The Demon Road Trilogy: The Complete Collection: Demon Road; Desolation; American Monsters
going to take from me.”
Shanks narrowed his eyes and looked down at the street, where a blood-drenched Heather was helping a blood-drenched Teddy into the back of the cruiser.
“We Roosevelts are a hardy lot,” Ella-May said, and blasted Shanks in the back.
For a moment, he flew, his spine arched and his arms flung wide. Then gravity found him, gripped him, yanked him down, hard, into the concrete steps. He bounced and twisted and tumbled and finally flipped, hitting the sidewalk with his head turned the wrong way round.
Milo walked down the steps after him, and calmly cuffed his hands behind his back as he lay there, unmoving.
A car pulled up and a man leaped out, carrying a black bag.
“Doc,” Ella-May said in greeting as she handed the shotgun to Amber, “good of you to come so quickly. I need you to see to my husband and daughter while I drive us to Waukesha Memorial.”
The doctor stared at the scene. “What the hell happened?”
“Heather has a stab wound to the abdomen,” said Ella-May. “As far as I can tell, it missed the major organs. Teddy has had his throat cut. No arterial damage. Both have lost a lot of blood.”
The doctor glanced down at Shanks. “What about this man?”
“He doesn’t need your help,” Ella-May said. She hurried down the steps and guided Heather into the passenger seat.
“Dad first,” Heather said. She was corpse-pale and covered in sweat. “His pulse is barely there.”
The doctor didn’t ask any more questions. He climbed in the back and Ella-May got behind the wheel. She reversed away from the sidewalk and swung round.
“Guess you’ll all be gone by the time I get back,” she said through the open window.
“We will,” said Amber.
“Good,” said Ella-May, and she floored it, the cruiser’s lights flashing.
Milo watched her go. “Passed her and Heather on my way here,” he said. “Figured if she was half as tough as her daughter, giving her the shotgun might not be a bad idea.”
Shanks moaned. His bones cracked and his neck straightened.
“Welcome back,” said Milo, hauling him to his feet.
The streets were quiet in Springton. This didn’t surprise Amber, not after the stories she’d been told. Tomorrow the townspeople would discuss the gunshots and the alarms and all this blood, and they’d let the theories settle in beside the legends and the myths they’d already stored up. She wondered what Walter S. Bryant would make of it all.
“What do we do with him?” asked Glen, keeping a respectful distance from Shanks as Milo forced him to walk.
“We’re taking him with us,” Milo said.
Shanks grunted out a laugh. “Are you inviting me to join your motley crew? I’ll say yes, but only if I can be leader.”
“Safest option,” Milo said, ignoring Shanks and talking to Amber as they neared the Charger. “We can’t leave him here, not after everything that’s happened.”
“We could chop him up,” said Glen. “Or, I mean, you could chop him up. Bury him, maybe?”
“Maybe,” said Milo. “But there’d always be the risk of someone digging him up by accident.”
“I do have a tendency to return when you least expect it,” said Shanks, chuckling.
They stopped at the rear of the Charger and Milo turned him so that Shanks’s back was to the car. Amber noticed that all of their bags had been taken out of the trunk and were now in a pile on the ground.
The trunk opened silently, red light spilling out.
“So we’ll take him with us,” Milo said. “It’ll be inconvenient for a few weeks, but the car will eventually digest him.”
“What?” said Shanks, his face going slack, and then Milo shoved him backwards.
Amber’s eyes played a trick on her then. For one crazy instant, it looked like Shanks was sucked into the trunk as the trunk itself enveloped him, the lid slamming closed like a great black jaw. Shanks kicked and battered and yelled from inside, and then all that noise turned down, like the Charger was slowly muting him.
Amber blinked. “Whoa.”
Glen was frowning. “Did you see that? Did I see that? What the hell was that?”
Amber looked at Milo. “Were you serious? About the car digesting him?”
Milo trailed a hand lovingly over the Charger’s contours. “She’s a beast,” he said.
THEY DROVE OUT OF SPRINGTON, parked behind a billboard, and Milo took out the maps while Amber examined Shanks’s brass key.
“Could we use that?” Glen asked, now sharing the back seat with their bags. “It took Shanks wherever he wanted to go, right? Can we use it?”
“He said only he controls where it leads,” Amber said, trying to read the tiny writing along its side. She gave up. “I doubt he’d want to help us.” She tossed it into the glove compartment and took out the iPad, started tapping.
Glen let a few moments go by before speaking again.
“I don’t mean to whinge,” he said, “but I am really uncomfortable with there being a serial killer in the boot.”
“In the what?” said Amber.
“Trunk,” Milo translated.
“Can he get me?” Glen asked. “What’s separating me from him? Is it this seat? Upholstery and foam? What if he still has his knife? Does he have his knife? We didn’t take it from him, did we? He might be burrowing through to me right now.”
“You’re safe,” said Milo absently. “The car will take care of him.”
“And that’s another thing I’m uncomfortable with,” Glen began, but Amber interrupted.
“Cascade Falls,” she said, list on the screen. “There’s one in Virginia, one in Michigan …” She frowned. “No, wait, those are waterfalls. I think. Well, they might be waterfalls and towns. What one do you think Shanks was talking about?”
“Found it,” said Milo, laying the map across the steering wheel. “Cascade Falls, Oregon.”
“How do you know that’s the one Gregory Buxton grew up in?”
“It feels right.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s what we’re going on?”
“You’re on the blackroads, Amber. You’ve got to learn to trust your instincts.”
“If you’re sure …” A moment later, she had called up images of a sleepy little town beside a lake. “The town of Cascade Falls. Less than ten thousand people. How long will it take us to get there?”
“Don’t know,” said Milo, folding away the map. “Two thousand miles … Four days, maybe. Get there some time on Saturday.”
Amber adjusted the bracelets on her wrist, sneaking a peek at the scars there: 406 hours left. Take four days away from that, and it would leave her with …
She scrunched up her face.
“What’s wrong?” Milo asked.
“Nothing,” she