by Blake Crouch
Cole stirred, eyes fluttering. They opened, got so wide Jack knew the boy had given him up for dead.
“Is it you?” the boy said.
“It’s me.”
Cole seemed to think things over for a minute.
“I dream about you every night and you talk to me just like this, but every time I wake up, you’re gone.”
“You’re awake, and I’m here, and I’m not going to be gone again.”
He drew the boy into his arms.
“Why are you crying?” Cole said.
“Because I’m holding you, and I didn’t think I ever would again.”
Naomi sat up at the other end of the couch. “Oh my God.” She burst into tears and lunged toward Jack, and he grabbed her, too, now holding his children in his arms, and he could not think of a time in his life when he’d been more overloaded with joy.
Dee wouldn’t take his word for it that he was okay. She made him strip and examined every square inch of his body with the flashlight, starting with the recent gunshot wound to his right shoulder.
“How’s it feel?”
“Pretty sore these last few days.”
“It’s infected. Come with me.”
She took him into the bathroom and cleaned the wound as well as she could with a few paper towels and antiseptic hand soap.
“You have to try and keep it clean until we find some bandages.”
She held up his left arm.
“What’s this?”
He slowly unwound the filthy bandage covering his ring finger.
Dee gasped when she saw it.
“Forgot to mention this,” he said. “Soldier at the top of Togwotee Pass cut it off.”
She grabbed the flashlight off the sink and shined the light on the jagged phalange and the scab trying to form across it.
Tears in her eyes again. “Your ring finger,” she said. “Your ring.”
Later, while the kids slept, he and Dee crashed on a sofa, and they talked as night fell. Soon it was pitch black except when light flickered through the tall windows in the archive room. Like watching a rainless thunderstorm, except even the most distant detonations shook the building’s foundation and made dust rain down from the ceiling into their eyes.
Jack drifted off and when he woke again, he was still holding Dee on the couch.
Her ear against his mouth. Didn’t know if she was sleeping. Whispered anyway. Told her how his heart was so full, how if they ever got someplace safe, he would spend every waking moment making her happy, loving her, loving Cole and Na. Fuck the life they’d walled themselves in with. He didn’t care if they lived in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. Let them be poor. Let them scrape by. He just wanted to be with her, every second of every hour of every day. Wanted to see her old and slow and gray. Watch her hold their granddaughters, their grandsons.
She didn’t respond except to make a sleepy sigh and to nuzzle in a little closer.
Jack sat up. The building shook, books falling off the shelves. His ears ringing. Dee was up too, her lips moving, but he couldn’t hear anything, and then the sound came rushing back—the kids screaming, Dee shouting. He got to his feet, the room brilliantly lit through those tall windows by the flames consuming a building several blocks away, burning with such intensity he could feel the heat through the glass.
He opened his mouth to say something but a fast-building roar stopped him, something approaching, the noise of it getting louder and closer. And then it was right on top of them, like God screaming, and in the flamelight, Jack could see his children covering their ears, mouths dropped open, eyes wide with terror.
Then it was gone, and the room filled with enough silence for the sounds of distant machinegun fire to filter in.
Jack was panting—they all were.
He turned to Dee, said, “We’re—”
A flash of scalding white light. The window blew out and something hit Jack in the chest that was neither force nor sound, but a terrible fusion of the two, and he was lying on his back, his molars jogged loose in their beddings, telling himself to get up, to check on his children, but his legs were slow to respond.
The ringing in his ears had become a jackhammer.
He sat up, eyes still struggling after that blinding detonation.
The building across the street had taken a direct hit, and amid the massive flames, he could see steel girders sagging, melting in the heat.
He was unstable on his feet.
Dee looked all right. She was sitting up, stunned, and he could see that her eyes were open, blinking slowly.
Cole and Naomi lay in fetal positions on the floor, still bracing, covering their heads and trembling. Jack put his hands on them and patted their backs, ran his fingers through their hair, and then Dee was beside him. He tried to say something to her, couldn’t hear his own voice inside his head, but Dee grabbed his face and pulled him close enough to read her lips.
He slung the machinegun straps over his neck and carried Naomi down the staircase, Dee leading with the flashlight, Cole draped over her shoulder.
On the second-floor landing, Jack heard that sound again, muffled now but racing toward a violent climax, and then the building shook with such intensity he couldn’t believe it resisted collapse.
Everywhere on the ground level, shelves had toppled. They waded through books, and the smell of old paper filled the air.
The shock wave had exploded the wall of windows at the entrance. They passed over mounds of shattered glass and outside into a nightmare world. Black smoke poured out of the ruins of whatever had stood across the street and at the pinnacle of the flagpole, the United States and Montana State flags had begun to burn at the fringes.
Dee led Jack over to a green Cherokee parked out of sight between the building and a hedge.
She glanced back, yelled, “You drive,” and tossed him a ring of keys.
Dee opened the rear passenger door and set Cole inside. Jack handed Naomi over, and after Dee had gotten their daughter in and shut the door, he put his lips to his wife’s ear.
“How much gas?”
“Enough to reach the border.”
“You have to be my gunner.” She nodded. “Shoot any fucking thing that moves.”
Jack climbed in behind the wheel and cranked the engine as Dee slammed her door and lowered the window.
His mind ran hot, trying to orient himself in the city.
Essentially two routes north—I-15 to Sweetgrass or Highway 87 to Havre.
He shifted into gear and eased the Jeep down through the steaming grass onto the pavement, the heat from the building across the street so intense it broke him out into a sweat.
He punched the gas, felt the wind and smoke streaming through the windshield into his face. The glass had been shot out, and that was going to make driving at high speed infinitely more difficult.
By the time he rolled up on the next intersection, he’d decided to try the highway north out of town. Jack glanced over at Dee, who already had the machinegun shouldered and aimed out the window. He tapped her leg, mouthed, “You ready?” She nodded. He glanced into the backseat, saw his children down in the floorboards, didn’t know if they could hear him, but he yelled, “Kids, do not lift your heads no matter what happens.”
Jack turned onto 3rd Avenue North and gunned the engine.
In the distance, tracers streamed into the low cloud deck, giving the eastern sky a radioactive burn.
They were doing eighty down the street, and he could barely see a thing in the absence of headlights and with the wind and smoke rushing into his face.
They shot through several dark blocks where nothing had been touched, Jack driving blind. He had reached to turn on the headlights when muzzleflashes erupted all around them like a swarm of fireflies, bullets striking the Jeep on every side and the windows exploding in fountains of glass, the racket of Dee’s machinegun filling the car as she screamed at him to go faster.
They sped away from the gunfire.
/> One block of peace.
Jack uncertain whether his hearing was improving or if they were coming up on another battle but the sound of gunfire and exploding mortar shells became audible over the groaning engine.
At the next junction, he looked down the intersecting street and saw a tank rolling toward them, flanked by a pair of Strykers.
A quarter mile ahead, a succession of ten closely-staggered explosions lit up four city blocks, and Jack could feel the road shuddering underneath him, everything illuminated brighter than midday, as if the sun had gone supernova. He could see people drawn to the windowframes of almost every building they raced past—unarmed, doomed, gaunt faces awash in firelight.
In the rearview mirror, Jack saw that one of the Strykers had launched out ahead of the tank. From it issued several splinters of light and a low-frequency, concussive report, like someone pounding nails. Two 50-caliber rounds punched through the back hatch, one of them obliterating the dash.
They had reached the blast zone, and up ahead, the road vanished into towers of incomprehensible fire.
Jack swung a hard left and drove up a sidestreet parallel to an elementary school, carpet-bombed into molten rubble.
The street teemed with people on fire who had fled the building, fifty of them he would have guessed. Their collective screams as they literally melted onto the pavement made Jack pray for deafness.
He was trying to drive around them, but they kept stumbling in front of the Jeep, and that Stryker was coming, nothing to do but drive through them, over them, Dee screaming, “Oh dear God,” over and over, and then she started shooting.
Two blocks from the school, Jack spotted the sign for the highway, and he veered onto the road and pushed the gas pedal into the floorboard.
The street was empty and they were screaming north, all the fire and death confined to the rearview mirrors.
They shot across a river and through the northern outskirts of the city.
Jack finally turned on the headlights.
They were pushing a hundred now into a vast and welcoming darkness.
North of town, nothing but black, endless prairie. Even forty miles out, they could still see the glow of everything burning and the tracer fire arcing through the sky. Jack had found a pair of sunglasses under the parking brake. He wore them against the wind, driving northeast now, the speedometer pegged and the noise like standing under a waterfall. The kids, and now Dee, crouched in the floorboards to escape it, but he didn’t mind. The rush of wind meant that every passing second that city was falling farther and farther behind, and the Canadian border rushing closer.
Jack had just glanced at the ruined dash, wondering about the time, when he noticed the line of deep blue—just a single shade up from black—lying across the eastern horizon.
* * * * *
DEE woke in the front passenger floorboard, cramped as hell, cold, and staring up at her husband who wore sunglasses, his hair blown back, face ruddy with windburn and the glow of what she guessed was sunrise. It was loud and the Jeep rode rough—either the shocks had given out or they were no longer traveling on a paved road.
She watched him. Even with the heavy beard coming in, he looked so thin, and her heart was swelling. She’d lost him, felt the awful vacuum of their separation, and now she had him back, sitting three feet away. For once, she knew what she had, the kind of man he was, even in the face of all this. Knew she didn’t need another thing for the rest of her life except to be with him. There was such a peace that accompanied that knowledge.
Jack must have felt her stare, because he looked down at her, grinning, but then his brow furrowed.
He touched her cheek.
She wiped the tears away and shook her head and climbed up into her seat.
Grassland. Far as she could see. Not a building in sight. Not a road. They were driving across the prairie.
Jack brought the Jeep to a stop in the grass and killed the engine.
The silence was astounding. It threw her into a state of semi-shock, her ears still ringing after last night.
She glanced into the backseat. Naomi and Cole lay curled up in their respective floorboards. She held her hands against their backs, confirmed the rise and the fall.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Her voice sounded muffled inside her head, like it was sourcing from a remote outpost.
Jack’s came back equally distant, “North of Havre. I figure the border’s about ten miles that way.” He pointed through the gaping windshield toward a horizon of grass, everything glazed with frost.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked.
“Engine’s been in the red awhile now. Plus, I have to pee.”
Jack stood pissing the ice off the grass and trying to come to grips with the massive silence. White smoke trickled out of the Jeep’s grille, and he could hear something hissing under the hood. Wondered if he’d toasted the water pump pushing the Jeep as hard as he had. He’d been taking it easy since leaving the paved roads north of Havre and driving onto the prairie, hoping it’d be the slower but safer route.
He walked back to the Jeep, climbed behind the wheel. Dee had set a few bottles of water and a pack of crackers on the center console, and they shared a meager breakfast together and watched the sun lift out of the plains.
It took an hour for the engine to cool, and then Jack cranked the Jeep and they went on. His attention stuck on the temperature gauge, the needle climbing much faster than he would’ve liked, passing the halfway point after only a mile, and edging into the red at two.
Finally shut it down at 2.75 miles. Jack wondered if he’d killed the engine, because smoke was pouring out of the grill now.
Jack got out, raised the hood.
Wafts of smoke and steam billowed out, and it smelled bad, too, like things had cooked that shouldn’t have. He had no idea what he was looking at, didn’t even really know what the fuck a water pump was, or what function it served beyond stopping this from happening.
He left the hood raised and walked around to Dee’s door.
“That doesn’t look good,” she said.
“It’s not. We’re going to have to wait awhile until it cools again.”
Two hours later, the engine had stopped smoking, and when Jack engaged the ignition, the temperature gauge dropped almost back to baseline.
The kids were awake and thrilled to discover the bag of junk food Jack had scored at the ski area. Cole’s smiling mouth was smeared with chocolate.
Jack shifted into drive and studied their progress in tenth-mile increments on the odometer, the landscape scrolling by so slowly.
At one mile, the needle had almost touched the red again, and smoke was coming out of the engine, the wind driving it up the hood and into the car.
Jack stopped, turned off the engine.
So this became the architecture of their day.
Drive one mile.
Overheat.
Wait two hours.
Drive another mile.
Overheat.
Rinse.
Repeat.
In the late afternoon, they were stopped again at the edge of a gentle depression. The hood raised. No wind. White smoke coiling up into the sky. Dee sat in the front passenger seat, dozing. Jack lay with his children in the cool, soft grass, staring into the sky. Cole was snuggled up against his chest, the boy asleep.
“How far are we?” Naomi asked.
“Two, three miles.”
“You really think there are camps across the border?”
“Won’t know until we get there.”
“What if there aren’t? What if it’s no different on the other side? It’s just an imaginary line, right?”
“Na, somewhere north of here, we’ll come to a place where we don’t have to run anymore, and we’ll drive or walk or crawl until we get there.”
She moved closer, her head against his shoulder.
“We’re almost there, aren’t we, Daddy?”
Behind them,
something chinked against the side of the Jeep.
“Almost, angel.”
A shot rang out across the prairie. Long ways off.
Jack sat up.
The echo going on and on.
“Was that a gun?” Naomi asked.
“I think so.”
Jack glanced back at the Jeep. Because of its dark color, he didn’t notice the bullethole right away, but he did see that Dee was awake, sitting up now.
“Mom’s up,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He got onto his feet and walked to Dee’s door. The reflection of the sky in the windowglass—a gray sheet of clouds.
He pulled open the front passenger door.
Dee was pale, and she was looking up at him with a brand of fear in her eyes he’d only seen twice before. Both times, she’d been in the throes of childbirth. The look had been pure desperation, like she’d committed herself to something she couldn’t bear to finish.
He still didn’t understand.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
“It hurts, Jack.”
She looked down, and he did, too.
Her seat was full of bright red arterial blood and she was squeezing her right leg.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jack said.
Naomi said, “What’s wrong.”
Jack yelled, “You and your brother run to the other side of the car.”
“Why? What—”
“Just do what I fucking tell you.”
Something struck the rear passenger door a foot away from Jack. He slid his right arm under Dee’s legs and lifted her out of the seat.
The report broke out as he carried her around the smoking grille, Dee moaning when he set her down in the grass on the other side of the Jeep.
“What happened?” Naomi said.
“She’s shot.”
“Oh God.” She covered her mouth with her hand.
Cole started to cry.