Read Online Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt - Free Book Online Page A

he’d felt in the pit of his stomach, the only spot on the map that had caught his eye and kept luring it back. He remembered the
III
. He saw what it meant
now. He scrambled closer and lay down.
    ‘
Pane bo ž e
. . .’ Janek said under his breath behind him, who had probably seen nothing like it, but Owen had. Like a key clicking open a lock, the memory suddenly
opened, his mind foretelling everything that he saw the split second before he saw it – the shapes of the buildings, the long huts with shallow roofs and high, wired fencing and double set of
gates, the second and third sentry posts; sight and memory compounding in a fused moment of connection.
    I’ve been here, he realized. My God. But how could it be so familiar? He felt the undeniable sensation that he had stood on that other side of the wire, that he had stared out through it
to where he stood now to see – yes, he thought, glancing behind him – this view, this vista, this very same forest. Yet, staring through the fence and along the stretch of compounds,
the rows of single-storey barracks and then up at the lookout post, something
had
changed. He kept expecting to see movement, to hear voices, maybe even shots being fired at them, but
wherever he looked there was nothing. Not the sight of a single soul.
    They nervously walked the fringes of the camp, eyes alert and ears pricked, but within it the barracks stood like wooden husks. The only movement Owen could see was a loose sheet of paper in the
dirt occasionally lifting in the breeze. Two high perimeter fences spanned the length, both with a barbed wire overhang at the top that tipped inwards. Between the fences were tangles of wire, and
then, another thirty or so feet in, a taut line of wire fixed a couple of feet above the ground that he wanted to call ‘the ditch’. There were empty guard towers at each corner and
every hundred yards in between. Some of the windows were still in place, while around one, smashed glass lay among the bandy legs, pressed into the dirt.
    The gates had been forced open and they squeezed through the gap. Owen walked with the pistol held ready in his hand, Janek with his knife, both expecting at any moment to be ambushed. As they
cautiously crept through the compound there were dozens of familiar-looking barracks, each raised a little off the ground for the ferrets to poke around beneath. He knew the kitchens, the theatre,
the bathrooms where there had been metal tubs for sinks and soap that never lathered. And yet how or why or for how long he had been here he was still unsure.
    He stopped at an intersection where the ground was compacted hard by footfall, and felt the hot surge of panic burning out from his collar and sweeping across his head. The buildings so oddly
familiar now spread as far as the eye could see, all desolate and empty and yet full in his mind with ghosts.
    ‘There’s no one here.’
    ‘
Hm, nikdo
,’ said Janek, nodding.
    The air was filled with the faint smell of kerosene.
    In time, he would describe it as a cloud lifting to reveal a landscape that secretly his mind had always known was there. The longer he stood between the barracks with their
blinking windows, his reflection captured for him within every glass, the more he saw and knew: the stumps where trees had been felled to clear more space; the two shallow steps up to each barrack;
the one step that was broken and had, he saw now, never been fixed; the double-fronted windows; the shutters at each frame hooked open, one or two of the catches snapped so that they groaned on
their hinges. Even the old split barrel was there that they had pelted a ball against. And there was the boy watching him. He could so easily have been one of the others, strangely returned, just
like Owen.
    They walked through it like sole survivors, Janek staring in through one window after another, rubbing the dirt off with his sleeve or knocking in the broken teeth of glass
with the butt of his