by Blake Crouch
The next time he woke the sun was straight overhead and he could hear Dee telling Cole a story. He sat up. His head swirled. Looked down at the pine needles, some of which had become glued together with blood. He felt feverish and cold, and soon Dee was there, easing him back onto the forest floor.
He opened his eyes, tried to sit up, thought better of it. Dee sat beside him and the sun was gone. Through the pines, the pieces of sky held the rich blue of late afternoon.
“Hi there,” she said.
“What time is it?”
“Four-fifteen. You’ve been sleeping all day.”
“Where are the kids?”
“Playing by a stream.”
“Nobody came?”
“Nobody came. You’re thirsty, I bet.” She unscrewed the cap from a milk jug and held it to his mouth. The coldness of the water stung his throat, ignited a fierce and sudden thirst. When he finished drinking, he looked up at his wife.
“How am I doing, Doc?”
Shook her head. “I stopped the bleeding, but you’re not so hot, Mr. Colclough.” She reached into the first aid kit, cracked open a bottle of Tylenol. “Here. Open.” Dumped a handful of pills onto Jack’s tongue, helped him wash them down. “I have to get that bullet out, and I need to do it before we run out of daylight.”
“Fuck.”
“Jack, there’s worse people you could be stuck with in this situation.”
“Than Wifey, MD?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re a GP. When’s the last time you even held a scalpel? Med school? I mean, do you even have the tools to—”
“Really, Jack? You want me to tell you the gory details of what I’m about to do, or you want to turn your head away and let me do my thing?”
“You can do this?”
She squeezed his hand. “I can. And I have to or you’ll get an infection and die.”
Jack lay flat on his back, his head turned away from his left shoulder, wishing for unconsciousness.
“Jack, I need you to be as still as you possibly can.”
Dee cut away his shirt.
“Using my Swiss Army knife?”
“Yep.”
“You’re going to sterilize it?”
“I’m afraid your health insurance plan doesn’t cover sterilizations.”
“That’s hilarious. Seriously—”
“It’s already done.”
“What with?”
“A match and an iodine pad. I’m going to wipe down your shoulder now.”
Felt like ice on a flaming wound as she cleaned the dried blood and gunpowder from the entry hole.
“How’s it look?” he asked.
“Like somebody shot you.”
“Can you tell how far in it went?”
“Please let me focus.”
Something moved inside his shoulder. There was pain, but nothing like he’d feared.
Dee said, “Shit.”
“First-rate bedside manner. What’s wrong?”
“I thought maybe I could do this easily. Just pull the bullet out with these plastic tweezers.”
“That sounds like a super plan. Why can’t you do it?”
“I can’t get at it yet.”
“Fuck, you’re going to cut me.” Jack heard the snap of a blade locking into place. “Big blade? Small blade?”
“Think about something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like what we’re going to have for dinner.”
And he did think about it. For four seconds. Pictured the jar of pickled beets in the Rover and it made him want to cry. All of it—lying here in the woods in extraordinary pain without food and the day leaving them and nowhere to go and no way to get there— and then the knife entered his shoulder in a revelation of searing pain.
“Holy motherfuck—”
“Hold still.”
She was really going after it, and Jack made a crushing fist, fighting back a surge of nausea as he tried to ask if she saw the bullet yet, if she could get at it now, desperate for some indication that this would be ending soon please God, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he descended into a merciful darkness.
When he came to, Dee was crouched over him, headlamp blazing and Cole and Naomi beside her looking on. She was lifting a piece of string attached to a needle and smiling. She looked exhausted.
“You passed out you big baby.”
He said, “Thank God for that. Please tell me you got it.”
Naomi held up a squashed mushroom of lead between her fingers.
“I’m going to make you a necklace so you can wear it.”
“You must have read my mind, sweetie.”
He groaned as Dee ran the needle through his shoulder again and tightened the knot.
“I know it hurts, but I have to finish.” She started another stitch. “I really had to cut you to get it out. You lost two, maybe three pints of blood, which is right on the verge of not being okay.”
He woke often during the night, freezing even inside his sleeping bag. The stars shone through the pines, and he was caught up in a fever dream—crawling toward a stream and dying of thirst, but every time he reached the water and cupped a handful to his mouth, it turned to ash and the wind took it.
Once, he woke and it was Naomi’s voice that came to him in the dark.
“It’s okay, Daddy. You’re just having a bad dream.”
And she brought the jug of water to his lips and helped him drink and she was still there, her hand against his burning forehead, when he sank back down into sleep.
* * * * *
HE registered the sun on his eyelids. Pulled the sleeping bag over his head, let his right hand graze his left arm.
The sickening heat had gone out of it.
Cole’s laughter erupted some distance away in the forest.
Jack opened his eyes and pushed away the sleeping bag and slowly sat up.
Midday light.
The smell of sun-warmed pine needles everywhere.
Wind rushing through the tops of the trees.
Dee inspected his left shoulder. “Looking good.”
“What about all that blood I lost?”
“Your body’s making it back, but you need to be drinking constantly. More water than we have. And you need food. Particularly iron so you can remake those red blood cells.”
“How are the kids?”
“Hungry. Na’s been amazing with Cole, but I’m not sure how much longer she can keep it up.”
“How are you?”
She looked back at the Rover. “Think it’ll start?”
“Even if it does, we might have a gallon of gas left. Maybe a cup. No way to know.”
“We can’t just sit here and wait.”
“We could head back toward the highway, or keep going up the canyon. See how far we get.”
“Jack, we’re not going to find anything, and you know it.”
“That’s a real possibility.”
“We need more gas.”
“We need a new car.”
“If we don’t find something, Jack, if we’re still in these mountains tonight and we have no way to travel anywhere except on foot, which you don’t have the strength for, it’s going to get very bad very fast.”
“You want to pray?”
“Pray?”
“Yeah, pray.”
“That’s really pathetic, Jack.”
The engine cranked on the first attempt, though when Dee shifted into reverse an awful racket jangled to life under the hood. She backed them out of the grove and took it slow through the trees toward the road.
“Which way, Jack?”
“Up the canyon.”
“You sure?”
“Well, we know what’s back toward the highway—nothing.”
She turned onto the road and eased through a gentle acceleration. They’d torn the plastic windows out and the noise of the engine precluded any communication softer than shouting. Jack glanced into
the backseat, saw Naomi and Cole sharing the jar of beets. Winked at his son, thinking he looked thinner in the face, his cheekbones more pronounced.
“We’re completely below the empty slash,” Dee said.
They did forty up the road, Jack constantly looking back through the glassless hatch for anything in pursuit.
After four miles, the pavement went to gravel.
They came out of the canyon.
The road had been cut into a mountainside and the pines exchanged for hardier, more alpine-looking evergreens and aspen in full color. At 2:48 p.m., the engine sputtered, and at 2:49, on a level stretch of road on the side of a mountain, died.
They rolled to a stop and Jack looked over at Dee and back at his children.
“That’s all, folks.”
“We’re out of gas?” Cole asked.
“Bone dry.”
Dee set the parking brake.
Jack opened his door, stepped down onto the road. “Come on.”
“Jack.” Dee climbed out and slammed her door. “What are you doing?”
He adjusted the sling which Dee had fashioned out of a spare tee-shirt for his left arm, said, “I’m going to walk up this road until I find something to help us or until I can’t walk anymore. You coming?”
“There’s not going to be anything up this road, Jack. We’re in the middle of a fucking wilderness.”
“Should we just lay down in the road right here then? Wait to die? Or maybe I should get the Glock and put us all—”
“Don’t you ever—”
“Hey, guys?” Naomi got out and walked around to the front of the Rover and stood between her parents. “Look.”
She pointed toward the side of the mountain, perhaps fifty feet up from where they’d stopped, at an overgrown, one-lane road that climbed into the trees.
Jack said, “It’s probably just some old wagon trail. There used to be mining around here I think.”
“You don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“There’s a mailbox.”
The mailbox was black and unmarked, and the Colcloughs walked past it up the narrow road into the trees. Jack was winded before the first hairpin turn, but keeping far enough ahead of Dee and the kids that he could gasp for air in private.
At four-thirty in the afternoon, he stopped at an overlook—dizzy, heartbeat rattling his entire body, pounding through his left shoulder. He collapsed breathless on the rock, still sucking down gulps of air when the rest of his family arrived.
“This is too much for you,” Dee said, out of breath herself.
They could see a slice of the road several hundred feet below where it briefly emerged from the forest. A square-topped dome of a mountain loomed ten miles away, the summit dusted with snow. Even bigger peaks beyond.
Jack struggled to his feet and went on.
The road wound through an aspen grove that was peaking—pale yellows and deep yellows and the occasional orange—and when the wind blew through the trees, the leaves fluttered like weightless coins.
The sun was falling through the western sky. Already a cool edge to the air in advance of another clear and freezing night. They hadn’t brought their sleeping bags from the car. Hadn’t brought water. Nothing but the shotgun and the Glock and it occurred to Jack that they might very well be sleeping under the stars on the side of this mountain tonight.
Several switchbacks later, the road curved and Jack walked out of the aspen into a meadow.
He stopped.
Took the Glock out of his waistband and tugged back the slide.
Dee gasped.
Cole said, “What, Mama?”
Jack turned around and shushed them and led them back into the woods.
“Is anyone there?” Dee whispered.
“I couldn’t tell. Let me go check things out.”
“I should go, Jack. You’re too weak.”
“Don’t move from this spot, any of you, until I come back.”
He jogged into the meadow. You could see the desert in the west, the sun bleeding out across it and the distant gray thread of Highway 191. It was getting cold. He slowed to a walk, his shoulder pulsing again. The wind had died away and the trees stood motionless. Somewhere, the murmur of a stream.
A covered porch ran the length of it, loaded with firewood. Solar panels clung to the steep pitch of the roof. Dormers on the second floor. A chimney rising up through the center. The windows were dark, reflecting the sunset off the glass so he couldn’t see inside, even as he walked up the steps.
The wooden porch bowed and creaked under his weight. He leaned in toward a window, touched his nose to the glass, framed his face in his hands to block the natural light.
Darkness inside. The shape of furniture. High ceilings. No movement.
He tried the front door. Locked. Turned away, shielded his eyes, and swung the Glock through the window.
Dee shouted something from the woods.
“I’m okay,” he yelled. “Just breaking in.”
He straddled the windowframe and stepped down into the cabin. Through the skylight above the entrance, a column of late sun slanted through the glass and struck the stone of the freestanding fireplace with a medallion of orange light. It didn’t smell like anyone had been here in some time. The mustiness of infrequent habitation.
From what he could see in the fading light, the floorplan was spacious and open. A staircase corkscrewed up to the second level where the banistered hallway and three open doors were visible from Jack’s vantage.
He moved across the hardwood floor toward the kitchen.
A deep sink and granite countertops lined the back wall of windows which looked out over the deck into the brilliant aspen.
He walked over to the pantry, pulled open the door.
Jack led Dee and the kids up the front porch steps and into the cabin.
“There’s food here, Jack?”
“Just come on.”
The last trickle of daylight was just sufficient to illuminate the kitchen, where Jack had thrown open every cabinet so they could see the treasure he’d found.
Dee sat down and put her head between her knees and wept.
They spread out on the floor as the world went black out the kitchen windows, each with their own cold can and sharing a big bag of sourdough pretzels torn open and spilled across the floor beside a sixer of warm Sierra Mist.
“Oh my God, this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” Naomi said, halfway through her clam chowder. Grunts of agreement all around—Jack had gone for the chili, Dee the beef vegetable soup, Cole the Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli.
A half hour later, Naomi slept on a leather couch near the fireplace while Jack covered her with two quilts he’d found in a game closet. He went up the spiral staircase, holding one of the kerosene lamps they’d taken from the coffee table downstairs, Dee in tow, carrying Cole. Into the first bedroom. Jack pulled back the quilt, blanket, sheet, and Dee laid their son on the mattress and kissed his forehead and covered him back up.
“It’ll get cold in here tonight,” she said.
“Not as cold as last night.”
“If he wakes up and no one’s here, he’s going to be scared.”
“You think so? After these last few days? He’s done in, Dee. He won’t wake for hours.”
They lay in bed downstairs in the dark under a pile of blankets. Somewhere, the tick of a second hand. Naomi’s deep respirations in the living room. No other sound.
“Do you think we’re safe here?” Dee whispered.
“Safer than starving and freezing to death on the side of a mountain.”
“But long-term, I mean.”
“I don’t know yet. I can’t think about it right now. I have nothing left.”
Dee snuggled up to him and stretched a leg across his, her skin cool and like fine-grit sandpaper. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest. First time in months she’d put her hands on him, and it felt, in the best kind of way, like a strang
er touching him.
“Nothing, Jack?” And she slipped her hand inside the waistband of his boxer shorts. “’Cause this doesn’t feel like nothing.”
“Our daughter is twenty feet away,” he whispered.
Dee climbed out of bed and crept across the floor and closed them in behind the French doors and their panes of opaque glass. He heard the lock push in. She pushed the straps off her shoulders and her undershirt puddled around her feet. Slid her panties down her legs, and Jack watched her come back to him, naked and pale, wishing for some moonlight for her to move through as she crawled across the bed.
“I’m nasty,” he said. “Haven’t had a shower in—”
“I’m nasty, too.”
She stripped him and sat him up against the headboard and eased down onto his lap, and already the pain in his shoulder was subsiding. He could tell this was going to be one of the great fucks of his life.
* * * * *
IN the morning, Jack hiked down to the road with a gallon of the gasoline he’d found in the shed. There was plenty more where it came from—six five-gallon containers that he figured were meant for the backup generator in case the solar power system failed. The Rover managed to crank, and he put it into four-wheel high.
A hundred yards up the mountain, he stopped and grabbed the chainsaw out of the backseat and came out of his sling. Took him thirty minutes just to hack through the dense lower branches so he could get at the base, going slow so he didn’t rip the stitches in his shoulder. Another twenty to carve a wedge into the trunk, and when the spruce finally fell across the road, it perfumed the air with sap and splintered wood.
Naomi and Cole were still sleeping when Jack returned to find Dee in the kitchen, having already done what he suggested—pull down all the food from the cabinets and the pantry to see what they had to work with.