Road of the Dead (17 page)

“Make sure you don’t kill him,” the preacher man says.

And the shotgun comes down like a piston, and everything goes black.

T
he first thing I see when I open my eyes is a big brown rat gnawing away at the sole of my shoe. He seems quite content, for a rat. His eyes are twinkling. His nose is twitching. His teeth are yellow. I don’t want to disturb him, he’s only chewing my shoe, but I think I’d better. Just in case.

But when I try to flick my foot at him, nothing happens.

My foot doesn’t work. My
feet
don’t work. I don’t know where they are. I know
where
they are—they’re right there, at the end of my legs, where they usually are—but my legs don’t seem to recognize them.

I don’t get it.

I don’t
get
it.

I’m closing my eyes now, trying to work out what’s going on. But I can’t seem to think straight. My head hurts.
My wrists hurt. I feel sick. My shoulders are aching. My arms are paralyzed.

Maybe I’m dreaming.

But I know I’m not. And when I open my eyes again, the rat’s still there. I watch him for a while, intrigued by his chewing action, then I turn my attention to my legs. They seem to be stretched out in front of me. I think about that for a while—
Why are my legs stretched out in front of me?
—and eventually I come to the conclusion that I must be sitting down. And that makes me think—
If I’m sitting down, I must be sitting
on
something
. So then I turn my mind to the hard brown stuff I can see on either side of my legs, and it doesn’t take too long for me to realize what it is: It’s wood. A wooden floor. Floorboards.

Now
I’m getting somewhere.

Summary: I’m sitting on a wooden floor with my legs stretched out in front of me, and a rat is chewing my shoe.

I still don’t want to disturb him, but they’re old shoes, and the soles aren’t all that thick, and if I leave him chewing much longer he’ll be through the shoe and into my socks and then he’ll start on my feet, and I don’t want that. So I think I’d better try flicking my foot again…

And this time it works. My foot moves. Not very far, and not very fast, but it’s enough. Ratty jumps back and scurries away, leaving a small cloud of dusty air in his wake. And now I’m just staring at the dust. It’s fine and old, like the dust of an unused room. There are bits of straw in it, too.

Straw?

I seem to remember seeing bits of straw somewhere before. Somewhere? Where? On the floor? I look down at the floorboards again. Bare wood. Dusted wood. Flecks of yellow on faded brown.

Floor.

OK, so that’s the floor. What about the ceiling?

And then I’m throwing back my head to look up at the ceiling, but before I get to see anything a roar of thunder rips through my skull and the veil of blackness comes down again.

I only passed out for a second or two, but when I opened my eyes this time, everything had suddenly become clear. I knew what had happened. I still didn’t know where I was, or how I’d gotten there, but at least I could remember what had happened. I remembered being in Quentin’s house, and Cole getting beaten up, and Red hitting me with the shotgun. I could feel the blunt gash on the back of my head. It was bleeding again. Fresh blood. Fresh pain. It hurt like hell, but that was OK, because now I knew what had happened.

When I’d looked up at the ceiling, I’d cracked the gash on my head against the thick wooden post behind my back, the post I was sitting against…

The post I was tied to.

My arms weren’t paralyzed. They were just tied so tightly behind my back I couldn’t feel them anymore.

I sat there for a while, staring at nothing, just slowing my heart and trying not to panic. It wasn’t easy. I
wanted
to panic. I was tied to a post, my head felt weird, I couldn’t move my arms, I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where my brother was, or even if he was still alive…

God, I wanted to see him. I’d never wanted anything so much in my life. I wanted to scream and shout and cry like a baby. I wanted him to be here. I wanted to know he was all right. I wanted him to tell me that
I
was all right, that everything was going to
be
all right…

I
wanted
him.

I
needed
him.

But he wasn’t here. And I couldn’t feel him. And crying like a baby wasn’t going to help, was it? So I didn’t. I just sat there for a while, staring at nothing. And when I was sure I wasn’t going to cry, I started looking around again.

And this time I kept the back of my head well away from the wooden post.

I took my time, letting my senses soak up everything around me—the floor, the walls, the roof, the air, the light, the emptiness, the silence—and when I was done I was pretty sure I knew where I was.

I was in a large wooden building with a timbered roof. The roof was cracked. The walls were cracked, too, and painted black. There were no windows or lights, but a pale
dawn light was seeping in through the cracks, and I could just about make out the shapes of things: a hatchway in the floor on the far side of the building, discarded sacks, loose piles of straw.

I was in a barn.

The air was calmed with a cool height of silence, and when I thumped my foot on the floorboards, the sound echoed emptily beneath me.

I was in the loft of a barn.

I knew it.

And I knew there had to be dozens of barns around Lychcombe, and they probably all looked the same, but there was something about this one that told me I’d been here before. I could feel the memory of myself in the air, smiling stupidly in the emptiness beneath me. I could see myself standing at the foot of a ladder, looking up at the hatchway, guessing that there probably wasn’t anything up there, and deciding not to bother.

I’d been here before…

I knew it.

I was in the barn at Abbie and Vince’s place.

I
knew
it.

Not that it made much difference; I’d known where I was all along. I was tied to a post—
that’s
where I was. And after I’d spent the next ten minutes twisting my arms and flexing my fingers and gouging the skin off my aching wrists, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere, either. The
wooden post was bolted to the floor. It reached all the way up to the roof. It was at least six inches square, and as tough as a cast-iron girder. I couldn’t see my hands, but I was guessing they were bound with plastic handcuffs. Policeissue, probably, courtesy of Mr. Bowerman. Trying to escape was a waste of time and energy.

So I didn’t bother.

Instead, I closed my eyes and shut down my mind and put all my energy into opening up every cell in my body. I might not know if Cole was still alive or not, but if he was, I’d find him. Wherever he was, I’d find him.

I had to.

It was all I could do.

I don’t know how long it took—I wasn’t aware of the passing time—but when I finally felt Cole stirring within me, the sun had risen and the dusty air inside the barn was dappled with the light of a golden morning.

C
ole is just waking up. He’s been unconscious for a long time, and it’s taking him a while to come to his senses. He knows he’s outside, he can feel the open air on his skin. It’s cold. Very cold. Cold and damp and earthy. His body is stiff and racked with pain and he can feel a sickness that he knows is fear, and it’s the only fear he knows—his fear for me.

“Ruben?” he says weakly. “Ruben…where are you?”

I’m here
, I tell him.
I’m here…

But he can’t hear me. He’s miles away. He can’t feel me. All he can feel is the pain and the cold and the fear. He can deal with the first two, but the fear is something else. He can’t stand it. He doesn’t want it. It doesn’t do him any good. So he closes his eyes and snuffs it out.

He lies still for a while, taking stock of himself, checking the damage. His pockets have been emptied. No guns,
no switchblade, no wallet, no nothing. His clothing is muddy and torn. He has a broken finger on his right hand, a hairline fracture in his right wrist. His left hand is OK. Badly bruised legs. Feet OK. Two, maybe three cracked ribs. Twisted shoulder. Broken nose, couple of busted teeth, split lip. Nasty gash over the right eye. Swollen cheek, swollen eyes, swollen head. Lumps, scratches, bruises, more cuts…

He’ll live.

He cracks open his eyes and winces at the pale morning sunlight. He’s lying on his back, looking up at the sky. He can see grass, red earth, a wood louse. The back of his head is damp.

He’s lying in a ditch.

He’s alive.

I try calling out to him again—
Cole…Cole…can you hear me?
—but he still doesn’t answer. He’s feeling the cold now, the stagnant moisture seeping into his painracked bones, and he can feel something pressing against his chest…and then suddenly all he can feel is the race of blood in his heart as a looming gray shadow falls over him.

There’s someone at the side of the ditch, someone standing over him, someone crouching down…

Cole tries to sit up, straining against the pain in his ribs, but it’s just too much. The pain cuts through him like a knife, pushing him back down into the dirt, and all he can do is look up into the crouching face and take whatever is coming.

“Are you all right?” the face says. “Christ, look at you. Shit.”

The sun’s in Cole’s eyes, so he can’t see who it is, but I recognize the voice straightaway.

It’s all right, Cole
, I tell him, breathing a sigh of relief,
there’s nothing to worry about. It’s Jess.

But he can’t hear me. He’s straining to see her face now, trying to shield his eyes from the sun, but one of his arms is trapped under his body and the other one is squashed up against the wall of the ditch.

“Stay there,” Jess tells him, “don’t move.”

“Who are you?” he says, still struggling. “What do you want?”

“Just keep
still
a minute.”

“I don’t
want
to keep still,” he snaps. “I want to get out of this stinking ditch.”

“You’ll hurt yourself if you carry on like that.”

“I’m already
hurt
,” he says, squinting angrily into the sun. “If I stay here much longer I’ll freeze to death.”

“I’m only trying to help,” Jess says huffily.

“Well, do something then.”

“What?”

“I don’t know…anything. Just get me out of here.”

Jess hesitates for a moment, then she shuffles forward and reaches down into the ditch. As she does so, her head moves to one side and blocks out the glare of the sun, giving Cole his first look at her face.

“Jess,” he mutters, softly surprised. “Jess Delaney.”

She smiles, tugging gently at his trapped arm. As Cole looks up into her eyes, I can feel that strange movement
inside him again—the tingling movement he’d felt when he’d first laid eyes on her. It still doesn’t feel quite right to share it, but this time I just can’t help myself.

It feels too good.

“I’m Cole Ford,” he tells her, “Ruben’s brother. I met your uncle—”

“Yeah, I know,” she says, trying again to free his arm. “Do you think you could give me some help here? My back’s getting stiff.”

After a lot more careful tugging—and rolling and pulling and lifting—Jess finally manages to help Cole out of the ditch and they both sink down to the ground—breathing hard, damp and muddied, exhausted. As Jess does her best to clean herself up, Cole looks around to see where he is. There’s a thorn hedge in front of him, then a strip of scrubby grass and a low stone wall, and beyond the wall is the road that leads down from the bus stop to the village. The village is off to his left, slumbering quietly at the bottom of the hill, and away to his right he can see the flat gray roof of the gas station glimmering dully in the morning light.

“Who did this to you?” Jess asks him.

“Who do you think?”

She nods. “You need to get to a hospital. You’re all broken up—”

“Have you seen Ruben?” he interrupts her.

She shakes her head, looking puzzled. “Why—what happened? Did Quentin—?”

“I’ve got to get back to the village,” Cole says, starting to get up. He stumbles, his head still dizzy. Jess reaches out and steadies him.

“You can’t go anywhere in that state,” she says. “You need…what’s that?”

“What?”

She reaches down and picks something up from the ground. “This…it just fell out of your shirt.”

She passes Cole a plain white envelope spattered with mud. He looks at it, opens it up, and removes a single sheet of paper, folded in two. He unfolds the paper and starts to read. The words are written in fine black ink:

Dear Mr. Ford
, he reads,
Your brother is safe and well. In order for him to remain so, you will leave the village and return to London today. A bus leaves for Plymouth at 14:32, arriving at the railway station at 15:21. The train to Paddington departs at 15:40. Your journey will be monitored. On confirmation of your arrival in London, your brother will be released without harm and no further action will be taken.

I trust you understand that the consequences of any refusal will be final.

Sincerely yours,

The message is signed with the mark of a crucifix.

I left Cole and Jess alone for a while and returned in my head to the solitude of the barn. I wanted to be on my own.
I wanted to think. I wanted to get the facts straight in my mind and weigh up the options.

Facts: It was early Sunday morning. I was tied up in a barn and I couldn’t get out. Cole didn’t know where I was. If he didn’t go back to London today, I was dead.

Options?

I couldn’t think of any.

I thought long and hard, looking at the situation from every possible angle, but no matter how many times I looked at it, the position remained the same: There was nothing I could do. It was all down to Cole. Either he went back to London, or he didn’t. If he did, Quentin would probably let me go. There was no guarantee, of course, but he had nothing to gain by
not
letting me go, and gain was all that mattered to him. As long as Cole did what he was told, I was pretty sure that nothing would happen to me, and by the end of the day I’d be on my way home, too, and that would be that. No further action. Quentin would get on with his business, Selden’s body would never be found, and no one would ever be charged with Rachel’s murder.

Would that be so bad?
I asked myself.
Who cares what Quentin does? Who cares about murder charges? Justice doesn’t change anything. And Selden’s dead anyway. The only thing that matters is getting Rachel’s body back, and that’ll happen eventually. We’ll just have to wait a bit longer.

Would that be so bad?

No more hurt. No more death. No more Quentin…

No more Rachel.

No more Rachel.

No more Rachel.

It kept coming back to me now—Rachel was dead. The reality kept welling up inside me, floating up from the depths like a great black cloud, filling my heart with darkness and my eyes with tears.

There was nothing I could do. I just sat there crying in the golden light, watching my tears turn to dust in the dirt.

Drifting…

Floating…

Feeling…

The heat in the trailer is blue and sleepy. I can hear the gas fire hissing. The air is scented with cigar smoke and coffee and freshly washed sheets drying on a clothes rack. I can see Cole sitting in an armchair in front of the fire and Jess kneeling on the floor at his feet. She’s cleaning and bandaging his hand. Her uncle is making coffee in a kitchen area at the back, and her little sister, Freya, is sitting on a foldaway bed in the corner, dandling a baby in her lap. The baby is silent, sucking its thumb. Freya is staring mutely at Cole.

A clock on the wall shows nine o’clock.

Everything is quiet.

Cole looks away from the fire and glances slowly
around the trailer. He likes what he sees. Fine-china plates on the wall, fancy carpets, framed photographs of smiling children. Potted plants, ornate mirrors, glass ornaments on a delicate table…

“Keep your hand still,” Jess tells him.

Cole looks down at her. He feels slightly embarrassed—being nursed, being looked after, being pampered—but it’s not too hard to put up with.

“You want sugar, boy?” Reason asks him.

Cole smiles and nods. Through a small window behind the old man, he can see a white BMW and a jet-black Shogun parked beside a pale blue trailer. The trailer is trimmed with silver and gold and decorated with baskets of flowers. To its right, a straw-haired man in a greased coat and boots is lumping broken pallets into an oil-drum fire. Wood smoke twists into the morning sky. Cole smiles quietly to himself. He can see dogs lying at the base of an angle-iron stake, two piebald ponies tethered to a pole, metal pails, wheels, a washtub on a table, rabbit skins, gas cylinders, a red plastic truck lying in the mud…

“Take your shirt off,” Jess says.

Cole looks at her, his eyes flicking awkwardly at Reason and Freya.

“Don’t be stupid,” Jess tells him. “They’re not nuns. Just take off your shirt. I need to tape up your ribs.”

As Cole begins to unbutton his shirt, Reason comes over and places a mug of coffee on a small wooden table beside
him. The message from Quentin is lying faceup on the table. Reason glances at it, then looks at Cole. He’s taken his shirt off now, revealing a lurid mess of welts and bruises.

“I seen your old man battered like that one time,” Reason says. “Big showman from Truro, ’twas. Fists like cannonballs.”

Cole smiles. “Who won?”

“Who d’you think? Baby-John soaked him up for an hour then opened up one of his eyes and switched him off.” The old man grins and takes two small cigars from his coat pocket. He lights them both with a match and passes one to Cole, then nods at the message on the table. “What you doing about that, then?” he says.

Cole puffs on his cigar. “What would you do?”

Reason shrugs. “Ain’t my brother.”

“What would you do if he was?”

“Probably the same as you.” He looks down at Jess, scratching thoughtfully at his grizzled chin, then turns back to Cole again. “You need any help, just say it.”

Cole nods. He likes the old man now. He likes his simplicity. He likes his cheap cigars. And he likes his niece, too—if that’s what she is. Cole somehow doubts it. Not that it matters. He doesn’t care who or what she is—he just likes her. I can feel the attraction tingling in his veins like electric blood.

I can feel his uncertainty, too. He isn’t used to liking things, and he isn’t sure what to do about it.

“I need some air,” he says to Jess. “Can we go for a walk or something?”

The long white grass is still moist with dew. I can feel the heavy moisture under Cole’s feet as he walks with Jess around the field at the edge of the camp. They walk slowly, not speaking for a while—just walking together, alone with their thoughts. Leaving me on my own with mine.

Drifting…

Floating…

Feeling…

In the middle of the field, a small gray horse is drinking from a trough. Dark eyes, strong head, ragged tail flicking at a storm of flies. And I wonder for a moment if it’s the horse from my dad’s first memory. I know it’s not, of course—it couldn’t be—but there’s something there…something…I don’t know what it is. I can feel Dad’s presence somewhere, but I don’t know where it’s coming from. It could be something to do with his memory, mixed up with the feelings I’m getting from Cole, or it could be something to do with Cole, mixed up with his memories of Dad. Or maybe it’s something else altogether…

I just can’t tell.

Whatever it is, though, it’s taking me to Dad.

I can feel his memories and his long-held sadness, and
I can see his face—worn and hard—and his troubled eyes, staring coldly at the whitewashed walls of his cell, and for a fraction of a second I can hear his voice—
Let it come, Rube, just let it come
—and then he’s gone again.

And so is the small gray horse.

The field is empty. No trough, no horse. Just Cole and Jess, still walking slowly, and Finn the lurcher, moping along in front of them. I wonder why it doesn’t feel strange—the sudden disappearance of a small gray horse. But I don’t think about it for long. It
doesn’t
feel strange. And it doesn’t bother me at all.

Finn the lurcher doesn’t look well. His eyes are glazed. His coat is dull. He has no sense of purpose to his movement anymore. He just slouches along in front of them, mournfully scanning the distant hills, waiting—as animals wait—for Tripe to come home. Jess is thinking about Tripe, too. I can feel the black cloud rising inside her. It’s all she can do to force it back down and bring her attention back to Cole.

“Are you all right?” she asks him.

“Yeah,” he lies.

I can feel him suffering. His broken bones ache. His head throbs. His mouth hurts. His ribs are screaming with every breath and every step he takes. He’s trying to ignore it all. Not out of any sense of bravado, but simply because that’s what he does.

“Come here,” Jess says, taking his arm.

She leads him over to a large granite boulder halfburied in the earth at the edge of the field, then helps him to sit down. He lights a cigarette. She sits down beside him. He gazes around. The early brightness of the morning sky has faded to a raw gray dullness. Rain clouds are scudding over the distant hills, darkening the moor with their shadows. I can hear the whisper of a coming wind in the air.