by Blake Crouch
Almost?
The man who’d searched the Land Rover asked, “How long are you two planning to stay in Canada?”
“A week,” Will said.
“So where’s your luggage?”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Devlin said, “We had an accident in Montana.”
“What kind of accident?”
“We came over a mountain pass and I guess the air pressure blew two corks out of the bottles of wine in our suitcase. Ruined everything. We threw the suitcase away. We’ll buy new clothes and stuff in Calgary.”
The customs officers glanced at each other, gave a brief nod, then the man with the Maglite said, “Have a safe trip.”
They stopped in Lethbridge, four miles from where the Google map said Jonathan’s truck had been for the last fifty minutes.
Stayed at an inn outside of town, ate takeout in their room, and slept hard and without dreams until the computer woke them at three in the morning with notification that the truck was on the move again.
The next twenty-four hours were murder. They followed Alberta Provincial Highway 2 for three hundred miles, north through Calgary, Red Deer, all the way to Edmonton, where they picked up the Alaska Highway, spent the afternoon blasting northwest through Alberta, taking turns driving.
Whitecourt. Valleyview. Grande Prairie.
Near Dawson Creek, they came within a mile of Jonathan’s truck as it stopped in town to gas up.
Evening approached and they prayed, hoped, begged the truck would stop, both starving, their eyes burning after a second full day on the road.
But Jonathan didn’t stop. He continued on that northwest trajectory, driving right on into the night through the uncitied wilds of northern British Columbia, on the most desolate two-lane stretch of highway they’d ever seen, Will driving, popping NoDoz with a chaser of flat Mountain Dew or cold coffee, the computer now in the front passenger seat, angled toward him, Devlin having long since fallen asleep.
It wasn’t his mind that was the problem, but his vision. With the exception of a gas stop in Fort St. John, Will had been on the road for twenty-four hours, and there was nothing NoDoz could do to recharge his eyes.
They passed into Yukon as the sun breathed its first shot of warmth into the sky.
Devlin stirred, sat up suddenly in the backseat. “Dad? You okay?”
“I don’t even know how to describe how tired I feel right now. Worse than cramming for the bar.”
Devlin reached forward and lifted the computer into the backseat.
“He’s just ahead in a town called Whitehorse, Yukon,” she said. “I think he stopped.”
“Are you serious?”
“The icon hasn’t moved in the last ten minutes.”
“Thank God. You were about to pull driving duty.”
They stopped at the first gas station they came to, just past the small airport in Yukon’s capital city.
Will turned off the car and shut his eyes.
“Wake me when he’s on the move again.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Will had just begun to dream, when his daughter’s voice broke through.
“He’s moving, Dad.”
“You are fucking kidding me.” Will rubbed his eyes, felt like he’d been asleep less than ten minutes, but the sun was above the horizon now, early rays glittering on the waters of the Yukon River. Pretty country up here, he thought, looking out at rolling foothills covered with fir trees.
According to the dashboard clock, he’d slept for almost two hours, though the brief reprieve had barely made a dent in his exhaustion. He turned the ignition, drove the Land Rover slowly through town, letting the truck put a few more miles of distance between them.
“You need to talk to me,” he said. “I’ll nod off, end up running us off the road.”
“I can drive.”
“Not yet.”
“What do you wanna talk about?”
“I don’t care. Just engage me. Take my mind off how tired I am.”
Devlin was quiet for a moment, staring out the tinted glass as they passed through downtown Whitehorse.
“Okay,” she said finally, “do you think Kalyn’s pretty?”
Will straightened in his seat. “Well,” he said, “I think that did the trick.”
“No, you have to answer my question.”
Whitehorse was fading away in the side mirrors, and they had the Alaska Highway all to themselves, a corridor of pavement through a forest of black spruce.
“Sure, she’s pretty.”
“You like her?”
“Excuse me?”
“In school, we have this rating system. You can like someone. You can like like them. Or you can like like like them.”
Will laughed. “So what was your rating with little Ben over the summer?”
“We’re not talking about me right now, Dad.”
“I don’t know, Devi. What do you think? That these last few days have been one big date? This is an incredibly stressful time, and I—”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t like her.”
He caught her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Look, I’m not saying this to judge or be mean, but Kalyn’s a damaged person, Dev. Nothing against her. I’m just saying I think she’s had a really hard time since her sister disappeared.”
“Harder than us with Mom?”
“Yeah. Why are you asking me all this? You want me to like her?”
“I guess it’d be all right. I mean, you haven’t dated anyone since Mom. Aren’t you, like, lonely?”
“You don’t like it, just the two of us?”
“No, I do, it’s just—Dad!”
Will’s eyes cut from the rearview mirror back to the windshield.
An enormous bull moose stood straddling the dotted white line of the Alaska Highway, thirty yards ahead.
Will slammed down on the brake pedal, lunging forward, something shooting through the space between the front seats, smashing into the dashboard.
“Devlin!”
The Land Rover skidded to a stop, the front bumper five feet from the moose, which just stood there staring dully at will through the windshield. He looked in the backseat, confirmed that Devlin was buckled in, safe but rattled, tears streaming down her face.
“No, honey, don’t cry. It’s okay. We’re all right.”
She shook her head, and Will’s stomach fell. He glanced down. Near the gearshift, in the front passenger seat, on both floorboards, and on his lap lay pieces of the computer, and the portion of the screen still attached to the shattered keyboard was black.
“Oh God,” he said.
“We can still find her, right?”
“Oh God.”
“Dad?”
He drove around the giant moose and floored the accelerator.
It was midday before Will finally spotted Jonathan’s truck, pulling away from the border station into the state of Alaska.
He and Devlin spent fifteen agonizing minutes talking with the American customs official, Will thinking the officer had probably sensed his impatience and decided to ask more questions than he otherwise would have. By the time they were on the road again and passing a sign welcoming them to the “Last Frontier State,” Will figured Jonathan had at least a twenty-mile head start.
He pushed the Land Rover to eighty-five, speeding along the Alaska Highway, passing RVs at the rate of one every couple of miles. In the nowhere town of Tok, Alaska, ninety-three miles west of the border, Will came to what he’d dreaded more than anything—a fork in the road. Stay straight on Alaska 1, head west to Fairbanks. Or make a left onto Alaska 2 and head south toward Anchorage.
“Which way, Dad?”
Will pulled onto the shoulder, shifted the car into park.
“Fairbanks is two hundred miles that way,” he said. “Kind of in the middle of the state. I don’t know much about it. Anchorage is in the south, on the coast.”
“How close do you think we are to the truck?”
; “I don’t know.”
“Dad—”
“Just give me a minute here, Dev!”
After thirty seconds of the most excruciating deliberation he’d ever put himself through, he finally shifted into drive and stomped the gas.
“Anchorage?” Devlin asked as the Land Rover accelerated to ninety miles per hour.
“It’s a shipping city. Lots of ports. I have a feeling they’re putting Kalyn on a boat.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, baby girl. Nowhere close to sure.”
TWENTY-NINE
When Kalyn woke, the truck was still and silent. She hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but the boredom and emotional heft of recent days had overtaken her again. She had no idea how long she’d been inside the trailer, though it felt like weeks. She sat up from the thick yellow foam, stared at the shiny metal ceiling, the two remaining jugs of water, the dwindling box of food. The metal pail in the farthest corner reeked of her piss and shit.
Strangely enough, she felt closer to her sister than she had in years, just knowing Lucy had spent time cramped in this little space.
Lucy was four years younger, and Kalyn had often lied to herself, insisted her sister was a brave, fearless person, that whatever had happened to her, she’d handled it with grace and courage. But locked in the trailer of this eighteen-wheeler, Kalyn knew that wasn’t the case. Lucy had awakened here confused, disoriented, and more terrified than she’d ever been in her life.
Kalyn heard something beyond the walls—impossible to tell what through the soundproofing.
A piece of yellow foam turned back, the door to her cage opening. She stood up, her feet bare, the rest of the trailer dark and the flickering lightbulb above her head doing nothing to illuminate whoever was out there.
A pair of handcuffs flew through the door and dropped on the yellow foam.
“Put ’em on.”
Flat voice, white male, no accent.
She picked up the handcuffs and closed them around her wrists.
“Come on out.”
Cold air swept through the trailer.
“Where am—”
Someone reached in, dragged her out, and then she was being lifted, hands gripping her arms above the elbows. She smelled day-old cologne and remnants of cigarette smoke.
They came to the end of the trailer and she was lowered into the arms of a tall man with blond hair, eyes the color of sea ice, but with less warmth.
THIRTY
In the late afternoon, Will pulled the Land Rover onto the shoulder at the junction of Alaska 1 and Alaska 4, yet another split in the highway.
Devlin read the mileage sign: “Anchorage, one eighty-seven. Valdez, one seventeen.”
Will let out a deep sigh, his head resting on the steering wheel. “We’ve lost her,” he said.
“Maybe the truck’s up ahead.”
He couldn’t bear the hope in his daughter’s voice. “I’ve been doing ninety for the last hour and a half. If he’d come this way, we would’ve caught up to him by now.”
“Where else could the truck have gone?”
“Where? Maybe he stopped in Tok and we didn’t see him. Probably he went on to Fairbanks.” He lifted what was left of the computer out of the front passenger seat and stared at the destroyed screen.
“Is Kalyn going to die?”
“I don’t know, Devi.”
“But probably she is?” Will punched the gas, spun the car around. “What are you doing, Dad?”
“Only thing left to do.”
THIRTY-ONE
They were passing through a city big enough to boast a pathetic skyline—meager collection of ten- and twelve-story buildings—the tall blond driving, a man on either side of Kalyn in the backseat of the new Suburban. The man to her right was young, twenty at most, and he kept eyeing her, fidgeting with his hands, his hair long and black, drawn back into a greasy ponytail. He’s nervous. The man to her left was perhaps ten years older—buzz cut, light brown hair, heavily freckled. They both wore black jeans and long-sleeved button-ups with down vests over the top, fat with pocket bulges—knives perhaps, or cell phones. She fought the urge to glance back, dying to know if the Land Rover was tailing them.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
The driver turned up the radio—NPR, “Talk of the Nation.”
It was 2:46 P.M., and they soon left the city, passing now along quiet residential streets, then stretches of forest, the houses more scattered, only a few per mile, then no homes or power lines and the road gone to gravel, narrowed into one lane, with tall spruce trees on either side. The Suburban was kicking up substantial clouds of dust, so she couldn’t see in the side mirrors if Will was following them.
Another five miles and the dirt road ended on the shore of a long, skinny lake.
The tall blond turned off the car. They waited, parked parallel to the lakeshore, affording Kalyn a view of the road as it disappeared into the trees. The dust of their passage had settled. Something’s happened. He isn’t coming.
“Would you please tell me where I am?” Kalyn asked.
The man behind the wheel looked in the rearview mirror, said, “Shut up.”
“I have to pee.”
“Hold it.”
“Seriously, my bladder’s about to rupture. I don’t know if I can hold it much longer, and I don’t want to pee all over your seat.”
The blond said, “Take her, Marcus.” She hoped he meant the younger of the two, but the freckled man opened his door instead and helped her out of the car.
He walked her twenty feet from the Suburban to a cluster of saplings, and Kalyn pulled her panties down, lifted her skirt, and squatted.
As her piss hit the ground and steamed, Marcus did exactly what she’d hoped for—looked away.
Kalyn came quietly to her feet, stepped out of her panties, and slipped her hands over Marcus’s head, squeezing them back into his neck for all she was worth. He was a few inches taller, much stronger, but that didn’t matter, because Kalyn had the edge of the metal cuff digging into his carotid artery, the bone of her forearm crushing his windpipe, and it only took five seconds for his knees to go.
She dragged him behind the saplings, ripped open his vest, calculating that she had maybe ten or fifteen seconds before the other men started to wonder where they were.
She found a .357, broke open the cylinder—six rounds—snapped it closed and started toward the Suburban, her bare feet freezing as she moved low and fast across the grass and rocks. She crouched behind the Suburban and peeked around the left rear taillight, spotted the side mirror on the driver’s side, the tall blond in the reflection, his head turned, talking.