Blake Crouch - Run

Jack climbed in behind the wheel and cranked the engine as Dee slammed her door and lowered the window.

His mind ran hot, trying to orient himself in the city.

Essentially two routes north-I-15 to Sweetgrass or Highway 87 to Havre.

He shifted into gear and eased the Jeep down through the steaming grass onto the pavement, the heat from the building across the street so intense it broke him out into a sweat.

He punched the gas, felt the wind and smoke streaming through the windshield into his face. The glass had been shot out, and that was going to make driving at high speed infinitely more difficult.

By the time he rolled up on the next intersection, he’d decided to try the highway north out of town. Jack glanced over at Dee, who already had the machinegun shouldered and aimed out the window. He tapped her leg, mouthed, “You ready?” She nodded. He glanced into the backseat, saw his children down in the floorboards, didn’t know if they could hear him, but he yelled, “Kids, do not lift your heads no matter what happens.”

Jack turned onto 3 rdAvenue North and gunned the engine.

In the distance, tracers streamed into the low cloud deck, giving the eastern sky a radioactive burn.

They were doing eighty down the street, and he could barely see a thing in the absence of headlights and with the wind and smoke rushing into his face.

They shot through several dark blocks where nothing had been touched, Jack driving blind. He had reached to turn on the headlights when muzzleflashes erupted all around them like a swarm of fireflies, bullets striking the Jeep on every side and the windows exploding in fountains of glass, the racket of Dee’s machinegun filling the car as she screamed at him to go faster.

They sped away from the gunfire.

One block of peace.

Jack uncertain whether his hearing was improving or if they were coming up on another battle but the sound of gunfire and exploding mortar shells became audible over the groaning engine.

At the next junction, he looked down the intersecting street and saw a tank rolling toward them, flanked by a pair of Strykers.

A quarter mile ahead, a succession of ten closely-staggered explosions lit up four city blocks, and Jack could feel the road shuddering underneath him, everything illuminated brighter than midday, as if the sun had gone supernova. He could see people drawn to the windowframes of almost every building they raced past-unarmed, doomed, gaunt faces awash in firelight.

In the rearview mirror, Jack saw that one of the Strykers had launched out ahead of the tank. From it issued several splinters of light and a low-frequency, concussive report, like someone pounding nails. Two 50-caliber rounds punched through the back hatch, one of them obliterating the dash.

They had reached the blast zone, and up ahead, the road vanished into towers of incomprehensible fire.

Jack swung a hard left and drove up a sidestreet parallel to an elementary school, carpet-bombed into molten rubble.

The street teemed with people on fire who had fled the building, fifty of them he would have guessed. Their collective screams as they literally melted onto the pavement made Jack pray for deafness.

He was trying to drive around them, but they kept stumbling in front of the Jeep, and that Stryker was coming, nothing to do but drive through them, over them, Dee screaming, “Oh dear God,” over and over, and then she started shooting.

Two blocks from the school, Jack spotted the sign for the highway, and he veered onto the road and pushed the gas pedal into the floorboard.

The street was empty and they were screaming north, all the fire and death confined to the rearview mirrors.

They shot across a river and through the northern outskirts of the city.

Jack finally turned on the headlights.

They were pushing a hundred now into a vast and welcoming darkness.

North of town, nothing but black, endless prairie. Even forty miles out, they could still see the glow of everything burning and the tracer fire arcing through the sky. Jack had found a pair of sunglasses under the parking brake. He wore them against the wind, driving northeast now, the speedometer pegged and the noise like standing under a waterfall. The kids, and now Dee, crouched in the floorboards to escape it, but he didn’t mind. The rush of wind meant that every passing second that city was falling farther and farther behind, and the Canadian border rushing closer.

Jack had just glanced at the ruined dash, wondering about the time, when he noticed the line of deep blue-just a single shade up from black-lying across the eastern horizon.

DEE woke in the front passenger floorboard, cramped as hell, cold, and staring up at her husband who wore sunglasses, his hair blown back, face ruddy with windburn and the glow of what she guessed was sunrise. It was loud and the Jeep rode rough-either the shocks had given out or they were no longer traveling on a paved road.

She watched him. Even with the heavy beard coming in, he looked so thin, and her heart was swelling. She’d lost him, felt the awful vacuum of their separation, and now she had him back, sitting three feet away. For once, she knew what she had, the kind of man he was, even in the face of all this. Knew she didn’t need another thing for the rest of her life except to be with him. There was such a peace that accompanied that knowledge.

Jack must have felt her stare, because he looked down at her, grinning, but then his brow furrowed.

He touched her cheek.

She wiped the tears away and shook her head and climbed up into her seat.

Grassland. Far as she could see. Not a building in sight. Not a road. They were driving across the prairie.

Jack brought the Jeep to a stop in the grass and killed the engine.

The silence was astounding. It threw her into a state of semi-shock, her ears still ringing after last night.

She glanced into the backseat. Naomi and Cole lay curled up in their respective floorboards. She held her hands against their backs, confirmed the rise and the fall.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Her voice sounded muffled inside her head, like it was sourcing from a remote outpost.

Jack’s came back equally distant, “North of Havre. I figure the border’s about ten miles that way.” He pointed through the gaping windshield toward a horizon of grass, everything glazed with frost.

“Why’d you stop?” she asked.

“Engine’s been in the red awhile now. Plus, I have to pee.”

Jack stood pissing the ice off the grass and trying to come to grips with the massive silence. White smoke trickled out of the Jeep’s grille, and he could hear something hissing under the hood. Wondered if he’d toasted the water pump pushing the Jeep as hard as he had. He’d been taking it easy since leaving the paved roads north of Havre and driving onto the prairie, hoping it’d be the slower but safer route.

He walked back to the Jeep, climbed behind the wheel. Dee had set a few bottles of water and a pack of crackers on the center console, and they shared a meager breakfast together and watched the sun lift out of the plains.

It took an hour for the engine to cool, and then Jack cranked the Jeep and they went on. His attention stuck on the temperature gauge, the needle climbing much faster than he would’ve liked, passing the halfway point after only a mile, and edging into the red at two.

Finally shut it down at 2.75 miles. Jack wondered if he’d killed the engine, because smoke was pouring out of the grill now.

Jack got out, raised the hood.

Wafts of smoke and steam billowed out, and it smelled bad, too, like things had cooked that shouldn’t have. He had no idea what he was looking at, didn’t even really know what the fuck a water pump was, or what function it served beyond stopping this from happening.