Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “You could wait in the car—”

  “Don’t be stupid. They’re probably watching us right now. If you leave me here, they’ll just come out and grab me as soon as you’ve gone. I won’t stand a chance without you. And anyway, what if you go in on your own and then you don’t come out? What am I supposed to do then?”

  Cole didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to. I was only telling him what he already knew.

  “OK,” he said after a while, “but just stick close to me—all right?”

  “I’ll be in your shoes.”

  “Here,” he said, pulling the pistol from his belt and passing it to me. “It reloads automatically. The safety catch is off. All you have to do is point it and pull the trigger. If you have to shoot someone, aim for their chest. And don’t hesitate. Don’t warn them, don’t give them a second chance, don’t say anything—just shoot them. OK?”

  “Yeah…”

  He reached over the backseat and picked up the shotgun. I passed him the two cartridges.

  “Is that all there is?” I asked him as he loaded the gun.

  He nodded, snapping the shotgun shut.

  “Are you sure? Maybe there’s more cartridges in the back—”

  “I’ve already looked.”

  “Do you think two’s enough?”

  “It’s all there is.” He looked at me. “Are you ready?”

  “I suppose…”

  “OK—let’s go and crack some coconuts.”

  I felt faintly ridiculous—walking up a village high street in the middle of the night with an automatic pistol weighing heavily in my pocket. It just didn’t fit. It was all out of place and out of time and out of my control. It didn’t feel right. Not to me, anyway. To Cole, though, it felt perfect. The shotgun in his hand, the cool air on his skin, the rocksteady ground beneath his feet…everything to him was just how it was. All he could feel was a straight-line emptiness in his head, and that was all he wanted.

  “Trees on the left,” he said quietly.

  “What?”

  “The trees to the left of the house, at the top of the drive…there’s someone behind them.”

  We were nearing the driveway now. It climbed quite steeply toward the house, and at the top, between the side of the house and a narrow pathway, I could just make out a clump of tall fir trees. As I squinted through the darkness, I saw something move, but I couldn’t tell what it was. It was just a vague movement. A dim shape.

  “Stay on my right,” Cole told me as we started up the driveway. “Keep your eyes on the house.”

  We moved up the drive, squeezing past the parked cars, and I tried to keep my eyes on the house. A light glowed dimly in a downstairs window, but apart from that, the building was dark. I couldn’t see anyone watching us, but the top of my head was tingling with vulnerability.

  I put my hand in my pocket and felt the cold steel of the pistol. It felt good now. Reassuring. Not quite so ridiculous anymore.

  We continued up to the top of the driveway and stopped in front of a large wooden door set in an arched stone porch. A gentle breeze was whispering through the trees in the garden, and I could smell the faint scent of pine in the air. The house was quiet. Everything was still. Somewhere in the distance a night bird screeched, and as the eerie call faded into the emptiness of the moor, I suddenly heard something else. Something closer. Rustling leaves. A footstep. Then a croaking voice.

  “I been looking for you.”

  I turned around and saw Big Davy coming out from behind the fir trees at the side of the house. He wasn’t wearing the neck brace anymore, but he sounded as if he was still suffering. He was holding his head at an awkward angle, too—walking slightly lopsided. But he was just as big as before, and his eyes were just as crazy.

  “You got a permit for that?” He grinned, nodding at the shotgun in Cole’s hand.

  Cole said nothing, just watched him approach.

  “See, the thing is,” he started to say, then he doubled over, coughing painfully, and put his hand to his throat. “Shit,” he wheezed, still rubbing his neck. He coughed violently again and spat on the ground, then he looked up and started lumbering toward Cole, his streaming eyes full of hate. “I been thinking about you,” he rasped, “I been thinking what I’m going to—”

  Cole moved fast and hit him hard, smack in the throat, just like before. Davy went down without a sound, not even gasping for breath this time, just choking silently in the dirt.

  Cole turned his back on him and stepped up to the front door. “Get behind me, Rube,” he said. “Watch my back.”

  I did as he asked, standing behind him, facing the street. Big Davy was still writhing on the ground, his mouth wide open, begging for air. His eyes were bulging in panic and pain.

  “He doesn’t look too good, Cole,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Davy.”

  “Don’t worry about him, just keep your eyes open for anyone else. You ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cover your ears.”

  I put my hands over my ears. The shotgun boomed and the air exploded in a sudden rush of splinters and smoke. When I turned around, the front door was hanging open and there was a big jagged hole where the lock used to be.

  “You could have knocked,” I said.

  He wasn’t listening. With the shotgun at his hip, he was staring intently through the open door at the dust-filled gloom of a high-ceilinged hallway. There were no lights. No people. Just dark and dust and silence.

  Cole opened the shotgun and took out the empty cartridge and dropped it to the floor. He waited a moment, then bent down quietly and picked it up again. Another moment, then he loaded the spent cartridge back into the shotgun and loudly snapped it.

  I didn’t get it at first, but then I realized that if anyone was listening they’d assume he’d just reloaded.

  “Got your pistol?” Cole said to me.

  I pulled it out of my pocket. “Yeah.”

  “I might need it. If I ask for it, just give it to me—OK?”

  “Right.”

  “Stay behind me.”

  He stepped into the doorway and reached around the wall, searching for a light switch. After a couple of moments a pale light snapped on, revealing the gloomy interior of the hallway. It was long and high and faded with age: old walls, old carpets, old furniture. Dark portraits lined the walls—faces, figures, long-dead ancestors—the paintwork cracked and greasy. On the left of the hallway was a broad flight of stairs with scarred wooden railings and banisters. There was a door at the end of the hallway, and two more along the right-hand wall. They were all closed.

  “Nice,” I said, looking around. “Very cozy.”

  “Shut up, Ruben,” Cole said.

  “I’m nervous.”

  “I know. Just keep it to yourself, I’m trying to listen.”

  I listened with him, but there wasn’t much to hear—a faint sigh of wind from outside, my thumping heart, bits of wood dropping off the door.

  Cole reached back and touched my arm and we stepped cautiously through the doorway together. Although the door was wide open, the outside world suddenly seemed a long way away. We were inside now. In this house. This was our world for now.

  As we edged along the hallway, my eyes seemed to see everything. Every little detail. The patches of damp on the walls. The threadbare carpet. The bare plaster showing on the ceiling. I could see cracked timbers and cables and sagging lead pipes. Muddy bootprints. Pinched cigarette ends. A browned apple core. There was a faint but insistent smell of gas in the air, and the air itself was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I could taste it. It tasted of stale breath and flesh and a dearth of blue sky, of inertia and gasoline and brick-dust.

  “Wait,” said Cole, holding out his hand and stopping.

  I stopped behind him. We were about halfway along the hallway, outside one of the doors. Cole was staring at it, listening hard, with the shotgun leveled at t
he handle.

  “Pistol,” he whispered.

  I passed him the gun. He took it with his left hand, keeping the shotgun aimed at the door. I heard him take a breath and steady himself, and I thought he was about to burst through the door, but the next thing I knew he was spinning around—away from the door—and aiming the pistol at the top of the stairs. Floorboards creaked, and I saw a slight movement behind the railings on the landing. Cole pulled the trigger and the pistol cracked dully in the silence. Blue flame flashed, a railing splintered, and a man’s voice yelped in pain.

  “The next one goes in your head,” Cole called out.

  A figure appeared slowly from the shadows. It was the Teardrop Man. A trickle of blood was running down his cheek from a splinter wound under his eye. As he raised his hands and moved cautiously down the stairs, Cole passed me the shotgun.

  “Watch the door,” he said. “If anyone comes out, shoot them.”

  As I covered the door with the shotgun, Cole turned his attention to Teardrop. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs now, wiping the blood from his face.

  “Come here,” Cole told him.

  Teardrop hesitated. “I was only—”

  “Shut up. Come here.”

  He edged closer to Cole, his hands held out in surrender.

  “Where’s Quentin?” Cole asked him.

  Teardrop glanced up the stairs, nervously licking his lips.

  Cole leveled the pistol at his head. “Don’t make me ask you again.”

  “Upstairs,” he said shakily. “Back room.”

  “Who’s with him?”

  “Red and Bowerman.”

  “What about the rest of them?”

  “They’re all over…”

  “Where? How many?”

  Teardrop nodded at the door I was covering. “There’s two in there, two in the next room, two in the kitchen—”

  “Where’s the kitchen?”

  “End of the hall.”

  “Any more?”

  “Upstairs—front room.”

  “How many?

  “Three.”

  “Outside?”

  “Four or five, maybe more.” He grinned, his confidence coming back. “It’s all covered. You won’t get out.”

  “Any weapons?”

  “Henry’s got his revolver. Bowerman’s got a rifle. Some of the others are carrying knives. You won’t—”

  Cole cut him off, cracking the pistol into his head, and he slumped to the floor and lay still.

  Two down, I thought to myself, only another dozen or so to go. Six downstairs, five upstairs, more out the back…I just couldn’t see how we were going to make it. I looked at Cole. He had no doubts. No doubts, no thoughts, no worries. His mind was empty. He wasn’t thinking at all.

  “There’s too many of them,” I said to him. “You can’t take them all out. What are we going to do?”

  “Get Quentin,” he said simply. “Once we’ve got him, the rest of them don’t mean anything.”

  I stared at him, wondering how he could think so clearly without having a thought in his head.

  He looked back at me, his eyes strangely content. “It’s only a game, Rube. You win or you lose. It’s not worth worrying about.”

  As I followed Cole up the stairs, keeping the hallway covered with the shotgun, I did my best not to worry about anything. But it wasn’t easy. What worried me the most was that I couldn’t stop worrying. What if this happens? What if that happens? What if I do something wrong?

  “If anyone opens a door,” Cole had told me, “just shoot. Don’t bother aiming at anything. Just close your eyes and pull the trigger.”

  It sounded so simple, but everything about it scared me to death. What if I killed somebody? What if I froze? What if I messed everything up because I was too busy worrying about messing things up?

  “All right?” Cole asked me.

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  We got to the top of the stairs and paused on a cramped little landing. At the far end of the landing was another closed door.

  Cole turned to me. “Can you still see the hallway from up here?”

  “Just about.”

  “Keep it covered. Don’t move till I call you in.”

  I sat down on the top of the stairs and watched the hallway. It was still empty. Still scary. I looked over my shoulder at Cole. He’d moved along the landing and was standing in front of the door, securing the pistol in the back of his belt.

  “The hallway, Rube,” he said gently, without turning around. “Just watch the hallway.”

  I looked down at the hallway again. The doors were still closed, but I could feel something happening now. The silence had changed. It was a silence about to be broken. I tightened my grip on the shotgun. I felt something move. Then one of the doors slowly creaked open—and I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.

  The silence exploded as the shotgun roared, and as the deafening blast ripped through the air I was vaguely aware of another loud crash behind me—the sound of Cole smashing down the door—and then everything erupted in a hail of noise and confusion: shouting, screaming, grunting, thumping, moaning. The sound of a pistol rang out, and I was desperate to turn around and see what was happening, but I forced myself to stay where I was and keep my eyes on the hallway. Dust was rising from a crater in the wall, and the remains of an oil painting lay scattered all over the floor, but there was nothing else to see. There were no bodies. The doors were all closed. The shotgun blast had done its job.

  And now, I realized, the gun was empty. Just a useless lump of metal in my hands. And that didn’t feel good. I tried to convince myself that no one else knew it was empty, so it didn’t really matter, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Neither did the silence behind me.

  It was too still now, like the hush that falls after a battle, and suddenly I didn’t want to turn around anymore. I didn’t want to see what was happening. I didn’t want to see that Cole was hurt, or worse. Because if I didn’t see it, it wouldn’t be true.

  “Are you going to sit there all day?”

  His voice ran through me like a surge of fresh blood, and when I turned around and saw him standing in the doorway, it felt so good I wanted to cry.

  “You all right?” he said.

  I nodded, unable to speak for a moment. All I could do was stare at him. He was breathing heavily, and he had a slight cut over his eye, but apart from that he looked fine. The room behind him was dim and dusty, the stale air grayed with a drift of gunsmoke. A pale yellow light shone from a table lamp, showing heavy gray curtains draped over the windows, a cumbersome leather sofa, and lots of dark wooden furniture. One of the metalheads was sprawled facedown on the sofa, the other one was curled up in a ball just beyond the door. Across the room, one of the bikers from the bar was sitting on the floor with his back against a heavy oak door. His teeth were bared and he was clutching his leg, trying to staunch the flow of blood from a bullet wound in his thigh. From the amount of blood on the floor beneath him, I guessed he wasn’t succeeding.

  I looked at Cole.

  “He had a knife.” He shrugged. “I didn’t have any choice.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They’ll be all right.”

  I nodded, looking over at the biker again. He didn’t look good. His eyes were dull. His face was white against the dark oak door, and I wondered if he was dying. And if he died, what would that mean? Bones and dust, I thought, bits of nothing. Let the dead bury the dead…

  A floorboard creaked, ripping the thoughts from my head, and then Cole was suddenly pulling me back from the stairs and snapping a shot at someone in the hallway. Wood thwacked, and I heard running feet, and then Cole let off another quick shot. Something shattered and a door slammed shut, and then everything went quiet again.

  “We’d better move,” Cole said, still looking downstairs. “They’re not going to run forever.”

  He turned around and helped me to my feet and told me to
watch the stairs, then he crossed over to the wounded biker and dragged him away from the door. The biker moaned in agony, cursing violently under his breath, but he was too weak to resist. Cole dumped him against the wall, then turned around and picked up a switchblade from the pool of blood on the floor. He wiped it clean, snapped it shut, and put it in his pocket.

  “All clear?” he asked me.

  I looked downstairs. “Yeah.”

  He beckoned me over. I crossed the room and joined him by the door. He guided me to one side and we both stepped back against the wall, out of harm’s way.

  “All right?” he asked me.

  I looked at him, trying to unscramble his feelings. There were shadows in his mind, echoed images of his intent: faces, figures, movements, lines, angles, actions, motions, shapes…

  None of it made any sense to me. I had no idea what he was going to do. But I knew it didn’t matter; all I had to do was trust him.

  I nodded at him.

  He nodded back, paused a second, then stepped away from the wall and launched a kick at the door. The air shattered and the door burst open with a sudden dull crash, and then Cole was just standing there in the splintered light, waiting for the dust to clear.

  Fourteen

  In the steel of Cole’s eyes I could see the faces of Bowerman, Quentin, and Red. Quentin was at the back of the room, sitting rigidly at a large oak desk, and Red was to the right of him, lurking in the alcove of a high arched window. Bowerman was standing in the middle of the room, pointing a rifle at Cole. He was drunk—his body swaying from side to side, the rifle in his hands tracing circles in the air.

  When he spoke, his voice was slurred and ugly.

  “Cole Ford,” he said, “I’m arresting you for possession of a firearm with criminal intent. You do not have to say any thing…ah, shit. Just gimme the gun, boy. Come on…don’t be a twat. I’m a police officer, for chrissake.” He laughed stupidly. “You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

  Cole raised his arm and fired the pistol. I heard a dull thwack, followed by a surprised yelp of pain, and then a metallic clatter and a heavy thump as Bowerman dropped his rifle and fell to the floor. Cole glanced down at him, then raised his eyes and stared deeper into the room. I could feel the amber eyes staring back at him through the dusted light.