The Fear Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  With the hearing in his left ear still impaired, it took him a few seconds to get a fix on the sound. A mote of light tore up the highway toward the filling station, accompanied by the watery growl of a V-twin, two pair of headlights in tow a quarter mile back, and Dee already shouting inside the car as he yanked out the nozzle and screwed on the gas cap.

  Dee had his door open and he jumped in, hands shoved into his pockets, digging for the keys.

  “Jack, come on.”

  Naomi sat up, blinking against the overhead dome light. “What’s going on?”

  Jack fumbled the set of keys, finally got the right one between his thumb and forefinger, and fired the engine as the cycle roared up on them. He went straight at the black and chrome Harley, the rider cranking back on the throttle to avoid a collision, the bike popping up on one wheel as it surged out of the way.

  Jack turned out into the highway. Back tires dragging across the pavement as he straightened their bearing.

  “Get the shotgun, Dee.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the way back.”

  She unbuckled her seatbelt and crawled over the console into the backseat.

  “Mama?”

  “Everything’s okay, Cole. I just need to get something. Go back to sleep.”

  Jack forced the gas pedal to the floorboard. Above the din of engine noise and the plastic windows flapping like they might rip off, Jack registered the vibration of the cycle in his gut.

  “Hurry up, Dee.”

  “I’m trying. It’s wedged under your pack.”

  He looked in the rearview mirror—darkness specked with the diminishing lights of town. He punched off the headlights. The speedometer needle holding steady at one hundred and ten though they still accelerated. The pavement silvered under the moon and glowing just enough for him to stay between the white shoulder lines.

  Dee crawled back into her seat.

  “Jesus, Jack. How fast are we going?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  A piece of fire bloomed and faded in the side mirror, and the square of glass exploded.

  “Get down.”

  The gunshot was lost to the flapping windows, but the V-twin wasn’t.

  “Give me the gun, Dee.” She hoisted it up from the floorboard, barrel first. “I need you to steer.”

  The cycle screamed just a few feet behind their bumper, only visible where its chrome caught glimmers of moonlight.

  His foot still on the gas, Jack turned back, vertebrae cracking, and aimed through the back hatch and pumped the twelve gauge. The thunder of its report sent a spike through his left eardrum and filled the Rover with the blinding, split-second brilliance of a muzzleflash. Through the shredded plastic of the back hatch, the cycle had disappeared.

  Bullets pierced the left side of the Rover, glass spraying the backseat.

  Jack spun back into the driver seat, his right ear ringing, and took the steering wheel and eased off the gas.

  The cycle shot forward and then its taillight blipped and it vanished.

  Cole screaming in the backseat.

  “Naomi, is he hurt?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “I think he’s just scared.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Help him.”

  “Where’s the motorcycle, Jack?”

  “I don’t see it. Steer again.”

  She grabbed the wheel and Jack pumped the shotgun. “I still can’t hear too well,” he said. “You have to tell me when you—”

  “I hear it now.”

  He strained to listen, couldn’t see for shit through the plastic window, but he did hear the cycle’s engine, the throttle winding up, and then the guttural scream was practically inside the car.

  “Hold on and stay down.”

  He turned back into the driver seat and clutched the wheel and hit the brake pedal and something slammed into the back of the Rover, the sickening clatter of metal striking metal, Jack punching on the headlights just in time to see the cycle turning end over end as it somersaulted off the road into darkness, throwing sparks every time the metal met the pavement, the rider deposited on the double yellow thirty yards ahead, the man sitting dazed and staring at his left arm which dangled fingerless and unhinged from his elbow, his unhelmeted head scalped to the bone.

  Jack struck the man at fifty-five. The Rover shook violently for several seconds, as if running a succession of speedbumps, and then the pavement flowed smoothly under the tires again.

  He killed the lights and pushed the Rover past a hundred, watching Dee’s side mirror for tailing cars. When the road made a sharp turn, he slowed and eased off the shoulder down a gentle embankment and turned off the car.

  Cole wept hysterically.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” Jack said. “It’s okay. We’re all right now.”

  “I want to go home. I want to go home now.”

  Dee climbed into the back and swept the broken glass off the leather seat and took Cole up into her arms.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know. I want to go home, too, but we can’t just yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not safe.”

  “When can we?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Jack glanced back and before the overhead light cut out, saw Naomi’s chin quivering, too.

  He opened his door, said, “I’ll be right back.”

  He crawled through the grass up the embankment and lay on his stomach in the shadow of an overhanging cottonwood at the shoulder’s edge, his heart beating against the ground, listening. He could still hear Cole crying, Dee hushing him like she had when he was a baby. He wiped his eyes. Hands shaking. Cold. The highway silent.

  They came so suddenly he didn’t have time to roll back down the hill—two cars tearing around the corner, no headlights, tires squealing, one of them passing within a foot of his head.

  They raced on into darkness, invisible, the groan of their engines slowly fading.

  Jack had dust in his eyes and grit between his teeth and the odor of burnt rubber was everywhere.

  AT dawn, they entered the largest city they’d seen since Albuquerque. The lights were still on. Gas stations beckoned. They undercut an empty interstate, Jack keeping their speed above sixty, and soon the city dwindled away behind them, him watching the image of it shrink in the only reflection left—the cracked side mirror on Dee’s door.

  They crested a pass. A small weather station beside the road. Fragile light on this minor range of green foothills. That city thirty miles back and to the south, its lights glittering in the desert. A distant range to the west with still a few minutes of night left to go. Jack was beyond exhaustion, shoulder aching from the twelve-gauge kick, his children awake, staring into the plastic of their respective windows. Catatonic. Dee snored softly.

  They rode down from the pass and out of the pines into empty, arid country. As the sun edged up on the world, Jack saw the building in the distance. He took his foot off the accelerator.

  The motel had been long abandoned, its name bleached out of the thirty-foot billboard that stood teetering beside the road. Dee stirred and sat up as Jack veered off the highway onto the fractured pavement.

  “Why are you stopping?”

  “I have to sleep.”

  “Want me to drive some?”

  “No, let’s stay off the road today.”

  He pulled around to the back of the building and turned off the engine.

  Stillness. The cathedral quiet of the high desert.

  Jack looked at the gas gauge—between a quarter and a half. He studied the odometer.

  “Five hundred and fifty-two miles,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How far we’ve come from home.”

  The room had two double beds. A dresser. An old television with a busted screen. Graffitied walls. Tied-off and shriveled condoms on the carpet
and a bathtub full of shattered beer bottles. Jack carefully turned back the rotting covers so as not to disturb the dust, and they lay their sleeping bags on the old sheets—Jack and Cole on one bed, the girls on the other—and fell asleep as the sun rose.

  He sat up suddenly. His wife stood over him. Dust trembling off the ceiling. A glass ashtray rattling across the bedside table.

  “Jack, something’s happening.”

  They parted the curtains and climbed over the rusted AC wall unit through the open windowframe. Midday light beat down on the desert and the ground vibrated beneath their feet, the inconceivable noise shaking jags of glass out of other windows, doors quivering in their frames. They walked over to the motel office and Jack ventured a glance around the corner of the building.

  On the road, a convoy rolled by—SUVs, luxury sedans, beater trucks with armed men riding in the beds, jeeps, fuel trucks, school buses, all moving by at a modest speed and raising a substantial cloud of dust in their collective passing.

  Jack turned back to Dee, said into her ear, “I don’t think they can see our car from the road.”

  Another five minutes crept by, Jack and Dee standing against the crumbling concrete of the motel until the last car in the convoy had passed, the drone of several hundred engines fading more slowly than Jack would have thought.

  Dee said, “What if we’d been traveling south on this road?”

  “We’d have seen them from miles away.”

  “With the binoculars?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if the kids and I were sleeping and you weren’t looking through the—”

  “Don’t do this, Dee. They didn’t see us. We weren’t on the road.”

  “But we could have been.” She bit her bottom lip and stared east toward a rise of low brown hills. “We have to be more careful,” she said. “We have to always be thinking the worst. I can’t watch my children—”

  “Stop it.”

  Dee walked along the brick and peered around the corner.

  “Still see them?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah. Sun’s reflecting off all that chrome.”

  Jack didn’t hear the engines anymore.

  Dee said, “They’re getting organized, aren’t they?”

  “Seems that way.”

  He stepped forward and looked with her. The convoy miles away now, like the long and shining trail of a snail.

  Naomi and Cole slept in the motel room. Jack and Dee sat outside on the concrete walkway, watching the light slant across the desert.

  Dee held her BlackBerry in her hand, said, “Still no signal.”

  “Who you trying to call, your sister?”

  She started to cry, and he didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, just put his arm around her for the first time in months. He thought about the last time he’d spoken to his father. A week ago. Sunday morning on the telephone. Sitting on the screened back porch and watching the lawn sprinklers water the fescue. Sipping on a mug of black coffee. They’d talked about the coming election and a movie they’d both seen and the World Series. When the time had come to hang up, he’d said, “I’ll talk to you next weekend, Pop,” and his father had said, “Well, all right then. You take care, son.” Same way they always ended their phone calls. What killed him was that it hadn’t, in any way, felt like the last time they would ever speak.

  They changed out of their three-day-old clothes, and Dee lit the campstove and brought the last two cans of old vegetable soup to a simmer. Sat in the darkening motel room passing the cooling pot and the last jug of water.

  At dusk, he stood in the middle of the road with a pair of binoculars, glassing the high desert.

  South: nothing.

  North: no movement save a handful of pumpjacks that dotted the landscape and ominous lines of black smoke ascending out of the far horizon.

  He turned at the sound of approaching footfalls. Naomi stepped into the road and pushed her chin-length yellow hair out of her face. The dark eyeliner she always wore had faded, she’d taken the silver studs out of her ears, and he thought how she looked like his little girl again yet older, her features sharpening into the Germanic, Midwestern prettiness that had begun to desert Dee. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d let him hold her, or if he was honest, the last time he’d wanted to. He’d lost sight of his daughter amid the angst and the Goth façade, and he saw, not for the first time, but for the first time with clarity, how in the last two years he’d become a stranger to the two most important women in his life.

  “What’s going on?” Naomi asked.

  “Just having a look around.”

  She stood beside him, dragged the soles of her black Chuck Taylors across the pavement.

  “What do you think about all this?” he asked.

  She shrugged.

  “You worried about your friends?”

  “I guess. You think Grandpa’s okay?”

  “No way to know. I hope he is.” He wanted to put his arms around her. Restrained himself. “I’m really proud of how you’re taking care of your brother, Na. As proud as I’ve ever been of you. Your being brave is helping Cole to be brave.”

  She nodded, but he could see tears shivering in her eyes. He drew her suddenly into him and she wrapped her arms around his waist and cried hard into his chest.

  With the Rover packed, they climbed in and took their seats and Jack started the engine. The desert deepening from blue into purple as they pulled out of the motel parking lot and into the highway, the stars fading in and the moon rising over the hills.

  They went north without headlights, and within a half hour, had come upon the town. Everywhere, houses burned, and the dead lay in the road and the sidestreets and the front yards. Jack made himself stop counting.

  “Don’t look out the windows,” he warned, and this time, his children listened.

  The town had lost power.

  Jack punched on the headlights.

  “Don’t.”

  “I can’t see.”

  Smoke streamed through the lightbeams and filled the car.

  The highway became Main Street. They passed between old buildings and a couple of restaurants and a dark marquee advertising a pair of films that had been released months ago.

  A few blocks past the downtown, he turned off the highway into the parking lot of a grocery store and stopped the Rover in the fire lane by the entrance.

  “Jack, please, let’s just get the hell out of here.”

  “We’re out of food. Almost out of water. I have to look.”

  He turned off the car and reached under his seat, grabbed the Glock. “Dee, you have the flashlight?”

  She set it in his lap.

  “Don’t leave, Daddy.”

  “I’ll be right back, buddy.” He touched Dee’s leg. “Anything happens, you lay on this horn and I’ll be here in five seconds.”

  The automatic doors stood a foot apart. He squeezed through, hesitating. Every part of him protesting against this. He flicked on the Mag-Lite and made himself go on, thinking how it didn’t smell anything like a grocery store should. A tinge of rust and rot hanging in the air. He dislodged a cart from the brood of buggies and set the gun in the child’s seat. Started forward, the wheels rattling, one squeaking, his light playing off the registers. He passed through the self-checkout aisle. No sound but the distant voltage in his left ear which hummed like a substation.

  He pushed the buggy toward produce. The shelves bare but still carrying the smell of vegetables and fruit. Ten feet ahead, a man lay beside empty wooden crates. The blood around him shimmering off the linoleum like black ice under the lightbeam. Jack stopped the cart. There were others behind this man and though he wouldn’t put his light directly on them, he stared at what the shadows didn’t hide. The closest: a woman facing him with her eyes still open, long yellow hair matted to the gore that had been bludgeoned out of her head.