The Low Road by Chris Womersley

Author:Chris Womersley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: SilverOak
Published: 2012-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

They moved as one single, lumbering creature. The air was wintry and turbid. The few trees had the tangled architecture of lungs. It was like moving through a sparse forest of bronchia, Wild thought. Some strange, internal world. Beside him, Lee murmured to himself, just halfformed words, like the beginnings of language. Or, possibly, its end. They tottered and rolled on the road. Wild was forced to grab him tighter to prevent them both from falling to the ground. He murmured noises of encouragement and sympathy.

Then, bubbling up through the silence, Lee heard a low sound. A rumbling, perhaps some impossibly huge machine, accompanied by a faint, almost indiscernible vibration through the earth. He thought at first that it must have been the sound of a train passing nearby, or an airport. He stopped. What’s that?

What?

That noise. The taste of his breath was bitter, like that of another man. He remembered reading that the flavour of garlic would infuse his mouth if he rubbed cloves of it on the soles of his feet. Was this what had happened? Had the sense of the man from whom he’d taken these clothes somehow passed into him, or was it just the bullet?

Again he spat, and was dismayed to notice swirls of blood in his spittle. He wanted to cry out, but no sound came. He imagined Wild and himself from a great distance, two tiny figures on a road in flat, featureless countryside. There was no sign of other people. Where had they gone? He listened for a long minute. The world was shrinking, becoming something frightening, something intimate.

Lee was aware of Wild at his side and was concerned, momentarily, at the prospect of bloodying Wild’s coat. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to end up like this. I’m sorry.

Wild’s voice was close by his ear. Come on, son. We’re nearly there. Come along, now. Not much further.

He wished he could curl up and sleep in that warm, dark voice. He tried to turn and face Wild, but only succeeded in unbalancing them both.

It’s OK, Wild was saying. We’re nearly there. This looks familiar to me. We’re nearly home.

They walked on. The afternoon drew breath, preparing for evening. The sound Lee had heard seemed not to come any closer, nor to grow fainter. It emanated from no particular point, but rather existed in the air around. He expected to see something appear from the murky distance: a tractor, or a truck of some sort. Perhaps it was the train they had travelled on?

But there was nothing. There was nothing.

He was overcome by fatigue, along with something else, an even heavier sensation that surfaced from some hidden part of him; despair and its terrible twin, hope. He detached himself from Wild’s grip and, clutching at his side, lay on the ground, stage by stage. Despite the rain, the ground was hard and brittle. Pebbles and rocks dug into his hip and the palm of his hand, the places that bore his weight. He held a hand in front of him, gloved with blood, dark in the wan light.

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.