by Blake Crouch
Jack’s hand was slicked with warm blood that was beading and dripping off the ends of his fingers.
A round zipped through one of the back windows.
“Na, Cole, get behind the tires and lay flat against the grass.” He looked at his wife. “You have to tell me what to do.”
“I don’t know if it nicked the femoral artery or what, but you’ve got to stop the bleeding right now or I’m going to go into hypovolemic shock and die.”
“How do I do that?”
“Wrap something around my leg.”
“Like a shirt?”
“Yes. Please hurry.”
Jack ripped open his button-up shirt and tore his arms out of the sleeves as another bullet hit the Jeep.
Dee cried out when he lifted her leg and ran one of the sleeves underneath it.
“How tight?” he asked, tying the first knot.
“Cut my circulation off.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He slid the loop to the top of her thigh and bore down on the knot, then put his foot on it while he cinched it down again. He kept watching Dee’s right hand which she’d been pressing into the wound, trying to stop the blood that pulsed between her fingers with every heartbeat.
“Is it working?” he asked.
“I can’t tell.” She blinked several times, staring into the fading sky. He thought her eyes looked glassy. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s stopping.”
“Can I leave you for a minute?”
“Why?”
“I need to see if anyone’s coming.”
He opened the rear passenger door—no safe way to do this.
Moved quickly into the backseat and reached into the cargo area, grabbing two AR-15s and a pair of binoculars, then diving back outside as another gunshot resounded across the prairie.
Jack crawled around to the back of the Jeep, lay with his chest heaving against the ground and brought the binoculars to his eyes.
Pulled the prairie into focus.
Distant grass, waving in the wind. A backdrop of clouds going dark as night fell. A jackrabbit standing on its hind legs.
He made a slow scan of the horizon.
A pickup truck scrolled into view—old, beat-to-hell Chevy with equal parts paint and rust. He lowered the binoculars to gauge the true distance—a mile, possibly more—then glassed the truck again.
A woman stood in the bed staring through the scope of a high-powered rifle that she’d braced against the roof. The rifle bucked, soundless. A bullet hit the other side of the Cherokee with a hard ping, like it had struck one of the wheels.
The report was slow in reaching him.
While the woman loaded another long, brass-tipped cartridge, he panned down the prairie, starting when he saw them. The men already so close they took up the entire sphere of magnification—three of them in hunting camouflage, a man perhaps five years his senior and two teenagers who shared a strong resemblance.
The teen boys carried semiautomatic pistols and the man a double-barreled shotgun, their faces flushed from running.
Jack lowered the binoculars. They were less than a hundred yards away. No idea how he’d missed them.
He took up one of the machineguns, wondering how much ammo remained.
Looked over at Dee, the children huddled around her.
“They’re coming, Dee.”
“How many?” she asked.
“Three of them.”
“I can help shoot,” Cole said.
“I need you to stay with Mama.”
Jack crouched behind the rear, right wheel, fingering the trigger.
“Is this it, Jack?”
“No, this is not it.”
He eased up until he could just see through the panels of spiderwebbed glass. The footsteps had become audible, swishing through the grass. The men would be upon them in seconds.
He crouched back down behind the tire.
Shut his eyes, took three deep breaths.
Came suddenly to his feet and swung out around the corner of the Jeep with the AR-15 shouldered. The three men already scrambling to raise their weapons vanished behind the burst of fire, the steady recoil driving into his shoulder, and then the magazine was evacuated, the barrel smoking, the men cut down fifteen feet from the Jeep.
A bullet struck the taillight by Jack’s leg, and he was back around the other side of the Jeep by the time the gunshot reached them.
“Are they dead, Daddy?”
“Yes.”
He lifted the other machinegun out of the grass.
“That one’s empty,” Dee said. “We’re out.”
He couldn’t stand the pain in her voice.
Knelt down behind the tire again and raised the binoculars. The light was going fast. Took him a moment to find the pickup truck again, and when he had, it wasn’t alone. Two other trucks had pulled up alongside it, their doors thrown open, and now he counted eight people, heavily-armed, in heated discussion.
“What?” Dee said. “What do you see? Jack.”
“There’s eight of them now. Three trucks.”
“We have to go.”
“Where, Dee? We’d get a mile, maybe two, before we broke down again.”
“Then what, Jack?”
“We fight.”
The people were climbing back into the trucks now.
“They’re coming,” he said.
Dee was struggling to sit up.
“You shouldn’t be moving,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. Give me a hand.”
“Dee, you shouldn’t—”
“Give me your fucking hand.” He pulled her onto her feet, her right pant leg dark with blood. She used him for support, groaning as she limped over to the Jeep and opened the driver side door.
She climbed in behind the steering wheel.
“Dee, the car will break down. We are not—”
“I know we’re not.”
He felt something inside of him unhook.
“No.”
Dee looked past him to her daughter. “Naomi, take Cole and gather up the weapons from the dead men.”
“Mom.”
“Right. Now.” When the children were gone, she said, “I can’t walk, Jack. It would be so easy for me to bleed out.”
“We’re going to get you help.”
“We’re all going to be dead in five minutes.”
“Dee—”
“Listen to me. It’s dusk. Soon, it’ll be night. Let me—”
“No, Dee—”
“Let me take the Jeep. Those trucks will follow my lights. Think they’re chasing us all down. By the time they catch up to me, it’ll be dark, and you and the kids—” her voice broke “—you’ll be safe.”
“But we’re almost there, baby.”
“You run all night, Jack. Promise me you won’t stop.”
Over the roof of the Jeep, in the blue dusk across the plain, he could see three points of light.
“No.”
“You ready to watch them die? Are you?”
“I’m not ready for this, Dee.”
“I know.”
Naomi and Cole were coming back over.
He grabbed her face and kissed her. There were tears running down their faces but they wiped them away as the kids arrived.
“There are trucks coming,” Naomi said.
“I know, baby,” Dee said. She looked at Jack. He took the handguns from Naomi and set them in Dee’s lap.
“We’re going due north,” he told her. “You come to us.”
Dee nodded. She looked down at Cole, her eyes glistening again. “Got a hug for Mommy?” The boy handed Jack the shotgun and leaned into the Jeep. Dee pulled Cole into her and kissed the top of his head. She glanced up at her daughter. “Na?”
“What are you doing?”
“Mom’s going to run some interference for us.”
“We’re not staying together?”
Jack grabbed Naomi’s arm and gl
ared at her, his chin trembling. “Hug your mother, Na.”
Naomi looked at Jack. She looked at Dee. She wrapped her arms around her mother, and as she sobbed into her chest, Jack heard the first distant grumble of the approaching trucks.
Already, it was dark and cold.
“Come on, angel.” Jack pulled Naomi away from Dee. “Take your brother into that depression, and you lie down in the grass at the bottom. I’ll be right there.”
“Daddy—”
“I know. Don’t think right now. Just go.”
Naomi gathered herself. “All right, Cole, let’s see what’s over here.”
“Where?” the boy said.
Dee watched her children run off down the hill into the dark.
“Let me take the car,” Jack said.
“I can’t walk,” Dee said. “The kids would have to leave me to find help. They’d be on their own. You want that?”
“Dee—”
“Stop wasting our last moment.”
He nodded.
“Do you know what I’m going to think about?” she said.
“What?”
“That day we had up at the cabin. That perfect day.”
“Wiffle ball in the field.”
She smiled. “Please get our children someplace safe. Make this mean something.”
“I swear to you I will.”
“I have to go now.”
“You have to stop crying so you can drive.”
In the distance, it was too dark to see the trucks, but their headlights were close enough to have separated into six points of light.
Jack kissed his wife once more and buried his face into the softness of her neck and just breathed her in. Then he looked into her eyes for precious seconds until she pushed him away. She pulled the door closed and cranked the engine.
He got down in the grass and he was crying as the Jeep rolled away, picking up speed. After ten seconds, the cornerlamps cut on—dim, orange light—and the noise of the engine became rackety across the prairie, sputtering and hacking.
Jack watched the approaching trucks, still moving toward him, getting louder as the Jeep dwindled away. No evident course diversion yet.
He glanced back into the depression, couldn’t see his children.
When he looked forward again, the trucks were turning, all of them, and difficult to see now with their headlights blazing east.
He lay there watching the lights move across the plain, the engines becoming quiet, the lights fading.
Their Jeep disappeared.
The trucks vanished.
He had to strain now to even hear the engines.
Then he was lying on the ground, and there was no sound but the wind blowing through the grass. He lifted the shotgun and rose to his feet, started toward the depression. Couldn’t see a thing under the cloud cover. He wouldn’t have seen anything regardless, with the tears streaming down his face. He called out for his children in the darkness, and when they answered, he let their voices guide him.
In the rearview mirror, Dee watched the trio of headlights pursuing her. The temperature gauge was pegged, and in the Jeep’s headlights, she could see streamers of smoke pouring out of the engine, smell things burning. Her leg throbbed, and she kept steady pressure on the gas pedal, trying to maintain her speed at twenty, but the engine had begun to lose power, cylinders misfiring, RPMs erratic, and still those trucks stayed with her, getting closer.
At 1.2 miles, the RPMs fell off and the engine seized, a violent clanging under the hood. Dee finally eased her foot off the accelerator, let the Jeep roll to a stop and die.
She turned the key back in the ignition.
Short of breath, her heart pounding.
The headlights of those trucks getting brighter in the rearview mirror, and the ominous symphony of their engines already audible.
She couldn’t feel her leg, didn’t know whether that was owing to the loss of blood flow or the adrenaline surging through her.
Her hands trembled as she lifted the guns out of her lap.
One of the trucks shot past, a hundred and fifty yards south, and kept going.
She turned around and looked back between the seats.
The other pair of headlights were motionless, a hundred feet back. They intensified, brights blazing into the Jeep for what seemed ages.
At last, she heard a series of distant door slams, and then the lights went dark.
Dee tossed the guns into the passenger seat and opened the center console, fingers probing until they grazed Ed’s pocketknife. Her thumbnail found the indentation in the steel and she pried open the longest blade and sawed through the fabric of the shirt Jack had tied around her leg.
The feeling returned—a flood of needles and heat—and she reached down between her seat and the door until her hand touched the lever. As the seat tilted back, the lights of the third truck appeared a quarter mile out through the windshield, moving in her direction.
She could hear voices now, and she could feel the blood spraying out of her, a warm pooling in her seat, the smell of iron filling the car. Already she was lightheaded and breathing fast and breaking out in a cold sweat.
Her arms slipped down to her sides and she was trying to find that day in Wyoming on the side of the mountain, but her thoughts kept tangling. As the footsteps approached she was so lightheaded she could barely think at all. Didn’t want to go back into the past anyway.
And as flashlight beams swept across the Jeep, she landed upon the image she wanted, clinging to it as the dizziness behind her eyes began to spiral and echoing voices screamed at her to get out of the car.
Sunrise on a prairie.
Three figures—a man, a boy, a young woman.
Tired and cold.
They’ve walked all night, and they’re still walking, just a few steps from the crest of a hill.
They reach the top.
Breathless.
The view goes on forever.
The man pulls his children close and points.
At first, they can’t see what he’s trying to show them, because the sun is exploding out of the horizon in radials of early light.
But as their eyes adjust, they see it—a city of white tents spread across the plain.
Thousands of them.
Numerous trails of smoke rise into the morning sky, and a band of soldiers have already seen them. They’re climbing the hillside toward her family, hailing them, and one of their number carries a blue and white flag flapping in the wind.
She wants to follow them—she’d give anything—but they’ve already started down the hillside without her, slipping away now, and she loses them in the blinding light of the sun.
They’d been running in the dark for three minutes when Cole dug his heels into the ground.
“Come on,” Jack said, pulling his arm, “we aren’t stopping.”
“We have to.”
Cole wouldn’t move.
Jack let go of Naomi’s hand and scooped the boy up in his arms and started jogging again.
Cole screamed, his arms flailing.
“Goddamnit, Cole—”
The boy grabbed his hair and tried to bite Jack’s face.
He dropped Cole into the grass.
“He’s turning into one of them,” Naomi screamed.
“Look at me, Cole.”
“We have to go back.” The boy was crying now.
“Why?”
“To get Mom.”
“Cole, we can’t go back. It’s too dangerous.”
“But it’s over.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“The lights. They aren’t here anymore.” Jack knelt down in the grass, his boy just a shadow in the dark.
“Cole, this is not the time to screw around.”
“I’m not, Daddy. I don’t feel it anymore.”
“When did it go away?”
“Just now, while we were
running. I can still feel it going out of me.”
“I don’t even know what that means, Cole.”
“You have to go get Mom. It’s okay now. The bad people won’t hurt you.”
Jack looked at his daughter.
“Go,” she said.
“Really?”
“If there’s even a chance, right?”
“Listen to me,” Jack said. “Do not move from this spot. It might be tomorrow morning before I come back, because I don’t think I’ll be able to find you in the dark.”
“What if you don’t come back?” she said.
“If I’m not back by mid-morning, you keep going north until you cross the border and find help. Cole, look at me.”
He held the boy’s hands. “If you’re wrong about this, you might never see me again. Do you understand that?”
The boy nodded. “But I’m not wrong.”
Jack ran across the prairie, tearing through the dark, his crumbling shoes flapping with every footfall, already gasping, no idea if he was headed in the right direction, and nothing to see but gaping blackness.
After five minutes, he stopped and bent over, his heart banging in his chest.
When he looked up again, he saw a cluster of red lights far across the plain. A further set of headlights. Over the rocketing of his pulse, he thought he heard the engines.
He was still gasping, realized he wasn’t going to get his wind back, so he started running again, working up to as much of a sprint as he could manage. He was terrified the taillights would vanish, but they stayed put, didn’t even seem to be moving away from him now.
Sweat ran into his eyes, and when he wiped the sting away, the lights had disappeared.
He stopped.
Didn’t hear the engines anymore.
Just an ocean of soundless dark.
Seven flashes exploded through the black. For a fraction of a second, he saw Dee’s Jeep and the three trucks surrounding it. Much closer than he thought, just a few hundred yards out. He was running again as the seven gunshots reached him and ripped his guts out, the last four hundred yards blazing past in a rush of terror, pain, and self-doubt, thinking he should have stayed with his children. He was going to see his wife dead and get himself killed, never see any of them again. And so close to safety, too.
He stopped twenty yards out from the vehicles, so far beyond the boundary of his endurance.
It sounded like sirens ringing inside his head, the darkness spinning.