by Blake Crouch
“Dad, I’m cold.”
“I know, sweetie. I’m sorry.”
Snow starred the windshield. A signpost appeared in the distance. Beside the words, Cinnamon Pass, which had been engraved in the wood, an arrow pointed to a road that could hardly be called a road—just a single lane of broken rocks that switchbacked up the flank of a mountain into the clouds.
Jack took the turnoff. Snow blew in through the open windows. They climbed several hundred feet above the other road, above timberline, and as Jack negotiated the first tight switchback, that squadron of trucks emerged out of the mist below, cutting triangles of light through the falling snow.
Dee lifted the binoculars from the floorboard and leaned out the window and glassed the valley. Even without magnification, Jack could see five of the trucks veer onto the turnoff for Cinnamon Pass.
“Why’s the one stopping?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Let me see. A man’s getting out.”
“What’s he—”
“Everybody get down.”
“What’s wrong?”
Something struck the Rover, and for a split second Jack thought the tires had thrown a rock.
A rifle shot echoed off the mountains.
“Get down on the floorboards.”
The Rover shook and pitched as Jack pushed the speedometer to ten miles per hour, maneuvering to avoid the largest, sharpest rocks that jutted out of the trail. The window at Naomi’s seat exploded in a shower of glass and everyone screamed and Jack shouted his daughter’s name and she said that she was okay.
Another rifle shot. They climbed into the base of a cloud, Jack thinking, He’s aiming for the tires, as a bullet punctured Dee’s door and ripped through his seat, inches from his back.
The mist thickened. The rocks had just been wet. Now they were frosted. The snow melting and streaking the windshield and pouring into the car through the open windows. Jack thought he heard another shot over the engine, but when he glanced out Dee’s window to where the valley should have been a few hundred feet below, there was only a blue-tinted mist cluttered with snowflakes that swirled and fell in disorienting profusion.
They climbed the mountainside, the road exposed, Dee and the kids still burrowed into the floorboards, Jack constantly checking the rearview mirror for headlights.
“Can we get up now?” Cole asked.
“Not yet.”
“It hurts to stay like this.”
The road leveled off and the Rover’s headlights passed over another signpost: Cinnamon Pass Elevation 12,640 Feet. Several inches of snow on everything in this tundra world. No trees or shrubs but only rock and nothing visible beyond fifty feet through the fog and pouring snow, the light more like dusk than early afternoon. In some outpost of emotion, divorced from the horror of the moment, Jack found the isolated beauty of this pass heartbreaking. The kind of wild place his father had loved to take him when he was a boy.
He brought the Rover to a stop and turned off the car and threw open his door.
“What are you doing, Jack?”
“Just checking things out. You guys can sit up now.”
He stepped down into the snow and shut his door. He strained to listen. At first, just the infinitesimal pattering of snowflakes falling on his shoulders, the ticking of the cooling engine, the wind, the invisible shifting of rocks on some obscured peak. Then he heard them—impossible to tell how far away, but the distant groan of engines became audible in the gloom below the pass, muffled by the snow. He got back into the car and cranked the engine and they went on. Jack shifted into four-wheel low. The road descending, the tires sliding on ice down the steeper grades. After two miles, shrubs appeared again. Then tiny, crooked fir trees. They dropped into a forest and a stream fell in beside the road. Still snowing here, but the snow had only begun to collect.
Jack turned off the jeep trail.
They went across a meadow and forded a stream and climbed up the bank into a grove of fir trees. He turned off the car and got out and walked back to the stream and stared across the meadow toward the road. The mist had all but dissolved in the trees. He looked back at the Rover, parked behind a grouping of blue spruce, then back to the road again. He scrambled down the bank to the edge of the stream and had started to cross over to test the soundness of their hiding place from the meadow. The rumbling chorus of engines stopped him. He went back up the bank. Dee and Cole had gotten out of the Rover and were coming toward him. He waved them back. “The trucks are coming.”
“Can they see us from the road?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced back at the meadow, imagined he could see the Rover’s tire tracks in the dusting of snow, though he wasn’t sure. The tread had definitely bitten into the soft dirt of the bank if the men in the trucks could see that far. The engines got quiet and then loud again. “Come on,” he said. They jogged through the wet grass around the spruce trees. The Rover reeked of hot brake fluid. Jack saw Naomi lying down across the backseat, headphones in her ears. He knocked on the glass of Cole’s window. She cut her eyes up at him and he held a finger to his lips and she nodded. They crouched behind the car.
Jack said, “I’m going to find a spot where I can watch the road.”
“Can I come?”
“No, buddy, I need you to stay here and take care of Mama. I won’t be far.” He looked at Dee. “Be ready to run.”
Jack jogged back toward the stream and ducked behind a boulder that rose to his shoulders. The trees dripping. Snowing hard. He could smell the spruce. The wet rock. Already the ground was white. He poked his head around the rock as the second truck emerged from the trees. It went alongside the meadow. He said, “There are no tracks to see, just keep moving, keep moving,” and it kept moving as the third and fourth and fifth trucks rolled into view—Dodge Rams, snow-blasted except for the engine-warmed hoods and the heated cabs. He could see white faces through the fogged glass of the passenger windows. He ducked back behind the rock and sat down in the snow and studied the smooth motion of his watch’s second hand. When it had made three revolutions, the engine noises had completely faded, and the only sound was the dripping trees. The pounding of his heart.
They unloaded their camping equipment from the back of the Land Rover and Jack unpacked their tent and read its instruction manual. Spent an hour trying to assemble the poles and unravel the mystery of how the tent attached to them. The snow was ankle-deep and still falling when he finally raised the four-man dome. They carried their sleeping bags and air cushions over from the car and tossed them inside. Dee and the kids took off their wet shoes and climbed in.
“I’ll be in in a little while,” Jack said. “Warm it up for me.”
He zipped them in.
With the new hunting knife, Jack cut large squares out of the plastic sheeting. He wiped the snow off the windowframes, dried the wet metal with the sleeves of his shirt, and duct-taped the plastic squares over three windows on the right side of the car and a large rectangle over the back hatch. You couldn’t see anything distinctly through the plastic, so he taped a piece over the intact glass of Cole’s window as well.
He spent the rest of the afternoon picking Naomi’s windowglass out of the backseat and the floor mats. Reorganizing everything in the cargo area. He checked the oil and washer fluid and tire pressure. When he’d finished, he looked for something else to do, needing his hands to be busy, his mind in the moment. It still snowed. He thought the sky had imperceptibly darkened, the afternoon sliding toward dusk. He hacked some limbs off a dead spruce and snapped off a few clusters of brown needles toward the base of the tree that had been shielded from the weather.
The stream was freezing. He picked a dozen fist-size rocks out of the water and stretched out his tee-shirt and loaded them all into the pouch it made. Inside the fire ring, he stacked wads of tissue paper and the browned spruce needles and a handful of twigs and enclosed them all in a framework of larger branches. Last fire he’d built had been at their home in Albuquerque
the previous Christmas, and he’d cheated, used a brick of firestarter to get things going.
His hands trembled in the cold as he held the lighter to the tissue paper and struck a flame.
Later, he heard the tent unzip. Dee crawled out, stepped into her wet shoes. She walked over and stood beside him.
“I guess it literally takes the end of the world to get a family camping trip.”
“I’m just trying to get a fire going so we can dry some stuff out.”
A wisp of smoke lifted out of the pitiful pile of blackened twigs and half-burnt tissue paper.
“You’re shivering. Come into the tent and get some sleep. I have your sleeping bag ready for you.”
He stood, his legs cramping. He’d been squatting for over an hour.
“Are you hungry?” he said.
“Will you let me worry about dinner? Please. Go sleep.”
Jack abandoned his wet clothes in a pile in the tent’s vestibule and crawled into his sleeping bag. He could hear Dee moving around outside and he could hear the snow falling down on the rain fly. He didn’t stop shivering for a long time. His children slept. He reached over and held his hand to Cole’s chest. Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Naomi lay on the other side of Cole against the tent wall. He leaned across, his hand searching out her sleeping bag in the darkness, then finally resting on her back. Rise and fall. Rise and fall.
When he woke it was pitch black and he thought he was in his bed in the guestroom in Albuquerque. He sat up and listened. He didn’t hear his children breathing. He didn’t hear anything but the pulsing in his left ear. He reached over in the dark. The sleeping bags empty. He almost called out for them, but then thought better of it. He dressed quickly in his cold, damp clothes and unzipped the vestibule and crawled outside. It had stopped snowing, and his footsteps squeaked in the half foot of powder. Inside the Rover, light flickered through the plastic windows. He went over and opened the driver’s door and got in. Everyone in their respective seats eating out of paper bowls. A candle on the center console. “Smells good,” he said.
Dee lifted a bowl off the dashboard and handed it to him.
“It’s probably cooled off. I didn’t want to waste fuel keeping it warm.”
Tomatoes and rice, heavily seasoned, with pieces of jerky mixed in. He stirred it up and took a bite. He could hear Naomi’s iPod, and he wanted to tell her to turn it off. Ration the damn power so you can play it when you actually need a distraction. She’d forgotten to bring her charger, and when that battery died, the music was finished. But he said nothing. Pick your battles.
He glanced at his watch—a few hours later than he thought.
“This is good,” he said. “Really good.”
“I didn’t like it,” Cole said.
“Sorry, buddy. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we don’t have much food right now, so we have to be thankful for what we do have.”
“I still don’t like it.”
Dee said, “Another truck went by while you were sleeping.”
“Was the light on in here?”
“No, I heard the engine coming in time to blow it out.”
Jack finished off the bowl of rice and tomatoes. He was still hungry, figured everyone else was, too. His head pounding from caffeine deprivation.
“Where’s the water?”
Dee handed him a jug from the floorboard at her feet. He unscrewed the cap, tilted it back.
They put Naomi and Cole to bed and went across the stream together and out into the meadow. The sky had cleared. Stars shone like flecks of ice and the serrated ridge of a distant peak glowed brighter and brighter as the moon came up behind it.
Dee said, “I need to know that you have a plan, Jack.”
“We’re alive, aren’t we?”
“But where are we going? How will we stay alive?”
They walked into the road, the snow tracked through, and it suddenly dawned on Jack what they’d done.
“Shit. We aren’t thinking.” He pointed at the meadow where their footprints led back into the trees, advertising the location of their camp.
Dee pushed him hard enough to make him stumble back. “Tell me how we’re going to survive this. Tell me right now, because I don’t see it. Pure luck we weren’t all murdered today.”
“I don’t know, Dee. I couldn’t start a fucking fire with matches and tissue paper this afternoon.”
“I need to know you have a plan. Some idea of what—”
“Well, I don’t. Not yet. I just know we can’t stay here after tonight. That’s all I know.”
“Because of food.”
“Food and cold.”
“That’s not good enough, Jack.”
“What else do you want from me?”
“I want you to be a fucking man. Do what you don’t do at home. Take care of your family. Be there. Physically. Emotionally—”
“I’m trying.”
“I know. I know you are.” She sounded on the verge of tears. “I just can’t believe this is happening.”
Cole woke up crying in the night. Jack unzipped his sleeping bag, let the boy crawl inside with him.
“What’s wrong, buddy?” he whispered.
“I had a dream.”
“You’re okay. It wasn’t real.”
“It felt real.”
“You want to tell me what it was about? Sometimes, when you talk about them, nightmares don’t seem so scary.”
“You’ll be mad at me.”
“Why in the world would I be mad at you?”
“You told me not to look.”
“Did you dream about those people we saw in the street today?” He felt his little boy’s head nodding.
“You said you wouldn’t comfort me because you told me not to look.”
He wrapped his arms around Cole. “You feel that?”
“Yes.”
“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I will always comfort you, Cole.”
“Can I stay in your sleeping bag?”
“You promise to go right back to sleep?”
“I promise.”
“Try not to think about all the bad stuff, all right? It’ll only give you more nightmares. Think about a happy time.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. When were you last really happy?”
The boy was quiet for a minute.
“When we went to see Grandpa.”
“You mean last summer?”
“Yeah, and he let me run through the sprinkler.”
“Then think about that, okay?”
“Okay.”
Jack held his son as the pleasing weight of sleep settled back over him, and he was beginning to dream again when Cole whispered something.
“What’d you say, buddy?”
The boy turned over and put his mouth to Jack’s right ear: “I have to tell you something else.”
“What?”
“I know why the bad people are doing it.”
“Cole, quit thinking about that stuff. Good thoughts, okay?”
“Okay.”
Jack closed his eyes.
Opened them again.
“Why, Cole?”
“What?”
“Why do you think the bad people are doing it?”
“’Cause of the lights.”
“The lights?”
“Yeah.”
“What lights? What are you talking about?”
“You know.”
“Cole, I don’t.”
“The ones I saw that night I stayed at Alex’s house, and we went outside real late with all the people.”
Something like an electrical impulse shuddered through him. Jack shut his eyes and held his palm to the shallow concavity of his son’s chest.
* * * * *
THEY slept long into the following day. They slept like people with no good reason to wake. As if the world to which they went to bed might become
reconciled to itself, if they could only sleep a bit longer.
When Jack drove back across the stream the water came halfway up the tires. It was early afternoon, and except for where the trees threw shade, the snow had disappeared from the meadow and the ground was supple. They turned onto the road. It descended. Muddy and crisscrossed with rivulets of brown water in the sunlight. Still snowpack in the trees. They came down out of the snow and the pure stands of spruce into aspen.
In the late afternoon, the road widened and became smoother and ran along the shore of a large mountain lake. Up ahead, Jack spotted a car on the side of the road—a luxury SUV with all four doors flung open.
He sped past at fifty miles per hour.
A quick glimpse: Parents. The woman naked, her thighs red. Three children. All facedown, unmoving in the grass.
Jack glanced in the rearview mirror. Naomi and Cole hadn’t noticed.
He looked over at Dee—she dozed against the plastic window.
The road went to pavement at dusk and they entered a mountain hamlet. Everything had been burned, the streets lined with the charred skeletons of houses and cars and gift shops, Jack thinking it must have been razed several days ago because nothing smoked. The air that streamed through the vents smelled like old, wet ash. His family slept. There was a field in the center of town near the school, browned and overgrown, with rusted, netless soccer goals at each end. At first, Jack thought someone had torched a mound of tires in the middle of that field until he saw a single black arm sticking up from the top of the heap.
They stabbed north into the night up a twisting, two-lane highway through the foothills of the San Juans, and they did not pass another car.
Jack pulled off the road into a picnic area beside a reservoir. They popped the back hatch of the Rover, and Dee fired up the propane-fueled camp stove and cooked a pot of chicken noodle soup from two old cans. They sat near the shore watching the moonrise and passing the steaming pot. After a night in the mountains, it felt almost warm.