Devastation Road Read Free

button. Someone else’s gun.
    He pulled himself to his feet and carried on walking. After an hour he passed a half-buried rock in the undergrowth. It had a painted face on it. He could have sworn that it was grinning.
    The house across the meadow was a ramshackle attempt at a wooden-framed building. Curling paint crumbled on the slatted walls and the veranda rails were loose and leaning,
while glass was strewn across the boards from a shattered window at the front. Beneath the broken guttering was a barrel, a bucket, a pair of boots and, pushed against the wall, the mound of an
overturned rowboat with a hole the size of a foot through it, the wood all gone to rot.
    He didn’t know how long he had been watching from under the trees. His thoughts kept sliding out from under him; he could barely keep himself conscious. The only constant was the hymn in
his head, that same refrain riding in and jerking him awake.
    He should approach and see if someone might help him but, other than the strutting chickens in the yard, everything was still. At the side there was an overgrown vegetable patch and he felt the
sudden pang of his hunger. The plants looked underdeveloped for this time of year though, the runner beans no more than scrawny infants reaching their arms up the canes. He stayed nervously
crouched. It felt too quiet – just the chickens clearing their throats and the occasional surf of dust.
    Eventually he ventured out, stalking low across the grass, the pistol in his hand. He gave the house a wide berth, avoiding the shattered plant pot in the yard and the dead plant limping,
saggy-limbed, from it. He crept in closer. He wondered if he should call out something. Hello? Is anyone in?
    The chickens clucked around his ankles as he edged between them. The strange liquid seeped from his nostrils again – not mucus but something else that stung at his lip until he wiped it
away.
    On the veranda the front door was ajar. He nudged it just hard enough to open it, waited and listened, and then cautiously stepped in.
    To one side of the hall was a room stuffed with oversized dining furniture: an overbearing redwood table that had been polished so intensely that the sunlight pooled on it, and far too many
chairs with narrow backs and finely crafted marquetry of two birds entwined in flight and splintered into different shaded pieces. There were paintings that, like the furniture, were too large for
the space, and their gilt frames seemed entirely at odds with the wooden walls and stubby nails that they had been hung from. It was as if two worlds had collided, one consuming the other, the
contents of a wealthy townhouse now hiding within the dead shell of a farm.
    Across the hallway the sitting room had been ransacked and the window smashed. There was a carved bookcase and matching dresser with a foreign newspaper on it, and a chaise longue and padded
chairs, one with several penny-sized holes in it that coughed out puffs of stuffing like spittle on to the seat. His shoes crunched on bits of mirrored glass and the discarded books on the floor.
When he turned over a broken photograph frame, the picture inside was gone. Sunlight pierced through two holes in the wall and fell on the debris, illuminating dried spatters of blood. He held
still and listened, but heard only the soft crinkle of china quietly splintering beneath his feet.
    In the kitchen, drawers hung open, gaping, but he could find nothing to eat. He gripped the sideboard with both hands and tried to shake off his faintness. No sink and no running water. He
slammed the work surface hard with his hand and cursed. He couldn’t even drink.
    At the top of the stairs he found three small bedrooms, all untouched and tidy, bar a double room at the back where the bed had a large dried bloodstain spread across its sheets, the rest of the
red-soaked bedding pulled out like innards across the boarded floor. He pressed himself against the wall and then stepped over it all