by Blake Crouch
“I like this better than the tomatoes and rice,” Cole said. “I could eat this every day.”
“Careful what you wish for,” Dee said.
Jack waved off his turn with the pot and stood up. He walked down to the edge and dipped his fingers in the water.
“Cold, Dad?” Naomi asked.
“Not too bad.”
“Why don’t you go for a swim then?”
He glanced back, grinning. “Why don’t you?”
She shook her head. He cupped a handful and tossed it back at his daughter, the water like falling glass where the moonlight passed through it.
Her screams echoed off the hills across the reservoir.
They drove west along the water.
“Where are we stopping tonight?” Dee asked.
“I wasn’t planning to. I’m not tired, and I think it might be safer to travel at night.”
It was noisy in the car, the plastic windows flapping. In the backseat, Naomi had her headphones in, eyes closed. Cole played with a pair of Hot Wheels, racing them up the back of Jack’s seat.
Jack said, “I was studying the roadmap you picked up in Silverton. I think we should head into northwest Colorado. It’s sparsely populated. Middle-of-nowhere type of place. What do you think?”
“And then where?”
“Day at a time for now. How you doing?”
She just shook her head, and he knew better than to push it.
The road traversed a dam and climbed. They followed the rim of a deep canyon. Deer everywhere, Jack stopping frequently to let them cross the road.
He pulled over after a while and the slowing of the car roused Dee from sleep.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have to pee.”
He left the car running and got out and walked to the overlook. Stood pissing between the slats of a wooden fence, looking across the canyon, which by his reckoning couldn’t have spanned more than a couple thousand feet. Down in the black bottom of the gorge, invisible in shadow, he could hear a river rushing.
The road turned north away from the canyon. They rode through dark country, no points of houselight anywhere, but the moon bright enough on the pavement for Jack to drive the long, open stretches without headlights. Miles to the south, the horizon put forth a deep orange glow. He watched the fuel gauge falling toward a quarter of a tank and thought about the phantom cries of that baby he’d heard the day before. Wondering, if they were real, what had become of it.
Late in the night, Jack reached over and patted Dee’s leg. She stirred from sleep, sat up, rubbed her eyes. He said nothing, not wanting to wake the kids, but he pointed through the windshield.
City lights in the distance.
Dee leaned over and whispered into his ear, her breath soured with sleep, “Can’t we just go around?”
He shook his head.
“Why?”
“We’re on fumes.”
“We have ten gallons in back.”
“That’s for emergencies.”
“Jack, it’s an emergency right now. Our life has become a fucking emergency.”
The town was empty, but then it was almost three in the morning. The air that poured through the vents bore no trace of smoke and the houses seemed untouched, if vacant, a few even boasting porchlights.
At the intersection of highways, Jack pulled into a filling station. He stepped out and swiped his credit card and stood waiting for the machine to authorize the purchase, the night air pleasant at this lower elevation. While the super unleaded gasoline flowed into the tank, he went across the oil-stained concrete into the convenience store. The lights were on, and the empty coolers along the back wall hummed in the silence. He perused the four aisles, all heavily grazed, and emerged with a package of sunflower seeds and another quart of motor oil. The pump had gone quiet, the ticker frozen at a hair past eleven gallons. He squeezed the handle, but the lever was still depressed, the tank run dry.
With the hearing in his left ear still impaired, it took him a few seconds to get a fix on the sound. A mote of light tore up the highway toward the filling station, accompanied by the watery growl of a V-twin, two pair of headlights in tow a quarter mile back, and Dee already shouting inside the car as he yanked out the nozzle and screwed on the gas cap.
Dee had his door open and he jumped in, hands shoved into his pockets, digging for the keys.
“Jack, come on.”
Naomi sat up, blinking against the overhead dome light. “What’s going on?”
Jack fumbled the set of keys, finally got the right one between his thumb and forefinger, and fired the engine as the cycle roared up on them. He went straight at the black and chrome Harley, the rider cranking back on the throttle to avoid a collision, the bike popping up on one wheel as it surged out of the way.
Jack turned out into the highway. Back tires dragging across the pavement as he straightened their bearing.
“Get the shotgun, Dee.”
“Where is it?”
“In the way back.”
She unbuckled her seatbelt and crawled over the console into the backseat.
“Mama?”
“Everything’s okay, Cole. I just need to get something. Go back to sleep.”
Jack forced the gas pedal to the floorboard. Above the din of engine noise and the plastic windows flapping like they might rip off, Jack registered the vibration of the cycle in his gut.
“Hurry up, Dee.”
“I’m trying. It’s wedged under your pack.”
He looked in the rearview mirror—darkness specked with the diminishing lights of town. He punched off the headlights. The speedometer needle holding steady at one hundred and ten though they still accelerated. The pavement silvered under the moon and glowing just enough for him to stay between the white shoulder lines.
Dee crawled back into her seat.
“Jesus, Jack. How fast are we going?”
“You don’t want to know.”
A piece of fire bloomed and faded in the side mirror, and the square of glass exploded.
“Get down.”
The gunshot was lost to the flapping windows, but the V-twin wasn’t.
“Give me the gun, Dee.” She hoisted it up from the floorboard, barrel first. “I need you to steer.”
The cycle screamed just a few feet behind their bumper, only visible where its chrome caught glimmers of moonlight.
His foot still on the gas, Jack turned back, vertebrae cracking, and aimed through the back hatch and pumped the twelve gauge. The thunder of its report sent a spike through his left eardrum and filled the Rover with the blinding, split-second brilliance of a muzzleflash. Through the shredded plastic of the back hatch, the cycle had disappeared.
Bullets pierced the left side of the Rover, glass spraying the backseat.
Jack spun back into the driver seat, his right ear ringing, and took the steering wheel and eased off the gas.
The cycle shot forward and then its taillight blipped and it vanished.
Cole screaming in the backseat.
“Naomi, is he hurt?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I think he’s just scared.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Help him.”
“Where’s the motorcycle, Jack?”
“I don’t see it. Steer again.”
She grabbed the wheel and Jack pumped the shotgun. “I still can’t hear too well,” he said. “You have to tell me when you—”
“I hear it now.”
He strained to listen, couldn’t see for shit through the plastic window, but he did hear the cycle’s engine, the throttle winding up, and then the guttural scream was practically inside the car.
“Hold on and stay down.”
He turned back into the driver seat and clutched the wheel and hit the brake pedal and something slammed into the back of the Rover, the sickening clatter of metal striking metal, Jack punching on the headlights j
ust in time to see the cycle turning end over end as it somersaulted off the road into darkness, throwing sparks every time the metal met the pavement, the rider deposited on the double yellow thirty yards ahead, the man sitting dazed and staring at his left arm which dangled fingerless and unhinged from his elbow, his unhelmeted head scalped to the bone.
Jack struck the man at fifty-five. The Rover shook violently for several seconds, as if running a succession of speedbumps, and then the pavement flowed smoothly under the tires again.
He killed the lights and pushed the Rover past a hundred, watching Dee’s side mirror for tailing cars. When the road made a sharp turn, he slowed and eased off the shoulder down a gentle embankment and turned off the car.
Cole wept hysterically.
“It’s okay, buddy,” Jack said. “It’s okay. We’re all right now.”
“I want to go home. I want to go home now.”
Dee climbed into the back and swept the broken glass off the leather seat and took Cole up into her arms.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. I want to go home, too, but we can’t just yet.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not safe.”
“When can we?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Jack glanced back and before the overhead light cut out, saw Naomi’s chin quivering, too.
He opened his door, said, “I’ll be right back.”
He crawled through the grass up the embankment and lay on his stomach in the shadow of an overhanging cottonwood at the shoulder’s edge, his heart beating against the ground, listening. He could still hear Cole crying, Dee hushing him like she had when he was a baby. He wiped his eyes. Hands shaking. Cold. The highway silent.
They came so suddenly he didn’t have time to roll back down the hill—two cars tearing around the corner, no headlights, tires squealing, one of them passing within a foot of his head.
They raced on into darkness, invisible, the groan of their engines slowly fading.
Jack had dust in his eyes and grit between his teeth and the odor of burnt rubber was everywhere.
* * * * *
AT dawn, they entered the largest city they’d seen since Albuquerque. The lights were still on. Gas stations beckoned. They undercut an empty interstate, Jack keeping their speed above sixty, and soon the city dwindled away behind them, him watching the image of it shrink in the only reflection left—the cracked side mirror on Dee’s door.
They crested a pass. A small weather station beside the road. Fragile light on this minor range of green foothills. That city thirty miles back and to the south, its lights glittering in the desert. A distant range to the west with still a few minutes of night left to go. Jack was beyond exhaustion, shoulder aching from the twelve-gauge kick, his children awake, staring into the plastic of their respective windows. Catatonic. Dee snored softly.
They rode down from the pass and out of the pines into empty, arid country. As the sun edged up on the world, Jack saw the building in the distance. He took his foot off the accelerator.
The motel had been long abandoned, its name bleached out of the thirty-foot billboard that stood teetering beside the road. Dee stirred and sat up as Jack veered off the highway onto the fractured pavement.
“Why are you stopping?”
“I have to sleep.”
“Want me to drive some?”
“No, let’s stay off the road today.”
He pulled around to the back of the building and turned off the engine.
Stillness. The cathedral quiet of the high desert.
Jack looked at the gas gauge—between a quarter and a half. He studied the odometer.
“Five hundred and fifty-two miles,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“How far we’ve come from home.”
The room had two double beds. A dresser. An old television with a busted screen. Graffitied walls. Tied-off and shriveled condoms on the carpet and a bathtub full of shattered beer bottles. Jack carefully turned back the rotting covers so as not to disturb the dust, and they lay their sleeping bags on the old sheets—Jack and Cole on one bed, the girls on the other—and fell asleep as the sun rose.
He sat up suddenly. His wife stood over him. Dust trembling off the ceiling. A glass ashtray rattling across the bedside table.
“Jack, something’s happening.”
They parted the curtains and climbed over the rusted AC wall unit through the open windowframe. Midday light beat down on the desert and the ground vibrated beneath their feet, the inconceivable noise shaking jags of glass out of other windows, doors quivering in their frames. They walked over to the motel office and Jack ventured a glance around the corner of the building.
On the road, a convoy rolled by—SUVs, luxury sedans, beater trucks with armed men riding in the beds, jeeps, fuel trucks, school buses, all moving by at a modest speed and raising a substantial cloud of dust in their collective passing.
Jack turned back to Dee, said into her ear, “I don’t think they can see our car from the road.”
Another five minutes crept by, Jack and Dee standing against the crumbling concrete of the motel until the last car in the convoy had passed, the drone of several hundred engines fading more slowly than Jack would have thought.
Dee said, “What if we’d been traveling south on this road?”
“We’d have seen them from miles away.”
“With the binoculars?”
“Yeah.”
“What if the kids and I were sleeping and you weren’t looking through the—”
“Don’t do this, Dee. They didn’t see us. We weren’t on the road.”
“But we could have been.” She bit her bottom lip and stared east toward a rise of low brown hills. “We have to be more careful,” she said. “We have to always be thinking the worst. I can’t watch my children—”
“Stop it.”
Dee walked along the brick and peered around the corner.
“Still see them?” Jack asked.
“Yeah. Sun’s reflecting off all that chrome.”
Jack didn’t hear the engines anymore.
Dee said, “They’re getting organized, aren’t they?”
“Seems that way.”
He stepped forward and looked with her. The convoy miles away now, like the long and shining trail of a snail.
Naomi and Cole slept in the motel room. Jack and Dee sat outside on the concrete walkway, watching the light slant across the desert.
Dee held her BlackBerry in her hand, said, “Still no signal.”
“Who you trying to call, your sister?”
She started to cry, and he didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, just put his arm around her for the first time in months. He thought about the last time he’d spoken to his father. A week ago. Sunday morning on the telephone. Sitting on the screened back porch and watching the lawn sprinklers water the fescue. Sipping on a mug of black coffee. They’d talked about the coming election and a movie they’d both seen and the World Series. When the time had come to hang up, he’d said, “I’ll talk to you next weekend, Pop,” and his father had said, “Well, all right then. You take care, son.” Same way they always ended their phone calls. What killed him was that it hadn’t, in any way, felt like the last time they would ever speak.
They changed out of their three-day-old clothes, and Dee lit the campstove and brought the last two cans of old vegetable soup to a simmer. Sat in the darkening motel room passing the cooling pot and the last jug of water.
At dusk, he stood in the middle of the road with a pair of binoculars, glassing the high desert.
South: nothing.
North: no movement save a handful of pumpjacks that dotted the landscape and ominous lines of black smoke ascending out of the far horizon.
He turned at the sound of approaching footfalls. Naomi stepped into the road and pushed her chin-length yellow hair out of her face. The dark eyeliner she always wore had faded, she’
d taken the silver studs out of her ears, and he thought how she looked like his little girl again yet older, her features sharpening into the Germanic, Midwestern prettiness that had begun to desert Dee. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d let him hold her, or if he was honest, the last time he’d wanted to. He’d lost sight of his daughter amid the angst and the Goth façade, and he saw, not for the first time, but for the first time with clarity, how in the last two years he’d become a stranger to the two most important women in his life.
“What’s going on?” Naomi asked.
“Just having a look around.”
She stood beside him, dragged the soles of her black Chuck Taylors across the pavement.
“What do you think about all this?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“You worried about your friends?”
“I guess. You think Grandpa’s okay?”
“No way to know. I hope he is.” He wanted to put his arms around her. Restrained himself. “I’m really proud of how you’re taking care of your brother, Na. As proud as I’ve ever been of you. Your being brave is helping Cole to be brave.”
She nodded, but he could see tears shivering in her eyes. He drew her suddenly into him and she wrapped her arms around his waist and cried hard into his chest.
With the Rover packed, they climbed in and took their seats and Jack started the engine. The desert deepening from blue into purple as they pulled out of the motel parking lot and into the highway, the stars fading in and the moon rising over the hills.
They went north without headlights, and within a half hour, had come upon the town. Everywhere, houses burned, and the dead lay in the road and the sidestreets and the front yards. Jack made himself stop counting.