Blake Crouch - Run

Dee lifted a bowl off the dashboard and handed it to him.

“It’s probably cooled off. I didn’t want to waste fuel keeping it warm.”

Tomatoes and rice, heavily seasoned, with pieces of jerky mixed in. He stirred it up and took a bite. He could hear Naomi’s iPod, and he wanted to tell her to turn it off. Ration the damn power so you can play it when you actually need a distraction. She’d forgotten to bring her charger, and when that battery died, the music was finished. But he said nothing. Pick your battles.

He glanced at his watch-a few hours later than he thought.

“This is good,” he said. “Really good.”

“I didn’t like it,” Cole said.

“Sorry, buddy. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we don’t have much food right now, so we have to be thankful for what we do have.”

“I still don’t like it.”

Dee said, “Another truck went by while you were sleeping.”

“Was the light on in here?”

“No, I heard the engine coming in time to blow it out.”

Jack finished off the bowl of rice and tomatoes. He was still hungry, figured everyone else was, too. His head pounding from caffeine deprivation.

“Where’s the water?”

Dee handed him a jug from the floorboard at her feet. He unscrewed the cap, tilted it back.

They put Naomi and Cole to bed and went across the stream together and out into the meadow. The sky had cleared. Stars shone like flecks of ice and the serrated ridge of a distant peak glowed brighter and brighter as the moon came up behind it.

Dee said, “I need to know that you have a plan, Jack.”

“We’re alive, aren’t we?”

“But where are we going? How will we stay alive?”

They walked into the road, the snow tracked through, and it suddenly dawned on Jack what they’d done.

“Shit. We aren’t thinking.” He pointed at the meadow where their footprints led back into the trees, advertising the location of their camp.

Dee pushed him hard enough to make him stumble back. “Tell me how we’re going to survive this. Tell me right now, because I don’t see it. Pure luck we weren’t all murdered today.”

“I don’t know, Dee. I couldn’t start a fucking fire with matches and tissue paper this afternoon.”

“I need to know you have a plan. Some idea of what-”

“Well, I don’t. Not yet. I just know we can’t stay here after tonight. That’s all I know.”

“Because of food.”

“Food and cold.”

“That’s not good enough, Jack.”

“What else do you want from me?”

“I want you to be a fucking man. Do what you don’t do at home. Take care of your family. Be there. Physically. Emotionally-”

“I’m trying.”

“I know. I know you are.” She sounded on the verge of tears. “I just can’t believe this is happening.”

Cole woke up crying in the night. Jack unzipped his sleeping bag, let the boy crawl inside with him.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” he whispered.

“I had a dream.”

“You’re okay. It wasn’t real.”

“It felt real.”

“You want to tell me what it was about? Sometimes, when you talk about them, nightmares don’t seem so scary.”

“You’ll be mad at me.”

“Why in the world would I be mad at you?”

“You told me not to look.”

“Did you dream about those people we saw in the street today?” He felt his little boy’s head nodding.

“You said you wouldn’t comfort me because you told me not to look.”

He wrapped his arms around Cole. “You feel that?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I will always comfort you, Cole.”

“Can I stay in your sleeping bag?”

“You promise to go right back to sleep?”

“I promise.”

“Try not to think about all the bad stuff, all right? It’ll only give you more nightmares. Think about a happy time.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. When were you last really happy?”

The boy was quiet for a minute.

“When we went to see Grandpa.”

“You mean last summer?”

“Yeah, and he let me run through the sprinkler.”

“Then think about that, okay?”

“Okay.”

Jack held his son as the pleasing weight of sleep settled back over him, and he was beginning to dream again when Cole whispered something.

“What’d you say, buddy?”

The boy turned over and put his mouth to Jack’s right ear: “I have to tell you something else.”

“What?”

“I know why the bad people are doing it.”

“Cole, quit thinking about that stuff. Good thoughts, okay?”

“Okay.”

Jack closed his eyes.

Opened them again.

“Why, Cole?”

“What?”

“Why do you think the bad people are doing it?”

“’Cause of the lights.”

“The lights?”

“Yeah.”

“What lights? What are you talking about?”

“You know.”

“Cole, I don’t.”

“The ones I saw that night I stayed at Alex’s house, and we went outside real late with all the people.”

Something like an electrical impulse shuddered through him. Jack shut his eyes and held his palm to the shallow concavity of his son’s chest.

THEY slept long into the following day. They slept like people with no good reason to wake. As if the world to which they went to bed might become reconciled to itself, if they could only sleep a bit longer.

When Jack drove back across the stream the water came halfway up the tires. It was early afternoon, and except for where the trees threw shade, the snow had disappeared from the meadow and the ground was supple. They turned onto the road. It descended. Muddy and crisscrossed with rivulets of brown water in the sunlight. Still snowpack in the trees. They came down out of the snow and the pure stands of spruce into aspen.

In the late afternoon, the road widened and became smoother and ran along the shore of a large mountain lake. Up ahead, Jack spotted a car on the side of the road-a luxury SUV with all four doors flung open.

He sped past at fifty miles per hour.

A quick glimpse: Parents. The woman naked, her thighs red. Three children. All facedown, unmoving in the grass.

Jack glanced in the rearview mirror. Naomi and Cole hadn’t noticed.

He looked over at Dee-she dozed against the plastic window.

The road went to pavement at dusk and they entered a mountain hamlet. Everything had been burned, the streets lined with the charred skeletons of houses and cars and gift shops, Jack thinking it must have been razed several days ago because nothing smoked. The air that streamed through the vents smelled like old, wet ash. His family slept. There was a field in the center of town near the school, browned and overgrown, with rusted, netless soccer goals at each end. At first, Jack thought someone had torched a mound of tires in the middle of that field until he saw a single black arm sticking up from the top of the heap.

They stabbed north into the night up a twisting, two-lane highway through the foothills of the San Juans, and they did not pass another car.

Jack pulled off the road into a picnic area beside a reservoir. They popped the back hatch of the Rover, and Dee fired up the propane-fueled camp stove and cooked a pot of chicken noodle soup from two old cans. They sat near the shore watching the moonrise and passing the steaming pot. After a night in the mountains, it felt almost warm.

“I like this better than the tomatoes and rice,” Cole said. “I could eat this every day.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Dee said.

Jack waved off his turn with the pot and stood up. He walked down to the edge and dipped his fingers in the water.