Demon Road Read online

  “I’ve always wanted to test that theory,” said Milo from the door.

  Shanks leaped up, grabbed Amber and put the gun to her temple. She felt her scales harden, but she doubted they’d be able to stop a bullet.

  Milo walked slowly into the school, holding his gun in both hands, his head cocked slightly, aiming down the sights.

  “Take one more step and I’ll shoot,” said Shanks. “Amber won’t look so beautiful with half her face missing, now will she?”

  Milo didn’t lower the gun and didn’t stop moving forward. “We’re not letting you leave.”

  Shanks laughed. “Oh, Milo, I doubt that is your decision to make.”

  “You and me aren’t on a first-name basis, Shanks. Let her go and I won’t blow your head off. You remember what that feels like, don’t you?”

  Shanks’s grip tightened. “I do indeed. But you may have noticed the last person to do that is now lying on the sidewalk outside with his life leaking away along with all that blood.”

  Milo gave a little smile. “I noticed, all right.”

  “Put the gun down. You know it can’t hurt me.”

  “That’s not exactly true, though, is it?” said Milo. “It can’t kill you, no, but it can hurt you. Might even put you down long enough for us to take those cuffs off of Amber’s wrists and put them on to yours.”

  “One more step,” Shanks said. The cold steel pressed harder into Amber’s head. “Take one more step.”

  Milo stopped walking.

  “Good doggy,” said Shanks. “Now toss the gun.”

  “Can’t do that, I’m afraid. Against my upbringing.”

  “Toss it or your ridiculous Irish friend dies first.”

  “Glen is not my friend,” said Milo. “And the moment that gun moves away from Amber’s head, I pull my trigger. I’m a pretty good shot, I have to warn you.”

  “Then Amber will be the first to die.”

  “You kill her, I pull my trigger. Whatever you do, this trigger gets pulled.”

  “Unless I give up,” said Shanks, “in which case you still put me back in that prison. You think you’re giving me options, but they all end the same way. The only difference is how many of you I get to kill. Well, Milo? Which one will I start with? The rude Irish boy, or the red-skinned demon girl?”

  Milo didn’t answer for a moment, and then he spread his arms, taking his finger from the trigger. “You got me,” he said. “Don’t hurt either of them. I’m putting my gun down.”

  He laid his pistol on the floor and straightened up, his hands in the air.

  Shanks shook his head. “I’m actually disappointed,” he said. “I thought we were headed for a showdown.”

  Milo cracked a smile. “Like in High Noon, you mean?”

  Shanks pushed Amber to her knees beside Glen, but kept his gun trained on Milo. “Something like that.”

  Milo didn’t seem particularly worried. He was so casual, he shrugged. “Ah, I was always partial to The Wild Bunch, myself.”

  “Me too,” said a voice behind them.

  Shanks turned to see a shotgun levelled at his chest, and then Ella-May blasted him off his feet.

  Shanks hit the ground, the front of his shirt obliterated. He rolled like a rag doll.

  Milo holstered his pistol and ran to Amber, the handcuff key in his hand. She reverted to normal instantly, but Ella-May wasn’t even looking at her.

  Shanks chuckled, and stood.

  Ella-May racked the shotgun’s slide and blasted him again. And again. Each blast threw him further back, turned his clothes to rags, mutilated his flesh. But, every time he stood up, his skin was unmarked.

  The fourth blast hurled him backwards through the door. Ella-May followed him out, and Milo, Amber and Glen followed.

  Shanks got up, smiling. “You can shoot me all you want,” he said, “you’re not going to kill me. It’s not going to change anything. Look at you. Ella-May Roosevelt. You got old.”

  “Maybe a few grey hairs here and there,” Ella-May said.

  “You look like them, you know. Your daughters. The ones I killed. Just like I killed your husband. You’re not so smart now, are you, Ella-May? You led them to me all those years ago when you had your whole life ahead of you … and now look. You’re old, with your life behind you, and I’ve taken every last one of your family from you.”

  “You took Christina,” said Ella-May. “But that’s all you’re going to take from me.”

  Shanks narrowed his eyes and looked down at the street, where a blood-drenched Heather was helping a blood-drenched Teddy into the back of the cruiser.

  “We Roosevelts are a hardy lot,” Ella-May said, and blasted Shanks in the back.

  For a moment, he flew, his spine arched and his arms flung wide. Then gravity found him, gripped him, yanked him down, hard, into the concrete steps. He bounced and twisted and tumbled and finally flipped, hitting the sidewalk with his head turned the wrong way round.

  Milo walked down the steps after him, and calmly cuffed his hands behind his back as he lay there, unmoving.

  A car pulled up and a man leaped out, carrying a black bag.

  “Doc,” Ella-May said in greeting as she handed the shotgun to Amber, “good of you to come so quickly. I need you to see to my husband and daughter while I drive us to Waukesha Memorial.”

  The doctor stared at the scene. “What the hell happened?”

  “Heather has a stab wound to the abdomen,” said Ella-May. “As far as I can tell, it missed the major organs. Teddy has had his throat cut. No arterial damage. Both have lost a lot of blood.”

  The doctor glanced down at Shanks. “What about this man?”

  “He doesn’t need your help,” Ella-May said. She hurried down the steps and guided Heather into the passenger seat.

  “Dad first,” Heather said. She was corpse-pale and covered in sweat. “His pulse is barely there.”

  The doctor didn’t ask any more questions. He climbed in the back and Ella-May got behind the wheel. She reversed away from the sidewalk and swung round.

  “Guess you’ll all be gone by the time I get back,” she said through the open window.

  “We will,” said Amber.

  “Good,” said Ella-May, and she floored it, the cruiser’s lights flashing.

  Milo watched her go. “Passed her and Heather on my way here,” he said. “Figured if she was half as tough as her daughter, giving her the shotgun might not be a bad idea.”

  Shanks moaned. His bones cracked and his neck straightened.

  “Welcome back,” said Milo, hauling him to his feet.

  The streets were quiet in Springton. This didn’t surprise Amber, not after the stories she’d been told. Tomorrow the townspeople would discuss the gunshots and the alarms and all this blood, and they’d let the theories settle in beside the legends and the myths they’d already stored up. She wondered what Walter S. Bryant would make of it all.

  “What do we do with him?” asked Glen, keeping a respectful distance from Shanks as Milo forced him to walk.

  “We’re taking him with us,” Milo said.

  Shanks grunted out a laugh. “Are you inviting me to join your motley crew? I’ll say yes, but only if I can be leader.”

  “Safest option,” Milo said, ignoring Shanks and talking to Amber as they neared the Charger. “We can’t leave him here, not after everything that’s happened.”

  “We could chop him up,” said Glen. “Or, I mean, you could chop him up. Bury him, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” said Milo. “But there’d always be the risk of someone digging him up by accident.”

  “I do have a tendency to return when you least expect it,” said Shanks, chuckling.

  They stopped at the rear of the Charger and Milo turned him so that Shanks’s back was to the car. Amber noticed that all of their bags had been taken out of the trunk and were now in a pile on the ground.

  The trunk opened silently, red light spilling out.

  “So we’ll take
him with us,” Milo said. “It’ll be inconvenient for a few weeks, but the car will eventually digest him.”

  “What?” said Shanks, his face going slack, and then Milo shoved him backwards.

  Amber’s eyes played a trick on her then. For one crazy instant, it looked like Shanks was sucked into the trunk as the trunk itself enveloped him, the lid slamming closed like a great black jaw. Shanks kicked and battered and yelled from inside, and then all that noise turned down, like the Charger was slowly muting him.

  Amber blinked. “Whoa.”

  Glen was frowning. “Did you see that? Did I see that? What the hell was that?”

  Amber looked at Milo. “Were you serious? About the car digesting him?”

  Milo trailed a hand lovingly over the Charger’s contours. “She’s a beast,” he said.

  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 ou
t 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.”