Road of the Dead by Kevin Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

of order.”
    “She had her cell.”
    Abbie shook her head. “You can’t get a signal around here. The police think she probably tried calling us from the phone box, then when she couldn’t get through she decided to walk to our house…”
    Her voice trailed off and she lowered her eyes, unwilling to go any further. But Cole didn’t seem to notice. Either that, or he just didn’t care.
    “So that’s when it happened,” he said. “Somewhere between the bus stop and your place…someone took her.”
    Abbie nodded silently.
    “Where were you then?” asked Cole.
    Abbie looked up suddenly. “What?”
    “Where were you when Rachel was walking back to your place?”
    “I just told you—”
    “Were you still at your mother-in-law’s?”
    Her eyes were getting angry now. “Why are you asking me—?”
    “What time did you leave?”
    She glared at Cole in disbelief. “You don’t have any right to question me.”
    “Why not?”
    “I was her friend , for God’s sake. If you think—”
    “I don’t think anything,” Cole said calmly. “I just want to know what happened to Rachel. The more you tell me the more I’ll know.”
    Abbie continued staring at him for a while, but I could see her anger fading.
    “Yeah, well…” she muttered eventually. “I can’t tell you any more, can I? I don’t know any more. I wish I did, but I don’t.”
    Cole was about to ask her something else, but before he could speak I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “I think we’re nearly there.”
    He looked at me, then looked out the window. Boundless acres of empty moorland stretched out into the distance. “Nearly where?” he said. “There’s nothing here.”
    “We just passed a sign,” I told him.
    “What sign?”
    “Lychcombe.”
    “He’s right,” Abbie said, getting to her feet. “It’s the next stop. Just around the corner.”
    As she walked off down to the front of the bus, Colecontinued looking out the window. His eyes took in the barren slopes and the scattered boulders and the lonely gray road winding its way into the fading hills, and I could feel him thinking to himself— This is no place to die .
    We got off the bus and watched it pull away, and then we just stood there for a while, mesmerized by the unworldly silence of the moor. I’d never heard anything like it before. It wasn’t a soundless silence—there was the soft rush of wind in the grass, the lonely bleating of distant sheep, the call of crows in a nearby forest…but somehow that made it all the more quiet. There were no human noises. No traffic. No voices.
    It was the silence of another age.
    Another time.
    Another bus stop. Another day. Another night. I could feel it—the sky black with rain, Rachel getting off the bus, trying her cell, then hurrying across the road to the telephone box, trying to call Abbie. But the phone’s out of order. Broken, busted, jammed. No signal. No answer. She can’t hear me. She’s hundreds of miles away. She’s all alone. She’s cold and wet and it’s dark and windy and there’s something out there, something that shouldn’t be there…
    “Don’t think about it.”
    Cole was standing beside me, his hand on my shoulder.
    “I can’t help it,” I told him.
    “I know.”
    He gave my shoulder a squeeze, then looked over at Abbie. She was waiting for us at the side of the road.
    “Don’t push her too hard,” I said quietly to Cole. “She’s frightened of something. If you try to force it out of her, she’ll just clam up. Go easy for a while—OK?”
    Cole nodded. Still looking at Abbie, he said, “Do you really think she looks like Rachel?”
    “Sometimes,” I said. “Other times I’m not so sure. Her face keeps shifting. Sometimes she looks like an anti -Rachel.”
    Cole looked at me.
    I shrugged.
    We walked over to Abbie and she led us across the road to a V-shaped junction where a hillside lane branched off the main road and headed down into a valley.
    “This is the road to