by Blake Crouch
In the early evening the city lay several miles in the distance. The sun low over the plains beyond. Everything bright, golden. The way Jack dreamed of this place.
He disengaged his hand from Donald’s, the man still sleeping against the door.
The gas gauge needle hovered over the empty slash.
He was debating whether to head into town or take the bypass when he saw the first sign—a billboard that had once advertised a casino, now whitewashed and covered in black writing:
YOU ARE NOW UNDER SNIPER SURVEILLANCE
Stop in the next 400 yards
Jack took his foot off the gas.
Another billboard, same side of the road, one hundred yards further down.
300 yards to stop
Comply or you will be shot
Jack looked in the rearview mirror, saw several vehicles trailing him, no idea where they’d come from.
200 YARDS
TURN OFF YOUR VEHICLE AND. . .
He could see a roadblock a quarter mile in the distance, set up at a fork in the highway.
More than twenty cars and trucks. Sand bags. Staunch artillery.
He was passing vehicles now on the shoulder that had been shot to hell and burned.
DO NOT FUCKING MOVE
The cars behind him were close now, one of them a Jeep Grand Cherokee with the roof cut out and two men with machineguns standing on the back seat, ready to unload.
Jack brought the minivan to a full stop, put it in park, and turned off the engine.
The Jeep hung back thirty yards.
Jack looked over at Donald, started to rouse him, then thought, Why wake the man just to be killed?
Six heavily-armed men in body armor strode up the middle of the highway toward the minivan, one of them dragging an emaciated man along by a leash in one hand, the other holding a cattle prod.
They didn’t strike Jack as military, didn’t carry themselves so cocksure.
As if it had been scripted, the greeting party stopped thirty yards out from the front bumper of the minivan, and the tallest of the bunch raised a bullhorn to his mouth.
“Both of you, out of the car.”
Jack grabbed Donald’s arm. “Come on, we have to get out.”
The man wouldn’t move.
“Donald.”
“You have five seconds before we open fire.”
Jack opened his door and stepped out into the highway with his hands raised.
“You in the car, get out or—”
“He doesn’t hear you,” Jack yelled. “His mind is gone.”
“Lay down on your stomach.”
Jack got down onto his knees and then prostrated himself across the rough, sun-warmed pavement. Listened to the sound of their footsteps coming toward him, and he didn’t dare move or even raise his head to watch them approach. Just lay there with his heart throbbing against the road, wondering, from a strangely detached perspective, if this was how and where it would end for him.
The men stopped several feet away.
One of them came forward and Jack felt hands running up and down his sides, his legs.
“Clean.”
“Go check the other guy. You, sit up.”
Jack sat up.
“Where’s Benny?”
One of the guards produced a blindfolded rail of a man, naked, beaten to within an inch of his life, bruises covering his body and face, his hands cuffed and a chain linking his ankles above his bare feet.
The tall, bearded man pointed a large revolver at Jack’s face and asked him his name.
“Jack.”
“Is there a bomb in your van?”
“No.”
The one who’d frisked Jack peered over the front passenger door, said, “This one’s completely checked out.”
The bearded man stared at Jack. “Jack, I want to introduce you to Benny.” Benny’s handler gave a hard tug on the leash, dragging him within a foot of Jack. “Here’s the deal. If Benny likes you, I’m going to blow your brains out all over the road. If he doesn’t, we’ll talk.” He looked at Benny. “Ready, boy? Ready to do some work?”
Benny nodded. He was salivating.
“Benny, I’m going to take your blindfold off and show you our new friend.”
Benny urinated on the pavement.
“If you do good, I’ll give you some water and a treat. Are you going to do a good job?”
Benny made a sound that wasn’t human, and then the bearded man nodded to his handler, who pulled off the blindfold. The wildman crouched in front of Jack. Eyes ringed with black and yellow bruises but still a deep clarity and intensity in them. He was inches from Jack’s face. Smelled terrible, like he’d been bedding down in his own shit, and he seemed to be staring at something on the back of Jack’s skull.
Jack looked up at the man holding the revolver. “What the fuck is—”
Never saw the thing move, but Benny was suddenly on top of him and trying to tear Jack’s throat out with his teeth. Took three men to drag it away and several jolts from the cattle prod before it finally collapsed in the road and curled up moaning in the fetal position.
Jack scrambled back toward the van, trying to catch his breath, the man with the revolver moving toward him, saying, “It’s all right. This is good news. If Benny had crawled into your lap and started cooing, you wouldn’t be with us anymore.”
“What is that thing?”
“Benny’s our pet. Our affected pet. He checks out everyone who tries to come into the city. I’m Brian, by the way.” He offered a hand, helped Jack onto his feet.
“Is the city safe?” Jack asked.
“Yeah. We figure there’s ten, fifteen thousand people here. Many have left, gone north toward the border, but that’s a rough trip. It’s heavily guarded up there. We’ve got all the roads into town protected.”
“No affected in the city?”
“Nope.”
“How’s that possible?”
“It was cloudy the night of the event over this part of Montana.”
“You haven’t been attacked?”
“Not by any force that stood a chance. We’ve got five thousand armed men ready to fuck shit up on a moment’s notice.”
Jack looked around, the RPMs of his heart falling back toward baseline.
“Has a woman with two children passed through in the last week?”
“I don’t think so. You have a picture?”
“No.”
“Your wife and kids?”
Jack nodded.
“You’re the first person to even come up this road in three days. Are they coming here to meet you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where they are. We were separated in Wyoming.” He looked at the rest of the crew. “Any of you seen them?”
Nothing but headshakes and sorrys.
“My boy is affected,” Jack said. “He isn’t symptomatic or violent, but he saw the lights. He’s seven years old. Would you let him in?”
“How’s it possible he isn’t like the others?”
“I don’t know, but he isn’t. His name is Cole.”
“We’ll keep an eye out for them,” Brian said. “If he isn’t hostile, we’ll let your family through.”
“You swear to me?”
“We don’t kill kids.” Brian pointed through the windshield at Donald. “Friend of yours?”
“I picked him up this morning outside of White Sulphur Springs, just walking down the middle of the road. He needs medical attention.”
“Well, there’s shelters set up at some of the schools. You might find a doctor at one of those.”
“There’s an Air Force base here, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s been on lockdown since everything went to hell. I guess it’s understandable—they’ve got the silos holding the Minuteman nuclear missiles.”
Jack climbed back into the driver’s seat.
“You’ll let me through?”
“Absolutely.” He closed Jack’s door. “Saf
e travels.”
Jack had passed through the outskirts of Great Falls a handful of times in the last ten years during those long driving trips to see his father when his old man had still lived in Cut Bank. But he hadn’t been in the city proper since he and Dee had left to start a life in Albuquerque, sixteen years ago. Thought this might be the most peculiar circumstance under which to experience the emotion of nostalgia.
Driving the quiet streets, he found it haunting to see the darkness fall upon a city that had no light to raise in its defense.
In the blue dusk, he passed an ice cream shop he and Dee had frequented all those years ago on Friday nights. But everything else, at least what little he could see of it, had changed.
He drove to a hospital and cruised past the emergency room entrance, dark and vacated.
Went on.
There was no one out. The streets empty. The geography of the town might have been an asset, might have stoked his memory, had there been streetlights to guide him. But it was as dark as the countryside in these city limits. He drove for thirty minutes, dipping into the reserve tank, rambling in search of anything that resembled a shelter.
The engine had already sputtered once when he saw the soft smears of light through windows in the distance, and as the form of the building took shape, he recognized it—a high school. People were milling around the steps that climbed to the main brick building, the cherry glow of their cigarettes barely visible in the dark.
Jack pulled over to the curb and turned off the minivan.
He was thirsty again.
“Donald,” he said. “We’re at a shelter. They might have hot food. Clean water. Cots. I’ll find a doctor to look at you. We’re in a safe city now. You’ll be taken care of.”
Donald leaned against the door.
“Don? You awake?” Jack reached over and touched the man’s hand.
Cool and limp.
His neck gave no pulse.
Jack climbed the steps to the school. Inside, candlelight flickered off the lockers and it smelled worse than a homeless shelter—stink of body odor and rancid clothing. Cots stretched down the length of the hallway, and everywhere the noise of hushed conversations and snoring. A baby crying somewhere. He didn’t smell food.
He walked a long corridor, cots on either side and open suitcases—barely enough room him to make his way down the middle without trampling someone’s filthy laundry.
Five minutes of negotiating the crowded hallways brought him to the entrance of a gymnasium, where a woman sat at a folding table reading by candlelight a library-bound edition of Treasure Island. She looked up at Jack with what he imagined to be the no-bullshit demeanor of a mathematics teacher, or worse, a principal.
“You’re new,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You from Great Falls?”
“Albuquerque. I’m looking for my family. My wife is Dee. She’s short, brown hair, beautiful. Forty years old. My son is Cole, and he’s. . .” As he said Cole’s name, he thought about Benny and the roadblocks at the edge of town.
“Sir?”
“He’s seven. My daughter is Naomi and she’s fourteen, looks a lot like her mother.”
“And you think they’re here?”
“I don’t know. We were separated, but I think they might have come to Great Falls—”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but we’ve got over two thousand people here. Look, I wish I could offer you a cot, but we’re maxed out and I don’t know when more food is coming. The Air Force base had been trucking in MRE rations, but we haven’t seen them in five days.” She sounded tired and emotionless. Jack thinking, You haven’t seen anything.
He glanced through the open doors into the gymnasium—a mass of sleeping bodies.
“There a morgue around?” he asked. “I’ve got a dead man in my car. Guy I picked up this morning who didn’t make it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’re in a little bit of chaos here.”
“If you see my family, tell them I was here looking for them.”
Jack drove to a nearby park that took up a single city block. Unbuckled Donald’s seatbelt, pulled him out of the front passenger seat, dragged him away from the car. He made it as far as a boulder surrounded by flower boxes whose contents lay in ruin, but could take him no further. He laid Donald down in the grass beside the rock and folded the man’s hands across his chest.
Sat with him for a long time in the dark, mostly because he didn’t feel right just leaving Donald here alone. Thinking there was something more to be done, though he had no idea what. The breeze was pushing those empty swings, one of them making an awful creaking noise that set Jack’s nerves even more on edge.
After a while, he said, “This is the best I can do, Don. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything.”
And he got up and walked back to the van.
Drove fifteen blocks toward the river, the engine sputtering, cylinders misfiring. He’d wanted to make it to the water, but that wasn’t going to happen.
The feeble moonlight was shining off the columns of the civic center several blocks ahead. When he saw them, he realized where he was and brought the minivan to a stop in the middle of the street. He sat staring in disbelief toward the square, little to see in the powerless dark but the five-story block of the Davidson Building. Wondered how it had not occurred to him until this moment to come here.
He put the van back into gear and cranked the steering wheel. Drove over the lip of the sidewalk into the middle of the square between two rows of potted evergreen trees.
Jack turned off the van. Sat in the dark and the quiet, listening to the engine cool. He was in a dark plaza, buildings on either side of him, joined by a skywalk. The fountain nearby, dormant.
So much as he had imagined it, even after all this time.
He opened his door and stepped down onto the concrete. It was cold. There were clouds scudding through the light of the moon. Silence like this was one thing in the wilderness, a completely different matter in the city. No cars out, no people, not even the hum of streetlamps or powerlines. Too dark. Too quiet. Everything wrong.
It hit him. Pure exhaustion. The emotional expenditure of the day. Felt the call of sleep, and the idea of a few hours of unconsciousness, of checking out of all of this, had never sounded better.
The minivan still smelled like death.
He cracked all the windows and laid the front seat back as far as it would go.
WHEN his eyes opened he was staring through the windshield at the windows of an office building thirty feet above him. A sheet of clouds reflected in the dark glass. He sat up. Hungry. Cold. Opened the door and stepped down onto the plaza. Eighteen years ago, there had been a coffeehouse a block from here, and he could almost smell the memory of their French roast, feel how the heat of it had steamed into his face on mornings just like this.
He walked toward Central Avenue. Strange not to know the day, but he was certain it was November now. The sky certainly looked it, and the steel chill in the air felt it. Clouds soft and pregnant, debating whether to snow or drop cold rain.
Up and down the avenue, not a single car on the street. A few of the stores had been looted, broken glass on the sidewalk. Nothing moved but some dead leaves scraping across the road.
Jack went back at the minivan and looked inside. Don’s youngest daughter had been sitting in the third row from what Jack could tell. It looked to him like she’d made the space her own—iPod, magazines, books, a stuffed penguin that had been dragged around forever.
He lifted a drawing pad out of the floorboard, stared at a half-finished sketch of countryside that looked remarkably similar to the Montana waste where he’d stumbled upon this van. She had talent. All she’d used was a black Magic Marker to suggest a sharpened mountain range, miles of sagebrush, and the road that shot a lonely trajectory through that country. He wondered if she’d been drawing when her family was ridden down. A line stopped abruptly at the summit
of a mountain, the downslope never finished. The black marker she’d used still lay uncapped on the carpet.