Devastation Road Read Online Free Page A

soldier’s ankles with his boot. Even knowing that they were dead, he squatted down and nervously touched one. The soldier’s hand was still
warm. He stood up again sharply, pulling the pistol from his pocket and looking around, then pacing back up the path several yards and scanning the trees on one side and the fields that rolled out
on the other. He thought he could sense eyes watching him but he could see nothing there. Whoever had shot them must still be close; these men were not long dead.
    He made his way back, still alert, and crouched down beside them again. The flies had already moved back in, pitter-pattering over the skin.
    After some awkward digging around he found a torn map in the breast pocket of one and a small notebook with a blank page at the back. He ripped it out and slipped it into his pocket along with
the stub of a pencil; their pistols, bullets and cigarettes, or any chocolate they might have carried, had already been taken.
    For some time he sat on the grass trying to piece the sheets of map together but the place names all looked foreign. He didn’t know whether they were German or Dutch or something else
entirely. He folded the pieces and pocketed them. When he stood back up, he could have sworn that one of the soldiers had turned his head.
    If there really was a war on and he had no idea where he was, then it was much safer not to be seen. The pain in his head still felt like eyes drilling into him and several
times Owen had abruptly stopped, distinctly sure that someone was following him. He kept hold of the pistol and checked his pockets: paper, maps, button, pencil. He had to keep checking that
everything was in place.
    The morning slowly dissolved, and at times the train wreck and the soldiers laid out like ninepins were gone from his mind entirely, so that it was only when he saw the scrap of paper in his
hand that the recollection sprang back and he remembered it was true.
    MAX , he had written.
    How despairing of him his brother would be.
    Lost? Oh, for God’s sake
.
    Snatches of thought like that constantly peeled away, though he tried hard to cling to them: drawing the stringers of a wing at his desk; the red trolleybus following the overhead wires down the
hill. He stepped on the back.
Not to worry, sir. ’Sonly thruppence
. The conductor had punched out a ticket anyway. Names, too, blew in and away again. Barnes and Budgie and Peri . .
.
    You need to make a note of everything
. Nothing in his head felt safe.
    And then his father was grabbing the strings just in time and swooping the kite back into the blue.
I say,
he said,
that was close
.
    It was only as these thoughts dispersed that he realized that he had somehow wandered on to a narrow road and was standing in the middle of it. The sky had opened up into a rich wide blue.
Dandelion seeds drifted like parachutists across his path. He stared behind him at the road he must have walked along, at the gentle haze in the distance shimmering above the dirt. Then, for a
moment, there in the watery blur, he thought he saw the silhouette of a boy standing maybe half a mile back – a boy, tall and thin and watching him. The silhouette quivered and
disappeared.
    The terrain hardened, the hills forming into jagged edges and the trees into prickly furze. For a while he sat on the verge and could not stop himself crying.
    He wondered if there was someone waiting for him. He had no wedding ring or photograph. If he were married would he not feel it? The memory of it might be gone like so much else but there would
surely be something deeper within him that could not so easily be cut away. In time, the sense of someone might come, he told himself; it might bring a face, a name. He would not die. He would not
give up. He would somehow get himself home.
    He took out the map again with fresh determination and searched within its sheets. Somewhere he was lost within it: the most indistinguishable pinprick trapped beneath its contours.