by Blake Crouch
“What business is that of yours?”
When the man just stared and made no response, Jack said, “I don’t know what this is all about, but we’re going to move on here.”
“I asked you where you’re going.”
Jack tried to wet the roof of his mouth with his tongue, but it had gone dry as sandpaper.
“Just up to Santa Fe to see some friends.”
The driver’s door of the truck behind them opened. Someone stepped down onto the pavement and walked over to join the others at the roadblock.
“Why do you have packs and jugs of water in the back of your car?”
“We’re going camping. There’s mountains up that way if you hadn’t heard.”
“I don’t think you’re going to Santa Fe.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you think.”
“Give me your driver’s license.”
“I don’t think so.”
The man racked a fresh shell into the chamber, and the awful noise of the pump action set Jack’s heart racing.
“All right,” he said. He opened the center console, took out his wallet, spent ten seconds trying to slide his license out of the clear plastic sleeve. He handed it through the window, and the man took it and walked over to the trucks and the other men.
Dee whispered through tears, “Jack, look out your window at the other side of the road.”
Where the light from the trucks diffused into the barest strands of illumination, Jack saw a minivan parked in a vacant lot, and just a few feet from it, four pairs of shoes poking up through the tall, bending grass, the feet motionless and spread at forty-five degree angles, toes pointing toward the sky.
“They’re going to kill us, Jack.”
He reached under his seat, lifted the .45 into his lap.
The man coming back toward the Discovery now.
“Dee, kids,” Jack said as he shifted into reverse, “unbuckle your seatbelts right now and when I clear my throat, get down as low as you can into the floorboards and cover your heads.”
The man reached his window.
“Get out of the car. All of you except the boy.”
“Why?”
The shotgun barrel passed over the lip of the windowglass, stopping six inches from Jack’s left ear. So close he could feel the heat from recent use radiating off the steel.
“This is not the way you want to handle this, Mr. Colclough. Turn off the engine.”
The other men walked over.
Jack cleared his throat and jammed his foot into the gas pedal, the Land Rover lurching back, a winch punching through the rear window, glass spraying everywhere. He grabbed the smoldering barrel with one hand and shifted into drive with the other. The shotgun blast ruptured his eardrum and blew the glass out of a window, the recoil ripping the barrel out of his hand along with several layers of cauterized skin. He could hear only a distant ringing, like a symphony of old telephones buried deep underground. Muzzleflashes and the front passenger window exploded, shards of glass embedding themselves in the right side of his face as he pushed the gas pedal into the floor again and cranked the steering wheel to miss the branches of the downed oak tree.
The Discovery tore through the grass and weeds of the vacant lot, the jarring so violent at this speed, Jack could barely keep his grip on the steering wheel. He turned up a grassy slope and took the Land Rover through a six-foot fence at thirty miles per hour into the backyard of a brick ranch. Plowed over a rose garden and a birdbath, then broke through the fence again near the house and raced down the empty driveway and onto a quiet street.
He hit seventy-five within four blocks, blowing through two-way stops, four-way stops, and one dark traffic signal until he saw lights in the distance—the fast-approaching intersection with Lomas Boulevard.
He let the Discovery begin to slow, finally brought it to a full stop on the curb, and shifted into park. Darkness in the rearview mirror, no incoming headlights. He tried to listen for the sound of tailing cars, but he heard only those muffled telephones and the painful bass throbbing of his left eardrum. He was shaking all over.
He said, “Is anybody hurt?”
Dee climbed out of the floorboard and said something.
“I can’t hear you,” he said. In the backseat, he saw Naomi sitting up. “Where’s Cole?” Dee squirmed around and leaned into the backseat, reaching down into the floorboard where Cole had taken cover. “Is Cole okay?” The murmur of voices grew louder. “Would someone please tell me if my son is okay?”
Dee leaned back into the front seat, put her hands on her husband’s face, and pulled his right ear to her lips.
“Stop shouting. Cole’s fine, Jack. He’s just scared and balled up on the floor.”
He drove six blocks to Lomas Boulevard. This part of the city still had power. The road luminous with streetlights, traffic lights, the glow of fast-food restaurant signs that stretched for a quarter mile in either direction like a glowing mirage of civilization. Jack pulled through a red light and into the empty westbound lanes. The orange reserve tank light clicked on.
As they passed through the university’s medical campus, someone stepped out into the road, and Jack had to swerve to miss them.
Dee said something.
“What?”
“Go back,” she shouted.
“Are you crazy?”
“That was a patient.”
He turned around in the empty boulevard and drove back toward the hospital and pulled over to the curb. The patient already halfway across the road and staggering barefoot like he might topple—tall and gaunt, his head shaved, a scythe-shaped scar curving from just above his left ear across the top of his scalp, the kind of damage it would have taken a couple hundred stitches to close. The wind rode the gown up his toothpick legs.
Jack lowered his window as the man collided breathlessly into his door. He tried to speak but he was gulping down breaths of air and emanating the hospital stench of sanitized death.
At last the man raised his head off his forearms and said in a voice gone soft and raspy from disuse, “What’s happening? I woke up several hours ago. The doctors and nurses are gone.”
Jack said, “How long have you been in the hospital?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know how you got there?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re in Albuquerque.”
“I know that. I live here.”
Jack shifted into park, eyeing the rearview mirror. “It’s October fifth—”
“October?”
“Things started about a week ago.”
“What things?”
“At first, it was just bits on the news that would catch your attention. A murder in a good neighborhood. A hit-and-run. But the reports kept coming and there were more everyday and they got more violent and unbelievable. It wasn’t just happening here. It was all over the country. A police officer in Phoenix went on a shooting rampage in an elementary school and then a nursing home. There were fifty home invasions in one night in Salt Lake. Homes were being burned. Just horrific acts of violence.”
“Jesus.”
“The president made a televised speech last night, and right after, the power went out. Cell phone coverage became intermittent. The internet too jammed up to use. By this afternoon, there were really no functioning lines of communication, not even satellite radio, and the violence was pandemic.”
The man looked away from Jack as gunshots rang out in a neighborhood across the street.
“Why is it happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The power went out before any consensus was reached. They think it’s some virus, but beyond that. . .”
Dee said, “Do you know how you were injured?”
“What?”
“I’m a doctor. Maybe I can help—”
“I need to find my family.”
Jack saw the man look into their car, and he thought he was going to ask for a ride, wondering h
ow he would tell him no, but then the man turned suddenly and limped off down the road.
There were lights on inside, but no customers, no cashier. He swiped his credit card through the scanner, waiting for authorization as he studied the ghost town and listened over the dwindling telephones in his head for the threat of approaching cars.
All but super premium had run dry. He stood in the cold pumping twenty-three and a half gallons into the Discovery’s tank and thinking how he’d meant to bring the red plastic container that held the lawnmower gas.
As he screwed the gas cap on, three pickup trucks roared by, pushing ninety down Lomas. Jack didn’t wait for a receipt.
Another mile and I-25 materialized beyond some dealerships, cars backed up from the onramps on either side of the overpass. Streams of red light winding north through the city, streams of white light crawling south.
Jack said, “Doesn’t look like they’re getting anywhere, does it?”
He veered into the left lane and streaked under the overpass at sixty miles per hour, his right ear improving, beginning to pick up the guttural sounds of the straining engine and the whimperings of Cole.
A blur of citylight, the Wells Fargo building glowing green in the distance. They shot three miles through downtown and Old Town, past Tingley Park, and then across the Rio Grande into darkness again, the western edge of the city without power.
“You have blood coming out of your ear, Jack.”
He wiped the side of his face.
Naomi said, “Are you hurt, Dad?”
“I’m fine, sweetie. Comfort your brother.”
They drove north along the river. Across the water, a great fire was consuming a neighborhood of affluent homes, their immense frames visible amid the flames. Jack said under his breath, “Where the fuck is the military?”
Dee saw the lights first—a cluster of them a couple miles up the road.
“Jack.”
“I see them.”
He killed the headlights and braked, crossed the yellow line into the other lane, then dropped down off the shoulder onto the desert. The Discovery’s cornerlamps barely lit the way, showing only ten feet of the desert floor as Jack negotiated between shrubs and sagebrush and skirted the edge of a serpentine arroyo.
The hardpan reached the broken pavement. Jack pulled back onto the highway and turned out the cornerlamps. Some distance to the south, the roadblock they’d detoured at the intersection of 48 and 550 stood out in the dark—cones of light blazing into the night.
They rode north without headlights, cold desert air streaming in through the jagged windowglass. Jack’s eyes were adjusting to the starlight, so that he could just discern the white wisps of reflective paint that framed the highway. Their city fell away behind them, a mosaic of darkness and light and four distinct fires that burned visibly from a distance of twenty miles.
An hour north, on the Zia Reservation, they met with a car heading south, its taillights instantly firing, Jack watching in the rearview mirror as it spun around in the highway and started after them. He accelerated, but the car quickly closed on their bumper. Its lightbar throwing shivers of blue and red through the fractured glass of the Discovery’s windows.
The officer’s boots scraped the pavement as he approached the Land Rover, his sidearm drawn and paired with a Mag-Lite. He sidled up to Jack’s lowered window and pointed a revolver at his head.
“You armed, sir?”
Jack had to turn his right ear to the man so he could hear, blinking against the sharp light. “I have a Forty-five in my lap.”
“Loaded?”
“Yes sir.”
“Just keep your hands on the steering wheel.” The state police officer shined his light into the backseat, said, “Jesus.” He holstered his gun. “You folks all right?”
“Not especially,” Jack said.
“Somebody shot your car up pretty good.”
“Yes sir.”
“You coming from Albuquerque?”
“We are.”
“How are things there?”
“Terrible. What do you hear? We’ve been checking our car radio, but it’s all static.”
“I hear I’ve lost officers up on the northwest plateau, but I don’t know that for certain. I been told of roadblocks, widespread home invasions. A National Guard unit getting slaughtered, but it’s all rumors. Things came apart so fast, you know?” The officer pulled off his wool hat. He scratched his bald dome, tugged at the tufts of gray that flared out above his ears and ringed his skull. “Where you headed?”
“We don’t know yet,” Jack said.
“Well, I’d get off the highway. Least for the night. I been chased and shot at by several vehicles. They couldn’t catch my Crown Vic, but they’d probably run you down no problem.”
“We’ll do that.”
“You say you have a Forty-five?”
“Yes sir.”
“Comfortable with it?”
“I used to deer hunt with my father, but it’s been years since I’ve even shot a gun.”
The officer’s eyes cut to the backseat, his face brightening. He waved and Jack glanced back, saw Cole sit up and look through the glass. He lowered Cole’s window.
“How you doing there, buddy? You look like a real brave boy to me. Is that right?”
Cole just stared.
“What’s your name?”
Jack couldn’t hear his son answer, but the officer reached his gloved hand through the window.
“Good to meet you, Cole.” He turned back to Jack. “Hunker down someplace safe for the night. You ain’t a pretty sight.”
“My wife’s a doctor. She’ll patch me up.”
The officer lingered at his window, staring off into the emptiness all around them—starlit desert and the scabrous profile of a distant mountain range, pitch black against the navy sky. “What do you make of it?” he said.
“Of what?”
“Whatever this is that’s happening. What we’re doing to ourselves.”
“I don’t know.”
“You think this is the end?”
“Sort of feels that way tonight, doesn’t it?”
The officer rapped his knuckles on the Discovery’s roof. “Stay safe, folks.”
Ten miles on, Jack left the highway. He crossed a cattle guard, and drove 2.8 miles over a washboarded, runoff-rutted wreck of a road until the outcropping of house-size rocks loomed straight ahead in the windshield. He pulled behind a boulder, so that even with the lights on, their Land Rover would be completely hidden from the highway. Shifted into park. Killed the engine. Dead quiet in this high desert. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned around in his seat so he could see his children.
“You know what we’re going to do?” he said. “When this is all over?”
“What?” Cole asked.
“I’m taking you kids back to Los Barriles.”
“Where?”
“You remember, buddy. That little town on the Sea of Cortez, where we stayed over Christmas a couple years ago? Well, when this is over, we’re going back for a month. Maybe two.”
He looked at Dee, at Naomi and Cole.
Exhaustion. Fear.
The overhead dome light cut out. Jack could feel the car listing in the wind, bits of dust and dirt and sand slamming into the metal like microscopic ball bearings.
Cole said, “Remember that sandcastle we built?”
Jack smiled in the darkness. They’d opened presents and gone out to the white-sand beach and spent all day, the four of them, building a castle with three-foot walls and a deep moat, wet sand dribbled over the towers and spires to resemble rotten and eroded stone.
“That sucked,” Naomi said. “Remember what happened?”
A storm had blown in that afternoon over Baja as the tide was coming in. When a rod of lightning touched the sea a quarter mile out, the Colcloughs had screamed and raced back to their bungalow as the rain poured down and the black clouds detonated. Jack had glanced back as they s
crambled over the dunes, glimpsed their sandcastle rebuffing its first decent wave, the moat filling with saltwater.
“Do you think the waves knocked it down?” Cole said.