Devastation Road Read Online Free Page B

He scanned
the symbols, the railway lines, the rivers and the strange-looking place names. Harry had once said that the cartographer was to the land what the draughtsman was to aircraft: bringing a plan and
order to something that would otherwise feel unnavigable. The map, though, was faded and stained, and staring at it he realized what nonsense this was, even if he tried to think of the contours as
no more than arcs and the rivers as no more than cables wiring the land together.
    As he moved the sheet away, his eyes were drawn to a name.
Sagan
. It sat at the edge of the sheet. He faltered, stared and then turned his gaze back to the other parts of the map. But
his eyes kept being pulled to it as if within him two wires had touched, sparking the slightest flicker of something in his head. He scanned around the name with his finger but nothing looked
familiar. Only perhaps the shading of a forest. A symbol printed below looked like the Roman numeral:
III
.
    Sagan
. He wondered if he had read about the place recently, or heard it on a broadcast. A place so far at the edge of the map as to be almost hanging off it.
    In the end he pulled out the scrap of paper and stub of pencil and wrote it down anyway, then found it again on the map and twice circled it. His finger followed the faint railway lines that
threaded away from it in either direction but nothing else caught his eye.
    As the evening drew in, the fields and woods gave way to forests that rose up over the steepening hillsides, capturing the swelling darkness within the clutch of their boughs.
He found a clearing and rummaged around for kindling, but beneath the trees everything was damp. As he poked about he sensed movement nearby – a figure, he thought, changing shapes between
the trees and shifting with the shadows.
    He pulled out the pistol. ‘Who’s there?’
    Then, in German: ‘
Wer ist da?
’
    He held still but all he could hear in the darkness was the nervous fidget of birds.
    He did not sleep but lay for hours, shivering and surrounded by the sounds of the forest. He squeezed his hands into his armpits once more and pulled his knees in tight, the
ground growing damp beneath him until it soaked through his clothes.
    He would not be afraid. But twice he sat bolt upright, swinging the pistol furiously about at the shapes of bats that were sweeping between the trees.
    Images, recent and opaque, and untethered to anything else, rose in his mind like air bubbles to the surface and just as quickly burst: sunlight burning through a skin of leaves; water rushing
around him. They flashed when he least expected: these leaves so close to his face; or the scuff and scratch of grass being hauled away from under him as if it was the earth, not him, that was
sliding. There was no catching them – these sudden openings into what might have been yesterday or the day before or even the year before; it was difficult to tell.
    The trolleybus came. He sat by the window. The street melted away.

He jerked awake, aware of the stench of smoke and the fizzle of flames. When he turned on his side he found that a shabby-looking boy was squatting in the undergrowth,
staring right at him. Owen scrambled to his feet, dropping the jacket that had been draped over him, and pulled out his pistol, but the boy did not flinch.
    In the clearing a fire had been lit and a crude spit constructed with a small animal roasting on it. Moisture from its skinned body dripped and the flames hissed and flared. The smoke was so
infused with cooked meat that Owen felt it pulling at his stomach.
    The boy didn’t look much older than fifteen, and was squatting with his outstretched arms resting on his knees and hands lightly clasped. He had an impish quality: unkempt hair with dried
bits of leaf caught in it, and a small snub nose. His eyes were narrow and dark, and he scrutinized Owen, then shifted and cleared his throat. He didn’t look in the slightest bit scared, but
gauged Owen and the