Catherine Jinks by The Road (html)

Author:The Road (html) [Road, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-18T01:23:58.757000+00:00

CHAPTER 11

lec had never driven a 1959 Ford station wagon before. He had certainly never driven anything that felt as if it was being held together by rubber bands and paper clips. The pedals had an alarmingly loose quality to them; the steering was sluggish, slow to respond and heavy to move; the gears ground in the gearbox like a pestle in a mortar. After five minutes behind the wheel, Alec was beginning to regard Del with more respect.

‘How long you had this thing?’ he asked her.

‘Oh...a bloody long time.’

‘Feels like it’s overdue for a service,’ Alec said tactfully, and Del snorted.

‘People say that,’ she replied, ‘and it sounds like I should bring in a stud bull.’

Puzzled, Alec dropped the subject. He wasn’t up to making small talk, anyway. For a while there, eating baked beans with Verlie and the kids, he had begun to feel more like himself; the knot in his stomach had started to unravel, the muscles in his shoulders to relax. Something about the smell of hot coffee – and Rosie’s plaintive demands for cornflakes – had thrust recent events at Thorndale into the background. But now, heading towards the scene of the massacre, Alec was growing tense again. He was sweating, and his mouth was dry. He knew that he was alone in his burgeoning sense of unease, however, because no one else in the car had actually encountered anything horrific during the last twenty-four hours. They had no idea what they had stumbled into – they hadn’t even grasped the fact that the laws of nature had been quietly overturned. Besides, Del was perhaps one can short of a sixpack (eccentric, at the very least), and Ross was a stick.

They didn’t have the nous to be scared.

‘Eight minutes,’ said Ross, who was keeping a close eye on his watch. The bastard had been pressured into coming by the wives of the party, and Alec knew why. It was because no one really trusted Alec. They saw how jumpy he was, and they misread the situation. They didn’t understand what he had been through. And they were probably prejudiced against truckies, in any case.

Alec might have been angry about it, if he hadn’t been so scared.

‘There is something weird goin on,’ Del suddenly remarked. She had been gazing out the window, her Lee Enfield propped between her pudgy knees. ‘I can’t put my finger ...it’s something to do with the distances . . .’

‘The markers are shot up,’ Ross volunteered.

‘Nah, I mean the . . .’ Without finishing her sentence, Del waved a hand. ‘We’re gettin close to the Pine Creek crossing. I can tell from where the trees are, on the right. We’ve only been drivin eight minutes and –’

‘Ten minutes,’ Ross interrupted.

‘All right, ten minutes. It still doesn’t make sense. I crossed Pine Creek yesterday afternoon –’

‘Look!’ cried Alec.

It was Diesel Dog. It had to be, though the vague, white shape on the horizon was impossible to identify as yet. Alec found himself speeding up, and had to force his foot off the spongy accelerator.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.