by Blake Crouch
“I think I see it.”
They screamed toward a road sign.
“You’re about to miss it,” Jack said.
She stepped on the brake and made the turn at thirty-five, swinging wide into the oncoming lane, the Rover briefly on two wheels.
“Nice,” Jack said.
Through the fist-size hole in his plastic window, he stared back down the highway, saw four vehicles streaking toward them. Inside of half a mile, he would’ve guessed.
“You see them?” Dee asked.
“Yeah. Get us up in those mountains as fast as you can.”
The highway shot through the last bit of desert before the mountains, and Jack could smell the heat of the engine and the sagebrush screaming by.
At a hundred miles per hour, they ripped through a ghost town—three buildings, two of them listing, a derelict post office.
The foothills lifted out of the desert less than a mile away, and already they were climbing.
“How’s the fuel gauge, Dee?”
“We’re on the empty slash.”
The road cut a gentle turn away from the foothills and passed through a grove of cottonwoods. They sped alongside a river and into a canyon, the colder, pine-sweetened air streaming through the plastic windows.
Jack said, “Start looking for a place to pull over.”
“Trees are too tight here.”
“Na, would you climb into the back again? When we make our move, we need to be certain they can’t see us.”
The sun blinked through the trees in shards of blinding light.
Jack leaned against the door again, felt Dee take hold of his hand.
“Talk to me, Jack.”
“I don’t feel like talking.”
“Because of the pain?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t see them yet,” Naomi yelled.
“Cole all right?” he asked.
“Sleeping if you can believe it.”
Into a meadow, the frosted grasses sparkling under the sun, the road straight for a quarter mile.
As they reentered the woods on the other side, Naomi said, “They’re just now coming into the meadow.”
“How many, sweetie?”
“Four.”
“You feel that, Jack?”
“What?”
“Engine just sputtered.”
He struggled to sit up.
Leaned back over.
Vomited into the floorboard.
“Jack, is there blood in it?”
“I don’t know.”
He sat up, focused on the passing trees instead of the acid burn in the back of his throat.
When they rounded the next hairpin curve, Jack saw a corridor through the pines—not a road or a path, just a little space between the trees.
“There, Dee. See it?”
“Where?”
“There. Slow down. Just left of that boulder. Drive off the road right there.”
Dee steered into the trees.
The violent jarring launched Jack into the dashboard, something struck the undercarriage, and by the time he was back in his seat, nose pouring blood, Dee had pulled the Rover into a shady spot between several giant ponderosa pines.
She killed the engine and Jack opened his door and stumbled out.
Easy to see the path they’d blazed through the forest—saplings severed, pale tire tracks in the trampled grass.
A couple hundred yards through the trees, four trucks raced by, and Jack stood listening to the roar of their engines, which after ten seconds, quieted down to a distant idling that went on and on, Jack listening, inadvertently holding his breath while his shoulder throbbed like a second heartbeat.
Dee walked over.
“They’re wondering if we’ve gotten ahead of them, or pulled a fast one,” he said. “If they’re smart, they’ll send two trucks up the canyon and two trucks back to the meadow to wait.”
“But they don’t know we’re out of gas,” Dee said. “If they think we doubled back, maybe they’ll keep going all the way to the highway.”
The engines went silent.
Naomi called out to Jack.
He spun around. “Shhh.”
“You think they’ve moved on?” Dee whispered.
“No. They’re listening for the sound of our engine. Go get the guns.”
They walked as far back into the woods as Jack could manage—barely fifty yards—and lay down in a bed of pine needles.
“Dee,” Jack whispered.
“What?”
“You’ve got to listen for what’s coming, okay? I have to rest now.”
“That’s fine.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “Just close your eyes.”
Jack turned over onto his right side, and he tried to listen for approaching footsteps but kept passing in and out of consciousness as the sun moved over the pines and made a play of light and shadow on his face.
The next time he woke the sun was straight overhead and he could hear Dee telling Cole a story. He sat up. His head swirled. Looked down at the pine needles, some of which had become glued together with blood. He felt feverish and cold, and soon Dee was there, easing him back onto the forest floor.
He opened his eyes, tried to sit up, thought better of it. Dee sat beside him and the sun was gone. Through the pines, the pieces of sky held the rich blue of late afternoon.
“Hi there,” she said.
“What time is it?”
“Four-fifteen. You’ve been sleeping all day.”
“Where are the kids?”
“Playing by a stream.”
“Nobody came?”
“Nobody came. You’re thirsty, I bet.” She unscrewed the cap from a milk jug and held it to his mouth. The coldness of the water stung his throat, ignited a fierce and sudden thirst. When he finished drinking, he looked up at his wife.
“How am I doing, Doc?”
Shook her head. “I stopped the bleeding, but you’re not so hot, Mr. Colclough.” She reached into the first aid kit, cracked open a bottle of Tylenol. “Here. Open.” Dumped a handful of pills onto Jack’s tongue, helped him wash them down. “I have to get that bullet out, and I need to do it before we run out of daylight.”
“Fuck.”
“Jack, there’s worse people you could be stuck with in this situation.”
“Than Wifey, MD?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re a GP. When’s the last time you even held a scalpel? Med school? I mean, do you even have the tools to—”
“Really, Jack? You want me to tell you the gory details of what I’m about to do, or you want to turn your head away and let me do my thing?”
“You can do this?”
She squeezed his hand. “I can. And I have to or you’ll get an infection and die.”
Jack lay flat on his back, his head turned away from his left shoulder, wishing for unconsciousness.
“Jack, I need you to be as still as you possibly can.”
Dee cut away his shirt.
“Using my Swiss Army knife?”
“Yep.”
“You’re going to sterilize it?”
“I’m afraid your health insurance plan doesn’t cover sterilizations.”
“That’s hilarious. Seriously—”
“It’s already done.”
“What with?”
“A match and an iodine pad. I’m going to wipe down your shoulder now.”
Felt like ice on a flaming wound as she cleaned the dried blood and gunpowder from the entry hole.
“How’s it look?” he asked.
“Like somebody shot you.”
“Can you tell how far in it went?”
“Please let me focus.”
Something moved inside his shoulder. There was pain, but nothing like he’d feared.
Dee said, “Shit.”
“First-rate bedside manner. What’s wrong?”
“I thought maybe I could do this easily. Just pull the bullet out wit
h these plastic tweezers.”
“That sounds like a super plan. Why can’t you do it?”
“I can’t get at it yet.”
“Fuck, you’re going to cut me.” Jack heard the snap of a blade locking into place. “Big blade? Small blade?”
“Think about something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like what we’re going to have for dinner.”
And he did think about it. For four seconds. Pictured the jar of pickled beets in the Rover and it made him want to cry. All of it—lying here in the woods in extraordinary pain without food and the day leaving them and nowhere to go and no way to get there— and then the knife entered his shoulder in a revelation of searing pain.
“Holy motherfuck—”
“Hold still.”
She was really going after it, and Jack made a crushing fist, fighting back a surge of nausea as he tried to ask if she saw the bullet yet, if she could get at it now, desperate for some indication that this would be ending soon please God, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he descended into a merciful darkness.
When he came to, Dee was crouched over him, headlamp blazing and Cole and Naomi beside her looking on. She was lifting a piece of string attached to a needle and smiling. She looked exhausted.
“You passed out you big baby.”
He said, “Thank God for that. Please tell me you got it.”
Naomi held up a squashed mushroom of lead between her fingers.
“I’m going to make you a necklace so you can wear it.”
“You must have read my mind, sweetie.”
He groaned as Dee ran the needle through his shoulder again and tightened the knot.
“I know it hurts, but I have to finish.” She started another stitch. “I really had to cut you to get it out. You lost two, maybe three pints of blood, which is right on the verge of not being okay.”
He woke often during the night, freezing even inside his sleeping bag. The stars shone through the pines, and he was caught up in a fever dream—crawling toward a stream and dying of thirst, but every time he reached the water and cupped a handful to his mouth, it turned to ash and the wind took it.
Once, he woke and it was Naomi’s voice that came to him in the dark.
“It’s okay, Daddy. You’re just having a bad dream.”
And she brought the jug of water to his lips and helped him drink and she was still there, her hand against his burning forehead, when he sank back down into sleep.
HE registered the sun on his eyelids. Pulled the sleeping bag over his head, let his right hand graze his left arm.
The sickening heat had gone out of it.
Cole’s laughter erupted some distance away in the forest.
Jack opened his eyes and pushed away the sleeping bag and slowly sat up.
Midday light.
The smell of sun-warmed pine needles everywhere.
Wind rushing through the tops of the trees.
Dee inspected his left shoulder. “Looking good.”
“What about all that blood I lost?”
“Your body’s making it back, but you need to be drinking constantly. More water than we have. And you need food. Particularly iron so you can remake those red blood cells.”
“How are the kids?”
“Hungry. Na’s been amazing with Cole, but I’m not sure how much longer she can keep it up.”
“How are you?”
She looked back at the Rover. “Think it’ll start?”
“Even if it does, we might have a gallon of gas left. Maybe a cup. No way to know.”
“We can’t just sit here and wait.”
“We could head back toward the highway, or keep going up the canyon. See how far we get.”
“Jack, we’re not going to find anything, and you know it.”
“That’s a real possibility.”
“We need more gas.”
“We need a new car.”
“If we don’t find something, Jack, if we’re still in these mountains tonight and we have no way to travel anywhere except on foot, which you don’t have the strength for, it’s going to get very bad very fast.”
“You want to pray?”
“Pray?”
“Yeah, pray.”
“That’s really pathetic, Jack.”
The engine cranked on the first attempt, though when Dee shifted into reverse an awful racket jangled to life under the hood. She backed them out of the grove and took it slow through the trees toward the road.
“Which way, Jack?”
“Up the canyon.”
“You sure?”
“Well, we know what’s back toward the highway—nothing.”
She turned onto the road and eased through a gentle acceleration. They’d torn the plastic windows out and the noise of the engine precluded any communication softer than shouting. Jack glanced into the backseat, saw Naomi and Cole sharing the jar of beets. Winked at his son, thinking he looked thinner in the face, his cheekbones more pronounced.
“We’re completely below the empty slash,” Dee said.
They did forty up the road, Jack constantly looking back through the glassless hatch for anything in pursuit.
After four miles, the pavement went to gravel.
They came out of the canyon.
The road had been cut into a mountainside and the pines exchanged for hardier, more alpine-looking evergreens and aspen in full color. At 2:48 p.m., the engine sputtered, and at 2:49, on a level stretch of road on the side of a mountain, died.
They rolled to a stop and Jack looked over at Dee and back at his children.
“That’s all, folks.”
“We’re out of gas?” Cole asked.
“Bone dry.”
Dee set the parking brake.
Jack opened his door, stepped down onto the road. “Come on.”
“Jack.” Dee climbed out and slammed her door. “What are you doing?”
He adjusted the sling which Dee had fashioned out of a spare tee-shirt for his left arm, said, “I’m going to walk up this road until I find something to help us or until I can’t walk anymore. You coming?”
“There’s not going to be anything up this road, Jack. We’re in the middle of a fucking wilderness.”
“Should we just lay down in the road right here then? Wait to die? Or maybe I should get the Glock and put us all—”
“Don’t you ever—”
“Hey, guys?” Naomi got out and walked around to the front of the Rover and stood between her parents. “Look.”
She pointed toward the side of the mountain, perhaps fifty feet up from where they’d stopped, at an overgrown, one-lane road that climbed into the trees.
Jack said, “It’s probably just some old wagon trail. There used to be mining around here I think.”
“You don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“There’s a mailbox.”
The mailbox was black and unmarked, and the Colcloughs walked past it up the narrow road into the trees. Jack was winded before the first hairpin turn, but keeping far enough ahead of Dee and the kids that he could gasp for air in private.
At four-thirty in the afternoon, he stopped at an overlook—dizzy, heartbeat rattling his entire body, pounding through his left shoulder. He collapsed breathless on the rock, still sucking down gulps of air when the rest of his family arrived.
“This is too much for you,” Dee said, out of breath herself.
They could see a slice of the road several hundred feet below where it briefly emerged from the forest. A square-topped dome of a mountain loomed ten miles away, the summit dusted with snow. Even bigger peaks beyond.