by Blake Crouch
Jack ran ten feet into the woods and slid out of his pack. He prostrated himself behind a log. Couldn’t hear a thing over his own panting and he closed his eyes and buried his face in the leaves until the pounding in his chest decelerated.
When he looked up again, four figures stood behind the shed where his family had hid just moments ago. Three others joined them.
Someone said, “Where’s Frank?”
“In the field. He caught some pellets in his neck.”
A woman walked over, the helve of an ax resting on her shoulder.
She said, “I saw someone run into the woods a minute ago.”
A beam of light struck the ground. “Let’s head in. Only four. And two of them children.”
Another light.
Another.
Someone shot their beam through the woods. Jack ducked behind the log, the light slanting past him, firing the fringes of the bark. They were still talking, but he’d lost their voices with his face jammed up under the log and straining to fish the twelve gauge shells out of his pocket. Jack was on the brink of shifting to another position but the footfalls stopped him.
They approached him now—must have been all eight of them—filling the woods with the dry rasp of crushing leaves. Someone stepped over the log and the heel of a boot came down inches from Jack’s left arm. He caught the scent of rancid body odor. He watched them move by, eight distinct fields of light sweeping the woods. He wondered how far in his family had made it, if Dee had any concept of what was coming her way.
After a while, he rolled out from under the log and sat up. Glanced back toward the shed. Into the woods again. He could hear the footfalls growing softer, indistinguishable and collective like steady rain, glimpsed the bulbs of distant light and occasionally a full beam where it swung through mist.
Jack dug into his pocket for the shells, fed in the last four.
Six rounds. Eight people.
He stood up and got his pack on.
Jacked a shell, started toward the lights.
After forty yards, the stream-murmur filtered in, and soon there was nothing but the sound of it and the cool, sweet smell of the water.
He eased down onto the bank. The lights had moved on. Blackness everywhere. Thinking he’d told Dee to get to the stream, but she may have seen the group of flashlights coming, been forced to go elsewhere. The urge to call out for her overwhelmed him.
He got up, started hiking again.
Sometimes the starlight would find a way down through the trees and he would catch a glimpse of the stream like black glass, warped and fissured, but mainly it was impossible to see anything. He didn’t dare use the Mag-Lite.
Fifteen minutes of blind groping brought him a quarter mile uphill.
He collapsed in a patch of cold, damp sand and stared back the way he’d come. He tried to catch his breath, but the longer he sat there the panic festered inside of him. Finally he rose to his feet, running uphill now, running until his heart felt like it was going to swell out of his chest. He went on like this for he didn’t know how long, and every time he stopped it was still just him alone in the woods and the dark.
* * * * *
THE violence of his own shivering woke him.
Jack lifted his head out of the leaves. Dawn. A moment before. Frail blue light upon everything in the brutal cold. He had dreamed but they were too sweet and vivid to linger on.
Worked his way up the mountain for thirty minutes before stopping streamside by a boulder covered in frosted moss. He looked around. Wiped his eyes. Considered all the ways they could have fucked this up—he might have gone upstream when he should’ve hiked down, or Dee and the kids had pushed hard all night and gotten too far ahead of him, or he’d unknowingly passed them in the dark, or maybe they hadn’t even stayed with the stream and become lost elsewhere on this endless mountain.
Another two hundred yards and he came around a large boulder, saw three people lying huddled together in the leaves on the opposite bank.
He stopped. Looked down at his shoes. Looked up again. Still there, and he didn’t quite believe it, even as he rock-hopped to the other side of the stream.
Dee stirred at the sound of his footsteps, then bolted upright with the Glock trained on his chest. He smiled and his eyes burned and then he was holding her as she shook with sobs.
“Do you know how easy it would’ve been for you to pass us by in the dark?” she whispered.
“But that didn’t happen,” he said.
“I heard all those gunshots. I thought you had—”
“That didn’t happen. I found you.”
“I didn’t know if we should wait or keep going, and then I saw all those lights in the woods, and we just—”
“You did exactly what you should have.”
Naomi sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked at her father, scowling.
“Hey,” she said.
“Morning, Sunshine.”
“We can’t go back,” Jack said. He was staring down at the bag of soupcans Dee had brought and the contents of his backpack, which he’d spread out in the leaves. A tent. Two sleeping bags. Water filter. Camp stove. Map. Not much else.
“But what if they leave?”
“Why would they? I saw their cars, Dee. They have no provisions, haven’t fallen in with a big group, so they’re facing the same problems we were—no gas, no water, no food. And they just stumbled across all those things at the cabin, plus shelter, plus two hundred pounds of meat in the freezer.”
“Jack, that place is perfect. We could have—”
“There’s eight of them. Eight armed adults. We’d be slaughtered.”
“Well, I don’t much feel like wandering aimlessly through the wilderness.”
“Not aimlessly, Dee.” He knelt down and opened the Wyoming roadmap. “We’re here,” he said, “northern edge of the Wind Rivers. We’re actually not that far from the east side of the mountains.” He traced a black line north. “Let’s shoot for this highway.”
“How far is it?”
“Fifteen, twenty miles tops.”
“Jesus. And then what, Jack?” He could hear the emotion rising in her voice. “We reach this road in the middle of nowhere, and then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Well, I know. We’ll need a big fucking miracle. Because that’s how we’re going to stay alive from here on out, Jack. Big fucking miracles. That’s how bad a shape we’re in, and you want us to hike across these—” Her voice broke and she turned away and walked off into the woods.
“Mom.” Naomi started after her, but Jack caught his daughter’s arm.
“Let her go, baby. Just give her a minute.”
They were all day hiking the mountainside. The aspen giving way to evergreens the higher they climbed. The stream shrinking toward headwaters, burbling softer and softer, until at last it disappeared into a rocky hole in the mountain, never to be heard from again.
Stopped while there was still plenty of light at a small lake at nine thousand feet. It backed up against a two hundred-foot cliff which had calved a rock glacier into the water—giant boulders half-submerged on the far side.
Jack raised the tent and collected fir cones and browned needles and more wood than they could burn in three nights.
He walked to the edge of the lake as the sun fell. The water looked black. So still as to suggest ice or obsidian, except for the slow concentric circles that eddied out when a trout surfaced. He kept reminding himself what a beautiful place this was, that they could be suffering on the East Coast, or in Albuquerque, or be dead like so many others. But somehow the bright side of things had burned out tonight, and the light draining out of the sky and the lake’s reflection of it just felt tragic.
He glanced back at his family—sitting outside the tent, waiting for him to get the fire going. Got up and started toward them. A day’s worth of walking in his swollen knees and lots more of that to come.
His children looked
up at his approach.
He forced himself to smile.
In the middle of the night, Cole said, “What’s that sound?”
Jack lay beside him on the sleeping bag. It had woken him, too, and he whispered, “Just that rockfall across the lake.”
“Is someone throwing rocks?”
“No, they’re shifting.”
“What are those splashes?”
“Fish jumping out of the water.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You want me to go out there and tell them to cut it out?”
“Yes.”
“It’s okay. I promise. Go back to sleep.”
“No one’s coming after us?”
“We’re safe up here, Cole.”
“I’m hungry.”
“We’ll eat something in the morning.”
“First thing?”
“First thing.”
The boy fell back asleep almost instantly but Jack lay awake, trying to ignore the rock jutting up through the bottom of the sleeping bag into his side. The moon was bright through the tent walls. He listened to everyone’s heavy breathing, thinking how, in his lifetime, he’d lain awake at night worrying over so much pointless shit—money, his job, a fight he’d had with Dee—and now that he had real life and death stuff to obsess about, all he wanted to do was sleep.
* * * * *
A film of ice rimmed the lake. Steam lifting off the surface in the early morning sun. Jack was on the grassy bank pumping water through the filter into a stainless steel pot. He boiled the water, added three packets of oatmeal from his emergency kit, and they sat around the smoking remnants of the campfire, passing the pot and trying to wake up.
After breakfast, they broke down the tent and packed up and headed out while there was still frost on the dying grasses.
They followed no trail.
With his compass, Jack marked a cirque of forbidding granite spires ten miles away as their definitive eastern goal.
They climbed all morning through a spruce forest, emerging at midday onto a broad, ascending ridge of meadows.
Herds of unattended cattle grazed the open range.
Mountains in every direction and the warm, adobe glow of desert to the east.
In the early afternoon, Cole began to complain that his legs hurt.
Dee took over Jack’s pack, and Jack put his son on his shoulders.
They’d all drunk plenty of water with breakfast but had since sweated it out under the high-altitude sun. Jack could feel a dehydration headache coming on. They’d all be suffering soon.
They pushed on in silence, everyone too tired, too thirsty to talk.
In the evening they came down into a valley that framed a lake. Naomi crying as she shuffled along on the sides of her blistered feet, telling everyone she was okay, that she could make it to the water.
Jack assembled the filter and pumped while his family drank straight from the plastic tube. Fifteen minutes to satisfy their thirst, and then Dee pumped for him, Jack lying in the cool grass and letting the freezing lake water run down his throat and over his sunburned face.
He felt delirious, his head undergoing a slow implosion, and it was all he could do to construct the tent. A fire was out of the question, and he didn’t want to eat—no one did—but Dee opened a can for each of them and handed out three tablets of maximum strength Tylenol apiece.
“I’ll just throw up,” Jack said.
“No, you won’t. You’ll keep it down. We’re all severely dehydrated and suffering from altitude sickness.” She handed him a can of pork and beans. “Get it in you, and drink some more water, and go to bed.”
His family slept but the agony in Jack’s head would not relent. He crawled outside a little after midnight and staggered to the edge of the lake. Bitter cold. Moon shadows everywhere. He lowered himself onto his hands and knees and dipped his head through a crust of ice into the water.
* * * * *
IN the morning the pain had eased. He could hear his family up and about outside. Almost hot inside the tent with the sun beating down. He didn’t remember coming to bed. Couldn’t recall much of the preceding night in fact. His head mushy, like he was coming off a bender.
They were eating down by the lake and he joined them. The sun already higher than he would’ve liked. They’d be getting a late start.
“How we doing?” he asked.
“Aces,” Naomi said.
He sat beside his daughter and she passed him her can.
He sipped the cold corn chowder. “How are your feet, angel?”
“They don’t look too pretty anymore. Mom wrapped them up.”
“We need to start sleeping with our food,” Dee said. “There’s ice crystals in my cream of mushroom.”
“I personally like ice in my soup,” Jack said.
Cole laughed.
“I wouldn’t exactly call this rationing,” Jack said, handing the can back to Naomi.
“We have to eat, Jack. We’re expending so much energy in these mountains.”
“What are we down to?”
“Eight cans.”
“Jesus.”
The climb up the east slope of the valley took them into the early afternoon, and then they finally broke out above the timberline onto the top of a knoll. Those granite spires loomed several miles to the east, their summits puncturing the low cloud deck. Not a tree in sight and rock everywhere. Four lakes visible from where they stood. The water blue-gray under the clouds.
They hiked east as the clouds lowered.
It grew dark early and a fine, cold mist began to fall, but they pushed on to the farthest lake at the foot of the cirque, everyone wet and shivering as they raised the tent on one of the few patches of level grass.
Stripped out of their wet clothes. Climbed in and Jack zipped them up. They huddled under the sleeping bags and listened to rain patter on the tent and watched the light fade out.
“Can I say something?” Naomi said. “Something not very nice, but it’ll make me feel better?”
“Baby, you can say whatever you want.”
“This. Fucking. Sucks.”
They ate supper and Jack dressed in dry clothes. He dug the water filter and pot out of his pack.
“Back in a bit,” he said.
Slipped on his wet trail shoes and crawled outside.
Down to the lakeshore, crouched by the water. His breath pluming in the blue dusk. He strained to pick out the voices of his family, wanted to hear them talking, but nothing broke the awesome silence.
Across the lake, he made out the faintest impression of the cirque. No texture, no detail. Just a charcoal silhouette of a jagged ridgeline several thousand feet above. The ghost of a mountain.
He filled the pot and carried it to the tent.
“This one’s for Naomi.” he said.
Watched his daughter gulp it down in two long, ravenous sips.
He pumped a pot for Cole, then another for Dee, and went back outside one last time to drink his fill.
The cirque had vanished, the dusk deepened, and flakes of snow mixed in with the rain. He stopped halfway through filling the pot. His hands were trembling.
Get it over with. If you have to lose it, lose it here.
He buried his face in the bend of his arm and cried into it until there was nothing left.
They nestled together in the cold and the dark, Jack and Dee on the outside, the kids between them. No one had spoken in a long time and Jack finally said, “Everyone all right?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess.”
“Yes.”
“Wow, that was so convincing.”
“This the worst trouble you ever been through, Dad?”
“Yeah, Na. Far and away.”
Cole said, “Are we going to die?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that isn’t going to happen to our family. I’m not going to let it happen. Okay?”
“
Okay.”
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“Goodnight, all.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
“You know I love you all, right? Do I say it enough?”
“Yes, Dad, you do.”
For a split second, a flash of the Naomi of old—sassy, sarcastic, acerbic.
It elicited his sole smile of the day.
* * * * *
A fragile inch of snow clung to the tent and glazed the rocks. Jack stared at the sky and the lake which reflected the sky—deep cobalt. He was hungry. Starving actually. But the purity of the morning light moved him with a fleeting weightlessness that broke his heart to see it go.
The cirque loomed. Simply no avoiding it. He stood there in the cold trying to see a route, but it all looked steep as hell. Like a stupid fucking thing to even consider, fact aside that he needed to get his seven-year-old son up and over it.
He woke his family, and while Naomi and Cole launched snowballs at each other, Dee pulled the stitches out of Jack’s shoulder. Then they packed up, re-bandaged their blistered feet, drank as much water as their stomachs could hold, and struck out before the sun had cleared the ridge.
They walked around the perimeter of the lake and into a field of car-size boulders. Didn’t even begin to climb until after lunchtime, which passed unacknowledged. By mid-afternoon the snow had vanished except for in the shadows and they were a thousand feet above the lake which shone like a diamond in the valley’s hand.
