by Blake Crouch
Jack brought the Land Rover to a full stop. An ember blew in through Dee’s window and alighted upon the dash. Smoldering into the plastic. Ash fell on the windshield like charcoal snow. He looked back at his children.
“I don’t want you to see what’s up ahead.”
“Is it something bad?” Cole said.
“Yes, it’s something very bad.”
“But you’re going to see it.”
“I have to see it because I’m driving. If I shut my eyes, we’ll wreck. But I don’t want to see it. Mama’s going to close her eyes, too.”
“Just say what it is.”
Jack could see Naomi already straining to peer around her mother’s seat.
“Is it dead people?” Cole asked.
“Yes.”
“I want to see them.”
“No, you don’t.”
“It won’t bother me. I promise.”
“I can’t make you shut your eyes, but I can give you fair warning. This is the kind of thing you’ll dream about, so when you wake up tonight crying and scared, don’t call out for me to comfort you, because I warned you not to look.”
Thinking, Will there be a tonight to wake from?
Jack drove on. They had been shot down, ten or fifteen of them, some killed outright, brainmatter slung into quivering gray-pink globules on the street. Others had managed to cover some ground before dying, the distance of their final crawl measured by swaths of purple-stained pavement and in one instance a long gray rope of gut like the woman had been tethered to the street. Jack glanced back, saw Naomi and Cole staring through the window, their faces pressed to the glass. His eyes filled up.
In the middle of town, they crossed a river that sourced from the mountains. In the summertime, in direct sun, it shone luminescent green and teemed with rafters and fly-fishermen. Today, the water reflected the colorless, smoked-out sky. A body floated down the rapids under the trestle bridge, jostled in the current, and Jack spotted numerous others rounding the bend—a group of blindfolded children.
Main Avenue widened to four lanes. Burned, abandoned cars clogged the street. Out of the valley rose a hundred unique trails of smoke.
“It’s like an army came through,” Dee said.
They passed two fast-food restaurants, several gas stations, a fairground, a high school, a string of motels.
Jack pointed to a grocery store. “We should get more food.”
“No, Jack.”
“Keep going, Dad. I don’t like it here.”
A woman stumbled out of the supermarket parking lot and ran into the street, holding out her hands to the Land Rover as if willing it to stop.
“No, Jack.”
“She’s hurt.”
He braked.
“Goddammit, Jack.”
The Land Rover’s bumper came to rest ten feet from the woman in the road.
Dee glared at him as he turned off the engine and opened his door and stepped down into the road. The doorslam echoed against an unnerving silence, disrupted only by a single sound Jack barely even registered with one unshattered eardrum—a baby wailing several blocks away.
He could see in the way the woman watched him approach that her eyes had witnessed pure horror in recent hours. He suddenly wished he’d never stopped the car, that he’d stayed on the other side of the windshield, because this was real, breathing agony standing before him. She sat down in the road. The intensity of her weeping like nothing Jack had ever heard, and he acknowledged the urge to dehumanize her, to shun sympathy. Too horrifying to identify with a human being who had reached this level of despair. Something contagious in their grief and loss. Her hair was dreadlocked with blood and her arms streaked red and her long-sleeved white tee-shirt stained like a butcher’s apron.
Jack said, “Are you hurt?”
She looked up at him, eyes nearly swollen shut from crying. “How can this be happening?”
“Are they still here? In town?”
She wiped her eyes. “We saw them coming with guns and axes. We hid in the closet. They came through the house, looking for us. I’d been in Mike’s house before. He’d sung carols on our front porch. I’d taken his family Christmas cookies. He said if we came out they would do it quickly.”
Jack squatted down in the road. “But you got out. You escaped.”
“They shot at us as we ran out the back door. Katie was hit in the back. They were coming. . .I left her.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I left her and I don’t even know if she was dead.”
Dee opened her door. Jack glanced back, said, “You want to come take a look at—”
“That’s a lie. I’m a fucking liar. I know she wasn’t dead because she was crying.”
“We need to go, Jack.”
“She was crying for me.”
He touched the woman’s shoulder. “Do you want to come with us?”
She stared back at him, her eyes glazing, mind drifting elsewhere.
“Jack, could we please leave this fucking town already?”
He stood.
“Katie was crying for me. I was so scared.”
“Do you want to come with us?”
“I want to die.”
Jack walked back to the Land Rover and opened the door as the woman screamed.
“What happened to her?” Naomi asked.
He started the engine.
Drove around the woman in the road and turned up a sidestreet.
“Jack, where are you going?”
He pulled over to the curb and turned off the car and got out. The houses burned and smoking. A row of bodies in the street on the next block. Dee climbed out and walked around to the front of the car and stood facing him.
“Jack?”
“I heard a baby crying over here while I was talking to that woman.”
“I don’t hear a thing, Jack. Look at me. Please.”
He looked down at her. As beautiful to him as she had ever been standing in this charred neighborhood in this murdered town. He saw the pulsing of her carotid artery in her long and slender neck. She seemed intensely alive.
Dee pointed toward the Land Rover. “They’re our charge. Do you understand that? Nobody else.”
“You made me stop for the hospital patient last—”
“That was the doctor in me. I’m over it now. We don’t have much food or water. We’re so vulnerable.”
“I know.”
“Jack.” She wouldn’t go on until he’d met her eyes. “I am holding my shit together by a very thin thread.”
“Okay.”
“I need you to make smart decisions.”
“I know,” he said, still straining to hear the cries of the baby.
North out of town. Out of the smoke and through a valley, its winding river marked by cottonwoods and the valley itself enclosed by red-banded cliffs and everything so purely lit under the lucid blue, like a dream, Jack thought. Or a memory. The way he still saw Montana that fall day all those years ago when he’d caught his first glimpse of Dee. The highway paralleled a narrow gauge railroad. They passed no other cars. Pastured cows raised their oblong heads to watch them speed by, and the air that filled the car carried the sweet, rich stink of a dairy farm. In the backseat, Naomi leaned on the door, listening to her iPod. Cole slept. For a second, it felt like one of those weekend trips to Colorado, and Jack did everything in his power to embrace the fantasy.
The road began to climb. Pressure building in Jack’s ears. The sky verging toward purple, and the air that rushed in through Dee’s window growing cooler and redolent of spruce trees. On the mountainsides, the conifers were laced with acres of aspen. The summits stood treeless, all gray and broken rock patched with old snow. They passed a deserted ski resort. A livery for tourists to purchase horseback rides. The road steepened. They climbed past ten thousand feet through a stand of spruce and crested the pass.
A few miles up the road, they came to a second, higher pass through the mountains. Jack pul
led over into the empty parking lot and turned off the engine. He and Dee got out and took a look around. Late morning. You could see for miles. The wind blew. Clouds amassing to the north. He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket. Powered it up. No service.
He opened his fly and urinated into the grass.
“Jack, there’s a restroom right there.”
“See anybody around?”
“Just because you can, huh?”
He zipped up, said, “Silverton’s down in that valley over there.”
Dee went to the car and came back with a pair of binoculars. She glassed the road from the pass to where it disappeared into the forest several miles north and a few hundred feet below.
“Anything?” Jack said.
“Nothing.”
They rode down from the pass out of the high country and back into the forest and then out of it again. The road had been gashed out of a cliff and the drop off the right shoulder was a thousand feet down to a river that snaked through a canyon. The valley from which it flowed contained a small town dotted with brightly-painted buildings and a railroad yard and a gold-domed courthouse at the north end.
“Well, it isn’t on fire,” Jack said. He glanced over, saw Dee massaging the back of her neck. “Headache?”
“Yeah, and it’s getting worse.”
“You know what it is, don’t you?”
“The elevation?”
“Nope. I’ve got one, too.”
“Oh my God, you’re right. We’ve missed our morning coffee.”
They rounded a hairpin turn: three trucks parked across the road, six men sprinting toward the Land Rover, guns pointed, screaming at them to stop the car.
“Jack, turn around.”
“They’re too close. They’ll open fire.”
“Won’t they anyway?”
“What’s happening?”
“Naomi, stay quiet, keep your headphones in, and don’t wake Cole.”
Jack still searched for a way out as the men closed in—a steep drop through trees over the right shoulder, an impossible climb up the mountainside off the left, and not enough room in this fast-diminishing increment of time to execute a three-point-turn and haul ass back the way they’d come.
Jack shifted into park. “Put your hands up, Dee.”
“Jack—”
“Just do it.”
The first man arrived training a bolt-action Remington on Jack’s head through the glass as the others surrounded the car.
“Roll it down,” he said. Jack lowered the window. “Where the fuck are you going?”
“Just north.”
“North?”
“Yeah.”
The man was bearded but young. Not even twenty-five, Jack thought. He wore a camouflage hunting jacket. A braided goatee tied off with a dangling row of black beads.
Someone standing behind the Rover said, “New Mexico tag.”
“Why are you up here? Who are you with?”
“No one, it’s just us.”
Another man walked over and stood by Jack’s window. A patchier beard. Long black hair flowing out of his corduroy bomber hat.
He said, “There’s a kid sleeping in the backseat. Their car’s been shot to hell, Matt. They got supplies and shit in the back.”
“We had to leave our home in Albuquerque last night,” Jack said. “Barely made it out.”
The man named Matt lowered his .30-.30. “You come through Durango this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“We heard it got pretty fucked up.”
“They burned it. Bodies everywhere.” Jack watched the fear take up residence in the man’s face. A sudden paling that made him look even younger than Jack had first suspected.
“It’s bad, huh?”
“Biblical.”
The others gathered around Jack’s window.
Cole sat up. “Are they mean, Daddy?”
“No, buddy, we’re okay.”
“Yeah, we’re cool, little man.”
The assembled men looked less like sentries than armed ski bums. Their weapons better suited to elk hunting than warfare—all toting high-powered rifles slung over their shoulders but not a pistol or shotgun to be seen.
“So you’re guarding the road into town?” Jack asked.
“Yep, and there’s another group stationed below Red Mountain Pass, trying to destroy the road.”
“Why?”
“There’ve been reports of a convoy of trucks and cars heading south from Ridgeway.”
“How many vehicles?”
“Don’t know. Most of Silverton’s already gone up into the mountains. Glad to see you driving a Land Rover, ’cause that’s really the only route left.”
“What route is that?”
“Cinnamon Pass to Lake City. And you should probably get going. It’s a bitch of a road.”
They rolled into the old mining town at midday and Jack pulled into a small grocery with several gas pumps out front. He sent Dee and the kids inside to scrounge for food while he flipped the lever and prayed there was something left. There was. He topped off the Rover’s tank, walked into the grocery. The cash register stood unmanned, the shelves stripped bare, the store pillaged.
He called out, “You finding anything?”
Dee from the back: “Slim pickings, although I did get a road map. Any gas left?”
“I filled us up.” Jack grabbed two five-gallon gasoline cans off a shelf in the barebones automotive aisle and went outside to the pump and filled them up. He cleared out a spot amid the camping gear and lifted the red plastic cans one at a time through the open window of the back hatch. Inside the store again, it took him several minutes to find the plastic sheeting. He carried two boxes of it, a roll of duct tape, and the single remaining quart of 10w-30 motor oil back outside with him. Dee and the kids were already in the car when he climbed in.
“How’d we do?” he said.
“Three strips of jerky. A can of diced tomatoes. Box of white rice. Bottle of seasoning.”
“Sounds like a meal.”
Up Greene Street for several blocks. Most of the shops closed. No one out. The sky sheeted over with uniform gray clouds which had moved in so suddenly that just a wedge of autumn blue lingered to the south, all the brighter for its dwindling existence. Jack turned into a parking space.
“I won’t be long.”
He left the car running and stepped into the sporting goods store. It smelled of waterproofing grease and gunpowder. Everywhere, racks of bibs and jackets patterned in every conceivable design of camouflage and mounted deer and elk heads with their impossible racks and a stuffed brown bear standing on its hind legs looking back toward an aisle of nets and fly-rods and hip waders. A burly-looking man with the girth of a drink machine stood watching him from behind the counter. He wore a flannel shirt, a vest flecked with renegade feathers of down, and he was pushing rounds into a revolver.
“What are you lookin for?”
“Shells for a twelve gauge and a—”
“Sorry.”
“You’re out?”
“I ain’t sellin any more ammo.”
The gun cases behind the counter had been emptied.
“Tell you what.” The man reached under the counter, brought out a sheathed hunting knife, and set it on the glass. “Take that. Best I can do. On the house.”
Jack walked to the counter. “I already have a knife.”
“What kind?”
“Swiss Army.”
“Good luck killin some son of a bitch with it.”
Jack lifted the large bowie. “Thanks.”
The storeowner flipped the cylinder closed and set to work loading a magazine.
“Are you staying?” Jack asked.
“You think I look like the type of hombre to let some motherfuckers run me out of my own town?”
“You should think about leaving. They wiped Durango off the map.”
“Under advisement.”
Someone pounded the store
front glass, and Jack turned, saw Dee frantically waving him outside.
When he pushed the door to the sporting goods store open, Jack heard a distant growl, a symphony of engines growing louder with each passing second, like the opening mayhem of a speedway race.
Dee said, “They’re here.”
As he reached to open his door, gunshots broke out in the south end of town and men were yelling and he glimpsed the lead trucks of the convoy already turning onto Greene Street. He jumped in behind the wheel and reversed out of the parking space and shifted into drive. Fed the engine gas, the hotels and restaurants and gift shops racing by, Jack running stop signs, doing seventy by the time he passed the courthouse at the north end of town.
The road turned sharply.
Jack braked, tires squealing.
Dee said, “You know where you’re going?”
“Sort of.”
The road left town and went to dirt, still smooth and wide enough for Jack to keep their speed above sixty. It ran for a couple of miles above the river and then emerged into a higher valley. They passed ruined mines. Mountains swept up all around them, the craggy summits edging into the falling cloud deck. In the rearview mirror, Jack eyed the dust clouds a mile back, and when he squinted, raised the half dozen trucks contained within them.
They passed the remnants of another mine, another ghost town.
The road became rocky and narrow and steep.
“Jack, you have to go faster.”
“Any faster, I’ll bounce us off the mountain.”
Naomi and Cole had unbuckled their seatbelts and they both sat up on their knees, facing the back hatch and watching the pursuing trucks.
“Get down, kids.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want you to get shot, Naomi.”
“Jack, come on.”
“Are they going to shoot at me, Daddy?”
“They might, Cole.”
“Why?”
Why.
The road had gone completely to hell, the Rover’s right tires passing inches from a nonexistent shoulder that plunged a hundred and fifty feet into a stream boiling with whitewater.