Catherine Jinks TheRoad (100 page)

‘And leave
us
here?’

There was a long, long silence, broken only by muffled sobbing. The terrible smell of rot, slurry, burnt flesh – whatever it was – had begun to penetrate the car. The children were coughing, now. Red smoke encircled them like fog, veiling the trees, the bushes, the night sky.

Noel straightened. He looked back over his shoulder, hesitating. Alec could see beyond him, in the firelight, the smouldering corpse on the ground, from which most of the smoke that encompassed them seemed to be issuing. John Carr’s body had been reduced to a blackened skeleton by an intense – perhaps unnatural – heat.

Alec turned his eyes away.

‘Please. Noel,’ Linda pleaded. ‘Let’s get out of here. We can’t stay here. Not with ...with...’

‘With
that
,’ Alec finished.

‘But the fire . . .?’

‘It’ll burn out! It’s nowhere near anything!’

Still Noel hesitated, even as the smoke began to drift between them and the ghastly cadaver, blocking their view of it. Alec opened his mouth again. He was about to point out that if they didn’t leave soon, they wouldn’t be able to see a bloody thing, flaming torch or no flaming torch.

But he didn’t have to.

Instead, he was forestalled by the haunting, melancholy, drawn-out cry of a crow. Suddenly, in the night, a crow cawed in some unseen tree, and was joined by another, and another. A chorus of crows, moaning and squawking. Their harsh voices drifted down through the smoke – plaintive, piercing, inhuman.

For a moment everybody listened with bated breath. Then Noel scurried around to the driver’s seat and hopped in.

When his foot hit the accelerator and the headlights flared, the clamour of crows was superseded by a curious rushing noise, like the wind, or the sea, or the beating of ten thousand wings. It died away quickly.