by Blake Crouch
“Don’t look out the windows,” he warned, and this time, his children listened.
The town had lost power.
Jack punched on the headlights.
“Don’t.”
“I can’t see.”
Smoke streamed through the lightbeams and filled the car.
The highway became Main Street. They passed between old buildings and a couple of restaurants and a dark marquee advertising a pair of films that had been released months ago.
A few blocks past the downtown, he turned off the highway into the parking lot of a grocery store and stopped the Rover in the fire lane by the entrance.
“Jack, please, let’s just get the hell out of here.”
“We’re out of food. Almost out of water. I have to look.”
He turned off the car and reached under his seat, grabbed the Glock. “Dee, you have the flashlight?”
She set it in his lap.
“Don’t leave, Daddy.”
“I’ll be right back, buddy.” He touched Dee’s leg. “Anything happens, you lay on this horn and I’ll be here in five seconds.”
The automatic doors stood a foot apart. He squeezed through, hesitating. Every part of him protesting against this. He flicked on the Mag-Lite and made himself go on, thinking how it didn’t smell anything like a grocery store should. A tinge of rust and rot hanging in the air. He dislodged a cart from the brood of buggies and set the gun in the child’s seat. Started forward, the wheels rattling, one squeaking, his light playing off the registers. He passed through the self-checkout aisle. No sound but the distant voltage in his left ear which hummed like a substation.
He pushed the buggy toward produce. The shelves bare but still carrying the smell of vegetables and fruit. Ten feet ahead, a man lay beside empty wooden crates. The blood around him shimmering off the linoleum like black ice under the lightbeam. Jack stopped the cart. There were others behind this man and though he wouldn’t put his light directly on them, he stared at what the shadows didn’t hide. The closest: a woman facing him with her eyes still open, long yellow hair matted to the gore that had been bludgeoned out of her head.
He picked a cluster of overripe bananas off the floor, the only offering of produce, and pushed the cart between the dead. The wheels went quiet, greased with blood. Dark shoeprints tracked through double doors into the back of the store. He took the gun and left the cart and pushed through them, swinging his light across pallets of stock that had already been scavenged of anything resembling food. Only packages of toilet paper remaining. He shined the light on the concrete floor and followed the bloody tracks to where they ended. There were over a hundred brass casings and spent shotgun shells in the vicinity of the freezer’s big silver door, and massive quantities of blood had leaked out from underneath it. He started to pull it open. Stopped himself.
He walked back out into the store and put his hands on the cart. The rear of the supermarket stunk of spoiled meat. As he rounded a corner into the first aisle, the cart bumped into a young child who had been hacked to pieces, a single neck tendon shy of a full decapitation. Jack turned and vomited into a naked shelf, stood spitting until his mouth quit watering. He’d seen a few frames of horror since Thursday night, but nothing like this. He tried to shove it into the back of his unconscious, but its shape wouldn’t fit anywhere. Beyond all comprehension.
He went on. Searching the shelves for anything, finding nothing but a gallon of water and more bodies to steer around. He rolled past empty glass cases that had held frozen meals, and then turned into the last aisle of the store, the beam of his Mag-Lite illuminating someone sitting up against a shelf lined with cartons of room-temperature milk. The teenage boy’s eyes opened, milky and failing to dilate at the onslaught of light. He held his belly as if trying to keep something in.
Jack left the cart and walked over to the boundary of where the blood had pooled. He squatted down. The boy’s respirations coming labored and sodden. He ran his tongue across his dried and cracking lips and said, “Water.”
Jack went to the buggy and rolled it back over and set the flashlight beside the gun. He broke the seal and twisted off the cap and held the mouth of the jug to the boy’s lips. He drank. A skinny, long-legged kid. Black denim jeans and a western shirt. He turned away from the water and drew a breath.
“You got to take me to Junction. I ain’t going to make it through tonight.” The boy looked off into the darkness. “Where’s Mama?”
“I don’t know.”
Jack got up.
“Where you going?”
“I have my family waiting outside.”
“Don’t leave me, mister.”
“I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do for you.”
“You got a gun?”
“What?”
“A gun.”
“Yeah.”
“You can shoot me.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“I can’t just sit here in the dark. Please shoot me in the head. You can do that for me. I’d be so grateful. You got no concept how this hurts.”
Jack lifted the jug of water.
“Don’t leave me, mister.”
He took the gun from the cart and jammed it down the back of his waistband. He tucked the bananas under his right arm and grabbed the flashlight and started walking up the aisle toward the front of the store.
“You son of a bitch,” the boy called after him, crying now.
They stopped at a filling station on the outskirts but the pumps were dry. Jack checked the oil and washed the filthy windshield and they headed north out of town into the high desert. The night clear and cold and nothing else on the road save the occasional mule deer. They ate the bananas—too soft and reeking of that oversweet candy stench of fruit that has just begun to turn—and Jack let them split his share. The two hamlets they passed through barely warranted the black specks they’d been assigned on the map—tiny ranching communities, burned and vacated. The most substantive structure for miles was a grain mill, looming above the desert like some improbable skyline.
Jack pulled off onto the side of the road to let Cole and Naomi have a bathroom break, and when the kids were out of the car, Dee said, “What’s wrong, Jack?”
He looked at her, glad when the overhead light cut off.
“Nothing. I mean, you know, besides everything.”
“What’d you see in that grocery store?”
He shook his head.
“Jack. We together in this?”
“Of course. That doesn’t mean you need to have me putting things in your head that you can’t get rid of.” As his eyes readjusted to the darkness, he looked through the windshield at a range of hills in the east. Heard a sudden shriek of laughter from Cole that almost made him smile.
Dee said, “Don’t push me away. I need to share this experience with you. I want to know what you know, Jack. Every single thing, because there’s comfort in it. I need that.”
“Not this, you don’t.”
Five miles on, Jack pulled off the road again, said, “Give me the binoculars.”
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
“I saw something.”
“What?”
“Lights. Everyone just sit still and don’t open your doors.”
“Why?”
“Because the interior lights will come on, and I don’t want anyone to see where we are.”
“What if they see us? What will happen?”
“Nothing good, Cole.”
Dee handed him the binoculars and he brought the eyecups to his eyes. At first, nothing but black, and he thought maybe the focus had been jarred, but then he picked them up again, stretched along the road like a stateless strand of Christmas lights.
“You just sighed. What is it, Jack?”
He moved the knob, pulled everything into focus. “The convoy.”
“Oh, God.”
“I think they’re moving away from us.”
“Can you tell how far?”
“And you’re sure they’re not coming toward us?”
He lowered the binoculars. “Let’s wait here awhile. Track their movement. Make absolutely certain.”
Jack glassed the convoy through the windshield, watching its slow progression away from them while the kids played Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Within the hour, the lights had vanished.
Heat blasted out of the vents to check the frigid air that streamed through rips in the plastic windows, Naomi and Cole bundled in their sleeping bags and huddled miserably together.
Just before midnight, Jack turned off the highway onto a dirt road and punched on the headlights.
They’d gone several miles when Dee leaned across the center console, and then back into her seat, pushing a discreet exhalation through her teeth that no one but her husband would have caught. The opening move in a battle they’d fought before.
“What?”
“You see the light?” she said.
“Yes, I see it.”
“Do you think there’s going to be a gas station out here?” She gestured toward the windshield and the expanse of empty country beyond the glass, devoid of even a spore of manmade light.
“It just came on a minute ago.”
“It means we’re out of gas, darling-heart.”
“No, it means we can still go for twenty-five miles. It’s called a reserve tank.”
He could feel the heat of her stare even in the dark.
She said, “We have ten gallons of gas sloshing around back there, and I don’t understand why you won’t—”
“Dee, it’s—”
“Oh my God, if you say it’s for emergencies one more. . .” She turned away from him. Stared into the plastic of her window. Jack on the brink of just pulling over, an act of appeasement he would never have considered under any other circumstance, when the headlights grazed a dark house.
He turned into the gravel drive and parked beside a powder-blue Chevy pickup truck from another time, headlights firing across a brick ranch with white columns on the porch.
“Let’s not stop here, Jack.”
“We have to take a look.”
Jack and Dee followed the stone path to the house and stepped up onto the front porch and knocked on the door. They waited. Heard nothing on the other side.
“Nobody’s home,” Jack said.
“Or maybe they saw a man walking up to their house with a shotgun and they’re waiting on the other side with a fucking arsenal.”
“Always the pessimist.” He knocked again and tried the door.
Jack pried a large, flat piece of sandstone out of the walkway and lobbed it through the dining room window. They crouched in the cedar chips and listened. A stalactite of glass fell out of the framing. Silence followed.
“I’ll go in,” Jack said, “make sure it’s safe.”
“What if it’s not?”
He reached into his pocket, handed her the keys. “Then you get the hell out of here.”
Standing in the dining room, the first thing to strike him was the warmth. He walked into the kitchen. The refrigerator humming. He opened it. Jars of mayonnaise and other storebought condiments and a mason jar of pickled beets and something wrapped in tinfoil. He went to the sink and turned on the tap. Water flowed.
Dee sat in the Rover in the driver seat, her hands on the steering wheel. He opened the door, said, “It’s empty and they have power.”
“Food?”
“There’s some stuff in the cabinets.” He looked into the backseat. “Na and Cole, I want you to bring all the empty jugs inside.”
Jack went around to the side of the house. He unsheathed his bowie and sawed off the nozzle to the garden hose. He unwound it and cut a six-foot length of green tubing. The opening to the Chevy’s gas tank was next to the driver-side door, a silver cap speckled with rust that took some hard cranking to unscrew. He’d already poured the five-gallon cans into the Rover, and they sat open on the gravel drive while he threaded the hose through the hole. It touched the bottom of the tank, the smell already wafting out of the end of the tube as he brought it to his lips.
The gas was oily in his mouth—sharp, pungent, and dirty. He spit it out and jammed the hose into the first gas can, his eyes watering, throat burning from the fumes.
Jack walked past the eight jugs of water lined up on the kitchen island. He leaned down into the sink and held his mouth under the open tap for a long time but there was no flushing of the gasoline which lingered in the back of his throat like persistent fog.
“How’d we do?” Dee asked.
He stood up, lightheaded. “Six gallons.”
“You all right?”
“I just need about fifty breath mints.”
Naomi said, “Come look what we found, Dad.”
He followed them across the wood laminate floor to a sliding glass door behind the breakfast nook. The vertical blinds had been swept back and he looked through the glass into a square of domesticated yard, moonlit and bordered by desert. He saw a dilapidated swingset, a pair of lawn chairs shaded by an umbrella, and closer to the house, a thirty-foot steel antenna mast.
Naomi flipped through the channels on a mammoth television set that looked like it had occupied the same patch of shag carpeting for thirty years. Every station drowned in static.
Jack lifted a telephone, held the receiver to his ear. Silence.
They walked down the hallway, the hardwood groaning under their footsteps.
“Can’t we turn some lights on? I don’t like it dark.”
“Lights might attract someone, Cole.”
“You mean like someone bad?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you think these people went?” Naomi asked.
“No telling. Probably just left their home like we left ours.”
Jack shined his flashlight through the first doorway they passed. A bedroom with two trophy cases and a large photograph above the headboard—a teenage boy riding an enraged bull.
They went on.
Naomi said, “Something smells bad.”
Jack stopped. He smelled it, too. Sharp enough to overpower the gasoline overload in his nasal cavity.
Dee said, “Kids, let’s go back to the kitchen.”
Naomi said, “What’s wrong?”
“Go with your mother.”
“Come on, guys. Jack, be careful.”
“Is it—”
“Na, think about your brother before you say another word.”
“What about me?”
“Come on, Cole, let’s go with Mom.”
Jack watched his family retreat and then turned back toward the closed door at the end of the hall, the smell intensifying with each step. He breathed through his mouth as he turned the doorknob and shined the light inside.
A man and a woman lay in bed. White-haired. Seventy-something. Framed photographs of what he presumed were their grown sons resting on their stomachs. The woman had been shot through the forehead, and the man cradled her to himself, a hole in his right temple, his right arm outstretched and hanging off the bed, a revolver of some caliber on the floor below his hand. The white comforter darkened with blood. Above the bed, Jack put his light on a series of fifty-one photographs that, in the lowlight, looked almost identical. He moved closer. The last photograph of the montage was a recent portrait of the couple on the bed, the man wearing an oversize tuxedo that swallowed him whole, the woman squeezed into a ragged wedding dress many sizes too small, and as Jack ran his light back through the portraits, the couple grew younger and their wedding clothes fit better and their smiles brightened toward something like hope.
Jack walked into the kitchen, found Dee and Naomi standing around the island, drinking from glasses of ice water. In the living room, Cole flipped through channels of static on the television.
“Everything all right?” Dee said.
“They weren’t murdered. He shot her and then himself
.”
“Can I see?”
“Why would you want to, Na?”
She shrugged. “You saw it.”
“I had to make sure everything was safe for us. I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
Jack found the radio setup in the den—a low-band rig, microphone, headphones, power meter. The room had no windows, so he turned on the desk lamp and settled into a cracking leather chair. The amateur radio license hanging on the wall above the equipment had been issued to Ronald M. Schirard, callsign KE5UTN.
“What’s all this stuff?” Naomi said.
“It’s a ham radio.”
“What’s it do?”
“Let’s you talk to people all over the world.”
“Isn’t that what cell phones are for?”
Dee said, “You know how to use this?”
“I had a friend in high school whose Dad was a ham. We’d sneak down into the basement at night and use his radio. But this equipment looks way more sophisticated.” He turned on the transreceiver and the microphone and put on the headset. The radio had been tuned to 146.840 megahurtz, and he didn’t tinker with it, just keyed the microphone.
“This is KE5UTN listening on the 146.840 machine.”
Thirty seconds of silence.
He restated the callsign and repeater identification, then glanced up at Dee. “This may take some time.”
Dee came back after a half hour and set a cup of coffee on the desk. Jack didn’t remove the headphones, just said, “Thanks, but I can’t go through caffeine withdrawal again.”
“Anything?”
“Not a word.”
An hour later and still no response, he finally reached for the dial to change the receiver frequency.
A voice crackled over the airwaves.