Blake Crouch - Run

Jack woke several hours later to Cole moaning.

“Dee?”

“What is it?”

Still couldn’t see a thing in the dark.

“Something’s wrong with Cole. He’s shivering.”

Dee’s hand slid over his and onto the boy’s face.

“Oh, Jesus, he’s burning up.”

“Why’s he shaking?”

“He has the chills. Let me have him.”

She took Cole into her arms and rocked him and hushed him and Jack lay in the dirt as the sound of rain striking the tin roof tried to carry him off.

COLE looked pale in the gray dawnlight that filtered into the ruins of the stable.

Jack said, “What is it do you think?”

“I can’t tell if it’s viral or bacterial, but it’s getting worse.”

“We’ll stay here for the day. Let him rest.”

“A fever is very dehydrating. He needs water.”

“You want to keep moving?”

“I think we have to.”

“What else can we do for him?”

Tears welling, she shook her head. “Let’s try to find some water, then get him someplace warm and dry. That’s all we can do.”

Dark swollen clouds.

Cold.

Everything wet and dripping.

Jack carried Cole in his arms.

The boy had woken but his eyes were milky and unfocused. Not present.

They went down through the pine forest to the road.

The first mile was a straight and steady climb. Then the road curved through a series of switchbacks, and when Jack looked down again, Cole was sleeping.

In the bend of the next turn, he stopped and squatted down in the road, keeping Cole’s head supported so he wouldn’t wake.

“There’s no way,” Jack said. “I could carry him on my shoulders for a little while longer, but not like this.”

“We can rest,” Dee said.

“Resting isn’t going to make my arms stronger. He weighs fifty-four pounds. I just can’t physically hold him.”

He looked around. They had hiked up into snow-a sloppy inch of it upon everything except the asphalt, the evergreen branches dipping and bouncing back as the snow sloughed off.

“Jack, what do you-”

“Just let me rest for a minute. He’s sleeping, and I don’t want to wake him.”

They sat in the road. Everything still except the melting snow. The wind in the spruce trees. Cole shivered in his sleep and Jack wrapped his jacket around him. Every five minutes, Dee would lay her hand against the boy’s forehead.

Naomi asked, “Is he going to die?”

“Of course not,” Jack said.

They ate enough snow to quench their thirst and make them all much colder, and Jack fed Cole pieces of slush. After an hour, they struggled onto their feet and went on. The road kept climbing. Soon there was slush on the pavement, then snow. Instead of cradling him, Jack found he could manage the weight better by carrying Cole draped over his left shoulder. They would walk a ways and then stop and start up again, the periods of walking getting shorter, the rests longer.

It snowed off and on through the day, the road leading them back up into high country. Toward late afternoon, they came across a deserted construction site, Jack’s heart lifting at the prospect of finding a pickup truck or even a forklift, but the only motorized equipment left behind had been a small crane, its snow-dusted framework looming over stockpiles of corrugated steel drainage pipe.

They spent the night inside one of the sixty-foot lengths of pipe, Jack sitting by the opening watching the snow come down until the light was gone. Listening to Dee whisper to Cole, the boy crying, mumbling gibberish, delirious with fever. Considering the state of their distressed little nation, he had no intention of falling asleep, but he shut his eyes just for a moment and

WHEN he opened them again, it was light out and the sky bright blue through the spruce trees and a half foot of fresh snow on the ground.

Naomi’s snoring echoed through the pipe.

He looked over at Dee who was awake and still holding Cole.

She said, “His fever broke about an hour ago.”

Had he been standing, the relief would have knocked Jack over.

“Did you even sleep?” he asked.

She shook her head. “But I can feel it coming now.”

Jack looked outside, snow glittering in the early sunlight. “I’m going to have a look around.”

“Food today,” she said.

“What?”

“One way or another, we have to find some food. Today. It’ll have been five days tonight since we last ate, and at some point in the not too distant, we won’t have the strength to keep moving. Our bodies just cannot continue to perform like this.”

He looked past Dee toward his daughter, sleeping in the shadows. “Na’s okay?”

“She’s okay.”

“You?”

Dee broke a smile. “I’ve lost probably twenty, twenty-five pounds these last three weeks. I can’t stop thinking how hot I’d look in a little bikini.”

Jack crossed the construction site, climbed up onto the track of the crane. The door had been left unlocked and he scoured the cab. Found three balled-up potato chip bags and a paper cup filled a quarter of the way with what appeared to be frozen cola.

He set the cup in the sun and moved back between the rows of stacked pipe.

The road was covered in snow.

He went up the hill, inhaling deep shots of freezing, snow-cleansed air. His stomach groaned. It felt good to be up early and walking in the woods with the sun streaming through the trees.

Someone shouted.

Jack stopped in the road, glanced back, but the sound hadn’t come from the construction site.

More voices spilled down through the trees.

He deliberated for three seconds, then started up the road, fighting for traction as he sprinted through powder.

The voices getting louder.

When he came around the next curve, there was a green sign that read “Togwotee Pass, ELEV 9658.”

In the distance, a lodge. Gas station. Tiny cabins off in the spruce trees.

The parking lot was crowded with an array of vehicles-dozen civilian cars and SUVs, three Humvees, two armored personnel carriers, one Stryker, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and a big rig with two Red Cross insignias emblazoned on the trailer that framed the words, “Refugee Relief.”

Jack headed toward a group of men in woodland camo BDUs standing by the gas pumps. One of them spotted him, and without a word to the others, shouldered his M16 which had been fitted with a nightscope. The rest of the men saw his reaction, drew their own weapons, and turned to face Jack.

He stopped, staring at five men pointing a variety of firearms in his direction, and the first thing to cross his mind was that it had been nine days since they’d fled the cabin, and how strange it felt to see people who weren’t his family again.

“Where’d you come from?”

Jack bent over to catch his breath, pointed back down the road. The man closest to him was the one who’d spoken. A redhead. Very pale. Freckled. Looked to be his age, his height, but with thirty added pounds of muscle and only a two-day beard. He pointed a Sig Sauer at Jack’s face.

Said, “You’re on foot?”

“Yes.”

“Carrying any weapons?” Jack had to think, realized he’d left the Glock back at the pipe with Dee, and considering the firepower on hand, figured that was probably a good thing.

“No, nothing.”

The man waved a hand toward the others and they lowered their machineguns.

“Where you from?”

Jack straightened. “Albuquerque. Been hiking through the mountains last week and a half. Haven’t had food in five days.”

The man holstered his pistol and smiled, said, “Well, by God, somebody get this man an MRE,” but no one moved.