by Blake Crouch
Dee shouted his name, and as he turned, fire blossomed in his left shoulder, coupled with a wave of nausea. A Ford F-150, beat to hell and coated in dust, rounded the north side of the butte. Jack sprinted back up the slope to Dee and crouched down beside her.
“How in the world did you just do that?” she asked.
“No idea.”
He dug two cartridges out of his pocket and fed them into the magazine tube and jacked a shell into the chamber.
The F-150 skidded to a stop beside the Rover. Two women jumped down out of the bed. Two men climbed out of the cab.
“Take this.” He gave her the shotgun, took back the Glock.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know, I’m—”
“No, I mean you’re really bleeding.”
“Run like hell toward those mountains. When they follow, lay down in the dirt and let them get close and then open fire. Shoot, pump, shoot. Pump it hard. You won’t break it.”
“Jack.” She was crying now.
“They are going to kill our children.”
She stood and started down the slope into the desert.
He looked down at the Glock in his hand which felt so small and held not a fraction of that devastating twelve-gauge reassurance.
Then he was running across the slope, couldn’t feel his legs or the bullet in his shoulder, nothing but the shudder of his heart banging against his chest plate. He saw Dee being chased by two people into the desert and a man with a large revolver following a woman uphill toward the boulder where his children hid.
The man stopped and looked at Jack and raised his gun.
Between the two of them, they exchanged a dozen rounds that never came close to hitting anything.
The slide on Jack’s .45 locked back, the man struggling to break open the cylinder of his revolver, and the woman had nearly reached the boulder. She was thirty-something, blond, and holding an ax under the blade. Naomi and Cole still huddled behind the rock, Jack twenty yards away and moving toward them now at a dead run.
Shotgun reports tore out of the desert.
The woman disappeared behind the far side of the boulder and Jack screamed at his daughter to move over the roar of another shotgun blast.
The blonde emerged behind his children, hoisted the ax.
He crashed into her at full speed and drove her hard into the ground. Grabbed the first decent rock within reach and before he’d even thought about what he was doing, he’d broken open the woman’s skull with seven crushing blows.
Jack wiped her blood out of his eyes, picked up the Glock, and went to his children.
Naomi wept hysterically, holding her brother in her arms, shielding him.
The woman twitched in the dirt.
Down on the desert, someone groaned as they dragged themselves across the ground.
Not Dee.
Jack pushed the slide back and stepped out from behind the boulder with the empty Glock. The man stood ten feet downslope, pushing rounds into the open cylinder of his revolver, and when he looked up his eyes went wide like he’d been caught stealing or worse. Jack trained the Glock on him, a two-handed grip, but he couldn’t stop his nerves from making it shake.
The man seemed roughly the same age as the blonde, who Jack could hear moaning behind the rock. He was sunburned and stinking. Lips chapped. Wore filthy hiking shorts and a pale blue, long-sleeved tee-shirt covered in rips and holes and dark sweat- and bloodstains.
“Drop it.”
The revolver fell in the dirt.
“Move that way,” Jack said, directing him up the hill away from the gun. “Now sit.”
The man sat down against the boulder, squinting at the new sun.
“Naomi, you and Cole come here.” He glanced over his shoulder as he said it, glimpsed a small figure moving toward them on the desert—Dee. In the morning silence, he could still hear that Jeep heading toward the mountains, the noise of its engine on a steady decline.
The man glared at Jack. “Let me help Heather.”
Naomi came around the boulder, struggling to carry Cole who whimpered in his sister’s arms.
“Go put him in the car, Na.”
“Is Mom okay?”
“Yes.”
“I want to see Heather.”
Naomi looked at the man as she moved past. “Why? She’s dead. Just like you’re going to be.”
The man called for her, and when Heather didn’t answer, his face broke up and he buried it in the crook of his arm and wept.
Jack’s left shoulder had established a pulse of its own. Lightheaded, he eased down onto a rock, keeping the Glock leveled on the man’s chest.
“Look at me.”
The man wouldn’t.
“Look at me or I’ll kill you right now.”
The man looked up, wiped his face, tears cutting streaks of red through the film of dirt and dust.
“What’s your name?”
“Dave.”
“Where you from, Dave?”
“Eden Prairie, Minnesota.”
“What do you do for a living?”
It took him a moment to answer, as if he were having to sift back through several lifetimes.
“I was a financial advisor for a credit union.”
“And this morning, out here in the desert, you were going to kill my children.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re fucking right I don’t understand, but if you explain it to me right now, you won’t die.”
“Can I see her first?”
“No.”
Dave stared for a split second at Jack—a look of seething hatred that vanished as fast as it had come.
“Heather and I came out several weeks ago with our friends on a backpacking trip near Sheridan. Up in the Big Horns. We camped at this place, Solitude Lake. Little knoll a couple hundred feet above the water. Our first night there, we had this crazy supper. Pasta, bread, cheese, several bottles of great wine. Smoked a few bowls before bed and crashed. The lights woke me in the middle of the night. I got Heather up, and we climbed out of our tent to see what was happening. Tried to wake Brad and Jen but they wouldn’t get up. We laid down in the grass, Heather and me, and just watched the sky.”
“What did you see?” Jack asked. “That turned you into this?”
The man’s eyes filled up. “You ever witnessed pure beauty?”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“I saw perfection for fifty-four minutes, and it changed my life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“God.”
“You saw God.”
“We all did.”
“In the lights.”
“He is the lights.”
“Why do you hate me?”
“Because you didn’t.”
“Were those your friends in the Jeep?” Jack asked, though he already knew the answer. As Dave shook his head, Jack felt a molten-liquid mass coalescing in the pit of his stomach. “You murdered them.”
Dave smiled, a strange and chilling postcard of glee, and he was suddenly on his feet and running, four steps covered before Jack had even thought to react.
The full load of double aught buckshot slammed into Dave’s chest and threw him back onto the ground. Dee stood holding the smoking shotgun, still trained on Dave who was trying to sit up and making loud, gasping croaks like a distressed bird. After a minute, he fell back in the dirt and went into silent shock as he bled out.
Jack struggled onto his feet and walked over to Dee.
“You’re really hurting,” she said.
He nodded as they started back down the slope toward the Rover and the F-150.
“I need to see your shoulder. Do you think the bullet’s still in there or—”
“It’s in there.”
They approached the vehicles.
Dee said, “Wish we could take the truck. At least it has windows.”
“We will take its gas.”
“You
kept the hose from the Schirards’ house?”
“Yeah.”
In the backseat of the Rover, Naomi cradled her brother in her arms, rocking him and whispering in his ear.
“Get the gas cans out of the back.”
The F-150 was black and silver under the layers of dust. Jack pulled open the passenger door with his right arm and stepped up into the cab. It smelled of suntan lotion. Trash cluttered the floorboards—empty boxes of ammunition, empty milk jugs, hundreds of brass shell casings.
He tugged the keys out of the ignition.
Back outside, he unlocked the gas cap.
“How much is in there?” Dee asked.
“I didn’t look at the gauge.” He took the hose from her and worked it through the hole. “Where’s the can?”
“Right here.”
He could feel a cool trickle meandering down the inner thigh of his left leg, wondered how much blood that meant he’d lost.
“You okay, Jack?”
“Yeah, I just. . .a little lightheaded.”
“Let me help with that.”
“I’ve got it. Just unscrew the cap.”
“It is.”
“Oh.”
As Jack brought the hose to his lips, a voice from the truck disrupted the fog in his head.
“Eighty-five, come back.”
Jack found the walkie-talkie inside the glove compartment.
“Eighty-five and Eighty-four, we’ve got Sixty-eight through Seventy-one headed back your way to check on things. If you’re already en route, advise, over.”
Jack pressed talk. “We’re in route.”
Another voice cut in, strained with pain, barely a whisper. “This is Eighty-four. . .oh, God. . .send help. . .please.”
“I didn’t copy that, over?”
Jack dropped the radio and climbed out. “That was the driver of the Jeep. We’re leaving.”
“Without the gas?”
“There isn’t time.”
He staggered over to the Rover, pulled open the door, slid in behind the wheel.
“We need gas, Jack. We’re under a quarter of a—”
“They’re sending four vehicles. Gas won’t help us when we’re dead.”
She ran back to the Ford and grabbed the tubing and the empty cans, tossed everything into the back of the Rover, and slammed the hatch.
“I’m driving,” she said.
“Why?”
“You’re in no shape.”
She had a point, his left shoe filling up with blood. He crawled over into the front passenger seat and Dee climbed in and shut the door, cranked the engine.
“Na, get you and Cole buckled in—”
“Just fucking go,” Jack said.
They started back across the desert, and Jack leaned against the door and tried to focus on the passing landscape instead of the fire in his shoulder. The pain was becoming unmanageable and sickening. He must have let slip a moan because Naomi said, “Daddy?”
“I’m fine, honey.”
He closed his eyes. So dizzy. Gone for a while and then Dee’s voice pulled him back. He sat up. Microscopic dots pulsating everywhere like black stars.
“Binoculars,” she was saying. “Can you look down the highway?”
She’d set them in his lap, and he lifted the eyecups to his eyes. Took him a moment to bring the road into focus through the driver side window.
The glint of sun off the distant windshields was unmistakable.
“They’re coming,” he said. “Still a ways off. Couple miles, maybe.”
The awful jarring of the desert disappeared as Dee turned onto the highway.
“Don’t do your safe, gas-mileage conserving acceleration,” he said. “Floor it and get us the hell out of here.”
The motor sounded harsh and clattery as they sped north, and Jack kept fighting the impulse to lean over to see the fuel gauge since the concept of unnecessary movement ran a bolt of nausea through him.
“What’s the gas situation?” he finally asked.
“Little under a quarter.”
“How fast you going?”
“Eighty-five.”
Jack opened his eyes and stared through the windshield—empty desert to the west, jagged mountains to the east. Overcome with the thought, the truth, that they’d reached the end of their five days of running. They were going to use up the last of their gas on this highway in the middle of nowhere and then those four trucks would show up and that would be the end of his family. His eyes filled up with tears and he turned away from Dee so she wouldn’t see.
The smell of smoke roused Jack off the door.
“Where are we?”
“Pinedale.”
The tiny western community had been cremated, the honky-tonk Main Street littered with burned-out trucks and debris from looted stores. Near the center of town, a line of corpses in cowboy hats sitting along the sidewalk like gargoyles, charred black and still smoking.
“Fuel light came on a minute ago,” Dee said.
“That was bound to happen.”
“How you holding up?”
“I’m holding.”
“You need to keep pressure on your shoulder, Jack, or it’s going to keep bleeding.”
They broke out of the fading smoke and Dee accelerated. The morning sky burned blue overhead, oblivious to it all.
Jack straightened and glanced back between the seats—nothing to see through the plastic sheeting that hyperventilated over the back hatch.
“I don’t like how we can’t see the road behind us,” he said. “Pull over.”
Three miles out of Pinedale, Dee veered onto the shoulder and Jack stumbled out of the Rover. Heard the incoming engines before he’d even raised the binoculars to his face—a dive-bomber wail like they were being pushed to the limits of their performance capabilities.
He jumped back into the front seat, said, “Go,” and Dee shifted into drive, hit forty before Jack had managed to shut his door.
“How far?”
“I didn’t even look. Where’d you put the shotgun?”
“Backseat floorboard.”
“Hand it to Daddy, Na.”
Jack took the Mossberg from his daughter, had to yell over the straining engine. “How many times did you shoot it, Dee?”
“I don’t know. Four or five. I wasn’t keeping count.”
Jack flipped open the center console, grabbed a few shells, started feeding them in, the pain brilliant with every twitch of the deltoid in his left shoulder.
“Na, climb into the way back and peek through those holes. See if you can spot whatever’s coming.”
He reached under his seat, grabbed the roadmap. Opened it across his lap to the Wyoming page and traced their route north out of Rock Springs through Pinedale.
“There’s a turnoff coming up, Dee. Highway 352. Take it.”
“Where’s it go?”
“Into the Wind Rivers. Dead-ends after twenty miles or so.”
“Oh my God, I see the trucks.”
“How far, Na?”
“I don’t know. They’re small, but I can see them. Getting closer for sure.”
“Why would we take a dead-end road, Jack?”
“Because they can see us and run us down on these long, open stretches. Go faster.”
“We’re doing ninety.”
“Well, do a hundred. If they catch us before the turnoff, it’s over.”