by Blake Crouch
JACK Colclough moved down the hallway, past the kids’ bedrooms, and into the kitchen, where four candles on the granite countertop and two more on the breakfast table made this the brightest room in the house. Dee stood in shadow at the sink, filling another milk jug with water from the tap. The cabinets surrounding her thrown open and vacated, the stovetop cluttered with cans of food that hadn’t seen the light of day in years.
“I can’t find the roadmap,” Jack said.
“You looked under the bed?”
“Yes.”
“Last place I saw it.”
Jack set the flashlight on the counter and stared at his fourteen-year-old daughter, pouting at the breakfast table, her purple-streaked blond hair twirled around her finger.
“Got your clothes together yet?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Go, Naomi, right now, and help Cole pack, too. I think your brother got distracted.”
“We aren’t really leaving, are we?”
“Get going.”
Naomi pushed back from the table, her chair shrieking against the hardwood floor, and stormed out of the kitchen down the hallway.
“Hey,” he shouted after her.
“Cut her a break,” Dee said. “She’s terrified.”
Jack stood beside his wife.
The night beyond the windowglass was moonless and unmarred by even the faintest pinpricks of light. The city’s second night without power.
“This is the last jug,” Dee said. “Makes eight gallons.”
“That isn’t going to last us very long.”
From the battery-powered radio on the windowsill above the sink, an old woman’s voice replaced the static that had dominated the airwaves for the last six hours. Jack reached over, turned up the volume.
They listened as she read another name, another address over the radio.
Jack said, “They’ve lost their fucking minds.”
Dee turned off the tap, screwed a cap onto the final jug. “You think anyone’s actually acting on that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“I’ll take these jugs out to the car. Go make sure the kids are getting packed.”
Jack hit the light switch out of habit, but when he opened the door, the garage remained dark. He shined the flashlight on the four steps that dropped out of the utility room. The smooth concrete was cold through his socks. He popped the hatch to the cargo area, illumination flooding out of the overhead dome lights into the two-car garage. He set the first jug of water in the back of the Land Rover Discovery. Their backpacks and camping equipment hung from hooks over the chest freezer, and he lifted them down off the wall. Pristine, unblemished by even a speck of trail dust. Four never-slept-in sleeping bags dangled from the ceiling in mesh sacks. He dragged a workbench over from the red Craftsman tool drawer and climbed up to take them down. Dee had been begging for a family camping trip ever since he’d purchased three thousand dollars’ worth of backpacking gear, and he’d fully intended for their family to spend every other weekend in the mountains or the desert. But two years had passed, and life had happened, priorities changed. The gas stove and water filter hadn’t even been liberated from their packaging, which still bore price tags.
Inside the house, Dee released a loud gasp. He grabbed the flashlight, negotiated the sprawl of backpacks and sleeping bags, and bolted up the steps and through the door into the utility room. Past the washer and dryer, back into the kitchen. Naomi and his seven-year-old son, Cole, stood at the opening to the hallway, their faces all warmth and shadow in the candlelight, watching their mother at the sink.
Jack shined the light on Dee—her face streaked with tears, body visibly shaking.
She pointed at the radio.
“They just read off Marty Anderson’s name. They’re going through the humanities department, Jack.”
“Turn it up.”
“Jim Barbour is a professor of religious studies at the University of New Mexico.” The old woman on the radio spoke slowly and with precision. “His address is Two Carpenter Court. Those of you near campus, go now, and while you’re in the neighborhood, stop by the home of Jack Colclough.”
“Dad—”
“Shhh.”
“—a professor of philosophy at UNM.”
“Oh my God.”
“Shhh.”
“—lives at Fourteen, fourteen Arroyo Way. Repeat. Fourteen, fourteen Arroyo Way. Go now.”
“Oh my God, Jack. Oh my God.”
“Get the food in the back of the car.”
“This is not—”
“Listen to me. Get the food in the back of the car. Naomi, bring yours and Cole’s clothes out to the garage. I’ll meet you all there in one minute.”
He ran down the hall, his sockfeet skidding across the dusty hardwood floor as he rounded the turn into the master bedroom. Clothes everywhere. Drawers evacuated from a pair of dressers. Sweaters spilling out of the oak chest at the foot of the bed. Into the walk-in closet, stepping on shoes and winter coats and handbags long gone out of vogue. He reached for the highest shelf on the back wall, fingers touching the hard plastic case and two small boxes, which he crammed into the pockets of his khaki slacks.
He returned to the bedroom, dropped to his knees, his stomach, crawling under the bed frame until he grasped the steel barrel of the Mossberg, loaded and trigger-locked.
Then back on his feet, down the hall, through the kitchen, the living room, foyer, right up to the front door, the lightbeam crossing adobe walls covered in photographs of his smiling family—vacations and holidays from another lifetime. Beside the door, on a table of wrought iron and glass, he grabbed his keys, his wallet, even his phone though there’d been no signal in two days. Jammed his feet into a pair of trail shoes still caked with mud from his last run in the Bosque, not even a week ago. He didn’t realize how badly his hands were shaking until he failed on the first two attempts to tie his shoelaces.
Dee was struggling to fit a sleeping bag into a compression sack as he came down the steps into the garage.
“We don’t have time for that,” he said. “Just cram it in.”
“We’re running out of space.”
He grabbed the sleeping bag from her and shoved it into the back of the Land Rover on top of the small cardboard box filled with canned food.
“Throw the packs in,” he said as he lay the shotgun on the floor against the backseat.
“You find the map?” Dee asked.
“No. Just leave the rest of this shit. Here.” He handed her the plastic gun case and a box of 185 grain semijacketed hollowpoints. “See if you can load the Forty-five.”
“I’ve never even shot this gun, Jack.”
“Makes two of us.”
Dee went around to the front passenger door and climbed in while Jack forced the cargo hatch to close. He reached up to the garage door opener, pulled a chain that disengaged the motor. The door lifted easily, cool desert air filling the garage. The spice of wet sage in the breeze reminded him of cheap aftershave—his father. A lone cricket chirped in the yard across the street. No houselights or streetlamps or sprinklers. The surrounding homes almost invisible but for the gentlest starlight.
He caught the scent of cigarette smoke the same instant he heard the sound of footsteps in the grass.
A shadow was moving across his lawn—a darker patch of black coming toward him, and something the shadow carried reflected the interior lights of the Land Rover as a fleeting glimmer of silver.
“Who’s there?” Jack said.
No response.
A cigarette hit the ground, sparks scattering in the grass.
Jack was taking his first step back into the garage toward the open driver side door, realizing everything was happening too fast. He wasn’t going to react in time to stop what was about to—
“Don’t come any closer.” His wife’s voice. He looked over, saw Dee standing at the back of the SUV, pointi
ng the .45 at the man who had stopped six feet away. He wore khaki canvas shorts, thong sandals, and a cream-colored oxford pollocked with bloodspatter. The glimmer was the blade of a butcher knife, and the hands that held it were dark with drying blood.
Dee said, “Kiernan? What are you doing here?”
He smiled. “I was just in the neighborhood. Been driving around, making some stops. I didn’t know you owned a gun. I’ve been looking for one myself.” Kiernan looked at Jack. “You must be Jack. We haven’t met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m the guy who’s been fucking your wife.”
“Listen to me, Kiernan,” Dee said. “You’re sick. You need—”
“No, I’m actually better than I’ve ever been.” He pointed the tip of the butcher knife at the Land Rover. “Where you going?”
Tires screeched, an engine revved, and a few blocks away, headlights passed behind a hedge, light flickering through the crape myrtles like a strobe. A succession of distant pops erupted in the night.
Jack said, “Dee we need to leave right now.”
“Go back to your car, Kiernan.”
The man didn’t move.
Jack took a step back and eased himself into the driver seat.
“Who is it out there, Daddy?” Cole asked.
Jack fished the keys out of his pocket. Craned his neck, peering into the backseat at his tense children.
“Naomi, Cole, I want you both to lay down in the backseat.”
“Why?”
“Just do what I tell you, Na.”
“Dad, I’m scared.”
“Hold your brother’s hand. You all right, Cole?”
“Yes.”
“Good man.”
He started the engine as Kiernan receded into the darkness of the front yard.
Dee jumped in beside him, slammed her door and locked it.
“You know how to pick ’em, Dee.”
“Do we have everything we need?”
“We have what we have, and now it’s time to leave. Stay down, kids.”
“Where are we going?” Cole asked.
“I don’t know, buddy. No talking, all right? Daddy needs to think.”
The dashboard clock read 9:31 p.m. as Jack shifted into reverse and backed out of the garage and down the driveway, nothing but the reddish glow of taillights to guide him. He turned into the street, put the car in drive. Hesitated, fingers searching for the automatic window control. The glass beside his head hummed down into the door. Over the idling of the Discovery’s engine, he heard another car approaching at high speed, headlights just becoming visible in the rearview mirror.
He stomped the gas, the Discovery accelerating through pure darkness.
“Jack, how can you see?”
“I can’t.”
He made a blind turn onto the next street, drove for several blocks in the dark.
Dee said, “Look.”
A house burned on the corner up ahead, flames shooting out of the dormers, the branches of an overhanging cottonwood fringed with embers while molten leaves rained down into the lawn.
“What is it?” Naomi asked.
“A house on fire.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to see.”
“No, Cole. Stay down with your sister.”
They sped up the street.
“I’m going to run us into something.” Jack flipped on the headlights. The console lit up. “You’re kidding me,” he said.
“What?”
“Way under a quarter of a tank.”
“I told you it was getting low last week.”
“You aren’t capable of pumping gas into a car?”
Three houses down, the headlights swept over two trucks that had pulled onto the lawn of an expansive adobe house.
Jack slowed.
“That’s the Rosenthals’ place.”
Through the drawn shades of the living room windows: four loud, bright flashes.
“What was that, Dad?”
“Nothing, Na.”
He gunned the engine and glanced over at Dee, a deathgrip on the steering wheel to keep his hands steady. Nodded at the gun in his wife’s lap.
“Wasn’t even loaded, was it?”
“I don’t know how.”
The university campus loomed empty and dark as Dee ripped open a box of ammunition. They passed a row of dorms. The quad. The student union. A squat brick building whose third floor housed Jack’s office. It occurred to him that today would have been the deadline for his bioethics class to hand in their papers on euthanasia.
“There’s a button on the left side behind the trigger,” he said. “I think it releases the magazine.”
“Are you talking about a gun?” Cole asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to shoot somebody?”
“It’s only to protect us, buddy.”
“But you might have to kill someone?”
“Hopefully not.” Jack watched Dee thumb another semijacketed round into the magazine.
“How many will it hold?” she asked.
“Nine, I think.”
“Where are we going, Jack?”
“Lomas Boulevard, then the interstate.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to work that—” Two sets of headlights appeared a hundred yards ahead. “Jesus Christ.”
“You see them, Jack?”
“Of course I see them.”
“What’s happening, Dad?”
In the rearview mirror, a third set of headlights rushed toward them.
“Jack, do something.”
His foot depressed the brake pedal into the floorboard.
“Jack.”
“Sit up kids.”
“What are you doing?”
“Naomi, Cole, sit up. Give me the gun.”
Dee handed over the .45, which he stowed under his seat.
“What are you doing, Jack?”
He took his foot off the brake, the Discovery nearing the roadblock.
“Jack, tell me what you’re—”
“Shut up. Everybody shut up.”
A large oak had been felled across the road, the middle section excised and two pickup trucks parked in front, blocking passage, their highbeams glaring into the night.
Dee said, “Oh, God, they’re armed.”
Jack counted four people standing in front of the vehicles, silhouetted by the headlights. One of their them came forward as the Discovery closed within ten yards—a man wearing an Isotopes baseball cap and a red windbreaker. He trained a shotgun on the Discovery’s windshield and extended his right hand for Jack to stop.
Jack shifted into park, locked the doors.
“I’ll do the talking. Nobody say a word.”
The third truck pulled within several feet of the Discovery’s back bumper, its headlights halfway up the glass of the back hatch, so they shone directly into the rearview mirror. The man with the shotgun produced a flashlight and circled the Land Rover, shining the beam through every window before arriving back at Jack’s door, where he tapped the glass and made circles in the air with his right pointer finger. Jack noted a cold trickle of sweat gliding over the contours of his ribs. He found the switch, lowered the window eight inches.
“What’s going on?” he said, and it came out naturally enough, like he’d been pulled over for a blown taillight, just some annoying traffic stop in the flow of an otherwise normal day.
The man said, “Turn the interior lights on.”
“Why?”
“Right now.”
Jack hit the lights.
The man leaned forward, the sharp tang of rusted metal wafting into the car, Jack watching the eyes behind the square, silver frames, the glasses of an engineer, he thought—large, utilitarian. Those eyes took in his wife, his children, before settling back on Jack with a level of indifference, verging on disgust, that prior to this moment was completely alien to his experience.
The man said, “Where you off to so late?”