The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

by the Sihanouk government to serve as one of the city’s principal high schools. Hau could not, at first, identify what it was about these buildings that seemed odd, until he became aware that all their windows were intact. But more than that, a dreadful silence seemed to emanate from the very heart of the school, smothering all sound around it. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. There was no birdsong. A pall of something you could almost touch seemed to hang over it, drawing Hau’s curiosity, yet at the same time provoking a dread that he could not identify.

He leaned his bike against a tree and very slowly crossed the road, watching keenly for any sign of movement. As he passed through the gates and beyond the walls he stopped, suddenly, and listened. What had seemed like silence was developing into a deep, distant hum, a vibration like the sound of a motor or a high-tension electricity pylon. Although ever-present, it was not a constant sound, but rose and fell in unusual cadences. And as Hau neared the main entrance, the intensity, though still muted, increased. It had a disquieting effect, and for a moment Hau hesitated, and considered turning back. But something compelled him on, to push open the door and step inside.

The stench of decay closed around him, sickly sweet, almost overpowering in the heat, and his ears filled with a buzzing that roared in the stillness. The air was black with flies. Engulfing, smothering clouds of them. He struck out blindly as if he could somehow fend them off, and quickly ripped the cloth from around his head and clamped it to his nose and mouth. The door he had entered by swung shut behind him, and in his panic he stumbled towards the light shining through another to his left. He found himself in a long corridor divided into cubicles by crude brick partitions. Sunlight slanted through the windows all along one side, almost obscured by the flies. His entrance seemed to infuriate them, their rage redoubled to a pitch that was almost unbearable.

The air was virtually unbreathable, and Hau choked behind the filthy rag he clutched to his face. His only thought was to get out. But the heat, his fever, the gnawing in his gut, combined with the stink and the flies, had a disorientating effect. Afraid to go back, uncertain now of which way he’d come in, he stretched out a hand to support himself against a brick partition and staggered forward to reach an opening. Turning into the cubicle, he tripped over a petrol can, falling and spilling an acrid yellow liquid across the floor beside him. Bile rose in his throat as he reached up to grasp the skeleton metal frame of a bed without a mattress, and found himself staring into eyes that gaped back at him from a half-decayed face – a face that seemed almost animated by the flies that crawled over its putrid flesh. The nose had gone. Black and broken teeth protruded from a mouth that gaped in a hideous grimace. Hau screamed in terror and fell back against the wall. The corpse was tied to the bed frame, hideously mutilated, still straining against the agony of a death that had not come soon enough. An empty chair sat by the side of the bed, and beyond it a blackboard still bore a bizarre list of instructions:

You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.

During the bastinado or the electrisization you must not cry loudly.

Don’t be a fool, for you are a person who dares to thwart the revolution.

If you disobey any point of my regulations you will get either ten strokes of the whip or five shocks of electric discharge.

The walls were plastered with grotesque black and white photographs of hundreds of dreadfully tortured faces and mutilated bodies.

Hau was shaking uncontrollably now, and he heard his screams like some disembodied sound from another world. He slithered across the fly-infested urine he had spilled on the floor, and ran down the corridor. More faces leered at him from every opening; twisted fingers, their bones poking through fetid flesh, grasped at him from beyond the grave, as they had done in his dream. Only this was no dream. Through a door to a classroom, all light nearly obliterated by the flies, Hau stumbled and fell. Stinking corpses piled up in the dark clasped him to their bosoms, a nightmare of arms and legs whose rotted flesh fell away in his hands. Accusing eyes stared in the gloom, open mouths breathing death in his face. Somehow, for he no longer acted with any will, he pulled free of their embrace and tumbled back through the door and along the corridor, flies in his ears and nose and mouth, tears blinding him. Through another door, and another, until suddenly he collapsed down a short flight of steps into bright afternoon sunshine and lay retching in the yard.

Still crawling with flies, he tore away his ragged calico tunic and trousers and ran naked across the yard, out through the gates and across the street. He grasped his bike, still racked by the sobs that tore themselves painfully from his chest, and ran pushing it up the street, almost unaware of his nakedness, certainly unashamed by it. For he knew now that there could be nobody left alive in this world but him.

*

The speeding black American saloon car wove its way through the debris-littered streets; the charred, rusted remains of civilian and military vehicles, the belongings of a lost population dragged out on to the street and left to the ravages of time. Its driver wore a kramar over his black tunic and trousers, but his three passengers were incongruous in their dark Western suits: two expressionless Chinese and a small, ageing Cambodian with a sad round face and deeply ringed dark eyes.

Sticky and uncomfortable in the airless heat of the car, they were jolted again and again by wide