Desolation (5 page)

He put the car in neutral and got out.

Amber stayed where she was, the Charger’s low rumble helping to calm her beating heart. The sky was beginning to brighten. Cold, startlingly fresh air filled the Charger.

There was a sharp wail of pain that was abruptly cut off.

She angled the rear-view to watch Milo drag the body into the bushes. Once that was done, she knew, he’d go back down the hill, stuff the real trooper’s corpse in the trunk of the patrol car and park it somewhere out of sight.

Then she’d insist that he get some sleep. They were in Alaska now, with maybe five hours of driving ahead of them, and the Hounds were still twenty or so hours behind. For the first time since all this began, Amber allowed herself to wonder if this was maybe the first step towards everything being suddenly okay.

I
T TOOK LONGER THAN
expected to find Desolation Hill.

They finally got to it a little before midday. This troubled Milo. Amber could see it in his face, and she didn’t have to ask why. They should have turned on to its streets without even thinking about it, such was the power of the Demon Road, or the Dark Highway, or the blackroads, or whatever name you used to describe the phenomenon of horror seeking horror. Such things were intertwined. Fate guided travellers on the blackroads, steering them to people and places that had been similarly touched by darkness. Sheer coincidence alone should have led Milo and Amber right on to the town’s main street.

Instead, they took several wrong turns and passed the turn-off without even noticing it. Once they’d found their way on to it, the road took them on a winding line between snow-topped hills until they came to a sturdy old sign that said

Just before the sign, a narrow track led off to their right, and directly beyond it the main road continued straight for a while before veering off and getting lost behind overgrown bushes and tall trees.

Milo pulled the Charger over to the side of the road.

“Why are we stopping?” Amber asked. “We’re here. We actually made it. What’s the problem?”

“We don’t know what’s waiting for us,” said Milo.

“Sure we do,” she said. “I’ve read you the town history. It’s short and boring. It’s a small town with a creepy name where nothing exciting ever happens.”

“That the internet knows about.”

“The internet knows all,” she said. “It’s the one place we’ll be safe from the Shining Demon.”

“But why?”

“Is that important?” she asked. “I mean, obviously it’s important, yeah, but is it important
now
? Is it important right now, at the side of the road? All we need to know is that we’ll be safe in there.”

“Buxton only lasted a week.”

“He said it was a weird place. That’s fine with me. I can handle weird. Milo, we can sort this out later. We can ask questions and get answers. But I’m tired. You’re tired. We need a good night of sleep. We need to stop running.”

He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Damn right I’m right.”

“Okay then, we go in, we don’t attract any attention. We speak only when spoken to. We fade into the background, understood?”

“I’ll try.”

“Try?”

“It’s a small town in the middle of nowhere. Newcomers are going to be noticed. That’s kind of inevitable.”

“Yeah, maybe, but we do our best to keep a low profile.”

“Agreed.”

Milo paused for a moment longer, then put the Charger in gear. “Okay then.”

They pulled out on to the road and passed the town sign and the Charger bolted forward suddenly and Amber yelled as she shifted, pain flaring in her hands, the shock of the change nearly blinding her to the fact that Milo, too, had turned into his demon-self. He jammed his foot on the brake and the Charger slid to a halt, growling in protest.

Cradling her hands to her chest, Amber met Milo’s burning red eyes. They were narrowed. He looked behind them, then in front, then stuck his head out of the window and looked up. Expecting an attack. Expecting something.

They waited. The Charger waited. But nothing came.

Milo’s skin lightened and the burning red left his eyes and mouth, and his curved horns retreated into his hairline.

“What the hell?” said Amber.

Milo examined his hands. “I don’t know. I can still feel—”

He shifted again without warning, into that black-skinned, horned demon, and he snarled in irritation and immediately reverted to his normal self.

“That was weird,” he muttered, then looked at her. “You’re going to have to change back.”

“But it hurts.”

“You have to change, and then you’ll have to fight against the impulse to shift again. It’s strong. It’s very strong.”

“For Christ’s sake …”

She gritted her teeth and reverted, and fresh pain sprang from her fingers and blinded her to her own thoughts and there was another flash of pain and she was a demon again.

“I can’t do it,” she gasped. “I can’t.”

“Revert,” said Milo. “And hold.”

“Give me a minute.”

“Now, Amber.”

“I’ll try again in a minute, you dick!”

“
Now
,” Milo snarled, his eyes starting to glow red, and Amber snarled back and reverted and this time she held it, despite the pain, and she focused on staying a normal, clumsy, ugly human …

And when the pain retracted far enough she took a deep, deep breath.

“Well done,” Milo said, settling back into his seat.

“This is horrible,” said Amber. Every inch of her wanted to shift. Her nerve endings jumped. Her skin was electric. The human form she inhabited was all wrong. “I feel like I need to pee,” she said. “I don’t need to pee, but you know that feeling? When you’re about to burst and you know that all you have to do is relax and it’ll suddenly feel so much better? It’s like that, times a thousand.”

Milo looked at her for a while. “Right,” he said at last. “Not the analogy I’d have used, but fair enough.”

“What’s wrong with us?”

Milo didn’t answer. He just got out of the car. Amber turned in her seat, watched him walk to the sign. He passed it and turned, a curious look on his face. He took a big step back to the Charger and shifted.

He stepped to the other side of the sign and reverted.

Scowling, he walked back to the car, shifting as he did so. By the time he got behind the wheel, he’d reverted again.

“This town is a curiosity,” he said.

“You think whatever shielded Buxton from the Shining Demon is the same thing that’s making us shift?”

“It’s likely the reason, yeah. Pity he didn’t mention this to us before he flew off.”

“I don’t like this,” said Amber. “I don’t like this feeling.”

“How’re the hands?”

“They hurt. Like, a huge amount.”

“We’ll get to that motel you found on the map,” said Milo. “You’ll be able to shift behind closed doors, and you’ll heal faster as a demon. A day or two, tops.”

He was probably right. The swelling had already gone down and her fingers were returning to their normal colour. Being a demon had its advantages.

“Sorry for calling you a dick,” she said.

“That’s okay. Sorry I snarled.”

“Guess we’re a little ruder than we’d like to be when we’re horned up.”

Milo looked at her.

“I should probably use a different word for that,” she said.

“Probably,” he agreed, and they started moving again. The town was affecting the Charger, too – its rumble was deeper, and somehow even more menacing, than usual.

Amber had examined the map online a dozen times before now, and as they drove she did her best to match it with her surroundings. They passed a used-car lot (TODD’S
NEARLY
NEW
CARS!
BEST
PRICES!) hemmed in by a chain-link fence. The cars stood in their rows like prisoners in an exercise yard, their gleaming potential bridled by circumstances beyond their control.

Beyond the lot was a gas station, complete with small convenience store, and then they were in the town proper. Main Street was the widest street the place had, and the longest, and it boasted a church and a healthy array of businesses. The Hill Hardware Store was next to Lucy’s Laundromat, which stood opposite Doctor Maynard’s office, which in turn stood next to Reinhold’s Pharmacy. Moraga Discount Store was the massive building on the east side of the square, a slightly raised public meeting place in the exact centre of Main Street that the road itself circled. The west side was taken up by the grander Desolation Hill Municipal Building, which had eighteen steps leading up to its doors and pillars on either side, marred only by the scaffolding that scaled it from ground to peak like the skeleton of a building that had been left there to die. There was nothing on the square itself except what looked like an old wooden mailbox on a post that had been set into the concrete.

The Charger drew some curious looks as it passed. Amber was used to that – it was certainly an impressive car. But today she thought the attention they were getting was different, somehow. Not hostile, exactly, just … wary.

Milo turned off Main Street, passed a bar named Sally’s, and kept going through a residential neighbourhood. The town itself continued up into the hills, into all those trees and all that snow, but they took a narrow blacktop without a yellow line up to a tall building that looked like it should have been perched on the edge of a cliff somewhere. The Dowall Motel was the only place to stay in the area, not counting a few bed and breakfasts, and the sign said there were vacancies.

They parked outside and got out. It was the beginning of May and there was a startlingly blue sky and yet Amber’s breath still crystallised in the air. She doubted it was much above forty. On Main Street there had been no snow, but up here, elevated slightly, it was still packed tightly at the sides of the road.

Amber had spent her whole life feeling miserable in the heat, so she wasn’t about to start complaining about the cold. Even so, the temperature was making her hands throb with a renewed vigour, and she hurried into the motel while Milo carried in their bags.

Inside, it was warmer. The wooden floorboards creaked under her weight. A moose head hung over the front desk, its terrific antlers rising to the high ceiling. A man came out of the back room. He looked young, in his thirties, but his side-parted hair had already gone grey and he held himself so stiffly that a sudden draught might possibly have snapped him in half.

He saw them and looked confused. Amber smiled, and led Milo to the desk. The man wore a little badge that identified him as Kenneth.

“Hi, Kenneth,” said Amber.

Kenneth didn’t answer. He had a mole under his right eye.

“We’d like a couple of rooms, please.”

Kenneth looked at them for quite a long time before speaking.

“I wasn’t expecting visitors,” he said.

This struck Amber as a somewhat strange thing to say.

“This is a motel, isn’t it?” Milo asked.

“Indeed it is,” said Kenneth.

“And you rent out rooms to visitors, don’t you?”

“Indeed we do,” said Kenneth.

“So do you have any spare rooms to rent out to us?”

“Indeed I have,” said Kenneth. “I just wasn’t expecting you, that’s all.”

Silence threatened to descend.

“Should we have called ahead?” Amber asked.

Kenneth blinked at her. “We don’t take reservations over the phone.”

“Online?”

“We don’t have a website,” he said. “My mother never approved of the internet. She said the internet was a filthy place for perverts and degenerates who only want to watch pornography.”

“It also has cats,” said Amber.

“We don’t allow animals,” Kenneth said quickly. “My sister is allergic to animal hair. If you have cats, you can’t stay here.”

“We don’t have cats,” Milo said. “We don’t have any animals. Is there anyone else staying here right now?”

“No.”

“Then could we please have two rooms?”

Kenneth hesitated.

“I’m a little puzzled,” said Amber. “You don’t take bookings online or over the phone, and obviously you don’t like it when people turn up unannounced … so how does anyone actually stay here?”