by Blake Crouch
He crawled out of the stall. The raging thirst gone, but the hunger pangs doubled him over when he stood, his feet so badly blistered he was afraid to see the damage.
He wandered toward the paper towel dispenser.
Cranked out a length of paper, tore it off.
Through the dark, and then he pulled open the door, the light like a railroad spike through his temples.
He limped out into the lobby, which looked almost like civilization in the daylight, sat down and went to work making a bandage for what was left of his ring finger.
He was already pushing open the front doors when he realized what he’d just walked past. Stepped back inside, half-expecting it to have vanished, like a mirage, but there it stood.
He rushed back into the cafeteria to the broken window. Lifted the rock off the floor and brought it into the lobby, where he hurled it through the glass.
He reached through and pulled out everything he could get his hands on—bags of potato chips, candy bars, crackers, cookies—until the vending machine was emptied and its contents spread across the floor.
He ripped into a bag of Doritos.
The chips were stale, leftovers from last season, but the intensity of the flavor made his mouth ache. He sat in the warm sunlight pouring through all the glass around the front entrance. Finished the bag and opened another filled with processed onion rings he would never have ingested in his former life. They were gone in a moment.
He drank his fill of water from the toilet and urinated for the first time in days.
Then grabbed the plastic garbage bag from the trashcan under the sink.
Back in the lobby, he put the two dozen packages of snacks into the bag and slung it over his shoulder.
There was a giant mirror on the wall across from the vending machine. He’d noticed it a little while ago, and now it called to him. The reflection unlike anybody he knew, his face thin as an ax-blade, beard coming in full. He was the color of rust, covered in dried blood, like a zombie-vagrant.
Outside the entrance to the resort, he came across a bicycle rack and a single, abandoned mountain bike standing up between the bars. The tires were low and there was bird shit all over the seat, but it looked otherwise in working order. He climbed aboard and tied his bag of food to the handlebars. He coasted down the sidewalk through the empty parking lot, turned out onto a country road, and then he was speeding along at thirty-five miles per hour down the winding, faded pavement and the cool, piney air blasting his face. The hum of the tires so otherworldly in the face of everything that had come before, like he was out for a bike ride on holiday.
Ten miles on and several thousand feet lower, Jack braked and brought the bike to a stop. Up ahead, a herd of range cattle was crossing the road, and he watched them pass. He’d ridden down out of the alpine forest and now the foothills of the mountains were bare and the air had become warm and redolent of sage.
He rode on, still cruising east and dropping. The foothills lay a mile behind him now, and the mountains fifteen, and the land was barren and open and the sky immense.
The riding turned strenuous when the grade of the road leveled out, but nothing compared to walking on blistered feet or crawling up a mountain.
In the evening he was twenty miles out from the mountains and turning north onto Highway 89, his quads burning and his face glowing with wind- and sunburn.
A mile and a half up the road, he caught the scent of water on the breeze, thinking he’d grown hypersensitive to the smell as of late, some recent adaptation borne out of nearly dying of thirst.
He crested a small rise and there lay the reservoir, the water like ink under the evening sky and the sun just a chevron of brilliance on the ridgeline of those mountains he’d ridden out of.
Abandoned the bike on the grassy shoulder and climbed down the slope to the water’s edge. Fell to his knees. Drank. It was cold and faintly sweet, none of that metallic, sterilized tang of toilet water.
He ate a supper consisting of a Butterfinger candy bar, two packages of Lays barbeque potato chips, and a Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookie.
Curled up in the grass by the water, already cold, but at least he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He watched the sun go behind the mountains and the stars begin to burn through the growing dark. Reeking of the dried, rotting gore that covered every square inch of his person.
He was crying before he realized it, hot tears running down his face. Alive now, and on track to stay that way for the time being. There were choices to make.
Head south back into Wyoming, maybe meet up with his family on the way. But they’d been separated now almost four days. They might’ve been picked up or found transportation or come upon some fate he couldn’t bring himself to imagine. Would Dee try to find him, or focus on getting Naomi and Cole across the border into Canada?
He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket. The battery had been dead for weeks.
He held down the power button and typed in Dee’s number, held the phone to his ear.
“Hey, baby. I’m at this lake in Montana about thirty miles north of Bozeman. It’s beautiful here. So quiet. I’m watching the stars come out. I hope you and the kids are okay. I’ve had a hard few days.”
Out in the middle of the lake, a fish jumped.
“I think I’m going to keep heading north toward Great Falls, our old stomping grounds. I have such sweet memories of that city and you.
“I don’t know how to find you, baby, so please stay open and make smart choices. I’m not leaving this country without you, Dee.”
The ripples from the middle of the lake were just beginning to reach the shore.
He put his BlackBerry back into his pocket.
The water became still again.
He let his eyes close when they were ready.
THE sound of wind in the grass. Sunshine on his eyelids. It didn’t feel cold enough to be first light. He sat up stiff, so sore. An act of willpower just to stand. Late morning, the sun already high. He walked up the grassy slope into the middle of the highway. The vistas north and south were endless. Nothing going. Nothing coming. Just silence and an overload of open space. The horizons so far, the sky so vast, it seemed right on top of him.
He stripped out of his clothes and ran naked and gasping into the freezing water. Ducked under and swam until he had to surface, ten yards out from the shore. He went back and grabbed his stinking clothes and carried them out into waist deep water, rinsed the blood and filth out of everything, and then used one of his shirts to scrub himself down.
Jack rode north up the highway, soaking wet. Rode hours. Until his clothes had dried out and he had nothing left. Stopped in the early evening, no idea how far he’d ridden, but he hadn’t passed a car or a house all day, and the world looked much as it had twenty-four hours prior—empty, big sky country—and he still felt very small in it.
TWO miles into his day, coasting down a long, gentle grade in the dawnlight, Jack braked and came to a stop in the road. He squinted, trying to sharpen his nearsightedness into focus. Couldn’t tell how far. A mile. Maybe two. The calculation of distance impossible in this country.
A vehicle parked in the road. One of its doors open.
For ten minutes, Jack didn’t move and he didn’t take his eyes off the car.
He pedaled up the road, stopping every few hundred yards to view things from a closer vantage.
It was a late model minivan. White. Covered in dust and pockmarked with bulletholes. Some of the windows had been shot out, and there was glass and blood on the pavement. All four tires low but intact. Utah license plate.
Jack stopped ten feet from the rear bumper and got off the bike.
Smell of death everywhere.
Somehow, he had missed the girl in the sagebrush. The sliding door of the minivan was open, and it looked as though she’d been gunned down running, her long blond hair caught up in the branches. He wasn’t going to get close enough to see how old she was, but she looked small from where he
stood. Ten years old maybe.
A woman sat in the front passenger seat and her brains covered the window at her head. Twin teenage boys lay slumped against each other in the backseat. The driver seat was empty.
Jack climbed in behind the wheel. The keys dangled out of the ignition. Fuel gauge at a quarter.
He turned the key.
The engine cranked.
He pulled the boys out of the back and their mother out of the front and lined them all up in the desert. Didn’t want to, but he couldn’t just leave the girl face up, naked and entangled in the sage.
He stood for a long time staring down at them.
Midday and the flies already feasting.
Jack started to say something. Stopped himself. It would’ve meant nothing, changed nothing, been solely for his benefit. No words to put this right.
He loaded the bicycle into the back.
He drove north, keeping his speed at a steady fifty. A CD in the stereo had been playing the Beach Boys, and Jack let it go on playing until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
He passed through a small, burned town, and fifteen miles north, on the outskirts of another, had to swerve to miss someone walking alone down the middle of the highway.
He stopped the car, watched a man staggering toward him in the rearview mirror, his defective gait unfazed, as if he hadn’t even noticed the car that had nearly hit him. He didn’t carry a gun or a backpack, nothing in his hands which he held like arthritic claws, his fingers bent and seemingly frozen that way.
Jack shifted into park.
The closer the man got, the more wrecked he looked—sunburned a deep purple, his dirty white oxford shirt streaked in blood and missing one of the arms entirely, his leather clogs disintegrating off his feet.
He walked right past Jack’s window and kept on going, straight down the double yellow.
Jack opened the door.
“Hey.”
The man didn’t look back.
Jack got out and walked after him. “Sir, do you need help?”
No response.
Jack drew even with him, tried to make eye contact, then finally stepped in front of the man, who stopped, his gray eyes staring off at a horizon beyond even the scope of this infinite country.
In another world completely.
“Are you hurt?” Jack said.
His voice must have made some impact, because the man met his eyes, but he didn’t speak.
“I have food in the car,” Jack said. “I don’t have water, but this road will take us through the Little Belt Mountains. We’ll find some in the high country for sure.”
The man just stood there. His entire body trembling slightly. Like there was a cataclysm underway deep in his core.
Jack touched the man’s bare arm where the shirt sleeve had been torn away, felt the sun’s accumulation of heat radiating from it.
“You should come with me. You’ll die out here.”
He escorted the man to the passenger side and installed him in the front seat.
“Sorry about the smell,” Jack said. “It ain’t pretty, but it beats walking.”
The man seemed not to notice.
Jack buckled him in and closed the door.
They sped down the abbreviated main street of another slaughtered town. Mountains to the north, and the road climbed into them. Jack glanced over at the man, saw him touching the matter on his window, running his finger through it, smearing it across the glass. A bag of potato chips and a candy bar sat in his lap, unopened, unacknowledged.
“I’m Jack, by the way,” he said. “What’s your name?”
The man looked at him as if he either didn’t know or couldn’t bring himself to say. His wallet bulged out of the side pocket of his slacks, and Jack reached over, tugged it out, flipped it open.
“Donald Massey, of Provo, Utah. Good to meet you, Donald. I’m from Albuquerque.”
Donald made no response.
“Aren’t you hungry? Here.” Jack reached over and took the candy bar out of Donald’s lap, ripped open the packaging. He slid the bar into Donald’s grasp, but the man just stared at it.
“Do you want to listen to some music?”
Jack turned on the Beach Boys.
They rode up into the mountains, Jack hating to be on a winding road again. With all these blind corners, you could roll up on a roadblock before you knew what hit you.
In the early afternoon, they passed through a mountain village that was probably very much a ghost town before anyone had bothered to burn it. A few dozen houses. Couple buildings on the main strip. Evergreen trees in the fields and on the hills, the smell of them coming through the dashboard vents, a welcome change.
On the north side of town, Jack pulled over and turned off the engine. When he opened the door, he could hear the running water in the trees and smell its sweetness.
“You need to drink something, Donald,” Jack said.
The man just stared through the windshield.
Jack lifted a travel mug out of the center console.
Jack rinsed the residue of ancient coffee out of the mug and filled it with water from the creek.
Headed back to the van, opened Donald’s door.
“It’s really good,” Jack said.
He held the mug to Donald’s sunblasted lips and tilted. Most of the water ran down the man’s chest under his shirt, but he inadvertently swallowed some of it.
Jack tried to give him a little more, but the man was disinterested.
“We’ll reach Great Falls in the afternoon,” Jack said. “It’s a big city. I used to live there.”
Impossible to know if the man registered a word he was saying.
“I got separated from my family five days ago.” Jack glanced at the man’s left ring finger, saw a gold wedding band. “Were you with your family, Donald?”
No response.
Jack sipped the water, grains of sand from the creekbed deposited on the tip of his tongue.
“Let me guess what you do for a living. My wife and I used to play this game all the time.” Jack studied the man’s leather clogs—nothing much to look at now, but they suggested wealth. Couple hundred dollars off the shelf. Jack inspected the tag on the back of the man’s collar. “Brooks Brothers. All right.” He looked at Donald’s hands. Covered in blood and still clutched like claws, but he could tell they weren’t the hands of a man who earned his living working outdoors. “You strike me as an ad man,” Jack said. “Am I right? You work in an advertising and marketing firm in Provo?”
Nothing.
“I bet you’d never guess my vocation. Tell you what. I’ll give you three. . .”
Jack stopped. Felt the cold premonition of having missed something lifting out of his gut. He almost didn’t want to know, but the fear couldn’t touch his curiosity.
He opened the glove compartment, rifled through a stack of yellow napkins, plastic silverware, bank deposit envelopes, until he came to the automobile liability policy, protected in a plastic sleeve. He opened it, stared down at the small cards that identified the coverage, the policy limits, and the named insureds.
Donald Walter Massey.
Angela Jacobs-Massey.
Jack looked at Donald.
“Jesus Christ.”
They went on through the mountains, Jack trying to pay attention to what was coming in the distance, but all he could think about was Donald, wondering what had happened back down the road. Couldn’t imagine the man fleeing. He wouldn’t have left his family. Had the affected purposely left him alive then? Murdered his family in front of him and then sent him down the highway on foot?
Jack blinked the tears out of his eyes.
He looked over at the man who now leaned against the door. That look in his face like he’d just been hollowed out. Jack wanting to tell him that he’d taken care of their bodies, or at least done what he could, shown them respect. He wanted to say something beautiful and profound and comforting, about how even in all this horror, there we
re things between people who loved each other that couldn’t be touched, that lived through pain, torture, separation, even death. He thought he still believed that. But he didn’t say anything. Just reached over and laced his fingers through Donald’s, which barely released their incomprehensible store of tension, and Jack held the man’s hand as he drove them down out of the mountains, and he did not let go.