Run

by Blake Crouch

  He returned to the bedroom, dropped to his knees, his stomach, crawling under the bed frame until he grasped the steel barrel of the Mossberg, loaded and trigger-locked.

  Then back on his feet, down the hall, through the kitchen, the living room, foyer, right up to the front door, the lightbeam crossing adobe walls covered in photographs of his smiling family—vacations and holidays from another lifetime. Beside the door, on a table of wrought iron and glass, he grabbed his keys, his wallet, even his phone though there’d been no signal in two days. Jammed his feet into a pair of trail shoes still caked with mud from his last run in the Bosque, not even a week ago. He didn’t realize how badly his hands were shaking until he failed on the first two attempts to tie his shoelaces.

  Dee was struggling to fit a sleeping bag into a compression sack as he came down the steps into the garage.

  “We don’t have time for that,” he said. “Just cram it in.”

  “We’re running out of space.”

  He grabbed the sleeping bag from her and shoved it into the back of the Land Rover on top of the small cardboard box filled with canned food.

  “Throw the packs in,” he said as he lay the shotgun on the floor against the backseat.

  “You find the map?” Dee asked.

  “No. Just leave the rest of this shit. Here.” He handed her the plastic gun case and a box of 185 grain semijacketed hollowpoints. “See if you can load the Forty-five.”

  “I’ve never even shot this gun, Jack.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  Dee went around to the front passenger door and climbed in while Jack forced the cargo hatch to close. He reached up to the garage door opener, pulled a chain that disengaged the motor. The door lifted easily, cool desert air filling the garage. The spice of wet sage in the breeze reminded him of cheap aftershave—his father. A lone cricket chirped in the yard across the street. No houselights or streetlamps or sprinklers. The surrounding homes almost invisible but for the gentlest starlight.

  He caught the scent of cigarette smoke the same instant he heard the sound of footsteps in the grass.

  A shadow was moving across his lawn—a darker patch of black coming toward him, and something the shadow carried reflected the interior lights of the Land Rover as a fleeting glimmer of silver.

  “Who’s there?” Jack said.

  No response.

  A cigarette hit the ground, sparks scattering in the grass.

  Jack was taking his first step back into the garage toward the open driver side door, realizing everything was happening too fast. He wasn’t going to react in time to stop what was about to—

  “Don’t come any closer.” His wife’s voice. He looked over, saw Dee standing at the back of the SUV, pointing the .45 at the man who had stopped six feet away. He wore khaki canvas shorts, thong sandals, and a cream-colored oxford pollocked with bloodspatter. The glimmer was the blade of a butcher knife, and the hands that held it were dark with drying blood.

  Dee said, “Kiernan? What are you doing here?”

  He smiled. “I was just in the neighborhood. Been driving around, making some stops. I didn’t know you owned a gun. I’ve been looking for one myself.” Kiernan looked at Jack. “You must be Jack. We haven’t met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m the guy who’s been fucking your wife.”

  “Listen to me, Kiernan,” Dee said. “You’re sick. You need—”

  “No, I’m actually better than I’ve ever been.” He pointed the tip of the butcher knife at the Land Rover. “Where you going?”

  Tires screeched, an engine revved, and a few blocks away, headlights passed behind a hedge, light flickering through the crape myrtles like a strobe. A succession of distant pops erupted in the night.

  Jack said, “Dee we need to leave right now.”

  “Go back to your car, Kiernan.”

  The man didn’t move.

  Jack took a step back and eased himself into the driver seat.

  “Who is it out there, Daddy?” Cole asked.

  Jack fished the keys out of his pocket. Craned his neck, peering into the backseat at his tense children.

  “Naomi, Cole, I want you both to lay down in the backseat.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do what I tell you, Na.”

  “Dad, I’m scared.”

  “Hold your brother’s hand. You all right, Cole?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good man.”

  He started the engine as Kiernan receded into the darkness of the front yard.

  Dee jumped in beside him, slammed her door and locked it.

  “You know how to pick ’em, Dee.”

  “Do we have everything we need?”

  “We have what we have, and now it’s time to leave. Stay down, kids.”

  “Where are we going?” Cole asked.

  “I don’t know, buddy. No talking, all right? Daddy needs to think.”

  The dashboard clock read 9:31 p.m. as Jack shifted into reverse and backed out of the garage and down the driveway, nothing but the reddish glow of taillights to guide him. He turned into the street, put the car in drive. Hesitated, fingers searching for the automatic window control. The glass beside his head hummed down into the door. Over the idling of the Discovery’s engine, he heard another car approaching at high speed, headlights just becoming visible in the rearview mirror.

  He stomped the gas, the Discovery accelerating through pure darkness.

  “Jack, how can you see?”

  “I can’t.”

  He made a blind turn onto the next street, drove for several blocks in the dark.

  Dee said, “Look.”

  A house burned on the corner up ahead, flames shooting out of the dormers, the branches of an overhanging cottonwood fringed with embers while molten leaves rained down into the lawn.

  “What is it?” Naomi asked.

  “A house on fire.”

  “Whose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want to see.”

  “No, Cole. Stay down with your sister.”

  They sped up the street.

  “I’m going to run us into something.” Jack flipped on the headlights. The console lit up. “You’re kidding me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Way under a quarter of a tank.”

  “I told you it was getting low last week.”

  “You aren’t capable of pumping gas into a car?”

  Three houses down, the headlights swept over two trucks that had pulled onto the lawn of an expansive adobe house.

  Jack slowed.

  “That’s the Rosenthals’ place.”

  Through the drawn shades of the living room windows: four loud, bright flashes.

  “What was that, Dad?”

  “Nothing, Na.”

  He gunned the engine and glanced over at Dee, a deathgrip on the steering wheel to keep his hands steady. Nodded at the gun in his wife’s lap.

  “Wasn’t even loaded, was it?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  The university campus loomed empty and dark as Dee ripped open a box of ammunition. They passed a row of dorms. The quad. The student union. A squat brick building whose third floor housed Jack’s office. It occurred to him that today would have been the deadline for his bioethics class to hand in their papers on euthanasia.

  “There’s a button on the left side behind the trigger,” he said. “I think it releases the magazine.”

  “Are you talking about a gun?” Cole asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to shoot somebody?”

  “It’s only to protect us, buddy.”

  “But you might have to kill someone?”

  “Hopefully not.” Jack watched Dee thumb another semijacketed round into the magazine.

  “How many will it hold?” she asked.

  “Nine, I think.”

  “Where are we going, Jack?”

  “Lomas Boulevard, then the interstate.”

  �
�And then?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to work that—” Two sets of headlights appeared a hundred yards ahead. “Jesus Christ.”

  “You see them, Jack?”

  “Of course I see them.”

  “What’s happening, Dad?”

  In the rearview mirror, a third set of headlights rushed toward them.

  “Jack, do something.”

  His foot depressed the brake pedal into the floorboard.

  “Jack.”

  “Sit up kids.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Naomi, Cole, sit up. Give me the gun.”

  Dee handed over the .45, which he stowed under his seat.

  “What are you doing, Jack?”

  He took his foot off the brake, the Discovery nearing the roadblock.

  “Jack, tell me what you’re—”

  “Shut up. Everybody shut up.”

  A large oak had been felled across the road, the middle section excised and two pickup trucks parked in front, blocking passage, their highbeams glaring into the night.

  Dee said, “Oh, God, they’re armed.”

  Jack counted four people standing in front of the vehicles, silhouetted by the headlights. One of their them came forward as the Discovery closed within ten yards—a man wearing an Isotopes baseball cap and a red windbreaker. He trained a shotgun on the Discovery’s windshield and extended his right hand for Jack to stop.

  Jack shifted into park, locked the doors.

  “I’ll do the talking. Nobody say a word.”

  The third truck pulled within several feet of the Discovery’s back bumper, its headlights halfway up the glass of the back hatch, so they shone directly into the rearview mirror. The man with the shotgun produced a flashlight and circled the Land Rover, shining the beam through every window before arriving back at Jack’s door, where he tapped the glass and made circles in the air with his right pointer finger. Jack noted a cold trickle of sweat gliding over the contours of his ribs. He found the switch, lowered the window eight inches.

  “What’s going on?” he said, and it came out naturally enough, like he’d been pulled over for a blown taillight, just some annoying traffic stop in the flow of an otherwise normal day.

  The man said, “Turn the interior lights on.”

  “Why?”

  “Right now.”

  Jack hit the lights.

  The man leaned forward, the sharp tang of rusted metal wafting into the car, Jack watching the eyes behind the square, silver frames, the glasses of an engineer, he thought—large, utilitarian. Those eyes took in his wife, his children, before settling back on Jack with a level of indifference, verging on disgust, that prior to this moment was completely alien to his experience.

  The man said, “Where you off to so late?”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  When the man just stared and made no response, Jack said, “I don’t know what this is all about, but we’re going to move on here.”

  “I asked you where you’re going.”

  Jack tried to wet the roof of his mouth with his tongue, but it had gone dry as sandpaper.

  “Just up to Santa Fe to see some friends.”

  The driver’s door of the truck behind them opened. Someone stepped down onto the pavement and walked over to join the others at the roadblock.

  “Why do you have packs and jugs of water in the back of your car?”

  “We’re going camping. There’s mountains up that way if you hadn’t heard.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to Santa Fe.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

  “Give me your driver’s license.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The man racked a fresh shell into the chamber, and the awful noise of the pump action set Jack’s heart racing.

  “All right,” he said. He opened the center console, took out his wallet, spent ten seconds trying to slide his license out of the clear plastic sleeve. He handed it through the window, and the man took it and walked over to the trucks and the other men.

  Dee whispered through tears, “Jack, look out your window at the other side of the road.”

  Where the light from the trucks diffused into the barest strands of illumination, Jack saw a minivan parked in a vacant lot, and just a few feet from it, four pairs of shoes poking up through the tall, bending grass, the feet motionless and spread at forty-five degree angles, toes pointing toward the sky.

  “They’re going to kill us, Jack.”

  He reached under his seat, lifted the .45 into his lap.

  The man coming back toward the Discovery now.

  “Dee, kids,” Jack said as he shifted into reverse, “unbuckle your seatbelts right now and when I clear my throat, get down as low as you can into the floorboards and cover your heads.”

  The man reached his window.

  “Get out of the car. All of you except the boy.”

  “Why?”

  The shotgun barrel passed over the lip of the windowglass, stopping six inches from Jack’s left ear. So close he could feel the heat from recent use radiating off the steel.

  “This is not the way you want to handle this, Mr. Colclough. Turn off the engine.”

  The other men walked over.

  Jack cleared his throat and jammed his foot into the gas pedal, the Land Rover lurching back, a winch punching through the rear window, glass spraying everywhere. He grabbed the smoldering barrel with one hand and shifted into drive with the other. The shotgun blast ruptured his eardrum and blew the glass out of a window, the recoil ripping the barrel out of his hand along with several layers of cauterized skin. He could hear only a distant ringing, like a symphony of old telephones buried deep underground. Muzzleflashes and the front passenger window exploded, shards of glass embedding themselves in the right side of his face as he pushed the gas pedal into the floor again and cranked the steering wheel to miss the branches of the downed oak tree.

  The Discovery tore through the grass and weeds of the vacant lot, the jarring so violent at this speed, Jack could barely keep his grip on the steering wheel. He turned up a grassy slope and took the Land Rover through a six-foot fence at thirty miles per hour into the backyard of a brick ranch. Plowed over a rose garden and a birdbath, then broke through the fence again near the house and raced down the empty driveway and onto a quiet street.

  He hit seventy-five within four blocks, blowing through two-way stops, four-way stops, and one dark traffic signal until he saw lights in the distance—the fast-approaching intersection with Lomas Boulevard.

  He let the Discovery begin to slow, finally brought it to a full stop on the curb, and shifted into park. Darkness in the rearview mirror, no incoming headlights. He tried to listen for the sound of tailing cars, but he heard only those muffled telephones and the painful bass throbbing of his left eardrum. He was shaking all over.

  He said, “Is anybody hurt?”

  Dee climbed out of the floorboard and said something.

  “I can’t hear you,” he said. In the backseat, he saw Naomi sitting up. “Where’s Cole?” Dee squirmed around and leaned into the backseat, reaching down into the floorboard where Cole had taken cover. “Is Cole okay?” The murmur of voices grew louder. “Would someone please tell me if my son is okay?”

  Dee leaned back into the front seat, put her hands on her husband’s face, and pulled his right ear to her lips.

  “Stop shouting. Cole’s fine, Jack. He’s just scared and balled up on the floor.”

  He drove six blocks to Lomas Boulevard. This part of the city still had power. The road luminous with streetlights, traffic lights, the glow of fast-food restaurant signs that stretched for a quarter mile in either direction like a glowing mirage of civilization. Jack pulled through a red light and into the empty westbound lanes. The orange reserve tank light clicked on.

  As they passed through the university’s medical campus, someone stepped out into the road, and Jack had to swerve
to miss them.

  Dee said something.

  “What?”

  “Go back,” she shouted.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “That was a patient.”

  He turned around in the empty boulevard and drove back toward the hospital and pulled over to the curb. The patient already halfway across the road and staggering barefoot like he might topple—tall and gaunt, his head shaved, a scythe-shaped scar curving from just above his left ear across the top of his scalp, the kind of damage it would have taken a couple hundred stitches to close. The wind rode the gown up his toothpick legs.

  Jack lowered his window as the man collided breathlessly into his door. He tried to speak but he was gulping down breaths of air and emanating the hospital stench of sanitized death.

  At last the man raised his head off his forearms and said in a voice gone soft and raspy from disuse, “What’s happening? I woke up several hours ago. The doctors and nurses are gone.”

  Jack said, “How long have you been in the hospital?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know how you got there?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You’re in Albuquerque.”

  “I know that. I live here.”

  Jack shifted into park, eyeing the rearview mirror. “It’s October fifth—”

  “October?”

  “Things started about a week ago.”

  “What things?”

  “At first, it was just bits on the news that would catch your attention. A murder in a good neighborhood. A hit-and-run. But the reports kept coming and there were more everyday and they got more violent and unbelievable. It wasn’t just happening here. It was all over the country. A police officer in Phoenix went on a shooting rampage in an elementary school and then a nursing home. There were fifty home invasions in one night in Salt Lake. Homes were being burned. Just horrific acts of violence.”