Читать книгу The Demon Road Trilogy: The Complete Collection: Demon Road; Desolation; American Monsters - Derek Landy - Страница 24

“THIS IS REALLY COOL OF YOU,” said Glen from the back seat for the fourth time.

Milo nodded, and Amber felt him glance sideways at her. She didn’t respond. She kept her eyes on the road as they drove past endless fields of white cotton pods, bursting like tiny puffs of cloud from all that green.

“So Amber tells me you’re her guide,” Glen continued. “You’ve travelled the Demon Road before, then?”

“We try not to talk about it,” said Milo.

“Talk about what?”

Milo sighed. “When you’re on the Demon Road, you don’t really talk about the Demon Road. It’s considered … crass. You can mention it, explain it, all that’s fine … but just don’t talk about it. And don’t call it that, either.”

“What, Demon Road?”

“Yeah. Try to be, you know … a little cooler about it.”

“Oh,” said Glen. “Yeah, sure. Blasé, like? Yeah, no problem. Kind of a nudge nudge, wink wink kind of thing, right? If you have to ask, you’ll never know. First rule of Fight Club, that sort of vibe? Yeah, that’s cool. I can do that.”

“Good.”

“So how long have you been on it?”

Amber turned in her seat. “He just said we don’t talk about it.”

“But how am I supposed to ask questions if I’m not allowed to talk about it?”

“Don’t ask questions, then.”

“But how am I supposed to learn?”

Amber went back to glaring out of the window.

Milo sighed again. “I haven’t travelled these roads in years.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t need to.”

“Do you know them well?” Glen asked.

“I did. Once upon a time.”

“So what are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Amber can transform into this beautiful demon girl, I’m dying of some monster’s creepy Deathmark … how come you’re here? What did you do or what was done to you?”

Milo didn’t answer.

Glen leaned forward. “Could you not hear me?”

“He’s ignoring you,” said Amber.

“Why? What’d I say?”

“You’re asking a whole lot of questions,” said Milo. “I like to drive in silence.”

“So do I,” said Amber.

“You do?” said Glen. “I hate driving in silence. I always have to have the radio on, even if it’s country music or something horrible like that. God, I hate country music. And I don’t mean the country music you have here in America, I mean the stuff we have in Ireland. Country singers here sound like they’ve been in a few bar-room brawls, you know? Back home they’re just blokes who walk around in woolly jumpers.”

“Woolly what?”

“Sweaters,” Milo said.

“Oh,” said Amber.

“My dad was a country-music fan,” said Glen. “At his funeral, they played all his favourite songs. It was awful. I wanted to walk out, y’know? Only I didn’t because, well, I’ve never been one to walk out of places. Well, no, I mean, I walk out of places all the time, obviously, or else I’d never leave anywhere, but I’ve never walked out of somewhere on principle. I can’t even walk out of a bad movie. My dad used to say I was just too polite for my own good. Suppose he was right.” He quietened down for a moment, his cheerfulness dimming, then looked up again, smile renewed. “So, Milo, how’d you get to be a guide? What qualifies you? Do you have, like, a dark and tormented history or something? Are you a demon, too? What’s your angle?”

“You writing a book?” Milo asked.

“Uh no. Just making conversation.”

They lapsed into a short-lived silence.

“You know what this car reminds me of?” Glen asked. “You ever hear of the Ghost of the Highway?”

Milo was done talking, so Amber took up the reins. “No,” she said. “Never have.”

“It was this guy who drove around, years ago, with his headlights off,” Glen said. “He’d drive up and down all these dark American roads at night, looking for his next victim.”

“That’s an urban legend,” Amber said. “When someone passes the other way and flicks their lights at him, he runs them off the road. We’ve all heard it.”

“No, but this is real,” said Glen. “Or, well, okay, maybe sort of real, but he did kill a few people back in the nineties. I looked it up. There are a load of websites about him.”

“There are websites about everything.”

“Yeah, I suppose. But it was a seventies muscle car he drove, I remember that much. Black, too. I think it was a Charger. Or a Challenger. So cool. Is this a Charger?”

Amber’s gaze drifted to the window again. “Yeah,” she said, hoping he’d shut the hell up now.

“There were a few survivors because he didn’t, like, get out of the car to finish them off, or anything. All he was interested in was bashing them off the road. Though he did run a few down, but, if you ask me, anyone who thinks they’re gonna sprint faster than a car kind of deserves to be run down, am I right? Ever since I heard about the Ghost of the Highway, I’ve wanted a car like that. And now I’m in one!”

“A dream come true,” Amber muttered.

“Just to drive in something that cool … We don’t have anything this awesome in Ireland. There are a few petrolheads who’ll import the odd Mustang or whatever, but you wouldn’t be able to drive around without people going, Who does your man think he is? – you know? But here you can drive a car like this and people won’t automatically think you’re a tool. People are more accepting here, y’know? But those police reports, in the victims’ own words, describing what it was like to be chased down by this terrifying black beast of a car … One moment they’re driving along fine, the road pitch-black behind them, the next these red headlights suddenly open up in their rear-view mirror …”

Amber stopped gazing out of the window, and looked at Milo out of the corner of her eye. His expression remained calm, but his hands gripped the wheel with such force that his knuckles had turned white. She suddenly had a knot in her belly.

“It was things like that, y’know?” Glen continued, oblivious. “Things like that that made me fall in love with America. A country so big you can do something as crazy as that as a hobby and never get caught … wow. I’m not saying I want to do something like that, but I appreciate the fact that I could. Land of the free, right? Home of the brave.”

Glen settled back, lost in his own overwhelming sense of wonder, and Milo didn’t speak again for another two hours.

By the time they stopped off at a Budget Inn in Jasper, Georgia, Milo looked a lot paler than he should have. His face was gaunt, his eyes distant. He got out of the Charger slowly, almost like it didn’t want him to leave, and only when they had left it behind them in the parking lot did he regain a little of his spirit. He told Glen to shut up three times as they checked in.

For his own reasons, Glen attempted an American accent that sounded like a cross between John Wayne and John Wayne’s idiot brother. Amber thought that the woman behind the desk would ask her for proof of age, but the woman seemingly couldn’t have cared less. Amber went to her room with a small bag containing necessities, a vending-machine sandwich, and a lukewarm can of Coke. The water in her shower took forever to heat up, but eventually she stood under the spray and closed her eyes. She worked a full mini-bottle of shampoo and conditioner into her hair, which had dried out in knots and tangles following her dip in the river, and when she was done she stood in front of the bathroom mirror naked.

Unimpressed with what she saw, she resisted the urge to shift. She didn’t see the point of feeling even worse about herself.

She turned on the TV. Every second channel had a preacher in an expensive suit talking about God and the Devil. She watched for a bit, hoping in vain to hear some words of comfort, but all she got was fear and greed. She flicked over to a horror movie, but that failed to distract her, so she turned the TV off, and all the lights, and climbed into bed. The mattress was uncomfortable and unfamiliar. The pillows were simultaneously too thin and too soft. She lay in the darkness. Voices came through the walls. TV sets played. Toilets flushed.

She thought about Milo and Glen and Imelda, and the trucker and Brandon. She thought about the Ghost of the Highway, and she thought of her parents, and how they were probably coming after her even as she lay there.

She got up, dragged a chair in front of the door, and jammed it up against the handle like she’d seen people do in movies.

She went back to bed. Sleep was a long time coming.