Blake Crouch - Run

My day, he thought. Fire and water.

Black of night, he shot awake.

Not only explosions but gunfire now. Inside the city limits.

He climbed into the front seat and peered through the windshield.

The sky lit up-cushions of cloud overhead and snow falling out of them.

Darkness.

The delayed boom of whatever artillery shell had just exploded.

A brighter flash toward the horizon.

Then black.

No way he was going back to sleep.

JACK watched the sky lighten through the glass, his fists still clenching the steering wheel, as they had for the last two hours. Like listening to a hurricane come ashore and the intensifying terror of the eye wall creeping closer. The sound of war coming.

He straightened up in the seat, pushed open the door, stepped outside. Snow clung to everything, and he brushed it off the minivan’s sliding door to uncover Dee’s name.

Realized he was crying. What if the guards hadn’t allowed Cole into the city? Would Dee have even risked an entry this close to the border? No. She’d have gone around, tried to rush the kids across. They might even be in Canada by now. They might be dead in Wyoming. Might be anywhere. But not here. Not with him.

He sat down in the snow.

They weren’t coming.

They weren’t coming.

They weren’t-

The jackhammer pounding of a machinegun broke out what couldn’t have been more than a few blocks away.

He pulled himself up by the door handle and staggered out into the street which was lined with mostly two- and three-story buildings and trees with a few orange leaves left dangling.

Three blocks down, muzzleflashes blossomed from a top floor window.

The firing went on for a full minute.

When it stopped, silence fell upon the city.

Specks of snow seemed to hang weightless in the air.

Jack stood in the street for a long time, but the shooting was over.

He walked back to the minivan, suddenly hungry, but even more tired, and he was asleep seconds after his head hit the seat cushion. He slept so hard it seemed like barely a minute had passed, and then he was awake again, his eyes burning with strain and disorientation and a noise like Armageddon right on top of him.

He peered over the back of the seat, saw people running through the square, twenty feet beyond the front bumper of the van. Dressed like civilians, he thought, in shabby clothes so tattered they all appeared to be molting. The three men bringing up the rear held shotguns at waist-level. They were backpedaling and firing and Jack could see the abject fear in their faces laced with the mad rush of adrenaline, something screaming at him to get the fuck down, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. The shotguns thundered and one of the men collapsed and then the small platoon streamed into the Davidson building.

For fifteen seconds, nothing. No sound. No movement.

Then a company of black-clad men swarmed the square, some of them taking position behind the planters, a handful charging into the building.

Jack got down into the floorboard and flattened himself against the carpet, pulling the blanket on top of him as machineguns erupted all around him, men yelling over the mayhem, the shotguns booming down out of the building several floors above, pellets and rounds chinking into the side of the minivan, and then a window exploded, glass everywhere, and the van sank to one side, a tire punctured.

A man began to scream nearby, and Jack covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut and he was saying her name. He could feel his lips moving, though he couldn’t hear the words, not even inside his head, over the terrible noise.

An explosion blew out every window in the van and then came a lull.

Numerous footsteps pounded the concrete. Someone shouted, and the next time Jack heard gunshots, they sounded distant, muffled.

He waited for another minute, then slowly sat up. Brighter in the van with the tinted windowglass shot out. A half-dozen men lay scattered across the plaza, one of them still crawling.

On the fourth floor of the Davidson building a black crater smoked, ragged flames cutting through.

Jack made his way up into the driver seat and eased the door open.

Gunshots inside the Davidson building.

He stared at the bank. Twenty yards tops. Get inside. Find an office, crawl under a desk. Wait for silence.

He glanced back toward the Davidson building. A man stepped out of the lobby and walked into the square. He was looking at the minivan. Jack ducked as far as he could under the steering wheel. More voices. Orders being shouted. Fading away now. He eased up into the seat again and peered through the shattered windshield. The black-clad men had lined the civilian platoon up in the middle of the street. They were making them get down on their knees at gunpoint.

A man in a red bandana stood in front of the POWs. Jack could just hear his voice from the front seat of the van, telling them he would be pleased to shoot them each in the head, felt sure they would in turn be pleased with this outcome. However, if even one of them resisted, his unit would spend the rest of the day torturing them to death.

A handful of the civilians wept. He could see their shoulders bobbing. But no one moved.

The man in the red bandana went to the first civilian, pulled a handgun from his holster, and shot him between the eyes.

He went on down the line, stopping midway to reload, Jack watching the heads of the condemned snapping back, bodies toppling, found himself drawn to study the unimaginable bracing of the next one to die.

Ultimate tension, then emptiness, then ten people lay dead on the snow-dusted street where ten had knelt living thirty seconds before. The soldiers left them there, drifting on down Central Avenue toward the river, in a formation that made Jack certain they were military.

When the last man had slipped out of view, Jack breathed again, leaning forward, his forehead touching the steering wheel.

Staying here, in this plaza, wasn’t going to work. Not with the city under siege.

Meant pushing on.

As he lifted his head, the man in the red bandana reappeared around the corner of the Davidson building. He was walking back into the square, straight toward the van. Jack’s heart jumped from zero to afterburn, a hot spike of panic flooding in.

He slammed his shoulder into the door and barreled out of the minivan at a dead sprint toward the bank, waiting for the gunshots, waiting, the shattered windows rushing toward him, waiting. Just as he reached them, he heard three shots squeezed off faster than he could have imagined, and he was inside, untouched he thought, turning left now, bolting up a set of stairs into the mortgage department, dark save for where crumbs of daylight filtered in through the offices that overlooked the plaza.

Jack stopped.

He could hear the man’s footfalls in the lobby down below.

Now running up the stairs.

Jack moved into a large, open maze of cubicles and desks, his world getting darker every step he took away from those windows.

He got down on his hands and knees and crawled under a desk. Couldn’t see a thing. Panting. The noise deafening. He shut his eyes, tried to calm himself, and when his heart finally slowed, he heard the footsteps-soft as mice-moving into the mortgage department toward him.

He took long, slow inhalations through his nose, and even in the dark chill of the bank, lines of sweat were running down out of his hair into his eyes.

The man let out a sharp breath. Couldn’t have been more than four or five feet away.

His footsteps trailed off into the black, only audible when the boot tread caught on the carpet-an imperceptible scratch.

Jack’s legs burned. He’d crammed himself up underneath a desk, the wood digging into his backbone.