Blake Crouch - Run

It hit him. Pure exhaustion. The emotional expenditure of the day. Felt the call of sleep, and the idea of a few hours of unconsciousness, of checking out of all of this, had never sounded better.

The minivan still smelled like death.

He cracked all the windows and laid the front seat back as far as it would go.

WHEN his eyes opened he was staring through the windshield at the windows of an office building thirty feet above him. A sheet of clouds reflected in the dark glass. He sat up. Hungry. Cold. Opened the door and stepped down onto the plaza. Eighteen years ago, there had been a coffeehouse a block from here, and he could almost smell the memory of their French roast, feel how the heat of it had steamed into his face on mornings just like this.

He walked toward Central Avenue. Strange not to know the day, but he was certain it was November now. The sky certainly looked it, and the steel chill in the air felt it. Clouds soft and pregnant, debating whether to snow or drop cold rain.

Up and down the avenue, not a single car on the street. A few of the stores had been looted, broken glass on the sidewalk. Nothing moved but some dead leaves scraping across the road.

Jack went back at the minivan and looked inside. Don’s youngest daughter had been sitting in the third row from what Jack could tell. It looked to him like she’d made the space her own-iPod, magazines, books, a stuffed penguin that had been dragged around forever.

He lifted a drawing pad out of the floorboard, stared at a half-finished sketch of countryside that looked remarkably similar to the Montana waste where he’d stumbled upon this van. She had talent. All she’d used was a black Magic Marker to suggest a sharpened mountain range, miles of sagebrush, and the road that shot a lonely trajectory through that country. He wondered if she’d been drawing when her family was ridden down. A line stopped abruptly at the summit of a mountain, the downslope never finished. The black marker she’d used still lay uncapped on the carpet.

Jack picked a cigar box off the floor, raised the lid.

Markers, pastel pencils, miniature bottles of acrylic paint, charcoal, brushes, erasers, and a sterling silver-etched heart locket that only ten-year-old boys give to ten-year-old girls.

Couldn’t bring himself to open it.

He was all morning writing her name. Big, block letters on the sliding door, the black Sharpies showing up well on the minivan’s white paint. He used up three markers coloring in the letters, then took a bottle of white acrylic paint and brushed her name onto the dark plateglass windows of the surrounding buildings.

Walked out into the street to test the visibility.

Dee’s name couldn’t be missed, even from fifty yards away.

By early afternoon a light mist was falling, and he sat in the front seat behind the wheel, watching the beads of water populate the glass.

Drifted off and when he woke again it was dark and a harder rain falling. He crawled into the very back and stretched out across the young girl’s seat. Wrapped himself in a blanket that still carried her smell. Hungry but he thought he should start rationing his bag of junk food, which contained only twelve packages when he’d taken inventory this morning.

The rainfall on the minivan roof was a good sound. He thought about his family until it hurt too much, and then he went to sleep.

THUNDER is what it sounded like in his half-conscious state, and it made the windows tremble. Jack tugged the blanket away from his face, lay there listening to see if it would come again, thinking he might’ve dreamed it.

It came again. Not thunder.

This was a deeper, focused sound, and it didn’t roll across the sky.

He crawled out of the backseat and pulled open the side door.

Walked through the plaza into the street.

Late morning. A low cloud deck. The pavement wet.

He heard it again. Far off. Perhaps beyond the city. He’d never heard it before, not in real life, but he knew it was the sound of bombs exploding.

The plateglass on the first floor of the Wells Fargo bank had been smashed out some time ago. Jack stepped through into the lobby. Dark, silent. He looked at the vacant bank teller stations. The velvet rope lines. Signs for commercial and residential mortgage departments. A water fountain stood against the wall between the men’s and women’s restrooms. He walked over and turned the knob. Nothing. He went into the women’s restroom and tried the faucet. Dry. There was water in the toilets, but he wasn’t at that point just yet. Comforting to know it was here, though.

He crossed the plaza to the Davidson Building. The entrance doors were locked. The glass intact. He uprooted a baby fir tree from a concrete planter which must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. When he’d finally hoisted it up, he ran toward the doors and heaved the planter at the glass like an oversize shot put.

Straight through. Shattered across the marble floor.

He took his time stripping branches from the fir tree, relieved just to have something to occupy his mind. When he’d finished, he unbuttoned his outer shirt and tore it into long strips. Raised the hood of the minivan, unscrewed the cap to the oil tank, dipped the pieces of his shirt inside. He tied the oil-coated cloth around the end of the stick, no idea if this would even work. He’d seen some version of it on a TV survival show several years ago, but he kept thinking he was missing a step.

He held the glowing orange coils of the van’s cigarette lighter to a dry corner of the fabric.

A flame appeared, crept across the cloth, and then the end of Jack’s torch ignited.

It burned beautifully.

He laughed out loud.

Jack arrived on the fourth-floor landing, firelight flickering off the concrete walls of the stairwell. He opened the door and stepped out into a carpeted hallway. Moved down the corridor, brass nameplates catching torchlight. Stopped at a window with the words financial advisors stenciled across the glass. In the firelight, he could see a waiting area, several chairs, a small table stacked with magazines. Jack tried the door, then set the torch on the fire-retardant carpet, lifted the metal trashcan standing beside an elevator, and hurled it at the glass.

Through the office windows, daylight filtered in. Down the length of the wall, he studied a photographic series of grinning salesmen. He carried his torch into a breakroom and opened the refrigerator. A dozen cups of undoubtedly-spoiled yogurt. Something wrapped in tinfoil. A Styrofoam box of leftovers that smelled like a rotting corpse.

A water cooler stood nearby.

He lodged the torch in the sink and knelt down on the floor. Held his mouth under the tap and drank until his stomach ached.

He entered a corner office and sat in the leather chair behind the desk. Propped his feet up and stared at framed photographs-a soccer team of boys in green uniforms, a family-sunglassed and screaming-on a raft in the midst of whitewater, three beer-flushed men, arm-in-arm, in the fairway of a golf course. He swiveled around in the chair and rolled toward the window. A half mile to the west, he could see the Missouri. The water gray-green under the clouds. Plains beyond. Down in the plaza, the minivan stood glazed in rainwater.

A plastic inbox tray rattled on the glasstop.

The building shook.

Two seconds later, he heard the blast.

Miles away, south of town, black smoke lifted off the prairie.

He carried the half-filled canister of water down the stairwell and through the lobby.

Outside, a light rain fell, the air cold enough to cloud his breath.

He climbed into the minivan and curled up in the backseat under the little girl’s blanket. Shut his eyes. Rain hammering the metal roof.