by Blake Crouch
He glanced through the open doors into the gymnasium—a mass of sleeping bodies.
“There a morgue around?” he asked. “I’ve got a dead man in my car. Guy I picked up this morning who didn’t make it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’re in a little bit of chaos here.”
“If you see my family, tell them I was here looking for them.”
Jack drove to a nearby park that took up a single city block. Unbuckled Donald’s seatbelt, pulled him out of the front passenger seat, dragged him away from the car. He made it as far as a boulder surrounded by flower boxes whose contents lay in ruin, but could take him no further. He laid Donald down in the grass beside the rock and folded the man’s hands across his chest.
Sat with him for a long time in the dark, mostly because he didn’t feel right just leaving Donald here alone. Thinking there was something more to be done, though he had no idea what. The breeze was pushing those empty swings, one of them making an awful creaking noise that set Jack’s nerves even more on edge.
After a while, he said, “This is the best I can do, Don. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything.”
And he got up and walked back to the van.
Drove fifteen blocks toward the river, the engine sputtering, cylinders misfiring. He’d wanted to make it to the water, but that wasn’t going to happen.
The feeble moonlight was shining off the columns of the civic center several blocks ahead. When he saw them, he realized where he was and brought the minivan to a stop in the middle of the street. He sat staring in disbelief toward the square, little to see in the powerless dark but the five-story block of the Davidson Building. Wondered how it had not occurred to him until this moment to come here.
He put the van back into gear and cranked the steering wheel. Drove over the lip of the sidewalk into the middle of the square between two rows of potted evergreen trees.
Jack turned off the van. Sat in the dark and the quiet, listening to the engine cool. He was in a dark plaza, buildings on either side of him, joined by a skywalk. The fountain nearby, dormant.
So much as he had imagined it, even after all this time.
He opened his door and stepped down onto the concrete. It was cold. There were clouds scudding through the light of the moon. Silence like this was one thing in the wilderness, a completely different matter in the city. No cars out, no people, not even the hum of streetlamps or powerlines. Too dark. Too quiet. Everything wrong.
It hit him. Pure exhaustion. The emotional expenditure of the day. Felt the call of sleep, and the idea of a few hours of unconsciousness, of checking out of all of this, had never sounded better.
The minivan still smelled like death.
He cracked all the windows and laid the front seat back as far as it would go.
* * * * *
WHEN his eyes opened he was staring through the windshield at the windows of an office building thirty feet above him. A sheet of clouds reflected in the dark glass. He sat up. Hungry. Cold. Opened the door and stepped down onto the plaza. Eighteen years ago, there had been a coffeehouse a block from here, and he could almost smell the memory of their French roast, feel how the heat of it had steamed into his face on mornings just like this.
He walked toward Central Avenue. Strange not to know the day, but he was certain it was November now. The sky certainly looked it, and the steel chill in the air felt it. Clouds soft and pregnant, debating whether to snow or drop cold rain.
Up and down the avenue, not a single car on the street. A few of the stores had been looted, broken glass on the sidewalk. Nothing moved but some dead leaves scraping across the road.
Jack went back at the minivan and looked inside. Don’s youngest daughter had been sitting in the third row from what Jack could tell. It looked to him like she’d made the space her own—iPod, magazines, books, a stuffed penguin that had been dragged around forever.
He lifted a drawing pad out of the floorboard, stared at a half-finished sketch of countryside that looked remarkably similar to the Montana waste where he’d stumbled upon this van. She had talent. All she’d used was a black Magic Marker to suggest a sharpened mountain range, miles of sagebrush, and the road that shot a lonely trajectory through that country. He wondered if she’d been drawing when her family was ridden down. A line stopped abruptly at the summit of a mountain, the downslope never finished. The black marker she’d used still lay uncapped on the carpet.
Jack picked a cigar box off the floor, raised the lid.
Markers, pastel pencils, miniature bottles of acrylic paint, charcoal, brushes, erasers, and a sterling silver-etched heart locket that only ten-year-old boys give to ten-year-old girls.
Couldn’t bring himself to open it.
He was all morning writing her name. Big, block letters on the sliding door, the black Sharpies showing up well on the minivan’s white paint. He used up three markers coloring in the letters, then took a bottle of white acrylic paint and brushed her name onto the dark plateglass windows of the surrounding buildings.
Walked out into the street to test the visibility.
Dee’s name couldn’t be missed, even from fifty yards away.
By early afternoon a light mist was falling, and he sat in the front seat behind the wheel, watching the beads of water populate the glass.
Drifted off and when he woke again it was dark and a harder rain falling. He crawled into the very back and stretched out across the young girl’s seat. Wrapped himself in a blanket that still carried her smell. Hungry but he thought he should start rationing his bag of junk food, which contained only twelve packages when he’d taken inventory this morning.
The rainfall on the minivan roof was a good sound. He thought about his family until it hurt too much, and then he went to sleep.
* * * * *
THUNDER is what it sounded like in his half-conscious state, and it made the windows tremble. Jack tugged the blanket away from his face, lay there listening to see if it would come again, thinking he might’ve dreamed it.
It came again. Not thunder.
This was a deeper, focused sound, and it didn’t roll across the sky.
He crawled out of the backseat and pulled open the side door.
Walked through the plaza into the street.
Late morning. A low cloud deck. The pavement wet.
He heard it again. Far off. Perhaps beyond the city. He’d never heard it before, not in real life, but he knew it was the sound of bombs exploding.
The plateglass on the first floor of the Wells Fargo bank had been smashed out some time ago. Jack stepped through into the lobby. Dark, silent. He looked at the vacant bank teller stations. The velvet rope lines. Signs for commercial and residential mortgage departments. A water fountain stood against the wall between the men’s and women’s restrooms. He walked over and turned the knob. Nothing. He went into the women’s restroom and tried the faucet. Dry. There was water in the toilets, but he wasn’t at that point just yet. Comforting to know it was here, though.
He crossed the plaza to the Davidson Building. The entrance doors were locked. The glass intact. He uprooted a baby fir tree from a concrete planter which must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. When he’d finally hoisted it up, he ran toward the doors and heaved the planter at the glass like an oversize shot put.
Straight through. Shattered across the marble floor.
He took his time stripping branches from the fir tree, relieved just to have something to occupy his mind. When he’d finished, he unbuttoned his outer shirt and tore it into long strips. Raised the hood of the minivan, unscrewed the cap to the oil tank, dipped the pieces of his shirt inside. He tied the oil-coated cloth around the end of the stick, no idea if this would even work. He’d seen some version of it on a TV survival show several years ago, but he kept thinking he was missing a step.
He held the glowing orange coils of the van’s cigarette lighter to a dry corner of the fabric.
A flame appeare
d, crept across the cloth, and then the end of Jack’s torch ignited.
It burned beautifully.
He laughed out loud.
Jack arrived on the fourth-floor landing, firelight flickering off the concrete walls of the stairwell. He opened the door and stepped out into a carpeted hallway. Moved down the corridor, brass nameplates catching torchlight. Stopped at a window with the words financial advisors stenciled across the glass. In the firelight, he could see a waiting area, several chairs, a small table stacked with magazines. Jack tried the door, then set the torch on the fire-retardant carpet, lifted the metal trashcan standing beside an elevator, and hurled it at the glass.
Through the office windows, daylight filtered in. Down the length of the wall, he studied a photographic series of grinning salesmen. He carried his torch into a breakroom and opened the refrigerator. A dozen cups of undoubtedly-spoiled yogurt. Something wrapped in tinfoil. A Styrofoam box of leftovers that smelled like a rotting corpse.
A water cooler stood nearby.
He lodged the torch in the sink and knelt down on the floor. Held his mouth under the tap and drank until his stomach ached.
He entered a corner office and sat in the leather chair behind the desk. Propped his feet up and stared at framed photographs—a soccer team of boys in green uniforms, a family—sunglassed and screaming—on a raft in the midst of whitewater, three beer-flushed men, arm-in-arm, in the fairway of a golf course. He swiveled around in the chair and rolled toward the window. A half mile to the west, he could see the Missouri. The water gray-green under the clouds. Plains beyond. Down in the plaza, the minivan stood glazed in rainwater.
A plastic inbox tray rattled on the glasstop.
The building shook.
Two seconds later, he heard the blast.
Miles away, south of town, black smoke lifted off the prairie.
He carried the half-filled canister of water down the stairwell and through the lobby.
Outside, a light rain fell, the air cold enough to cloud his breath.
He climbed into the minivan and curled up in the backseat under the little girl’s blanket. Shut his eyes. Rain hammering the metal roof.
My day, he thought. Fire and water.
Black of night, he shot awake.
Not only explosions but gunfire now. Inside the city limits.
He climbed into the front seat and peered through the windshield.
The sky lit up—cushions of cloud overhead and snow falling out of them.
Darkness.
The delayed boom of whatever artillery shell had just exploded.
A brighter flash toward the horizon.
Then black.
No way he was going back to sleep.
* * * * *
JACK watched the sky lighten through the glass, his fists still clenching the steering wheel, as they had for the last two hours. Like listening to a hurricane come ashore and the intensifying terror of the eye wall creeping closer. The sound of war coming.
He straightened up in the seat, pushed open the door, stepped outside. Snow clung to everything, and he brushed it off the minivan’s sliding door to uncover Dee’s name.
Realized he was crying. What if the guards hadn’t allowed Cole into the city? Would Dee have even risked an entry this close to the border? No. She’d have gone around, tried to rush the kids across. They might even be in Canada by now. They might be dead in Wyoming. Might be anywhere. But not here. Not with him.
He sat down in the snow.
They weren’t coming.
They weren’t coming.
They weren’t—
The jackhammer pounding of a machinegun broke out what couldn’t have been more than a few blocks away.
He pulled himself up by the door handle and staggered out into the street which was lined with mostly two- and three-story buildings and trees with a few orange leaves left dangling.
Three blocks down, muzzleflashes blossomed from a top floor window.
The firing went on for a full minute.
When it stopped, silence fell upon the city.
Specks of snow seemed to hang weightless in the air.
Jack stood in the street for a long time, but the shooting was over.
He walked back to the minivan, suddenly hungry, but even more tired, and he was asleep seconds after his head hit the seat cushion. He slept so hard it seemed like barely a minute had passed, and then he was awake again, his eyes burning with strain and disorientation and a noise like Armageddon right on top of him.
He peered over the back of the seat, saw people running through the square, twenty feet beyond the front bumper of the van. Dressed like civilians, he thought, in shabby clothes so tattered they all appeared to be molting. The three men bringing up the rear held shotguns at waist-level. They were backpedaling and firing and Jack could see the abject fear in their faces laced with the mad rush of adrenaline, something screaming at him to get the fuck down, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. The shotguns thundered and one of the men collapsed and then the small platoon streamed into the Davidson building.
For fifteen seconds, nothing. No sound. No movement.
Then a company of black-clad men swarmed the square, some of them taking position behind the planters, a handful charging into the building.
Jack got down into the floorboard and flattened himself against the carpet, pulling the blanket on top of him as machineguns erupted all around him, men yelling over the mayhem, the shotguns booming down out of the building several floors above, pellets and rounds chinking into the side of the minivan, and then a window exploded, glass everywhere, and the van sank to one side, a tire punctured.
A man began to scream nearby, and Jack covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut and he was saying her name. He could feel his lips moving, though he couldn’t hear the words, not even inside his head, over the terrible noise.
An explosion blew out every window in the van and then came a lull.
Numerous footsteps pounded the concrete. Someone shouted, and the next time Jack heard gunshots, they sounded distant, muffled.
He waited for another minute, then slowly sat up. Brighter in the van with the tinted windowglass shot out. A half-dozen men lay scattered across the plaza, one of them still crawling.
On the fourth floor of the Davidson building a black crater smoked, ragged flames cutting through.
Jack made his way up into the driver seat and eased the door open.
Gunshots inside the Davidson building.
He stared at the bank. Twenty yards tops. Get inside. Find an office, crawl under a desk. Wait for silence.
He glanced back toward the Davidson building. A man stepped out of the lobby and walked into the square. He was looking at the minivan. Jack ducked as far as he could under the steering wheel. More voices. Orders being shouted. Fading away now. He eased up into the seat again and peered through the shattered windshield. The black-clad men had lined the civilian platoon up in the middle of the street. They were making them get down on their knees at gunpoint.
A man in a red bandana stood in front of the POWs. Jack could just hear his voice from the front seat of the van, telling them he would be pleased to shoot them each in the head, felt sure they would in turn be pleased with this outcome. However, if even one of them resisted, his unit would spend the rest of the day torturing them to death.
A handful of the civilians wept. He could see their shoulders bobbing. But no one moved.
The man in the red bandana went to the first civilian, pulled a handgun from his holster, and shot him between the eyes.
He went on down the line, stopping midway to reload, Jack watching the heads of the condemned snapping back, bodies toppling, found himself drawn to study the unimaginable bracing of the next one to die.
Ultimate tension, then emptiness, then ten people lay dead on the snow-dusted street where ten had knelt living thirty seconds before. The soldiers left them there, drifting on down Central Avenue toward the river, in a
formation that made Jack certain they were military.
When the last man had slipped out of view, Jack breathed again, leaning forward, his forehead touching the steering wheel.
Staying here, in this plaza, wasn’t going to work. Not with the city under siege.
Meant pushing on.
As he lifted his head, the man in the red bandana reappeared around the corner of the Davidson building. He was walking back into the square, straight toward the van. Jack’s heart jumped from zero to afterburn, a hot spike of panic flooding in.
He slammed his shoulder into the door and barreled out of the minivan at a dead sprint toward the bank, waiting for the gunshots, waiting, the shattered windows rushing toward him, waiting. Just as he reached them, he heard three shots squeezed off faster than he could have imagined, and he was inside, untouched he thought, turning left now, bolting up a set of stairs into the mortgage department, dark save for where crumbs of daylight filtered in through the offices that overlooked the plaza.
Jack stopped.
He could hear the man’s footfalls in the lobby down below.
Now running up the stairs.
Jack moved into a large, open maze of cubicles and desks, his world getting darker every step he took away from those windows.
He got down on his hands and knees and crawled under a desk. Couldn’t see a thing. Panting. The noise deafening. He shut his eyes, tried to calm himself, and when his heart finally slowed, he heard the footsteps—soft as mice—moving into the mortgage department toward him.