The Fear Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  Jack struggled to his feet and went on.

  The road wound through an aspen grove that was peaking—pale yellows and deep yellows and the occasional orange—and when the wind blew through the trees, the leaves fluttered like weightless coins.

  The sun was falling through the western sky. Already a cool edge to the air in advance of another clear and freezing night. They hadn’t brought their sleeping bags from the car. Hadn’t brought water. Nothing but the shotgun and the Glock and it occurred to Jack that they might very well be sleeping under the stars on the side of this mountain tonight.

  Several switchbacks later, the road curved and Jack walked out of the aspen into a meadow.

  He stopped.

  Took the Glock out of his waistband and tugged back the slide.

  Dee gasped.

  Cole said, “What, Mama?”

  Jack turned around and shushed them and led them back into the woods.

  “Is anyone there?” Dee whispered.

  “I couldn’t tell. Let me go check things out.”

  “I should go, Jack. You’re too weak.”

  “Don’t move from this spot, any of you, until I come back.”

  He jogged into the meadow. You could see the desert in the west, the sun bleeding out across it and the distant gray thread of Highway 191. It was getting cold. He slowed to a walk, his shoulder pulsing again. The wind had died away and the trees stood motionless. Somewhere, the murmur of a stream.

  A covered porch ran the length of it, loaded with firewood. Solar panels clung to the steep pitch of the roof. Dormers on the second floor. A chimney rising up through the center. The windows were dark, reflecting the sunset off the glass so he couldn’t see inside, even as he walked up the steps.

  The wooden porch bowed and creaked under his weight. He leaned in toward a window, touched his nose to the glass, framed his face in his hands to block the natural light.

  Darkness inside. The shape of furniture. High ceilings. No movement.

  He tried the front door. Locked. Turned away, shielded his eyes, and swung the Glock through the window.

  Dee shouted something from the woods.

  “I’m okay,” he yelled. “Just breaking in.”

  He straddled the windowframe and stepped down into the cabin. Through the skylight above the entrance, a column of late sun slanted through the glass and struck the stone of the freestanding fireplace with a medallion of orange light. It didn’t smell like anyone had been here in some time. The mustiness of infrequent habitation.

  From what he could see in the fading light, the floorplan was spacious and open. A staircase corkscrewed up to the second level where the banistered hallway and three open doors were visible from Jack’s vantage.

  He moved across the hardwood floor toward the kitchen.

  A deep sink and granite countertops lined the back wall of windows which looked out over the deck into the brilliant aspen.

  He walked over to the pantry, pulled open the door.

  Jack led Dee and the kids up the front porch steps and into the cabin.

  “There’s food here, Jack?”

  “Just come on.”

  The last trickle of daylight was just sufficient to illuminate the kitchen, where Jack had thrown open every cabinet so they could see the treasure he’d found.

  Dee sat down and put her head between her knees and wept.

  They spread out on the floor as the world went black out the kitchen windows, each with their own cold can and sharing a big bag of sourdough pretzels torn open and spilled across the floor beside a sixer of warm Sierra Mist.

  “Oh my God, this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” Naomi said, halfway through her clam chowder. Grunts of agreement all around—Jack had gone for the chili, Dee the beef vegetable soup, Cole the Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli.

  A half hour later, Naomi slept on a leather couch near the fireplace while Jack covered her with two quilts he’d found in a game closet. He went up the spiral staircase, holding one of the kerosene lamps they’d taken from the coffee table downstairs, Dee in tow, carrying Cole. Into the first bedroom. Jack pulled back the quilt, blanket, sheet, and Dee laid their son on the mattress and kissed his forehead and covered him back up.

  “It’ll get cold in here tonight,” she said.

  “Not as cold as last night.”

  “If he wakes up and no one’s here, he’s going to be scared.”

  “You think so? After these last few days? He’s done in, Dee. He won’t wake for hours.”

  They lay in bed downstairs in the dark under a pile of blankets. Somewhere, the tick of a second hand. Naomi’s deep respirations in the living room. No other sound.

  “Do you think we’re safe here?” Dee whispered.

  “Safer than starving and freezing to death on the side of a mountain.”

  “But long-term, I mean.”

  “I don’t know yet. I can’t think about it right now. I have nothing left.”

  Dee snuggled up to him and stretched a leg across his, her skin cool and like fine-grit sandpaper. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest. First time in months she’d put her hands on him, and it felt, in the best kind of way, like a stranger touching him.

  “Nothing, Jack?” And she slipped her hand inside the waistband of his boxer shorts. “’Cause this doesn’t feel like nothing.”

  “Our daughter is twenty feet away,” he whispered.

  Dee climbed out of bed and crept across the floor and closed them in behind the French doors and their panes of opaque glass. He heard the lock push in. She pushed the straps off her shoulders and her undershirt puddled around her feet. Slid her panties down her legs, and Jack watched her come back to him, naked and pale, wishing for some moonlight for her to move through as she crawled across the bed.

  “I’m nasty,” he said. “Haven’t had a shower in—”

  “I’m nasty, too.”

  She stripped him and sat him up against the headboard and eased down onto his lap, and already the pain in his shoulder was subsiding. He could tell this was going to be one of the great fucks of his life.

  IN the morning, Jack hiked down to the road with a gallon of the gasoline he’d found in the shed. There was plenty more where it came from—six five-gallon containers that he figured were meant for the backup generator in case the solar power system failed. The Rover managed to crank, and he put it into four-wheel high.

  A hundred yards up the mountain, he stopped and grabbed the chainsaw out of the backseat and came out of his sling. Took him thirty minutes just to hack through the dense lower branches so he could get at the base, going slow so he didn’t rip the stitches in his shoulder. Another twenty to carve a wedge into the trunk, and when the spruce finally fell across the road, it perfumed the air with sap and splintered wood.

  Naomi and Cole were still sleeping when Jack returned to find Dee in the kitchen, having already done what he suggested—pull down all the food from the cabinets and the pantry to see what they had to work with.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” he said by way of greeting.

  Dee looked up from where she sat on the kitchen floor, surrounded by cans and glass jars and packages. “How’d the car do?”

  “Rough as hell, but I got it to the shed. Maybe I’ll play mechanic in a few days, see if I can fix what’s wrong.”

  They spent the morning dividing out the food and trying to see what they might make from the staples like flour and sugar, assuming Jack could fire up the solar power system and get the stove working. In the end, rationing as frugally as they could stomach, they calculated enough meals to feed their family for thirteen days.

  “That’s not good enough,” Dee said. “And we’re going to be hungry all the time before we actually begin to starve to death.”

  “It’s more food than we had yesterday. I saw some fly-fishing gear in the shed, and there’s a stream out back.”

  “You took one class, Jack. Two years ago. None of your flies at home eve
r touched water, and you think you’re going to go out there and catch enough fish for us—”

  “How about sending some positive energy into this situation, dear-heart?”

  She flashed a fake smile, batted her eyes. “I’m sure you’ll catch more than we can eat, Jack. I know you can do it.”

  “You’re such a bitch.” He said it with love.

  He assembled a six-weight fly rod in the shed, stocked his vest with an assortment of flies, and carried a small cooler into the woods toward the sound of moving water. Found it fifty yards in—a wide, slow stream that flowed through the aspen. He sat down on the grassy bank. The sun as high as it would be all day. Light coming down through the trees in clear, bright splashes. The sky cloudless. Almost purple.

  He filled the cooler in the stream. Got the tippet tied on and chose a fly at random. Took him five attempts to cinch the knot, then walked downslope until he came to a shaded pool several feet deep and out of the ruckus of the main current.

  His first cast overshot the stream and the fly snagged on a spruce sapling. He waded across, the water knee-deep and freezing, and clambered out onto the warm grass on the opposite bank.

  An hour later, he felt his first tap.

  Midafternoon, he hooked a fingerling, Jack tugging the green line and backing away from the stream. It flopped in the grass, and he carefully lifted the fish which torqued violently and then went still, gills pulsing in his hand. Silver. Spotted with brown dots. He unhooked the fly and walked back to the cooler and dipped the trout into the water, thinking, God, was it small. Two or three bites at most if he didn’t completely destroy the thing when he tried to clean it.

  They dined at the kitchen table as the light ran out—two cans of cold navy beans split between the four of them, three pretzels apiece, water from one of the plastic jugs Dee had brought in from the Rover.

  “How many fish did you catch?” Cole asked.

  “One,” Jack said.

  “How big?”

  Jack held his pointer fingers five inches apart.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s still in the cooler by the stream. But I saw some big ones.”

  “Can I come fishing with you tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Middle of the night, Jack sat up in bed.

  “What’s wrong?” Dee asked, still half-asleep.

  “I should’ve cut down the mailbox.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The mailbox by the road. The one Naomi saw that led us here.”

  “Do it first thing in the morning.”

  “No, I’m going now. I won’t be able to sleep.”

  He hiked down with the chainsaw in the dark, reached the road at four in the morning. Cold. Below freezing he would’ve guessed. That distant, square-topped mountain shining silver under the moon. He walked out into the road and stood listening for a while.

  The chainsaw motor seemed inappropriate at this hour. Like screams in a church. He decapitated the mailbox and carried it across the road and threw it down the mountainside.

  Walking back up to the cabin, he rounded a hairpin curve and froze. Heart accelerating at what loomed just twenty feet up the road. It raised its enormous head, the giant rack pale and sharp in the predawn. He’d almost brought the shotgun, decided against it fearing his left arm couldn’t bear the weight. And so he watched the seven-hundred-pound elk walk off the road and vanish into the trees, wondering how long it might have fed his family.

  BY midmorning, he had the off-grid power system up and running, water pumping in through the tap from the underground cisterns, and the water heater beginning to warm. They filled five plastic grocery bags under the faucet and tied them off and stowed them in the chest freezer. Tried not to acknowledge the fact that they were all skipping lunch.

  Jack left Dee and Naomi to scour The Joy of Cooking for efficient bread recipes that jived with their ingredient list, and took his son with him into the woods.

  He’d anticipated Cole wanting to fish, and since there wasn’t any spinning tackle to be had in the shed, surprised the boy with a provisional pole he’d fashioned that morning—an aspen sapling skinned of bark and fitted with an eight-foot length of nylon string and a ceiling screw hook with which Cole might only inflict minimal damage.

  The knot tying went faster and the casting smoother, Jack sticking the fly in the vicinity of his intent almost every time.

  He’d caught two fingerlings by three o’clock and his first grown-up fish by four—a twelve-inch Rainbow on a dry fly that had been loitering in a pool beside a cascade. Cole screamed with delight as Jack brought the fish ashore, both of them squatting in that pure fall light to inspect the reddish band and the black spots and the micaceous skin that faded into white at the edges.

  “It’s really something, isn’t it?” Jack said.

  “You did good, Dad.”

  Jack set his rod in the grass and worked the hook out and carried the trout back across the stream toward the cooler in two hands and with as much care as he’d handled Naomi and Cole as squirming newborns.

  They fished until the light went bad, Jack torn between the stream and his son who’d abandoned the aspen rod to construct a pile of polished, streambed stones on the opposite shore. Jack trying to ignore that thing that had been gnawing at him now for two days, that he wouldn’t ever be ready to look in the eye. How could a father? But he saw it—from a distance, an oblique glance—and for right now at least, that was as close as his heart could stand to be.

  When they returned, the sun had just slipped below the desert and Dee and Naomi were hanging blankets over the windows and the cabin smelled of sweet, baking bread.

  The women had carried in several armloads of firewood from the porch and stacked it around the hearth, and while Cole regaled everyone with the story of catching the fish, Jack built a base of kindling using a dozen of the pinecones stored in a wicker basket and an issue of USA Today.

  The front-page headlines stopped him as he ripped out a sheet—six-month-old bits of news about the war, political infighting, Wall Street, the death of a young celebrity.

  “What’s with the blankets over the windows?” he asked as he balled up the sports page and hoisted the first log onto the pyre.

  “So our fire won’t be visible.”

  Two more logs and then he struck a match, held it to the newsprint.

  Jack lay in bed watching fireshadows move across the walls of the living room. Warm under the blanket. Hungry but content.

  “We can’t have fires like this anymore,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we don’t need them. The winter here is going to be awful. We should save the firewood for blizzards. Nights when it goes below zero. I’m going to have to cut a hell of a lot more wood.”

  “So you want to stay?”

  “If we can get the food situation under control.”

  “I don’t know, Jack.”

  “What? You’d rather go back out into what we just escaped?”

  “No, but we’ll starve to death here.”

  “Not with a seasoned outdoorsman like me taking care of things.”

  A tremor of laughter moved through her.

  “You noticed any changes in Cole?” he asked.

  “No. Why? What makes you ask that?”

  “That man in the desert—the one you shot when he came after me? He and his wife had been camping with another couple. They saw the lights. The other couple slept through them. Afterward, they murdered their friends.”

  “What does this have to do with my son?”

  “You, me, and Naomi, we slept through the aurora. Cole spent the night at Alex’s. Their family went out to the baseball field with the neighborhood and watched. Remember him telling us about it the next day?”

  Dee was quiet for a long time.

  Jack could see the embers in the fireplace and he could hear his daughter breathing.

  “It doesn’t mean anythin
g, Jack, what that man told you. He’s our son, for chrissake. You think he wants to hurt us?”

  “I don’t know, but this is something we should be aware of. Today, I caught him staring at himself in the mirror. For a long time. It was weird. I don’t know what that was about, but—”