by Blake Crouch
“I just wanted to get my wife to some people who could help her. Aren’t there any hospitals or—”
“Wait here.”
“Please.”
“Wait,” he snaps.
The driver steps onto the sidewalk and climbs the stairs to where Daniela is now sitting on the highest step, leaning against the railing.
He kneels in front of her, and though I hear his voice, I can’t make out the words.
The woman with the assault rifle covers me and Amanda.
Across the street, I see firelight flickering through a window as one of our neighbors looks down on whatever is unfolding in front of my house.
The driver returns.
He says, “Look, the CDC camps are at capacity. Have been for two weeks. And it wouldn’t matter if you got her into one anyway. Once the eyes hemorrhage, the end is very close. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather pass in my own bed than a cot in a FEMA tent filled with dead and dying people.” He looks over his shoulder. “Nadia, would you grab this gentleman some auto-injectors? And a mask while you’re at it.”
She says, “Mike.”
“Just fucking do it.”
Nadia goes to the back of the Humvee and opens the cargo doors.
“So she’s going to die?”
“I’m sorry.”
“How long?”
“I’d be surprised if she makes it to the morning.”
Daniela groans in the darkness behind me.
Nadia returns, slaps five auto-injectors into my hand along with a face mask.
The driver says, “Wear the mask at all times, and I know it’s hard, but try not to touch her.”
“What is this stuff?” I ask.
“Morphine. If you give her all five at once, she’ll slip away. I wouldn’t wait. The last eight hours are ugly.”
“She has no chance?”
“No.”
“Where’s the cure?”
“There won’t be one in time to save the city.”
“They’re just letting people die in their homes?”
He studies me through his mask.
The face shield is tinted.
I can’t even see his eyes.
“If you try to leave and hit the wrong roadblock, they’ll kill you. Especially after dark.”
He turns away.
I watch as they climb back into the Humvee, fire up the engine, and drive off down the block.
The sun has gone below the horizon.
The street is getting dark.
Amanda says, “We should go right now.”
“Just give me a second.”
“She’s contagious.”
“I’m aware.”
“Jason—”
“That’s my wife up there.”
“No, it’s a version of your wife, and if you catch whatever she has you’ll never see your real wife again.”
I strap on the mask and climb the steps to the front porch.
Daniela looks up as I approach.
Her ruined face breaks me.
She’s vomited blood and black bile all over herself.
“They won’t take me?” she asks.
I shake my head.
I want to hold her and comfort her.
I want to run away from her.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to pretend it’s going to be all right. I’m ready.”
“They gave me these,” I say, setting the auto-injectors down.
“What are they?”
“A way to make it end.”
“I watched you die in our bed,” she says. “I watched my son die in his. I don’t ever want to go back in that house. Of all the ways I thought my life would go, I never imagined this.”
“This isn’t how your life turned out. Only how it ended. Your life was beautiful.”
The candle falls out of her hand and extinguishes on the concrete, the wick smoking.
I say, “If I give you all of these at once, this can be over. Is that what you want?”
She nods, tears and blood running down her cheeks.
I pull a purple cap off one of the auto-injectors, hold the end against her thigh, and press the button on the opposite end.
Daniela barely even flinches as the spring-loaded syringe fires a dose of morphine into her system.
I set up the next four and administer them all in quick succession.
The effect is nearly instantaneous.
She falls back against the wrought-iron railing, and her black eyes glass over as the drug takes hold.
“Better?” I ask.
She almost smiles, then says, her words thickening, “I know I’m just hallucinating this, but you’re my angel. You came back to me. I was so afraid to die alone in that house.”
The dusk deepens.
The first stars appear in the eerily black skies above Chicago.
“I’m so…light-headed,” she says.
I think of all the evenings we’ve sat on this porch. Drinking. Laughing. Bullshitting with the neighbors passing by as the streetlamps up and down the block winked on.
In this moment, my world seems so safe and perfect. I see now—I took all that comfort for granted. It was so good, and there were so many ways it could’ve all gone to pieces.
Daniela says, “I wish you could touch me, Jason.”
Her voice has become hoarse and brittle, little more than a whisper.
Her eyes close.
Each cycle of her respiration becomes longer by a second or two.
Until she stops breathing altogether.
I don’t want to leave her out here, but I know I shouldn’t touch her.
Rising, I move to the door and step inside. The house is silent and dark, and the presence of death clings to my skin.
I pass the candlelit walls of the dining room, move through the kitchen, and into the study. The hardwood floor creaks under my footsteps—the only sound in the house.
At the foot of the stairs, I stop and stare up into the darkness of the second floor, where my son lies rotting in his bed.
I feel the pull to go up there like the irresistible gravity of a black hole.
But I resist.
I grab the blanket draped over the couch, take it outside, and cover Daniela’s body.
Then I close the door to my house and walk down the steps and away from the horror.
I get in the car, start the engine.
Look over at Amanda.
“Thanks for not leaving me.”
“I should have.”
I drive away.
Some parts of the city have power.
Some are in the black.
My eyes keep welling up.
I can hardly see to drive.
Amanda says, “Jason, this isn’t your world. That wasn’t your wife. You can still go home and find them.”
Intellectually, I know she’s right, but emotionally, that just ripped my guts out.
I am hardwired to love and protect that woman.
We’re passing through Bucktown.
In the distance, an entire city block is hurling hundred-foot flames at the sky.
—
The interstate is dark and empty.
Amanda reaches over and pulls the mask off my face.
The smell of death from inside my home lingers in my nose.
I can’t shake it.
I keep thinking of Daniela, lying dead under a blanket on our front porch.
As we pass to the west of downtown, I glance out my window.
There’s just enough starlight to profile the towers.
They’re black, lifeless.
Amanda says, “Jason?”
“What?”
“There’s a car following us.”
I look in the rearview mirror.
With no lights, it looks like a phantom riding my bumper.
Blinding high beams and red-and-blues kick on, sending splinters of light through the interior of the car.
A voi
ce booms through a megaphone behind us: Pull your vehicle onto the shoulder.
Panic swells.
We have nothing to defend ourselves with.
We can’t outrun anything in this piece of shit.
I take my foot off the gas, watch the speedometer needle swing counterclockwise.
Amanda says, “You’re stopping?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I ease down on the brake pedal, and as our speed falls, I veer onto the shoulder and bring the car to a stop.
“Jason.” Amanda grabs my arm. “What are you doing?”
In the side mirror, I watch a black SUV pull to a stop behind us.
Turn off your vehicle and drop the keys out the window.
“Jason!”
“Just trust me.”
This is your last warning. Turn off the car and drop the keys out the window. Any attempt to flee will be met with lethal force.
A mile or so back, more headlights appear.
I shift the car into PARK and kill the lights. Then I lower my window several inches, stick my arm through, and pretend to drop a set of keys outside.
The driver’s-side door to the SUV opens, and a man in a gas mask steps out with his weapon already drawn.
I throw the car back into gear, hit the lights, and floor the accelerator.
I hear a gunshot over the roar of the engine.
A bullet hole stars the windshield.
Then another.
One rips into the cassette deck.
Looking back, I see the SUV now several hundred yards down the shoulder.
The speedometer is at sixty and climbing.
“How far are we from our exit?” Amanda asks.
“A mile or two.”
“There’s a bunch of them coming.”
“I see them.”
“Jason, if they catch us—”
“I know.”
I’m doing a little over ninety now, the engine straining to maintain speed, the RPMs inching into the red.
We blow past a sign giving notice that our exit is a quarter mile ahead on the right.
At this speed, we reach it in a matter of seconds.
I hit the exit at seventy-five and brake hard.
Neither of us are buckled in.
The inertia slams Amanda into the glove box and shoves me forward into the steering wheel.
At the end of the ramp, I take a brutal left turn through a stop sign—tires squealing, rubber burning. It slings Amanda against her door and nearly sends me flying into her seat.
As I drive across the overpass, I count five sets of flashing lights on the interstate, the closest SUV now speeding onto the exit ramp with two Humvees in tow.
We tear through the vacated streets of South Chicago.
Amanda leans forward, stares out the windshield.
“What is it?” I ask.
She’s looking at the sky.
“I see lights up there.”
“Like a helicopter?”
“Exactly.”
I scream through empty intersections, past the shuttered El station, and then we’re clear of the ghetto, speeding alongside abandoned warehouses and train yards.
In the boondocks of the city.
“They’re getting close,” Amanda says.
A round thunks into the trunk of the car.
Followed by three more in fast succession, like someone taking a hammer to metal.
She says, “That’s a machine gun.”
“Get down on the floorboard.”
I can hear the anthem of sirens drawing near.
This antiquated sedan is no match for what’s coming.
Two more rounds pierce the back window and the windshield.
One rips through the middle of Amanda’s seat.
Through the bullet-riddled glass, I see the lake straight ahead.
I say, “Hang on, we’re almost there.”
I make a hard right onto Pulaski Drive, and as a trio of bullets peppers the rear passenger door, I cut the lights.
The first few seconds of driving without headlights feels like we’re flying through total darkness.
Then my eyes begin to adjust.
I can see the pavement ahead, the black silhouettes of structures all around us.
It’s as dark as the countryside out here.
I take my foot off the gas, but I don’t touch the brake.
Glancing back, I see two SUVs make aggressive turns onto Pulaski.
Up ahead, I can just make out the pair of familiar smokestacks spearing the starlit sky.
Our speed is under twenty miles per hour, and though the SUVs are gaining fast, I don’t think their high beams have touched us yet.
I see the fence.
Our speed keeps dropping.
I steer across the road, and the grille smashes into the locked gate, splitting the doors apart.
We roll slowly into the parking lot, and as I maneuver around the toppled light poles, I look back toward the road.
The sirens are getting louder.
Three SUVs streak past the gate, trailed by two Humvees with machine-gun turrets mounted to their roofs.
I kill the engine.
In the new silence, I listen to the sirens fading away.
Amanda climbs up from the floorboard as I grab our pack from the backseat.
The slams of our doors bounce off the brick building straight ahead.
We move toward the crumbling structure and all that’s left of the original signage: CAGO POWER.
A helicopter buzzes overhead, a brilliant spotlight scraping across the parking lot.
Now I hear a revving engine.
A black SUV skids sideways across Pulaski.
Headlights blind us.
As we run toward the building, a man’s voice through a megaphone orders us to stop.
I step through the hole in the brick façade, give Amanda a hand inside.
It’s pitch-black.
Ripping open the pack, I quickly dig out the lantern.
The light reveals the destroyed front office, and the sight of this place in the dark takes me back to that night with Jason2, when he walked me naked and at gunpoint into another version of this old building.
We move out of the first room, the lantern piercing the darkness.
Down a hallway.
Faster and faster.
Our footsteps pounding the rotten floor.
Sweat runs down my face, stings my eyes.
My heart beats so hard it rattles my chest.
I’m gasping for breath.
Voices call after us.
I look back, see lasers cutting through the black and splotches of green from what I assume are night-vision goggles.
I hear the noise of radios and whispered voices and the rotors of the helicopter bleeding through the walls.
A torrent of gunfire fills the hallway, and we flatten ourselves against the ground until the shooting stops.
Struggling back onto our feet, we push on with even more urgency.
At a junction, I take us down a different hall, mostly sure it’s the right way though it’s impossible to be certain in the dark.
We finally emerge onto the metal platform at the top of the open stairs that lead down into the generator room.
We descend.
Our pursuers are so close I can pick out three distinct voices reverberating through the last hallway.
Two men, one woman.
I move off the last step, Amanda right on my heels as heavy footfalls clang on the stairs above us.
Two red dots crisscross my path.
I sidestep and keep running, straight into the darkness ahead, where I know the box has to be.
Gunshots ring out above us as two figures in full biohazard gear launch off the bottom of the stairs, hurtling toward us.
The box stands fifty feet ahead, the door open and the metallic surface gently diffusing the light of our incoming lantern.
Gunshot.
/> I feel something zip by my right ear like a passing hornet.
A bullet strikes the door with a spark of fire.
My ear burns.
A man behind us screams, “There’s nowhere to go!”
Amanda is first into the box.
Then I cross the threshold, turn, dig my shoulder into the door.
The soldiers are twenty feet away, so close I can hear them panting through their gas masks.
They open fire, and the blinding muzzle flashes and the bullets chinking into the metal of the box are the last I see and hear of that nightmare world.
—
We shoot up immediately and start walking down the corridor.
After a while, Amanda wants to stop, but I can’t.
I need to keep moving.
I walk for a full hour.
Through an entire cycle of the drug.
My ear bleeding all over my clothes.
Until the corridor collapses back into a single box.
I throw off the pack.
Cold.
Coated in dried sweat.
Amanda is standing in the center of the box, her skirt dirty and ripped, sweater torn off completely from our run through the abandoned power plant.
As she sets the lantern on the floor, something inside of me releases.
The strength, the tension, the anger, the fear.
Everything flooding out at once in a stream of tears and uncontrollable sobbing.
Amanda turns off the lantern.
I crumple down against the cold wall, and she pulls me over into her lap.
Runs her fingers through my hair.
AMPOULES REMAINING: 40
I come to consciousness in the pitch-black, lying on my side on the floor of the box, my back to the wall. Amanda is pressed up close against me, our bodies contoured together, her head resting in the crook of my arm.
I’m hungry and thirsty.
I wonder how long I’ve slept.
At least my ear has stopped bleeding.
It’s impossible to deny the reality of our helplessness.
Aside from each other, this box is the only constant we have.
A very tiny boat in the middle of a very large ocean.
It’s our shelter.
Our prison.
Our home.
—
Carefully, I untangle us.
Pulling off my hoodie, I fold it into a pillow and slide it under Amanda’s head.
She stirs but doesn’t wake.
I feel my way around to the door, knowing I shouldn’t take the risk of breaking the seal. But I have to know what’s out there, and the claustrophobia of the box is wearing on me.