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“And there I was feeling sorry for myself,” she mumbled. She looked down at herself. “Did I puke? I don’t remember puking.”
“You did,” said Milo.
“Damn.” She noticed he was wearing a different shirt. “Did I puke on you?”
“You did.”
“Sorry.”
“She gave me pills for you. You can take another in a little over an hour.”
Which left just enough time for the pain to build nicely. Amber straightened up, careful to keep her hands steady. “That guy … he said Astaroth knows where we’re headed.”
Milo nodded. “Figured as much.”
“Did you recognise him?”
Milo shook his head. “You catch his name?”
Amber hesitated. “Elias Mauk,” she said.
“I’ve heard of him,” said Milo, “and I got the impression we’d been friends once.”
“Friends? He wanted to kill you.”
“We must have had a falling-out. Hell, for all I know, maybe we were partners. Serial killers in cahoots.”
“His face didn’t spark any memories?” she asked. “His voice?”
“Nothing,” said Milo. “My life is still as blank as it’s been for the last twelve years.”
“He, uh, he seemed to know that Milo isn’t your real name.”
“Yeah.” They got to a dark and empty crossroads, and the Charger creaked pleasantly as they turned right. “I wonder what it is.”
The phone in her jacket rang. Amber held up her bandaged hands.
“Oh yeah,” Milo said. She twisted slightly and he reached into her pocket, took the phone out, and thumbed the answer button. He set it to loudspeaker.
“Uh, hello?” said the voice on the other end. “That Amber?”
“I’m here,” she said.
“Oh, Amber, hi. This is Jeremy?”
“Hi, Jeremy.”
“The guy you gave that hundred bucks to?”
“I know who you are, Jeremy.”
“Right,” Jeremy said, “yeah, sorry. Anyway, you wanted to know if a group of bikers turned up?”
Her mood turned cold and plummeted. “Yes, we did.”
“Well, they just passed through town,” Jeremy said. “Not more than two minutes ago. Five of them. Long hair, leather jackets, beards, the works. Rode straight through without stopping. Didn’t look left or right, just kept looking ahead.”
“Thanks, Jeremy,” said Amber. “Don’t spend that money all at once.”
Milo hung up and slipped the phone back in her pocket. She looked at him.
“How far back is Jeremy?”
“Twenty hours,” said Milo. “Maybe twenty-two.” He glanced at her. “We knew we couldn’t shake them.”
“I know,” she said. “But still … It’d be nice if something went our way for once, that’s all.”
“Astaroth can send whoever he likes,” said Milo. “The fact is, the Hounds are at least twenty hours behind us and we are ten hours away from Desolation Hill. No one’s going to stop us.”
“You need to sleep.”
“I will. We’re on a straight blast into Alaska. Once we sneak across the border, I’ll take a few hours’ rest. When we get where we’re going, I’ll sleep a full night.”
“That’s providing everything we’ve heard about Desolation Hill is true.”
“You think Buxton was lying?”
“No,” said Amber. “But just because Gregory hid there for a few weeks doesn’t mean we can.”
“We don’t have a wide variety of options available to us,” said Milo. “He thinks we’ll be undetectable to the Shining Demon and the Hounds once we’re inside the town limits, and I trust him to know what he’s talking about. That’ll at least give us time to get our breath back and formulate some kind of plan.”
“Because our plans always work out so well for us.”
He didn’t respond to that. She didn’t expect him to.
They drove on in comfortable and familiar silence. The knob for the radio remained, as ever, untouched. Even if she’d wanted to turn it, her bandaged hands would have made that impossible. Besides, she’d grown out of her fear of quiet moments. She didn’t need music to fill the silences anymore.
She took a few more pills and the rising pain faded to a manageable throb as she looked out at the endless parade of trees. She wondered what kind they were. It was hard to tell in the dark, but she thought they were spruce, although she was no expert.
“What kind of trees are those?” she asked Milo.
“Green,” he said, and that’s how the conversation ended.
They passed sleeping houses and sleeping cars and an impressive array of parked pickups with slide-in campers that reared up and over like one dog humping another. It got ridiculously cold in the car and Amber wrapped herself awkwardly in a blanket. The stars tonight were astonishing.
“See the stars?” she asked Milo.
“Bright,” he grunted.
She nodded. Yup. They were indeed bright.
She slept, then, and didn’t dream, and when she opened her eyes the Charger was slowing and there were lights flashing lazily ahead of them.
She sat up straight, the blanket covering her hands. “Cops?”
“State trooper,” said Milo. His face was pale, his features tight. They were already in Alaska, which meant he’d been driving too long. The Charger had started whispering to him.
Amber saw the trooper, in his jacket and a wide-brimmed hat, holding up one hand. The Charger stopped beside him and Milo wound down the window.
“Hey there, folks,” the trooper said, leaning in and smiling. “This is a heck of a nice vehicle you’ve got here. Don’t see many of these old muscle cars round these parts, let me tell you. What is she, a ’69?”
“’70,” said Milo.
“1970,” said the trooper, and whistled appreciatively. “Gee whiz, you’ve kept her in a good condition.”
“Thanks,” Milo said.
“Sure thing!” He bent lower, and smiled in at Amber. “Hey there, little lady.”
He had light stubble on his chin and his shirt didn’t fit right. The top button wouldn’t close round his thick neck. There was blood on his tie.
That was all Milo needed. He’d been behind the wheel for nine or ten hours without much of a break and certainly no sleep, and this was all it took to make him snap. He shifted, growing horns, his skin and hair now the deepest, most impossible black, and, when he snarled, the same red that spilled from his eyes spilled from his mouth. He grabbed the trooper’s tie and yanked hard as he hit the gas. The Charger lurched forward, picking up speed, dragging the hollering trooper along with it. They passed the patrol car and Amber glimpsed a bare leg sticking out of the grass behind it.
The man in the trooper uniform gurgled and cursed and clung to the side of the Charger as they hurtled uphill. His right hand disappeared for a moment, then came back, holding a pistol that he quickly dropped when they went over a bump.
They got to the top of the hill and evened out, and Milo released his hold and the road snatched the man from the window. Milo braked, testing Amber’s seat belt and jarring her hands.
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.
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IT 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—”
