by Blake Crouch
When Jack came to, the man was holding his ring finger in front of his face and sliding the gold wedding band up and down the free-range digit.
“Where is the person who put this ring on your finger?”
The pain reached up through Jack’s entire left arm like a molten rod he couldn’t shake free.
The man unholstered his Sig Sauer, pushed the barrel into Jack’s left eye. “Sir, I will put a bullet through your cornea.”
“They’re dead,” Jack said. “You crazy fuckers killed them.”
Dee opened her eyes, the sound of cranking engines having stirred her from sleep. She eased Cole down onto the floor of the pipe and crawled outside.
The sun-glare blinding off the snow.
She called for Jack.
Scanned the construction site but didn’t see him.
Hurried through the snow into the road as other engines roared to life.
They weren’t far—just a short distance through the trees—and she was running up the road now toward a clearing.
She rounded a turn. There was an oasis at the top of the pass. Military vehicles rumbled in the parking lot, and for a moment her heart lightened and she thought they were saved until her eyes fell upon two soldiers a hundred feet away, dragging a bloody-faced man by his arms toward the open doors of an eighteen-wheeler.
Jack.
She started toward him, got three steps before the mother inside her screamed louder than the wife. Out in the open now. The noise of two dozen engines was deafening and the air was filling with exhaust. The men were pulling her husband up the ramp into the back of the truck while two other soldiers aimed their weapons into the darkness of the semitrailer. She held the Glock, but in the face of all this, it felt like a bad joke. That voice inside her begging to run. Someone was going to see her and chase her into the woods, kill her or take her away, and then her children would be alone out here and she couldn’t imagine anything worse than that.
She backpedaled off the road into the woods and crouched down in a thicket of spruce saplings as the Bradley Fighting Vehicle lurched out of the parking lot into the road, leading the convoy down the west side of the pass. Other cars and SUVs fell in behind as Jack’s legs disappeared into the trailer. Soon after, the two soldiers emerged and lowered the rear door. Latched it, hopped down onto the pavement, lifted the metal ramp, walked it underneath the bed of the truck. They ran to the Stryker and one of them ducked into the back while the other climbed up onto the roof and manned the 50-cal.
The big rig lumbered out of the parking lot, tailed by the Stryker, and it felt like her heart was being ripped from her chest as she watched the convoy begin to slip away, rolling down the other side of the mountain.
In an instant, it was gone. All she could hear was the transfer truck downshifting on a steep grade. Then the top of the pass stood silent. No wind. No birds cheeping. Just the sun pouring down onto the snow.
Dee leaned over into the ice and came apart.
She staggered back into the road and followed it down the east side of the pass. Her throat raw from crying and she still held clumps of her hair that she’d ripped out. Desperate to do something to fix this but she couldn’t. That helplessness felt like loose electricity under her skin—wild and frantic but with no outlet. The urge to put the gun to her own head bordered on irresistible.
She reached the construction site and walked over to the pipe. Her children still slept. She crawled inside and sat with her knees drawn into her chest, trying not to cry again so they might sleep a little longer. Jack was slipping farther and farther away with every passing second, and she could feel the expanding distance and it tore her guts out.
Naomi was stirring. Dee turned and stared into the shadow of the pipe, watched her daughter sit up and rub her eyes.
She looked around.
“Where’s Dad?”
Dee whispered, “Come outside. I don’t want to wake Cole.”
“What’s wrong?”
The tears were starting up in her eyes again. “Just come on.”
When Dee told her daughter what had happened, Naomi cupped her hand to her mouth and ran to a far stack of pipes and crawled into one on the bottom row. Dee stood in the snow with her eyes welling up again, listening to the pipe distort Naomi’s sobbing like some tragic flute.
Cole stared at her, grave as she’d ever seen him, but he didn’t cry. They were sitting on a patch of dry pavement in the road in the warmth of high-altitude sunlight.
“Where did they take him?” the boy asked.
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Why did they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they going to kill him?”
The questions came like little stabs of reinforcement, shoring up the horrific reality of it all.
“I don’t know.”
Cole looked back toward the construction site. “When is Naomi going to come out?”
“In a little while. She’s really upset.”
“Are you upset?”
“Yeah, I’m upset.”
“When can we see Daddy again?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Cole.”
The boy stared at a trickle of snowmelt gliding down the pavement. “This is one of the worst things that ever happened, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” She could tell he was mulling something over, sorting out the ramifications.
“If we don’t find Daddy, does that mean you’re my wife and I get to be in charge of Naomi?”
Dee wiped her face.
“No, sweetheart, it doesn’t mean that.”
In the afternoon, Dee walked over to the pipe where Naomi had holed herself up for hours and crouched down by the opening. Inside, her daughter lay unmoving, and she reached out, touched her ankle.
“Na? You asleep?”
Naomi’s head shook.
“There are some buildings just up the road. I thought we could check them out, see if there’s food. Warm beds to sleep in.”
No movement. No answer.
“You can’t lay here indefinitely, wishing things aren’t the way they are.”
“I know that, Mom. I know that. Can you just give me thirty minutes, please?”
“Okay. But then we have to leave.”
The shadows stretched as they walked through slush to the top of the pass.
The lodge had been vandalized.
The restaurant raided.
Refrigerators contained nothing but rotting vegetables and fruit. Spoiled jars of condiments that she almost considered eating.
Dee had to break glass to gain entry to one of the tiny cabins. They climbed through the windowframe. Just as cold on the inside, but at least there were two bunk beds along the wall.
The kids crawled into bed and Dee unlocked the door and went back outside. Walked down to the road and stood at the crest of the pass. Thirty-five miles away, Grand Teton punctured the bottom curve of the sun and the nearer peaks were catching alpenglow. The snow and the rock the color of peach skin.
Watched the sun drop, wondering where Jack was in all that darkness.
She closed her eyes, spoke aloud.
“Jack, do you hear me? Wherever you are, whatever’s happening to you in this moment, know that I love you. And I’m with you. Always.”
She’d never said anything with such desperation. Closest she’d ever come to prayer. Wondered if the intensity of what raged inside her could carry the words to him on some secret frequency.
Beneath the stars, she started back toward her children, the snow crunching under her footsteps. A part of her still thinking that when she walked into that little cabin, Jack would be there, her sensory memory still operating on the default of his proximity.
In the total darkness of the cabin, she could hear Cole and Naomi breathing deeply. She pulled off her crumbling shoes and took a bottom bunk—sheeted mattress, no blanket. Hoped her children dreamed of something other than what their life had become.
/> * * * * *
IN the morning, Naomi had barely the strength to rise out of bed, and the prodding it took rivaled the difficulty Dee had experienced trying to rouse her two months ago on the first school day of the year.
They wandered outside, having slept through most of the morning, and now it was almost warm and the sun was high and there were only patches of snow in the shadows and the forest. They ate as much of it as they could get down.
The pavement was dry. They started down the other side of the pass, Dee cold and more lightheaded than when she donated blood. The spruce trees and the sky seemed to have lost their vibrancy, almost sepia-toned, and the sounds of the forest and their footsteps on the road came muffled.
She wondered if they were dying.
In the midafternoon, Dee glanced up and saw that Naomi was sitting in the road, swaying over the double yellow like windblown sawgrass.
Dee eased down beside her.
“Are we stopping?” Cole asked.
“Yeah, for a minute.”
The boy walked over to the shoulder to investigate a brown sign riddled with buckshot that warned, You Are Now in Grizzly Bear Country.
“I think a rest is a good idea,” Dee said.
“I’m not resting.”
“Then what is this?”
“I’m so hungry and tired and Dad’s probably dead. I just want to die now, too.”
“Don’t say that.”
Naomi turned slowly and stared at her mother. “Don’t you? Be honest.”
“We have to keep going, Na.”
“Why do you say that? We don’t have to do anything. We can stay right here and waste away or you can put us all out of our miseries right now.”
Her eyes flickered at the Glock tucked into Dee’s waistline.
It surprised Dee as much as it did Naomi when she slapped her daughter hard across the face.
Whispered, “You get the fuck up right now, young lady, or I will drag your little ass down this mountain so help me God. I didn’t raise you to quit.”
Dee struggled back onto her feet as Naomi slumped across the road and wept with what little energy she still had.
Dee crying, too. “Come on, Cole, let’s go.”
“What’s wrong with Naomi?”
“She’ll be okay. Just needs a minute.”
“Are we leaving her?”
“No, she’ll be right along.”
They had covered barely a mile by evening when they left the road for a boulder-strewn meadow. No snow or running water anywhere. As the thirst stalked them, all Dee could think about was all the snow they’d passed up earlier in the day, how she should have taken a container from the restaurant at the pass, packed it with ice for later.
The ground was soft and moist from the recent snowfall, and they curled up on the far side of a boulder, hidden from the road, everyone asleep before the stars came out.
* * * * *
DEE woke with the sun in her face and a dehydration headache. Her children slept and she let them go on sleeping. Lethargic and hopeless. Nothing more unappealing than rising from the cool soft grass to trudge on down that road.
She lay there, gliding in and out of consciousness, always returning to the question—where are you? And—are you? It seemed impossible that he could be gone and she not know. Not feel it in the pit of her soul.
She lay facing her daughter, Naomi’s eyes half open, blades of dead-yellow grass trembling between them that Dee had been giving serious thought to eating.
“I hurt everywhere,” Naomi said.
“I know.”
“Are we dying, Mom?”
How to answer such a question.
“We’re in rough shape, baby.”
“Is it going to hurt a lot worse than this? Toward the end, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“How much longer?”
“Naomi. I don’t know.”
Dee had completely lost time, and whether the sun’s position in the sky indicated late morning or early afternoon, she couldn’t tell. She reached over and put her hand to Cole’s back. Confirmed the rise and the fall. The boy slept against the boulder and she could feel the cold radiating from the rock.
When Dee rolled back over toward her daughter, Naomi was sitting up in the grass. Dee thinking her zygomatic bones seemed extraordinarily pronounced, the bones like crescent moons forming the lower range of her hollowed-out eye sockets.
“You hear that?” Naomi said.
Dee did. A sound like sustained thunder. She looked up, said, “It’s above us, Na.”
A jet, too distant to discern the type, streaked across the sky, its contrail iridescent in the brilliant blue.
Night and freezing cold. Dee lying with her back against the boulder, Cole shivering in her arms. The children slept, but she’d been awake for an hour, fighting black thoughts. She hadn’t intended to lie in this meadow all day. Between the weakness and exhaustion, it had just happened. But tomorrow would involve a choice, and knowing they’d only be more exhausted, thirstier, and in greater agony, she was already making excuses for why they shouldn’t push on. Basking in the increasingly soothing presence of what lay two feet away in the grass, just within arm’s reach.
Naomi shook her awake.
“Mom, get up.”
Dee opened her eyes to her daughter silhouetted against the sweep of stars and leaning over her.
“What’s wrong, Na?” It hurt to speak, her throat swollen.
“Someone’s coming.”
“Give me a hand.”
She extricated herself from Cole’s embrace and grabbed onto Naomi’s arm and tugged herself upright.
Sat listening.
At first, nothing. Then she discerned the sound of an engine still a long ways off, had to strain to tell if it was fading away or approaching.
“It’s coming toward us, Mom.”
Dee used the boulder to pull herself onto her feet. She picked up the Glock, the metal glazed with frost. They walked through the alpine meadow to the shoulder of the road. The double yellow glowing in the starlight, and the noise of the approaching car getting louder, like a wave coming ashore.
Dee’s leg muscles burned. The warmth of her hand had melted some of the frost off the Glock, and she used her shirt to wipe the condensation and ice from the steel.
“Go back to the boulder, Na.”
“What are you going to do?”
Dee slipped the Glock into a side pocket of her rain jacket. “When you hear me call out, wake Cole and bring him over, but not until. And if it doesn’t go right, something happens, you hide, and take care of your brother.”
“Mom—”
“We don’t have time. Go.”
Naomi ran back into the meadow and Dee stepped out into the road, searching for the glint of headlights through the trees, but there was nothing save for the noise of the approaching engine.
A shadow blitzed around the corner.
She had intended to lay down on the pavement, but she didn’t have the guts for that now facing a car with no headlights barreling toward her in the dark of night, so she just stood straddling the double yellow line and waving her arms like a madwoman.
Inside of a hundred yards, the RPMs fell off and the glow of brakelights fired the asphalt red and the tires screeched against the pavement, Dee shielding her eyes from the imminent collision but not yielding an inch.
Then the engine idled two feet away from her and the smell of scorched rubber filled the air. She lowered her arm from her face as the driver’s door squeaked open. It was a Jeep Cherokee, dark green or brown—impossible to tell in this light—with four fuel containers strapped to the roof.
“You trying to commit suicide?” the man growled.
Dee took out the Glock, lined it up in the center of his chest. By the glow that emanated from the Jeep’s interior lights, she could see that he was older—short brown hair on top, a great white beard, salt and pepper mustache that struggled to merge the
two. He held something in his left hand.
“Drop it,” she said.
When he hesitated, she sighted up his face, and something in her eyes must have persuaded him, because a gun clattered onto the pavement.
“You’re ambushing me?”
Dee shouted for the kids, heard them come running in the dark.
“Grab the top of the door,” Dee said.
He complied as Naomi and Cole hustled across the road.
On the door below the window, Dee noticed a National Park Service emblem.
“Do you see him, Cole?” Dee said as he sidled up beside her.
“Yes.”
She wouldn’t take her eyes off the man.
“Does he have any light around his head?”
“Lady, what are you—”
“Be quiet.”
“No, Mom.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
Still, she didn’t lower the gun. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Ed.”
“Ed what?”
“Abernathy.”
“What are you doing out here, Mr. Abernathy?”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Girl with the gun gets the answers.”
“I’m trying to survive.”
“We aren’t affected,” she said.
“Neither am I.”
“I know.”
“How exactly do you know?”
“You have water and food?”
He nodded, and it was just a flash of a thought—considering their present state, what the world had become, Dee should kill him right now and take his Jeep and whatever provisions it contained. Not fuck around for one more second, because there was too much at stake. Pulling the trigger, though, was another thing. Maybe he was a good guy, maybe not, but she couldn’t shoot him in cold blood, not even for her children, and maybe because of them.