Читать книгу The Demon Road Trilogy: The Complete Collection: Demon Road; Desolation; American Monsters - Derek Landy - Страница 33

THEY DROVE OUT OF SPRINGTON, parked behind a billboard, and Milo took out the maps while Amber examined Shanks’s brass key.

“Could we use that?” Glen asked, now sharing the back seat with their bags. “It took Shanks wherever he wanted to go, right? Can we use it?”

“He said only he controls where it leads,” Amber said, trying to read the tiny writing along its side. She gave up. “I doubt he’d want to help us.” She tossed it into the glove compartment and took out the iPad, started tapping.

Glen let a few moments go by before speaking again.

“I don’t mean to whinge,” he said, “but I am really uncomfortable with there being a serial killer in the boot.”

“In the what?” said Amber.

“Trunk,” Milo translated.

“Can he get me?” Glen asked. “What’s separating me from him? Is it this seat? Upholstery and foam? What if he still has his knife? Does he have his knife? We didn’t take it from him, did we? He might be burrowing through to me right now.”

“You’re safe,” said Milo absently. “The car will take care of him.”

“And that’s another thing I’m uncomfortable with,” Glen began, but Amber interrupted.

“Cascade Falls,” she said, list on the screen. “There’s one in Virginia, one in Michigan …” She frowned. “No, wait, those are waterfalls. I think. Well, they might be waterfalls and towns. What one do you think Shanks was talking about?”

“Found it,” said Milo, laying the map across the steering wheel. “Cascade Falls, Oregon.”

“How do you know that’s the one Gregory Buxton grew up in?”

“It feels right.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s what we’re going on?”

“You’re on the blackroads, Amber. You’ve got to learn to trust your instincts.”

“If you’re sure …” A moment later, she had called up images of a sleepy little town beside a lake. “The town of Cascade Falls. Less than ten thousand people. How long will it take us to get there?”

“Don’t know,” said Milo, folding away the map. “Two thousand miles … Four days, maybe. Get there some time on Saturday.”

Amber adjusted the bracelets on her wrist, sneaking a peek at the scars there: 406 hours left. Take four days away from that, and it would leave her with …

She scrunched up her face.

“What’s wrong?” Milo asked.

“Nothing,” she mumbled. “Doing math.”

Three hundred and ten hours. Which was … thirteen days, or thereabouts. Just under two weeks. Fully aware that time was slipping away from her, and equally aware that there was nothing she could do about it, Amber nodded. “Okay then, we better get going. Unless you want to find somewhere to sleep?”

She was quietly pleased when Milo shook his head. “Too wired after all that drama. I’ll drive until morning, then we’ll pull in somewhere for a few hours. That okay with you?”

“That’s cool.”

“I’ll be dead by Oregon,” Glen said quietly from the back seat.

She turned, but his face was in shadow. “Aw, listen, Glen …”

“Maybe I should go somewhere fun for my last few days, and let you go on without me.” She could see the edge of a sad smile. “You’ve been to Disney World, Amber – do you think that’d be a good place to die?”

“I’ve … never really thought about it.”

“Maybe on one of the rollercoasters,” Glen said. “Or on that other ride, what’s the really annoying one?”

“It’s a small World.”

“That’s it. Go in alive, come out dead. That’d be something, wouldn’t it? I wonder how many people die in theme parks every year.”

“I don’t know,” said Amber. “But I do know that the chances of someone actually getting injured in the Orlando parks is, like, one in nine million or something.”

“Wow. That’s not bad. So someone dying on It’s a small World would be pretty rare, then?”

“Well, yeah … You’re moving very slow and not a whole lot happens. Are you sure that’s where you want to spend your last few days, though? Isn’t it a bit …”

“Tacky?” said Milo.

“That wasn’t what I was going to say. I was just wondering if it’d be better for you to spend time with your family.”

“My family hates me,” Glen said. “Why do you think I wanted to come here so badly?”

“I’m sure they don’t hate you,” said Amber.

“They might,” said Milo.

Amber ignored him. “My parents want to kill me,” she said. “I’m sure your parents aren’t nearly as bad as that.”

“Well, maybe not,” said Glen, and he laughed, and Amber laughed, and then they remembered what they were laughing about and they both stopped.

“You two are a pair of idiots,” said Milo, and he pulled out on to the road and drove.

They took the interstate west for a few hours, then slipped off on to the back roads. They drove through Sigourney, then Delta, and passed a sign for a town called What Cheer. Farmland and electricity pylons flashing by almost hypnotically. Amber started taking a mental note of the populations listed on each sign, testing her dreadful maths skills by adding them up in her head – 2,059, 328, 646… By the time they were in sight of Knoxville, Iowa, she was going to tell Milo that in the last hour they had passed 15,568 people, then she decided not to. It just wasn’t that interesting.

They had breakfast at the Downtown Diner, then slept for a bit in the car. Exhaustion pulled Amber down deep into a dreamless sleep. Even her subconscious was too tired to play.

When she awoke, she cracked one eye open. Milo sat behind the wheel, looking through the windshield, unmoving. He wasn’t blinking. His face was slack. She wondered if he slept with his eyes open, like a shark. She moved slightly and he turned to her, and that blank expression was wiped away like it had never really been there. He nodded to her, and started the car, and Glen sat up suddenly in the back.

“What?” He blinked. “Oh. Sorry. We’re off again, then.” When neither Amber nor Milo answered, he nodded to himself. “Another few hours closer to my death.”

“Glen—”

“No, Amber. No. Don’t try to comfort me. I’m beyond comfort. There’s nothing you can do, nothing you can say, which would ease the weight I feel on my soul. It’s heavy. It’s so heavy. How much does a life weigh? Can you answer me that? No, I don’t think you can. So thank you for your effort, Amber, and I truly mean that. But you won’t see a smile from me today.”

Amber felt bad. She had been about to tell him to shut up.

“You’re not going to die,” said Milo.

“Death is tapping me on the shoulder as I sit here.”

“Nothing’s tapping you anywhere. You’re not going to die because we’re going to stop off at The Dark Stair and you can deliver the Deathmark to this Abigail, whoever she may be, and then you can leave us alone.”

Amber frowned. “You know where it is?”

Glen shoved his head between them. “You know where The Dark Stair is? You knew where it was all this time and you didn’t tell me?”

Milo pulled out on to the road and started driving. “I wasn’t sure if it’d be on our way. As it turns out, it is.”

“Where is it?” asked Amber.

“Salt Lake City,” said Milo. “It’s a bar for people like … well, like us, I guess. People on the blackroads.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Glen. “If it wasn’t in the direction you happen to be heading, would you have told me? Or would you have just let me die?”

“I’d have told you.”

Glen gaped. “You’d have let me die!”

“I’d have told you,” Milo said again. “I couldn’t tell you before now because Amber’s parents might have found you if you went off alone.”

“I have less than four days to live, Milo! What if Shanks had told us that Gregory Buxton lived east instead of west? What then?”

“Then I’d have put you on a Greyhound.”

Glen glanced at Amber. “A dog?”

“A bus.”

He turned to Milo again. “And what if that Greyhound got a flat tyre? Or was in an accident? Or I got delayed somehow? I get lost very easily, I’ll have you know! If you’d told me where The Dark Stair was at the very beginning, I’d have already delivered the Deathmark and I wouldn’t be dying right now! Admit it! You don’t care if I live or die, do you?”

Milo thought about it for a few seconds. “Not really,” he said.

Glen gasped again.

They drove for another ten minutes without anyone saying a word, but Amber had to ask. She just had to.

“This isn’t going to throw us off schedule too much, is it?”

“Ohh!” cried Glen, and Amber winced. “Oh, I’m sorry if my impending doom is throwing you off schedule, Amber! I’m sorry if my imminent demise is inconveniencing you! Tell you what, you let me out here. I’ll roll over by the side of the road and die quietly without causing anyone too much bother!”

Milo waited until he had finished, then answered. “It shouldn’t,” he said.

“Are you still talking about this?” Glen cried.

“Salt Lake City is that weird place, isn’t it?” said Amber. “Run by the Amish, or something.”

“Founded by Mormons,” said Milo. “And yeah, they’re pretty strict with their liquor laws and they don’t look too kindly on public profanity, but we’re going to be well-behaved and we’re not going to drink, now are we? Besides, The Dark Stair isn’t exactly typical of Salt Lake City. It isn’t typical of anywhere, for that matter.”

“Do you know it well?”

Milo shook his head. “Been in there twice, for no more than half an hour apiece. There’s a lot of kids running around. I remember thinking how weird that was. We’ll spend tonight in Nebraska somewhere, get to Salt Lake City tomorrow afternoon or thereabouts. From there it’s another eight hundred miles to Buxton’s home town. It’s Tuesday now – we’re still on track to get to Cascade Falls by Saturday.”

Amber nodded. “Okay. Yeah, okay.”

“Bet if I died back here you wouldn’t even notice,” Glen muttered, but they ignored him.

They drove on flat roads through flat lands. A few trees here and there, though paltry things, and lonesome. Telegraph poles linked hands over green fields and brown, and carried on into the wide, never-ending distance. A train on the tracks, its carriages the colour of rust and wine, names and slogans painted on the side in indecipherable graffiti.

They stopped at an Amoco gas station outside of a town called McCook, and Amber and Glen went in to use the restrooms and get sandwiches while Milo waited in the Charger. It was just after two and it was warm. The smell of gasoline was on the air.

“How much do you know about Milo?” Glen asked while they were waiting to pay for the food. The old man in front of them was having trouble pulling his wallet from his sagging pants.

Amber shrugged. “I know I’m paying him a lot of money to get me where I need to go.”

“So you don’t know anything about him?”

She sighed. “No, Glen, I don’t.”

The old man got his wallet halfway out before it snagged on the corner of his pocket. Amber watched, with an interest that surprised her, the tug of war that followed.

“Remember that story I told you,” Glen said, “about the Ghost of the Highway?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

He nodded, satisfied. “Then you suspect it, too.”

“I don’t suspect anything.”

“Milo’s the Ghost.”

“Glen, seriously, drop it, okay? We’ve been driving for hours and I am sore and cranky.”

“He’s a serial killer, Amber.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

The old man turned slowly, looked at them with frowning eyes. Amber gave him a pleasant smile, and waited for him to turn back round.

“What’s ridiculous about it?” Glen asked softly. “He uses a car instead of a knife, but he’s still a serial killer. And that isn’t any ordinary car. You know it isn’t. It’s …” He leaned in closer, and his voice became a whisper. “It’s possessed.”

“Glen, you sound so dumb right now.”

“You saw what it did. It swallowed Shanks. That wasn’t my imagination running away with me, no matter how much I try to convince myself. It swallowed him. It’s possessed.”

The old man finally paid and moved off, and they stepped up to the cash register.

“Any gas?” the bored girl asked.

“Nope,” said Amber, and paid.

They walked outside, looked across the forecourt to the Charger.

“We’re at a gas station and he’s not even filling the tank,” said Glen. “How many times has he had to stop for petrol? Twice? Three times? Travelling all this way, he’s had to stop for petrol three times? Do you know how much fuel a car like that burns?”

“So this car has good fuel economics. So what?”

“Aren’t you wondering what else it runs on? He said it’ll digest Shanks. How many other people has it digested? And look how clean it is. It’s always clean and I’ve never seen him wash it. It’s like it cleans itself. And what’s the deal with him only being able to drive it eight hours a day?”

“On average,” said Amber. “He’s driven it longer.”

“But what’s the deal? Why that rule? Why eight hours? Because it’s road safe? Or maybe it’s got something to do with him not wanting to push his car too hard or else it’ll get tired.”

She turned to him. “Fine, Glen, I’ll play this game. What does it mean? Huh? What does it all add up to?”

He hesitated before answering. “I think the Charger’s alive.”

“Oh my God …”

“Don’t look at me like that. It’s not just a car, is it? It’s more than that. You know it is. You got him a sandwich, right? What’s the betting he’s not going to eat it?”

“And what will that prove? He’s not hungry?”

“He doesn’t eat when he’s driving,” said Glen. “I don’t think he sleeps when he’s behind the wheel, either. Did he sleep this morning? Did you see him sleep? I didn’t.”

She rubbed her eyes. “I was sleeping myself, okay? I didn’t see much of anything.”

“What about going to the toilet? We needed to pee – why didn’t Milo?”

“Dude, I’m really not going to talk about anyone’s bathroom habits.”

“We’ve asked him to pull over so that we could pee, like, twenty times so far.”

“You’ve got a bladder problem.”

“I pee, you pee, he doesn’t pee. Have you seen him pee?”

“No, Glen, I have not seen Milo pee. What the hell are you talking about?”

“I think the Charger sustains him. I think it takes his … y’know, his waste—”

“Ew.”

“—and uses it, and when he’s behind the wheel his body doesn’t need to function the way our bodies do.”

“That is disgusting. And stupid.”

“He said the Charger would digest Shanks. That means some part of it is organic.”

“He was being metaphorical, you idiot.”

“Are you sure? He’s the Ghost, Amber. He’s a serial killer, and he’s bonded to the Charger. Maybe he doesn’t do it anymore, maybe he’s reformed, I don’t know. But you said he took it out of storage for the first time in twelve years? What if it’s like an addiction? He’s stayed away from it for all this time and he hasn’t needed to kill. But now he’s back using it again. How long before it takes him over? How long before he becomes the Ghost of the Highway?”

“This is a stupid conversation and it is ending right now.”

She walked across the forecourt, black asphalt hot even through the soles of her shoes. Glen kept up.

“It swallowed Shanks. It’s alive. You know what I think? I think the reason he doesn’t turn on the radio is because he’s scared of what the car might say.”

She spun round to him. “If you’re not happy with our mode of transport, you don’t have to travel with us. No one’s asking you to.”

Glen looked her dead in the eye. “I’m not leaving you alone with him.”

“He’s not going to hurt me.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Neither do you,” she said, and stalked back to the Charger.

She got in, slamming the door. After a moment, she got out again, held the door open while Glen got in the back. Then she retook her seat and slammed the door a second time.

“Everything all right?” Milo asked.

“Fine,” said Amber. “Here’s your sandwich.”

He took it. “Thanks. I’ll have it later.”

He turned the key and the Charger roared to life. It rolled smoothly across the loose gravel to the road as an eighteen-wheeler thundered by. Milo watched it go. While he was distracted, Amber reached for the radio.

Her fingers hovered over the dial. One turn. One turn, one twist, and music would fill the car, or static, or someone complaining about something, or commercials, or preaching … or a voice. A voice unlike any she’d ever heard. The voice of the car. The dark voice of the dark car.

She dropped her hand, and the Charger pulled out on to the road, and they drove on.