched at the sound.

  Cole looked at me, nodding his head at the pistol in my hand. “You all right with that for a bit longer?”

  “Why?” I said. “Where are you going?”

  He glanced at Nate, then back at me. “Keep the gun at his head. If he moves or makes a sound, shoot him—all right?”

  Before I could answer, Cole had opened the door and gotten out of the car. He walked around to the front, opened the passenger door, and leveled the shotgun at Skinny.

  “Get out,” he told him.

  Skinny didn’t move, he just cowered in his seat and looked up at Cole with a desperate whiteness in his eyes.

  Cole nudged the shotgun closer to his face. “You want me to break the rest of your teeth?”

  Skinny shook his head.

  “Get out,” Cole repeated.

  Skinny hesitated for a moment, then started climbing painfully from the car. Cole stepped back, keeping him covered with the shotgun, then directed him around to the front of the car. The rain had stopped now, and as Skinny moved awkwardly into the beam of the headlights, his bloodstained face appeared stark and pale against the backdrop of the thick black sky. When Cole told him to stop, he seemed to just hang there in the middle of the road, floating like a wounded ghost—blood-streaked, shivering, his body angled with fear.

  Cole broke open the shotgun and held it out to him, letting him see the chambers. Skinny didn’t have to look to know that the gun was loaded, but he couldn’t help himself—his eyes darted down and he saw the truth of the two brass cartridges glinting dully in the beam of the headlights. When Cole snapped the shotgun shut and took a step forward, Skinny’s eyes flashed up at him, frozen in absolute fear. He could see Cole’s empty heart in his eyes, and he knew what it meant. He knew without doubt what was coming. We all did.

  But we were all wrong.

  I watched in disbelief as Cole lowered the shotgun, turned it around in his hands, then offered it, stock first, to Skinny.

  “Take it,” he told him.

  All Skinny could do was stare wide-eyed at the shotgun.

  “Take it,” Cole repeated.

  Skinny looked at him, his fear clouded with confusion. Was it a trick? A joke? Some kind of game? Skinny glanced at the gun again, then back at Cole, then his hands started reaching out cautiously for the gun. He didn’t want to take it, but he was too scared of Cole to do anything else. His hands were shaking as they slowly reached out, and his eyes kept darting from the gun to Cole, expecting him to snatch it away any second. But he didn’t. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there, perfectly still, watching and waiting. Skinny got one hand on the gun, then the other, and then Cole let it go.

  Skinny had the shotgun.

  Still staring at Skinny, Cole took half a step back. “All right,” he said quietly, “let’s see you do it.”

  Skinny frowned, half-smiled, then shook his head in confusion. The shotgun hung loosely in his hands.

  “Start counting,” Cole told him.

  “Whuh…?” said Skinny.

  “Raise your gun and start counting. You can count, can’t you? Just count to three and pull the trigger.”

  “Yeah, but…look…” Skinny tried smiling again. “Look…I didn’t mean nothing with your brother…we was just—”

  “I’m not going to stand here forever,” Cole told him. “Either you start counting or I will. Three seconds—you or me?”

  Skinny shook his head. “I don’t wanna—”

  “One…” said Cole.

  Skinny looked down at the gun in his hands, his eyes lost in fear.

  “Two…”

  “No, look…please…I’m sorry—”

  “Three.”

  Skinny dropped the gun and stepped back in almost hysterical surrender—bowing his body, raising his hands, shaking his head from side to side and mouthing silent nothings. Cole just stood there, watching him. I felt for Skinny for a moment—feeling his weakness, his shame, his loneliness—but I was also remembering how I’d felt when he’d had me on the ground with the shotgun pressed to my head, and although I didn’t really blame him for that, there was no getting away from the fact that he’d done it. He’d made his choice. He’d sided with Red. And now he was paying the price for it.

  He’d fallen to his knees now, and as Cole picked up the shotgun and turned his back on him, he buried his head in his hands and started crying. I guessed he knew that nothing would ever be the same for him again. He’d been humiliated, shamed, his mask stripped bare, and—worst of all—Nate had witnessed everything. And Nate and Skinny weren’t friends. They had no loyalties. They just did things together, like animals in a pack. And if Nate could make himself look better by telling everyone else what had happened—and I was pretty sure that he thought he could—he wouldn’t think twice about doing it. The story would soon spread, getting worse with every telling, and that’d be it for Skinny—he wouldn’t be worth shit to anyone.

  As Cole opened the passenger door and got back in the car, I looked over at Skinny again. He was still kneeling at the side of the road, still shaking and quivering in the dark…

  He was as dead as if Cole had just shot him.

  “Take us to the Gormans’ place,” Cole told Nate.

  Without so much as a glance at Skinny, Nate turned the car around and headed back the way we’d come. I was tempted to look back at Skinny again, but I was afraid of what I might see, so I just closed my eyes and hoped that Cole had finished for the night.

  I should have known better.

  Twelve

  As we left the moor behind and headed back to the village, the worst of Nate’s fear gradually left him. He was still nervous and edgy, but his hands had stopped shaking and he was driving with a lot more confidence than before. I suppose he was thinking the same as me—that Cole had spent all his anger on Skinny. From Nate’s point of view, it wasn’t a bad assumption to make. He hadn’t been hurt, he hadn’t been shamed, and he was on his way to the relative safety of the Gormans’ farmhouse. Cole wasn’t going to do anything there, was he?

  If I’d been in Nate’s shoes, I’d probably have felt the same. But I wasn’t. And—like I said—I should have known better.

  “Vince’s place, yeah?” Nate said to Cole as we drove up through the village.

  Cole nodded, his eyes staring blankly through the windscreen. Nate gunned the car and swung it past Quentin’s house, and then we were speeding along the winding lane through the dead-dark shadows of the pine forest.

  I realized I still had the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, and my fingers ached, so I placed it carefully on the seat beside me. When I looked up again, Cole had turned around in the passenger seat to face me.

  “Everything all right?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Any trouble?”

  “No,” I said. “No trouble.”

  He kept his eyes on me for a little while longer, then he turned back and stared through the windscreen again. He looked tired. I saw Nate flick a glance at the shotgun resting in his lap.

  “Watch the road,” Cole told him.

  Nate turned back and we drove on in silence, slicing through the moorland darkness like a silent beam of cold white light. I gazed through the window, imagining things I couldn’t see—the night-world of the forest, the ring of stones, the thorn tree, the Road of the Dead. I imagined the ancient mourners carrying their coffins across the moor—trudging wear
ily through the desolate night, cold and tired and shrouded in silence—and I realized that they were all dead now…every single one of them. They’d been dead for centuries. All that was left of them now was bones and dust and bits of nothing. They’d lived and struggled and fought and prayed…

  And all for what?

  For hope? For God? For nothing?

  Go home, Ruben, Rachel had said. Let the dead bury the dead.

  I still didn’t know what she meant.

  When I opened my eyes again, the car was slowing down and we were approaching the turnoff to the farmhouse. In the beam of the headlights I could see the gateway to the forest and the boulder where Jess had laid her dead dog in the sun.

  “Pull up over there,” Cole told Nate.

  Nate stopped the car, and Cole turned around to face me.

  “Can you make your own way back to the house from here?” he said. “I don’t want Abbie and Vince to see the car.”

  “What about you?” I said. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Not yet.” He glanced at Nate. “I want a quiet word with him. We’re going for a little drive. It won’t take long.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No way—”

  “I’m not going to do anything, Rube. I’m just going to talk to him.”

  “I don’t care what you do—you’re not doing it without me.”

  As Cole looked at me, blinking slowly in thought, I could see that Nate was starting to look nervous again. I didn’t blame him. The idea of having a quiet word with Cole in the middle of the night was enough to make anyone feel nervous—even me.

  “All right,” Cole said to me.

  “All right what?”

  “You can come with us. But you have to let me do things my way.” He glanced at Nate again, then back at me. “Whether you like it or not—OK?”

  I nodded…but something didn’t feel right. I could feel something false, and I wondered if Cole was just putting on an act to scare Nate—get him scared, get him talking. Maybe the show with Skinny had all been part of it, too.

  Was Cole that smart?

  I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “We need to swap places, Rube,” he said, struggling to adjust the shotgun in his hands. “I can hardly move in this seat.” He opened his door, then turned around and looked at me. “You get in the front and I’ll get in the back.”

  “OK,” I said, opening the door.

  “Give me the pistol first.”

  I passed him the pistol and got out of the car and started moving around to the front, but before I got there the passenger door suddenly slammed shut, followed almost immediately by the rear door, and I heard them both being locked.

  “Hey!” I shouted, bending down to look through the windows. Cole had the pistol rammed into Nate’s throat and was yelling at him to drive. “Hey, Cole!” I cried out, rapping on the window with the flat of my hand—bam, bam, bam. “Hey! HEY! What are you doing?”

  The engine roared and the car sped off in a shower of dirt and gravel, leaving me stumbling around at the side of the road, staring after it like an idiot.

  “Shit,” I muttered, angrily brushing the dirt from my clothes. “Shit.”

  The farmhouse was quiet when I got back. A light was on in the front room, and as I let myself in and crept upstairs I could hear the sound of a TV turned down low. I could sense the wary presence of Abbie and Vince behind the closed door—waiting, listening, wondering—and I wondered what they were wondering about. The same things, different things…the same things, but in different ways?

  I went to the bathroom, then I went into the bedroom and shut the door and lay down on the bed and thought about Cole.

  I knew what he’d done to me, and why he’d had to do it, and I was pretty sure I knew what he was going to do with Nate. It was all the same thing, really. He needed information, and he knew how to get it, and he knew he needed to be on his own to do what he had to do. I knew it, too. If I’d gone with him, I would have brought some sense of righteousness with me. I might not have wanted to, but I would. And then Cole wouldn’t have been able to do anything. Whatever it was he intended to do—and I knew he’d do whatever it took—he could only do it in an emotional void: no right, no wrong, no good, no bad, no feelings at all—just do it.

  My brother knew how to turn off his heart.

  I wanted to turn everything off, too. Just press a button—click—and shut myself down. Turn off my heart, turn off my mind, turn off my body—just lie there, senseless, like a dormant tree in winter, waiting for the spring to return. Or maybe I could wait even longer…

  I don’t believe in life after death, but I know for a fact that matter doesn’t cease to exist: It just changes. Everything that gives us life just goes somewhere else when we die. Our atoms, our molecules, our particles—they all just drift away into something and somewhere else. Into the ground, into the air, into the rest of the universe. Rachel is dead, and she’s never coming back, but in a thousand years’ time her atoms will be everywhere—in other people, in animals, in plants…in dormant trees waiting for the spring to return.

  If only I could wait for a thousand years…

  It was a nice thought, but that’s all it was—just another useless thought. I had a lot more of them over the next hour or so, but none of them changed anything. I was still there, still waiting, still lying on the bed. Abbie and Vince were still downstairs, still watching TV. Rachel was still dead. And Cole was still somewhere else, still doing what he did.

  My stupid head couldn’t change anything.

  It must have been around midnight when Cole came back. I heard a car coming down the lane, and when I looked out the window I saw the Astra rolling into the yard, its headlights lighting up the barn and the outhouses. It pulled up in front of Vince’s Land Rover and Cole got out, leaving the headlights on. In the beam of the lights I could see the shotgun in his hand and the pistol in his belt and the heartlessness in his face, and I knew that he was still in the void. It was frightening. Even the night seemed afraid of him. As he crossed over to the Land Rover and wrenched open the hood and peered inside, the darkness shivered all around him.

  I couldn’t see what he was doing under the Land Rover’s hood. He was bent over the engine, reaching out for something, studying something, getting hold of something…

  “Hey!”

  The voice came from the front door.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  It was Vince. I looked down and saw him coming out of the house and marching across the yard toward Cole. I couldn’t see his face, but his walk looked furious, and his voice was getting louder by the second.

  “Hey, Ford! FORD! I’m talking to you…Hey! Hey! HEY!”

  Cole didn’t react. He just kept on doing what he was doing—straightening up, calmly examining the tips of his fingers, angling his hand in the Astra’s headlights to get a better look. It wasn’t until Vince had stomped up to within half a meter of him, and was yelling right into his face, that Cole finally acknowledged his presence. Even then he barely looked at him. He just rolled his shoulder and whipped up the shotgun and hammered the barrel into Vince’s head.

  I ran downstairs and got to the hallway just as Cole was dragging Vince’s body through the front door. I stopped and stared. Vince wasn’t moving. He’d gone down hard when Cole had hit him, and now his eyes were still closed and his head hung lifelessly to one side, and I was beginning to fear the worst. He was dead…Cole had killed him…

  But Cole didn’t seem to care. As Abbie came running downstairs, screaming and crying and throwing herself at her husband, Cole just lugged Vince’s body into the front room, dropped it onto the sofa, and calmly left her to it.

  She was hysterical—sobbing, crazy, out of control—and I was starting to lose it, too. If Vince was dead…that was it. That was the end. If Vince was dead, Cole was as good as dead, too. He’d be locked up forever. Lost. Gone. Dead.

  Just like everyone else.

  L
ost.

  Gone.

  Dead.

  But I guess that Cole had a lot more faith than me—faith in himself, faith in his strength, faith in the thickness of Vince’s skull—because ten minutes later Vince was sitting up on the sofa, grunting and groaning and holding a packet of frozen peas to his head.

  And no one was lost.

  And no one was gone.

  And no one was dead.

  Abbie was still hysterical, though, pacing around the room like a crazy woman, spitting and cursing at Cole. “Christ, what’s the matter with you? You could have killed him, you stupid bastard. You’re worse than a bloody animal…”

  Cole’s face showed nothing. He was standing at the window, the shotgun still in his hand, and he was keeping a close eye on Vince. He didn’t think Vince would do anything, but he wasn’t going to take any chances.

  “I want you out of here tonight,” Abbie hissed at Cole. “Right now. Just get your stuff and piss off back to where you belong.” She stared at him with bulging eyes. He ignored her. She shook her head and turned her back on him. “I’ve a good mind to call the police—”

  “Call them,” Cole said.

  She stopped and turned around. “What?”

  “Call the police. It’s about time you told them the truth.”

  Abbie froze, her eyes suddenly cold with fear. She tried to blink it away, but the damage was already done.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, trying to sound angry again.

  “OK.” Cole shrugged. “Let’s call the police, then.” He began moving across the room toward a telephone on the wall. “Do you want me to call an ambulance while I’m at it?”

  Abbie hesitated, darting a glance at Vince, but he was still too groggy to know what was happening. Cole picked up the phone and started dialing.

  “Wait,” Abbie told him.

  Cole stopped dialing, but he kept the phone in his hand.

  “Are you ready to start talking?” he said to Abbie.