The Road by Cormac McCarthy Read Free Book Online

knapsacks over his shoulder and they tore through the crumbling bracken. The boy was terrified. Run, he whispered. Run. He looked back. The truck had rumbled into view. Men standing in the bed looking out. The boy fell and he pulled him up. It’s all right, he said. Come on.
    He could see a break through the trees that he thought was a ditch or a cut and they came out through the weeds into an old roadway. Plates of cracked macadam showing through the drifts of ash. He pulled the boy down and they crouched under the bank listening, gasping for breath. They could hear the diesel engine out on the road, running on God knows what. When he raised up to look he could just see the top of the truck moving along the road. Men standing in the stakebed, some of them holding rifles. The truck passed on and the black diesel smoke coiled through the woods. The motor sounded ropy. Missing and puttering. Then it quit.
    He sank down and put his hand on top of his head. God, he said. They could hear the thing rattle and flap to a halt. Then just the silence. He had the pistol in his hand, hecouldnt even remember taking it from his belt. They could hear the men talking. Hear them unlatch and raise the hood. He sat with his arm around the boy. Shh, he said. Shh. After a while they heard the truck begin to roll. Lumbering and creaking like a ship. They’d have no other way to start it save to push it and they couldnt get it fast enough to start on that slope. After a few minutes it coughed and bucked and stopped again. He raised his head to look and coming through the weeds twenty feet away was one of their number unbuckling his belt. They both froze.
    He cocked the pistol and held it on the man and the man stood with one hand out at his side, the dirty crumpled paintmask that he wore sucking in and out.
    Just keep coming.
    He looked at the road.
    Dont look back there. Look at me. If you call out you’re dead.
    He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered look to it where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. He stepped down into the roadcut and he looked at the gun and he looked at the boy. Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance.He was lean, wiry, rachitic. Dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it.
    Where are you going?
    I was going to take a crap.
    Where are you going with the truck.
    I dont know.
    What do you mean you dont know? Take the mask off.
    He pulled the mask off over his head and stood holding it.
    I mean I dont know, he said.
    You dont know where you’re going?
    No.
    What’s the truck running on.
    Diesel fuel.
    How much do you have.
    There’s three fifty-five gallon drums in the bed.
    Do you have ammunition for those guns?
    He looked back toward the road.
    I told you not to look back there.
    Yeah. We got ammunition.
    Where did you get it?
    Found it.
    That’s a lie. What are you eating.
    Whatever we can find.
    Whatever you can find.
    Yeah. He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said.
    That’s what you think.
    You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot.
    Yes they will. But you wont.
    How do you figure that?
    Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.
    Are you a doctor?
    I’m not anything.
    We got a man hurt. It’d be worth your while.
    Do I look like an imbecile to you?
    I dont know what you look like.
    Why are you looking at him?
    I can look where I