Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  I could feel the reddened clay clinging to the soles of his shoes.

  The cold mist of rain.

  The smell of damp cloth.

  “We’d better get going,” says Cole.

  Reason nods, drains the last few drops of his drink, stubs out his cigar, starts buttoning his coat. Jess has moved away from the sink and is perched on the edge of a mauve sofa, sipping from a glass of water. Hot and cool in black jeans and a thin black cardigan, her shadowed eyes are quietly angry.

  “What am I?” she says. “Invisible?”

  “Who said that?” Reason grins.

  “It’s not funny. You’re totally ignoring me here.” She glances at Cole. “Both of you. You’re treating me like I don’t exist.”

  Cole doesn’t know what to say. It’s not his business. It’s not up to him whether Jess comes with them or not. It’s between her and Reason. But then again…it is his business. He wants to be with her, but he doesn’t want her getting hurt. He wants her to come, but he doesn’t know if he needs her or not. She might be useful; she might be a liability. He needs all the help he can get, but he can’t afford to take any risks.

  He doesn’t know what to say.

  “It’s not my business,” he says.

  Jess looks at him for a moment, then turns to her uncle. “I’ve got a right to be there,” she tells him. “Red killed my dog. It’s my right to see him pay for it.”

  Reason doesn’t answer immediately. He carries on buttoning his coat, staring thoughtfully at the floor, his steady old eyes showing nothing. Then he looks up, suddenly somber, a sad smile weighing down his face. He gazes fondly at Jess for a while, then turns to Cole again.

  “What d’you think, boy?”

  “I think she’s right,” says Cole, staring openly at Jess. “She’s as much a part of this as anyone.”

  Jess looks back at him, and the heat of the trailer moves in the silence between them. They have a yearning to be somewhere else, somewhere alone, somewhere together. They can both see it—a place of soft grass and whispers and wide-open skies—but they both know it’s not going to happen. It’s another place, another time, another life.

  “Come on,” says Reason, breaking into the moment. “If we don’t go now, the two of you’ll be crying at the moon forever.” He picks up the sawed-off shotgun and throws it across to Cole. Cole catches it, glad to have something to distract him from his embarrassment. “You all right with that?” Reason asks him.

  Cole hefts the ugly-looking gun in his hand. “Yeah,” he says. “It’ll do.”

  Minutes later, the trailer is empty and the red Mercedes is coasting down the dark moorland road toward the village. As the car glides slowly into the valley, the shimmering blue light of the gypsy camp fades into the background, and the horizon up ahead begins to glow with a bloodred flicker of heat.

  Eighteen

  I’ve never been so far outside myself as I was that night. It was almost as if my physical self had ceased to exist. It was still there, still tied to a post in an empty barn, still hurting, still scared, still tired, but it wasn’t really me any more. I’d become something else. I’d risen from the flesh of my body, up through the timbered roof, up into the boundless skies, rising higher and higher and higher, until eventually my other self was nothing more than a scrape in the ground below. I’m floating. Drifting. Riding the air like a spiderling borne on the wind. I have no control over anything. I have no say in where I’m going, or what I can see, or what I can feel, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Wherever I am, whatever I’m seeing and feeling, that’s it: That is the world.

  There simply isn’t anything else.

  There’s Quentin’s house, cold and gray and glowering in the dusk. The stone walls seem to grow from the ground, the lightless black windows scowling down at the village like the sockets of staring dead eyes. There’s the splintered front door, hastily boarded up. There’s a growing whisper of wind in the trees, the electric scent of a coming storm. There are vehicles in the driveway—the gas tanker, the Toyota pickup, motorcycles parked in the shadows—and away from the house, away from the lights, there are gypsies waiting in cars. There’s the Shogun, the BMW…there’s a Renault, a Jeep, an Audi. There are others, too. And back at the house, there’s the straw-haired man in the greased coat and boots and the two younger men from the gypsy camp.

  The straw-haired man is leading the others around the side of the house, keeping in close to the walls, moving slowly, cautiously, quietly. The Straw Man has a pair of bolt cutters in his hand. The other two have lengths of lead piping tucked into their belts.

  At the corner of the house, the Straw Man pauses and turns around. “Stay here and wait for the call,” he whispers to one of his companions. “Watch the door and the windows.” He touches the other one on the arm and gestures toward the top of the house. The other one looks up and nods. The Straw Man pats his shoulder and they both move off around the corner into the cold stone shadows.

  Inside the house, a room downstairs has been turned into a makeshift hospital. The curtains are closed and the lights burn brightly. The air smells of whiskey and blood. The wounded are lying wherever they can—on dining tables, on sofas, on blankets on the floor. There’s Ron Bowerman with his gunshot shoulder. Big Davy—crushed windpipe. The metalheads and Teardrop—three broken skulls. It was Quentin’s idea to keep them all here. “There’s too many for the hospital,” he’d told Red earlier this morning. “If we take them all in, there’s going to be questions. Get Jim Lilley out here.”

  And now Jim Lilley is here, in this room, dressed in a long white doctor’s coat, drinking whiskey and tending to the biker with the gunshot leg. He knows the biker might die, and he knows there’s nothing he can do about it. If he was a doctor, there might be a chance. But he’s not a doctor—he’s a vet. And for the last five years he’s been using and illegally selling a drug called ketamine, an animal anesthetic. And Henry Quentin knows that. Which is why he’s got Jim Lilley out here. Because he knows there’s nothing he can do about it.

  Quentin himself is sitting at his desk in the room upstairs, waiting for the phone to ring. Red is watching him from a leather armchair across the room. The two heavy bikers standing guard at the door are part of a gang that Quentin has called in from Plymouth. There are two more downstairs, another two in the garden. Red doesn’t rate them. They’re mercenaries, only in it for the money. Not that he cares. As far as he’s concerned, the whole thing’s gone to shit anyway. Henry’s lost it. Gone too far. Too complicated. Too soft. He should’ve just whacked the breeds and buried them on the moor.

  “What are you looking at?” Quentin says to him.

  “Nothing,” Red grins. “I was just wondering…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I was just wondering.”

  Quentin glares at him, sick of his dumb smiling face, then he turns his attention back to the phone.

  “He won’t be there yet,” Red says.

  “I know.”

  “The train’s not due in for another ten minutes.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not going to be early.”

  Quentin looks up. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  Red just grins again. “You really think Ford’s gone?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “You sure?”

  Quentin’s face remains blank, his voice stone cold. “He got on the train. He hasn’t gotten off. We’ve had him watched all the way. He’s gone.”

  “What if he comes back?”

  “He won’t come back.”

  Red jerks his head at the bikers by the door. “So what are they for? If Ford’s not coming back, why do we need them?”

  Quentin says nothing. His resinous eyes are burning hard into Red now, warning him not to go any further, but either Red is too stupid to notice or he just doesn’t care anymore.

  “And another thing,” Red says. “What are you going to do with the kid? You can’t just let him
go—”

  The telephone rings, cutting him off. Quentin looks at it for a moment, then calmly picks it up.

  “Yes?”

  The room is quiet. I can hear everything: the faint tinny voice coming from the telephone; Quentin breathing, listening to the voice; Red sniffing, wiping his nose…and then a strange muffled click from outside, and suddenly the tinny voice has gone.

  “Hello?” Quentin says into the phone. “Hello?”

  His eyes narrow at the silence.

  He frowns. “Hello?”

  “What’s up?” says Red.

  Quentin continues staring at the receiver for a while, then a slow realization comes over his face and he carefully puts down the phone and turns toward the window.

  The Straw Man pauses halfway down the drainpipe and glances back up at the top of the house. The rain has started, filling the air with silver-black needles. The thickly painted drainpipe is slick and greasy, getting harder to grip. But it doesn’t matter. The job is done. The severed telephone cable is flapping loosely in the wind, tapping lightly against the guttering.

  The Straw Man looks down and drops his bolt cutters to his waiting companion, then he turns back to the drainpipe and clambers down the last few meters to the ground.

  “You see anything?” he says, drying his hands on his coat.

  His companion shakes his head.

  The Straw Man nods and looks at his watch. “Two minutes,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  His companion tosses the bolt cutters into some bushes and passes the Straw Man a sawed-off rifle. The Straw Man checks it, glances up at the window again, then they both move off around the back of the house.

  “Has Vince got a radio?” Quentin asks Red.

  “Why?”

  Quentin looks through the open window for a moment, gazing down into the rain-swept dusk, then he leans forward and glances up at the severed telephone cable. There’s no anger or surprise in his face, just sheer calculation. He steps back from the window and turns to face Red.

  “Has Vince got a radio? Yes or no?”

  “No.”

  “What about Sim?”

  Red shakes his head. “What’s going on?”

  “The phone’s dead. Someone just cut the line.”

  “Shit,” says Red, getting to his feet and moving over to the window. “Did you see who it was?”

  Quentin says nothing. He sits down at his desk and stares straight ahead, thinking hard. Red pulls back the curtain and checks the telephone wire, then glares down through the window, searching the ground below. His mouth is tight, his eyes wired. He can’t see anything through the rain.

  “Shit,” he says again, closing the curtains and turning back to Quentin. “It’s Ford, isn’t it?”

  “Get out to Vince’s place,” Quentin tells him. “Get the boy and take him down to the Bridge.”

  Red stares at him. “Is Ford back in London or not?”

  “It doesn’t matter where he is—just go. Use the basement door. Leave your car out front and take the Transit.” He throws Red some keys. “It’s parked in the road around the back. I’ll meet you at the hotel in a couple of hours.”

  The basement door leads Red out into a narrow alleyway at the far side of the house. Hidden from view behind a thick growth of bramble and knotweed, he moves briskly through the teeming rain toward a wrought-iron gate at the end of the alleyway. The gate is bolted and topped with barbed wire. As Red unlocks it and steps through into a moorland wasteground, a high-pitched whistle suddenly pierces the air. Red pauses, looking back at the house. He hears muffled thumps, running feet, shouting voices. He keeps listening for a moment, then he grins to himself and moves off into the wasteground, heading for the road at the back of the house.

  I’m lost for a while. Drifting out of control. I’m everywhere and nowhere, and everything is tumbling around me. I’m in Quentin’s house. Upstairs, downstairs. Upstairs, in his room, looped in the moment of his ancient voice—Get out to Vince’s place…get the boy and take him down to the Bridge…get the boy and take him down to the Bridge…take him down to the Bridge. I’m downstairs, floating through chaos, through bedlam, through a frenzied clamor of violence and hatred, through savagery and pain, through lead pipes and knives and clashing heads. Gypsy men are born to fight. I’m the Straw Man, beating on a biker in the kitchen. I’m a black-haired gypsy kid, cracking a hood with a rock. I’m Teardrop, lunging for the kid with a scalpel. I’m the fight in their hearts. I’m lost in it. I’m drifting out of control…

  I’m in the barn, cowering in the crash of the storm. I’m cold. I’m shivering. It’s dark. I’m scared.

  Red is coming to get me.

  I’m broken.

  Red is coming.

  I’m seeing dead rabbits and dogs and thorn trees and stones and twitching rats with sharp yellow teeth…

  And then suddenly they’re gone. All my pictures, all my places, all my different worlds…everything has fused into one. One place, one time; right here, right now. I’m back in my brother’s heart.

  The chaos has stilled and the house is quiet. The fight is over. All that’s left is the murmuring sound of the aftermath—groaning bodies, scuffling feet, sniffs and coughs, lowered voices. The house is gradually emptying. Most of Quentin’s men have already gone, scattered into the night, and now the gypsies are leaving, too. There’s nothing left for them to do. They’ve fought Quentin’s men, they’ve run them off, they’ve locked the wounded in the room downstairs and posted a guard outside. They’ve searched the house from top to bottom, looking everywhere for me, and they’ve kept Henry Quentin in the room upstairs, waiting for Cole to arrive.

  And now he’s here.

  With me in his heart.

  He’s standing in front of Henry Quentin with the sawed-off shotgun leveled at his head. Reason is on his right, smoking a cigar, and Jess is on his left. Quentin is still sitting at his desk. Still calm, still upright, still smiling under his skin. Right now he’s studying Reason and Jess—looking them over, weighing them up—like a farmer examining livestock. His eyes wander up and down Jess, then he nods to himself and focuses on Reason.

  “You surprise me, Mr. Delaney,” he says. “I expected a lot less of you.”

  Reason says nothing, just stares at Quentin and spits a shred of tobacco from his tongue.

  Quentin turns to Jess. “If it’s Red you’re after, my dear, I’m afraid you’re too late—you just missed him. I’m sure he’ll catch up with you soon, though.”

  Jess looks back at him for a moment, then turns to Cole. “Red’s car is still here, but there’s no sign of him anywhere. He must have gotten out through the basement.”

  Cole nods.

  Reason says, “He’ll have gone for your brother.”

  Cole nods again. All this time he hasn’t taken his eyes off Quentin. I can feel his finger on the trigger of the shotgun, and I know he wants to pull it. He wants Quentin’s blood. He wants him dead.

  But he wants me more.

  “Where is he?” he says, raising the shotgun to his shoulder.

  Quentin stares past the barrels at Cole, his eyes as steady as ever. “I believe we’ve been through this before.”

  “My brother—where is he?”

  “Oh, your brother,” says Quentin. “I’m sorry, I thought you meant John Selden. Are you not looking for Selden anymore?”

  This is it for Cole. This is enough. Enough games, enough words, enough holding back. Enough of everything. No more. It’s time to finish it.

  He says to Reason, “Go downstairs and see if you can find out where Red went. I don’t expect anyone knows, but ask them anyway. Let me know if you get anything—OK?”

  Reason nods.

  Cole looks at Jess. “Go with him.”

  “What about you?” she says. “What are you going to do?”

  Cole holds her gaze for a moment, then looks away without answering. She stares at him for a while longer, then Reason takes her gently by the arm and gui
des her toward the door. As they leave the room, she glances back at Cole again—her eyes full of feelings I don’t understand—and then she’s gone, her footsteps fading down the stairs.

  Cole feels nothing. As he backs across the room and locks the door—keeping the shotgun on Quentin—I can feel his heart turning black. He’s emptying himself, voiding himself of everything, including me. And by the time he’s walked back over and stopped in front of the desk, I can barely feel him at all.

  Quentin just sits there, looking up at him, totally unmoved.

  “You’re not going to kill me,” he says, almost smiling.

  “No,” Cole tells him. “I’m not going to kill you. But you’re going to wish that I had.”

  The feelings died completely then. I floated with Cole for a few more moments, time enough to see him taking hold of the desk and pulling it away from Quentin, but I wasn’t with him anymore. I wasn’t feeling anything. I was just floating, just looking down, just watching things happen. And then that died, too, and Cole was gone, and I wasn’t floating anymore, and I wasn’t looking down—I was tied up in a rain-soaked barn, looking out through the cracked black walls at the headlights of a Transit van bursting into the yard outside.

  Nineteen

  Icould hear the van lurching and skidding across the yard, bouncing up and down in the rain-sodden mud, and I could see the glare of its headlights strobing through the cracks in the barn wall, illuminating the loft in a blaze of flashing white lights, and just for a moment I was floating again…floating back through the lights…through the cracks in the wall…out into the airless black air of the yard. And in that moment I could see everything. I could see Red in the windscreen of the Transit van—his grinning face, his grubby red suit, his wrong eyes glazed in mad concentration. I could see the headlights sweeping around the yard, lighting up flashes of static rain. I could see the barn, the outhouses, the mutant shack. Bins and boxes and empty sacks. I could see the storm-drenched moorland beyond the yard, the wind-whipped trees, the ash-black fields, the hills in the distance rising from a plain of darkness…