Road of the Dead by Kevin Brooks Read Free Book Online

she took a deep breath and began to explain. “Earlier that evening, I’d walked down to the village with Rachel and we’d had a quick drink in the pub. She was getting the last bus back to Plymouth. It leaves at eight-thirty.”
    “What time did you leave your house?” Cole asked her.
    “About quarter to seven. The village isn’t far away…about twenty minutes’ walk. Maybe half an hour. It was just starting to rain when we got there. I remember stopping outside the pub and looking up at the sky and seeing these huge black rain clouds rolling toward us across the moor. I tried telling Rach then that she should stay another night and go back in the morning, but she wouldn’t listen.When I told her there was a really bad storm coming, she just shrugged and said, ‘Let it come.’”
    I looked at Cole. He didn’t show anything, but I knew what he was thinking. “Let it come” is something that Dad often says. Whenever there’s something bad on the horizon, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Let it come. Just let it come.”
    “Anyway,” Abbie continued, “we went into the pub and had a couple of drinks, and while we were in there the storm started to break.” She shook her head. “God, it was unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. The skies just opened up and the rain came down in buckets. It was like a monsoon or something.” She looked out the bus window. “All this was flooded. The road, the moor, everything. Look…” She pointed to the side of the road. “You can still see all the stuff that got washed down from the moor.”
    I looked out the window. The edge of the road was littered with flood debris—dried mud, leaves, twigs.
    Abbie shook her head again. “I told Rachel she couldn’t go back in the storm. I told her. I said I’d call Vince and get him to pick us up before it got too bad, but she just wouldn’t have it. She said she wanted to go home.” Abbie looked at Cole, then at me. “She said she missed her family.”
    Cole closed his eyes for a moment. I didn’t close mine, because I knew if I did I’d start crying.
    Cole said, “Who’s Vince?”
    “My husband.”
    Cole nodded. “But Rachel wouldn’t let you call him?”
    “No. She wouldn’t even let me walk with her to the bus stop. ‘There’s no point in both of us getting soaked, is there?’ she said.”
    “What time did she leave the pub?” Cole asked.
    “About eight.”
    “What did you do?”
    “Nothing. I stayed in the pub for a while, then I went around to visit my mother-in-law. She lives in the street behind the pub.”
    “And that was the last time you saw Rachel—when she left the pub?”
    Abbie nodded. “I found out later that the bus was about an hour late because of the storm, but she definitely got on it. The driver remembers her. But the bus never got to Plymouth. It had to stop…” She leaned to one side and pointed through the windscreen at the road up ahead. “It was just over there. See that steep little bank at the end of the road?”
    We both looked out the window. About half a mile ahead, the road dipped down and veered off to the right under a steep bank of trees. As we got closer, we could see where the bank had collapsed. Piles of red earth and fallen trees had been bulldozed off the road.
    “The road was blocked,” Abbie said. “Nothing could get through. The bus had to turn around and come back. It was getting pretty late by then, and the road was gettingreally bad, so by the time the bus got back to Lychcombe it was gone eleven o’clock. The driver remembers Rachel getting off. He asked her if she was going to be all right. She told him not to worry, she had some friends in the village and she’d stay the night with them.”
    “But she never showed up,” said Cole.
    “No…we just assumed she’d caught the train and gone home. We didn’t know anything was wrong until the next day.”
    “Why didn’t she call you?”
    “The phone box by the bus stop was out