Devastation Road Read Online Free

rickety rattle of their furniture bumping
around inside.
    After a while the road began to edge westerly, taking the procession with it, until it tipped the travellers over a hill and they disappeared into the sunlight.
    He had walked long distances before, he thought, for now a recollection was pooling. Not just the muscle memory of walking for hours, but days, and not in the full blush of spring either, but
through deep snow with blizzards buffeting through a pine forest and whipping hard against his face. Then, just as quickly, the memory was gone again. He wondered if there was still a war on
– a war that felt so distant in his mind and yet he was quite sure had barely begun.
    He remembered a radio announcement, and the next day at his desk, carefully marking out the lines of a plane – a precision laid out for something that, in his mind at least, had not yet
been ruined in its reality – he had barely been able to concentrate. A worry had seeped into him that everything was about to change and with it, him too. Everyone would be altered. Lines
would be redrawn, populations recalculated, trajectories of bombs and bullets scrutinized. No one would look for beauty in design any more. The womanly curve of a plane’s belly would be
bastardized, bloated to make room for parachutists and weapons of destruction.
At least we ain’t getting called up
, Harry had said. And yet everything had changed.
    As he sat on the verge feeling for other cuts and bruises on a body that no longer felt like his own, and in clothes that weren’t his either, he found a pocket in the seam of the trousers
and was surprised to find a metal button. He turned it over in his palm. It looked familiar yet he couldn’t remember whether he had seen the button before.
    He skirted a wheat field – the crop already waist-high, and the soft stalks rustling in the breeze. He had spent the morning wondering just how long he had been gone. He
stopped for a moment and watched the wind casting ripples through the shifting leaves. If he tuned his ears he could hear them whispering to him, the reedy
hush
of their voices.
    He glanced around and then, seeing that no one was about, he took a step in, slowly venturing further and then feeling the lure of something stronger than he was pulling him in deeper. The tips
of wheat licked at his arms as they had done when he’d been a child, that familiar smell of dusty dirt, and the crop swilling and swaying around him. He wanted to run through it. And then, in
the memory that swept in on the breeze, sweeping him into it too, his brother was suddenly in front of him, the back of his head bobbing through the crop, the stark whiteness of his shirt against
the tan of his arms.
Max
, he shouted.
No, Max, wait!
The two of them running through the wheat, their arms knocking against the stalks and the sun burning so bright that sometimes
Max would disappear in its flare; or, without warning, would drop like a dead bird into the crop so that Owen would lose him and panic. He would stand in the middle of the field calling out to him:
Max,
he would shout,
where are you?
Then Max would burst out through the stalks beside him and with a holler knock him down into the dirt.
I was here all the time,
stupid
, he would say, laughing, as Owen picked himself up. But not this time.
    Not now.
    He stood in the middle of the field, anxiously scanning it for that same movement, that rippling path, an unseen disturbance quickly coming for him through the wheat. He stood, waiting –
watching and waiting – until another breath of wind blew through the crop, taking his fear and his brother with it.
    The seven soldiers were laid out along the verge like ninepins, each dressed in red green uniforms and missing their shoes and socks. Around them flies patrolled, alighting on
stony faces or disappearing inside an open collar, or up the tunnel of a trouser leg and through a bracken of hairs.
    Owen edged closer then nudged one of the