Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

“He gave you up. He used you. He got Rachel killed. He kept my brother tied up like a dog—”

  “No,” Abbie whispered, beginning to cry, “that wasn’t him—”

  “—and now he’s run out on you. You don’t owe him anything.”

  “He’s my husband,” she said, trembling with tears. “He’s all I’ve got…” She lowered her eyes for a moment, lost in her sadness, then she sniffed back her tears and lifted her head again, jerking the rifle at Cole. “You’re not taking him away from me,” she said. “I can’t let you do that.”

  “I’m not taking him anywhere,” Cole told her. “He’s already gone.”

  She shook her head. “You’ll talk to the police. You’ll tell them what he did. They’ll take him away. I can’t let you do that.”

  Cole looked at her, and I could feel him struggling to understand himself. He hated her, despised her, reviled her…he didn’t want to feel anything but disgust for her. But he did. He couldn’t help it. Despite all her faults—her cowardice, her selfishness, her self-delusion—she was doing something for someone she loved. And that meant something to Cole.

  “I’ll talk to him,” he said to her.

  “Who?”

  “Vince.” He looked over her shoulder, nodding toward the lane. “He’s coming back, look.”

  As Abbie’s eyes lit up and she turned to look at the lane, Cole stepped forward and snatched the rifle from her hands. Realizing she’d been tricked, she spun around and lunged at him, clawing wildly at his eyes, but before she could reach him, Jess stepped up and grabbed her from behind and quickly pulled her away. As she struggled and screamed, spitting and cursing like a crazy woman, Cole unloaded the gun, threw away the round, then raised the rifle over his head and smashed it into the ground.

  Abbie’s screams had turned to sobs now. Her madness had burned itself out. She was slumped in Jess’s arms, her head bowed down, her body heaving with moans and tears.

  “We’d better get her back to the house,” Cole said to Jess.

  Jess looked at him, quietly surprised at his concern. “Do you think that’s a good idea? I mean, we shouldn’t hang around here much longer.”

  “She needs help,” he said simply, stepping up and taking Abbie’s arm. “Come on, I’ll give you a hand.”

  I followed them out of the barn and across the yard to the house. Abbie wasn’t crying anymore…she wasn’t anything anymore. Her face was blank and her eyes were white and she didn’t seem to know where she was going. I don’t think she cared, either. If Cole and Jess hadn’t been there, guiding her along by her arms, I think she would have wandered off into the moorland night and kept on walking forever.

  We got her inside the house and took her into the front room. While Jess helped her over to the sofa and covered her up with a blanket, Cole went over to a cupboard by the phone and started searching through the drawers.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked him.

  “Her mother-in-law’s phone number.”

  “Why?”

  “Who else is going to look after her?”

  I watched him rummaging through the drawers, leafing through address books and odd scraps of paper—cool and calm and steady—and I knew he wasn’t struggling anymore. He’d given up trying to understand himself. Something was telling him to do what he was doing, and that was enough for him. He didn’t need to know why.

  I glanced over at Jess. She was watching Cole, too. Her eyes were still, seeing nothing but him, and I could feel the silent contentment inside her. She was with him now, feeling what he was feeling, and as he flipped through the pages of a small tattered notebook and found the number he was looking for, she could sense his uncertainty.

  “Do you want me to do it?” she asked him.

  He looked at her.

  She smiled at him, then came over and picked up the phone. “What’s the number?”

  Cole showed her the notebook and she dialed the number. It was late now—the early hours of Monday morning—and the phone rang for a long time before it was answered.

  “Mrs. Gorman?” Jess said eventually. “Sorry to wake you. I’m at your daughter-in-law’s house. Vince isn’t here and Abbie needs someone to look after her…No, she isn’t hurt, but she shouldn’t be on her own right now.” She stopped talking and listened for a moment, and I could hear a distant voice barking out questions down the phone—Who are you? What’s the matter? What’s going on? Jess said nothing. She looked at Cole, he nodded quietly, and she put down the phone.

  She smiled at Cole again. “All right?”

  He nodded. “Thanks.”

  They gazed at each other for a second or two, and as I watched them I could feel all the stuff I’d felt before—the good stuff, the tingling stuff, the stuff that didn’t feel right to share—only now it felt different. It was deeper now. More than I could understand.

  Cole looked over at Abbie. She was still lying on the sofa, not moving, just staring blindly at the ceiling. Her lips were fluttering, but she wasn’t making a sound.

  Cole turned back to Jess. “Do you think she’ll be all right on her own for a while?”

  Jess shrugged. “I don’t think there’s much else we can do for her.” She looked at Cole. “What about the others in the barn?”

  “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.

  Kevin Brooks Talks About…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

  GO THERE.

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  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 impossibl
e 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—