amusement, his would go strangely blank, like he was an impartial observer to whatever degrading activity he was spearheading. His eyes frightened Austin most of all, though. They were dull eyes. Intelligent, in their way, but dull. Cole had a shark’s eyes.
Austin waited for a car to pass, then ran across the street, on to the square. They heard him coming, and turned. Hillock laughed and punched Mabb in the arm and Mabb laughed and returned the favour. Cole didn’t laugh. He only smiled, his tongue caught between his teeth. He had a large handful of paper slips.
Austin staggered to a halt. He didn’t dare get any closer. He’d run all this way to stop them, even though he knew there was nothing he could do once he got here.
The ballot box was old and wooden. It had a slot an inch wide. Cole Blancard turned away from Austin and stuffed all those paper slips through that slot, and Austin felt a new and unfamiliar terror rising within him. Panic scratched at his thoughts with sharp fingers and squeezed his heart with cold hands. Mabb and Hillock took fistfuls of paper slips from their pockets, gave them over, and Cole jammed them in, too.
A few slips fell and the breeze played with them, brought them all the way to the scaffolding outside the Municipal Building. The three older boys didn’t seem to mind. When they were done, they walked towards Austin, forcing him to move out of their way. Mabb and Hillock sniggered as they passed, but Cole stopped so close that Austin could see every detail of the purple birthmark that stretched from Cole’s collar to his jaw.
“Counting, counting, one, two, three,” Cole said, and rammed his shoulder into Austin’s.
Austin stood there while they walked off, their laughter turning the afternoon ugly. One of those slips scuttled across the ground and Austin stepped on it, pinned it in place.
He reached down, picked it up, turned it over and read his own name.
THE VAN WAS OLD and rattled and rolled, coughed and spluttered like it was about to give up and lie down and play dead, but of course it defied expectations, like it always did, and it got them to Desolation Hill with its oil-leaking mechanical heart still beating. That was close to a 4,000-mile journey. Kelly had to admit she was impressed. She thought they’d have to abandon the charming heap of junk somewhere around Wyoming, and pool what little money they had to buy something equally cheap but far less charming to take them the rest of the way.
“I think you owe someone an apology,” Warrick said smugly.
Kelly sighed. “Sorry, van,” she said. “Next time I’ll have more faith in your awesome ability to keep going. There were times, it is true, when I doubted this ability. Uphill, especially. Even, to be honest, sometimes downhill. You have proven me wrong.”
“Now swear everlasting allegiance.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“Ronnie,” Warrick called, “she won’t swear everlasting allegiance to the van.”
“Kelly,” said Ronnie from behind the wheel, “you promised.”
“I promised when I didn’t think the van would make it,” said Kelly. “Promises don’t count when you don’t think you’ll ever have to keep them.”
“I’m not sure that’s technically correct,” said Linda, still curled up in her sleeping bag.
“Hush, you,” said Kelly. “You’re still asleep.”
“Big Brain agrees with me,” said Warrick. “You tell her, Linda!”
“Two,” Kelly commanded, “sit on Linda’s head, there’s a good boy.”
Two just gazed at her, his tongue hanging out, and wagged his tail happily.
“Swear allegiance to the almighty van,” said Warrick.
“Not gonna happen.”
“Then swear allegiance to this troll,” he said, pulling an orange-haired little troll doll from his pocket and thrusting it towards her. “Look, he’s got the same colour hair as you.”
She frowned. “My hair is red. That’s orange.”
“It’s all the same.”
“It’s really not.”
“Swear. Allegiance. To our Troll Overlord.”
“Warrick, I swear to God, stop waving that thing in my face.”
He kept doing it and she sighed again, and crawled over the seat in front to sit beside Ronnie. “Pretty town,” she said.
Ronnie opened his mouth to reply, but hesitated.
She grinned. “You were going to say it, weren’t you?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You so were,” came Linda’s muffled voice. Then, “Two, get off me.”
Kelly grinned wider. “You were going to say appearances can be deceiving, weren’t you?”
“Nope,” said Ronnie, shaking his head. “I was going to say something completely different. I was going to say, ‘Yes, Kelly, it does look like a nice town.’”
“But …?”
“Nothing. No buts. That was the end of that sentence.”
“Warrick,” said Kelly, “what do you think? Do you think Ronnie is fibbing?”
“I’m not talking to you because you have refused to swear allegiance to either my van or my troll doll,” said Warrick, “but, on a totally separate note, I think our Fearless Leader is totally telling fibs and he was, in fact, about to utter those immortal words.”
“You’re all delusional,” said Ronnie. “Now someone please tell me where I’m supposed to go in the whitest town I’ve ever been to. Seriously, there is such a thing as being too Caucasian.”
“Take this left coming up,” Linda said.
“She’s a witch!” cried Warrick.
“It’s GPS.”
“Not a witch, then,” Warrick said. “False alarm, everybody. Linda is not a witch, she just has an internet connection. You know who was a witch, though?”
“Stefanianna North was not a witch,” Kelly said.
“You didn’t see her!” Warrick responded. “You don’t know!”
“Neither do you. You were unconscious the whole time.”
Warrick sniffed. “It wasn’t my fault I was drugged.”
“You weren’t drugged,” said Ronnie, “you were high. And that was your fault because it was your own weed you were smoking.”
“Aha,” said Warrick, leaning forward, “but why was I smoking it?”
“To get high.”
“No,” Warrick said triumphantly. “Well, yes, but also because of the socio-economic turmoil this world has been going through since before I was even born. My mother had anxiety issues when I was still in the womb, man. That affects a dude, forces him to seek out alternative methods of coping later in life.”
“So that’s what you were doing?” Kelly asked. “You were coping?”
“I was trying to,” Warrick said. “And that’s when Stefanianna came to kill me. I don’t remember much—”
“Because you were high.”
“—but I do