Road of the Dead (22 page)
“What about them?”
“Maybe we should call an ambulance?”
Cole looked puzzled. “Why?”
Jess shrugged again.
Cole looked at her for a moment, then he dropped the notebook back in the drawer and started moving toward the door. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here.”
I didn’t notice the smell inside the tanker cab until we were halfway up the lane. Cole was driving, Jess was in the passenger seat, and I was sitting on a narrow little armrest between them. The rain had stopped and Cole had his window open, letting in a cold draft of stormy air, but the stench was so thick that the breeze didn’t make any difference. The smell clung to everything. I thought it was me at first—my filthy clothes, my blood and sweat—but it didn’t seem to be coming from me. It smelled like the mud from the yard—rotten, sick, gaseous, nauseating. I started sniffing and looking around—at Cole’s shoes, Jess’s shoes, my shoes, the floor of the cab—but I couldn’t see anything. I was beginning to feel something, though. It was the memory of a dream—a dream of death. A feeling of skin and blood and purpled hands…of cold earth and crawling things. A dream of a dead man dreaming of me…
I could feel him.
He was here.
I could smell him.
I couldn’t breathe now. I couldn’t move. I didn’t
want
to move. But slowly my head began to turn, and then my shoulders, and as I leaned back and looked behind the seat, my skin went cold and the air in my throat turned to ice. There he was: the Dead Man.
“Shit,” I whispered. “
Shit
.”
He was wrapped up tightly in trash bags and tape, entombed in a roll of old carpet. The carpet was damp, caked with patches of thick dark soil. Small pink worms were wriggling in the soil, some of them white with rain, and the yellowed tape on the trash bags was dotted with hundreds of tiny black flies.
I turned away, gagging slightly, and stared at Cole.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot to tell you.”
“You
forgot
?”
He nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. We’d turned off the lane now and were heading toward the village.
“Shit,” I muttered again.
Cole looked at me but didn’t say anything. He glanced briefly at Jess, then turned back to the road and kept on driving, his battered hands effortlessly working the tanker’s heavy steering wheel. I turned away from him and gazed out through the windscreen. Away in the distance, the dark horizon was beginning to glow with the first faint light of day. The sun was rising, reddening the sky, and as I looked
out over the dawning moor I could see that nothing had changed—the desolate fields, the bone-white grasses, the hills and the forests and the distant tors…
It was all still there.
Still empty. Still dead.
“It’s what we came for,” Cole said.
I looked at him. “What?”
“The body…it’s what we came for.”
“I know.”
“It’s only a body.”
“I know.”
“We can go home now. We can bring Rachel home.”
“Yeah, I
know
.”
“So what’s bothering you?”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t
know
what was bothering me. Cole was right—he was right about everything. We’d set out to find the Dead Man, and now we’d found him. Now we could go home. Now we could bring Rachel home.
Did it matter how Cole had found Selden’s body? Or where? Did it matter how he’d gotten Quentin to tell him? Did it matter where Quentin was now?
I looked through the windscreen again. We were entering the village, passing the ancient stone house where so much had happened, so much I didn’t know about. The driveway was empty, the lights were all out. The house was dark and silent.
Did any of it matter?
I looked at Cole. He was exhausted—his face drained, his eyes heavy, his body weighed down with pain.
“Is it over now?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said quietly, “it’s over.”
I smiled to myself and settled back in the seat. I knew it wasn’t over, and I knew it never would be. There were still things to do, things to take care of, and home was still a long way away. Everything was a long way away—where we’d been, where we were, where we were going.
It was a long road.
But we were on it together.
And that was enough for me.
As we drove off into the bloodred dawn, and the hills behind us faded into the crimson sky, I closed my eyes and said good-bye to Rachel’s ghost, then I closed my mind and let myself drift away.
The Road of the Dead
Q: Where did the idea for
The Road of the Dead
come from?
A:
Like most of my books,
The Road of the Dead
developed over time from a number of different ideas. In this case, I’d written half a book about the two brothers before, but it hadn’t quite worked, so I went off and wrote something else. Then, sometime later, I was thinking about an idea for a plot that I’d had in mind for a long time, and I realized that it would be a perfect storyline for the two brothers.
Q: Do you have any brothers or sisters? If so, how would you describe your bond? If not, how do you think this has affected the way you look at brother and sister relationships?
A:
I have two brothers: one older, one younger. We weren’t particularly close when we were growing up, but as we got older we gradually got to know each other a lot more, and now—although we don’t see each other that much—we have much more of a bond than we used to.
Q: Do you think you’re more like Ruben or Cole?
A:
I’m like Ruben, but I’d like to be like Cole.
Q: Why is that?
A:
I like thinking about things, and I think about things a lot, but sometimes I wish I could just turn off all the thinking and deal with everything in a more straightforward way. Conflicts, for example. I’ve always hated any kind of conflict, and I’ve always tried to deal with it by thinking it through, trying to see all the different points of view…and then, inevitably, running away from it! I’m a natural coward, which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing (it’s always seemed a fairly sensible state of mind to me), but it would be nice now and then to have the ability to deal with conflict in the way that Cole deals with it—i.e., without any fear.
Q: The book follows a very hard journey for each of the characters. What was it like to write?
A:
I really enjoyed it. Although it is a very dark book, and quite harrowing at times, I found it very refreshing to write. It really meant a lot to me, and I felt very close to the characters. And because it was a hard journey for them, I somehow felt that we were all in it together.
Q: Some readers have observed that The Road of the Dead has the feel, thematically, of a Western. Was this genre an influence on you?
A:
Absolutely. I’ve read Westerns all my life, and they’ve been a huge influence on my writing. I could talk for hours about what Westerns mean to me, and how they’re never that far away from me when I’m writing, but with
The Road of the Dead
the Western influence was right there all the time. I’ve always wanted to write something that does more than just borrow from Western themes, but because I’m English, and my books are set mostly in England—and Westerns are intrinsically bound up with the geography and history of the USA—it’s always been quite difficult. But I realized with
The Road of the Dead
that I could transfer some of the basic themes to a specific English setting (i.e., Dartmoor) without losing too much of the mythical element of the Western, and once I had the storyline and the characterization worked out, it all started falling into place.
Q: Your next book, Being, is quite a departure from The Road of the Dead, which was itself something of a departure from Candy, its predecessor. Do you deliberately try to write a different book each time?
A:
I don’t set out to write something different purely for the sake of being different, but I definitely like to try different things. There’s so much to write about, and so many different ways of doing it, that it seems kind of a waste to me to keep doing exactly the same kind of stuff all the time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and as a reader there are some serial books that I really like, it’s just not the kind of stuff I want to do as a writer. The world’s too big to stay in the same place for too long.
For more conversation with Kevin Brooks, check out www.thisispush.com
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EDITED BY DAVID LEVITHAN
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EDITED BY DAVID LEVITHAN
BEING
by Kevin Brooks
I used to dream. When I was a little kid, I used to dream of a whirling wind that spun me around inside myself and sucked me down into terrible places. I never knew what the terrible places were, but I knew they were going to kill me. And I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to go to those terrible places. I just wanted to wake up. I knew that if I could wake myself up, I’d be all right. I
knew
that. And I knew what I had to do to wake myself up. I had to move. Move anything. A finger, a hand, a leg. Anything. Just move it. Move. Move. Move.
It was impossible then, but I always managed to kill the dream.
But this was no dream. This was nowhere near a dream. This was the worst thing imaginable. Worse than that: It was real. I was lying on a hospital bed, paralyzed and mute, and unknown people were saying unknown things about me.
Silvery filaments?
Some kind of plastic…?
It couldn’t be real.
But it was.
I can still hear the voices.
…and I want the immediate area quietly secured and Andrews and Ingle, get them debriefed and confined until further notice. I want his medical records, clothes, fingerprints, history…everything. I want to know everything about him. Was anyone with him when he arrived?
No.
What about his parents? Where are they?
He’s a looked-after boy—
A what?
He’s an orphan. Abandoned at birth. He’s lived in Homes or with foster parents all his life. For the last year or so he’s been with a couple called Young. Peter and Bridget Young. We haven’t been able to contact Mrs. Young, but we’ve been in touch with the husband. He’s been told there were minor complications and the boy needs to stay overnight.
What did he say? Did he want to see him?
He’s on his way now.
Sort it out. Go.
Sir.
The door opens quietly, then closes again.
Someone locks it.
The man called Ryan continues talking.
Why didn’t this show up on the X-rays? Was he x-rayed? Four weeks ago. Here.
Flip flap—the plastic flap of an X-ray film.
Are these normal?
Perfectly.
This is him?
Yes.
You’re sure?
Yes.
Flip flap. Silence.
Right…we need to do it now.
I don’t understand.
Open him up.
I can’t—
You have to.
No, listen—
No, you listen, Professor. You’re doing it now, and you’re doing it alone.
But—
Now! Do you understand? You cut that thing open now.
The shock of the words takes a moment to sink in—
cut that thing open
…that’s what he said…
you cut that thing open now
—and then it hits me. Panic. Terror. Physical horror. Shit, they’re going to cut me open. Right now. Cut me open. They’re going to
CUT ME OPEN
…
I have to
do
something.
I have to move.
Anything. A finger, a hand, a leg. Anything. Just move it…move move
MOVE
!!
I can’t move.
I breathe in, trying to steady my heart, breathing the taste of gas. Rubber. Gas. Tube.
Breathe slowly.
Don’t panic.