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.
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
