Blake Crouch - Run

“Jack.”

He looked over Dee’s head to where the desert sloped up to the base of the butte.

“Naomi, you see that large boulder fifty yards up the hill?”

“Where?”

Jack punched through the plastic window and tore it off the door. “There.”

“Jack, no.”

“Take your brother up there and hide behind the rock. No matter what happens, what you see or hear, don’t move, don’t make a sound, until we come get you.”

“What if you don’t?”

“We will.”

“I’m hungry,” Cole cried, eyes still half-closed, not fully awake.

“Go with your sister, buddy. We’ll eat something when you come back.”

“No, now.”

“Get him up that hill, Na, and keep him with you.” He faced Dee, her eyes welling.

“You sure about this, Jack?”

“Yes.” What a lie.

Naomi dragged Cole out of the car, but the boy fell crying to the ground, and he wouldn’t get up.

Jack squatted down in the dirt.

“Look at me, son.” He held the boy’s face in his hands.

“I’m hungry.”

He slapped Cole.

The boy went clear-eyed and hushed, stared at his father, tears running down his face.

“Shut up, and go with your sister right now, or you’re going to get us all fucking killed.” He’d never sworn at his son, never laid a hand on him before.

Cole nodded.

Naomi helped her brother to his feet and Jack watched as they jogged up the slope together, hand-in-hand. Jack looked at his wife. “Come on.”

They ran south for sixty or seventy yards, and then Jack pulled Dee down behind a piece of rock the size of a minivan that had calved off from the butte in another epoch.

Already Jack could hear the growl of an approaching engine.

Dee visibly trembling.

A Jeep appeared around the corner of the butte, kicking streamers of dust in its wake as the driver downshifted.

“Where’s the other truck, Jack?” He glanced back toward the Rover, didn’t see it coming.

“Stay here.”

“Where are you going?”

The Jeep sped toward them on a trajectory that would bring it past the boulder by twenty or thirty feet.

He stood. “Here.” Handed her the Glock. “Don’t move from this spot.”

Jack racked the slide and stepped out from behind the boulder and ran. Three men in the Jeep, and the one in back standing on the seat and holding onto the roll bar and a rifle, his long black hair blowing back. Jack slid to a stop in the dirt and pulled the stock into his shoulder and fired before they ever saw him. The driver started bleeding from several holes in his face and the long-haired man fell backward out of the Jeep into a sagebrush. Jack pumped the shotgun and got off another round as the Jeep drew even with him, registered a muzzleflash from the front passenger seat at the same instant the buckshot punched the third man out of the doorless Jeep, which veered sharply away and accelerated into the desert, the driver’s head bobbling off the steering wheel.

Dee shouted his name, and as he turned, fire blossomed in his left shoulder, coupled with a wave of nausea. A Ford F-150, beat to hell and coated in dust, rounded the north side of the butte. Jack sprinted back up the slope to Dee and crouched down beside her.

“How in the world did you just do that?” she asked.

“No idea.”

He dug two cartridges out of his pocket and fed them into the magazine tube and jacked a shell into the chamber.

The F-150 skidded to a stop beside the Rover. Two women jumped down out of the bed. Two men climbed out of the cab.

“Take this.” He gave her the shotgun, took back the Glock.

“You’re bleeding.”

“I know, I’m-”

“No, I mean you’re really bleeding.”

“Run like hell toward those mountains. When they follow, lay down in the dirt and let them get close and then open fire. Shoot, pump, shoot. Pump it hard. You won’t break it.”

“Jack.” She was crying now.

“They are going to kill our children.”

She stood and started down the slope into the desert.

He looked down at the Glock in his hand which felt so small and held not a fraction of that devastating twelve-gauge reassurance.

Then he was running across the slope, couldn’t feel his legs or the bullet in his shoulder, nothing but the shudder of his heart banging against his chest plate. He saw Dee being chased by two people into the desert and a man with a large revolver following a woman uphill toward the boulder where his children hid.

The man stopped and looked at Jack and raised his gun.

Between the two of them, they exchanged a dozen rounds that never came close to hitting anything.

The slide on Jack’s.45 locked back, the man struggling to break open the cylinder of his revolver, and the woman had nearly reached the boulder. She was thirty-something, blond, and holding an ax under the blade. Naomi and Cole still huddled behind the rock, Jack twenty yards away and moving toward them now at a dead run.

Shotgun reports tore out of the desert.

The woman disappeared behind the far side of the boulder and Jack screamed at his daughter to move over the roar of another shotgun blast.

The blonde emerged behind his children, hoisted the ax.

He crashed into her at full speed and drove her hard into the ground. Grabbed the first decent rock within reach and before he’d even thought about what he was doing, he’d broken open the woman’s skull with seven crushing blows.

Jack wiped her blood out of his eyes, picked up the Glock, and went to his children.

Naomi wept hysterically, holding her brother in her arms, shielding him.

The woman twitched in the dirt.

Down on the desert, someone groaned as they dragged themselves across the ground.

Not Dee.

Jack pushed the slide back and stepped out from behind the boulder with the empty Glock. The man stood ten feet downslope, pushing rounds into the open cylinder of his revolver, and when he looked up his eyes went wide like he’d been caught stealing or worse. Jack trained the Glock on him, a two-handed grip, but he couldn’t stop his nerves from making it shake.

The man seemed roughly the same age as the blonde, who Jack could hear moaning behind the rock. He was sunburned and stinking. Lips chapped. Wore filthy hiking shorts and a pale blue, long-sleeved tee-shirt covered in rips and holes and dark sweat- and bloodstains.

“Drop it.”

The revolver fell in the dirt.

“Move that way,” Jack said, directing him up the hill away from the gun. “Now sit.”

The man sat down against the boulder, squinting at the new sun.

“Naomi, you and Cole come here.” He glanced over his shoulder as he said it, glimpsed a small figure moving toward them on the desert-Dee. In the morning silence, he could still hear that Jeep heading toward the mountains, the noise of its engine on a steady decline.

The man glared at Jack. “Let me help Heather.”

Naomi came around the boulder, struggling to carry Cole who whimpered in his sister’s arms.

“Go put him in the car, Na.”

“Is Mom okay?”

“Yes.”

“I want to see Heather.”

Naomi looked at the man as she moved past. “Why? She’s dead. Just like you’re going to be.”

The man called for her, and when Heather didn’t answer, his face broke up and he buried it in the crook of his arm and wept.

Jack’s left shoulder had established a pulse of its own. Lightheaded, he eased down onto a rock, keeping the Glock leveled on the man’s chest.

“Look at me.”

The man wouldn’t.

“Look at me or I’ll kill you right now.”

The man looked up, wiped his face, tears cutting streaks of red through the film of dirt and dust.

“What’s your name?”