by Blake Crouch
“There were four of us.” Tears coming. “My husband was taken two days ago by some sort of military unit. Do you know where he might be?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“We haven’t eaten in a week.” Dee felt unstable, eased her right leg back to brace herself against falling. “I don’t want to keep aiming this gun at your face.”
“That’d be all right with me, too.”
She lowered the Glock, slid it into the back of her waistband.
Ed started to bend down. Stopped midway. “I’m picking up my gun, but there’s no threat intended.”
“Okay.”
He ducked behind the door, lifted the revolver off the pavement, and came toward them. Squatted down to Cole’s eye-level.
“I’m Ed,” he said. “What’s your name?”
Cole didn’t reply.
“Tell him your name, buddy.”
“Cole.”
“Do you like Snickers candy bars?”
Dee’s stomach fluttered with a new pang of hunger.
“Yes sir.”
“Well, you’re in luck.”
“Are you a nice person?”
“I am. Are you?”
Cole nodded and Ed pushed against his knees and stood to face Naomi.
“I’m Naomi,” she said.
“Glad to meet you, Naomi.”
Dee extended her hand. “Ed, I’m Dee.”
“Dee, very nice to meet you.”
The upwelling came so fast and unexpectedly that she fell toward Ed and wrapped her arms around his neck. Sobbing. Felt him patting her back, couldn’t pick out the words, but the deep tone of his voice which seemed to move through her like thunder was the closest she’d come to comfort in days.
Ed pulled the Cherokee into the meadow and got out and popped the hatch. Dee and the kids gathered around as he rifled through a banker’s box of packaged food. Three more plastic gas containers crowded the backseats, numerous jugs of water on the floorboards.
Dee sat in the back with Naomi and Cole, her fingers over-anxious and shaking as she ripped open Cole’s wrapper. At the smell of chocolate and peanuts, her hunger swelled into an ache.
They had two candy bars each and several apples, shared a gallon of water from a glass jug. So ravenous it felt less like eating and drinking, more like finally breathing again after being held underwater. When they’d finished, it was all Dee could do not to beg for more, but from the look of things, Ed was light on provisions.
“Where you coming from?” she asked.
He sat in the grass near the rear bumper, just inside the field of illumination thrown from the Jeep’s rear dome light. “Arches in Utah.”
“You a park ranger?”
“Yep.”
“We left Albuquerque. . .I don’t know, three weeks ago, I guess? What day it is.”
“Friday. Well, early Saturday now.”
“We were trying to get to Canada. Heard there were refugee camps across the border.”
“I heard the same.”
“Have you run into much trouble?”
He shook his head. “I left three days ago. Been traveling mainly at night, and in fact, I actually need to keep moving.”
He rose to his feet. Dee noticed he wore green pants and a long-sleeved, gray button-up, wondered if this was his ranger uniform.
She said, “Would you let us come with you?”
“I can’t fit you all inside.”
“Then take my children.”
“Mom, no.”
“Shut up, Na. Would you? Please?”
Ed took out his revolver.
“I need you out of my Jeep right now. I’ve given you some of my food, my water. I’ll even leave a jug with you, but I cannot take you.”
Dee stared down at her filthy, stinking shoes.
“We’ll die out here.”
“And we may all die if you come with me. Now get out of there. I have to go.”
Dee stood watching the Jeep move across the meadow and into the road, heard the engine rev, saw its taillights wink out, listening as it sped away from them into the darkness.
Naomi was crying. “You should’ve shot him, Mom. You had him back there with his gun on the ground and you just let him—”
“He’s not a bad man, Na.”
“We’re going to die now.”
“He wasn’t trying to hurt us. You want to live in a world where we have to kill innocent people to survive? I won’t do that. Not even for you and Cole. There’s things worse than dying, and for me, that’s one of them.”
Cole said, “Listen.”
An engine was approaching. The shadow of that Jeep reappeared and shot out a triangle of light as it entered the meadow.
The engine cut off.
Ed climbed out.
“I’m not happy about this,” he said, walking around to the back, popping the hatch. “Not one goddamn bit. So don’t say anything, for God’s sake don’t thank me. Just get over here and help me make some room.”
Ed loaded what would fit into the cargo area and made just enough room for Naomi and Cole in the backseat. Dee climbed in up front, buckled herself in, and Ed cranked the engine. Heat rushed out of the vents. The digital clock read 2:59 a.m. Ed put the car into gear and eased across the meadow, over the shoulder, back onto the road.
Turned on the stereo as he accelerated.
Dirty blues blasting from the speakers: “She’s a kindhearted woman, she studies evil all the time/She’s a kindhearted woman, she studies evil all the time/You well’s to kill me, as to have it on your mind.”
Dee leaned against the window, watched the trees rush by. Felt so strange to be moving this fast again, the pavement streaming under the tires. The road snaked down through the spruce forest on a steep descent from the pass and her ears kept popping and clogging, the world loud, then muffled, then loud again when she swallowed. With the moon full and high, it struck the road like sunlight and made shadows of the trees. The view to the west was long, and through the windshield she could see the massive skyline of the Tetons.
Dee glanced back between the front seats—Cole and Naomi sleeping sprawled across each other. She reached over, touched Ed’s shoulder.
“You saved our lives.”
“What’d I say about thanking me?”
“I’m not thanking you, just stating a fact.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t want to, that’s the thing. I’m a supremely selfish fuck.”
Dee tilted her seat back. “Let me know if you want me to drive.”
He grunted, his hands tapping time to the blues, Dee wondering if he’d have sung along if they weren’t in the car with him.
“You can sing if you want,” she said. “Won’t bother us.”
“Might want to be more careful about what you offer in the future,” he said, and started to sing.
His voice was awful.
She dozed against the window, dipping in and out of dream fragments that she couldn’t quite commit herself to before settling finally into a hard and dreamless sleep.
Next time she woke, it was 5:02 a.m.
Still dark out the windows except where the faintest purple had begun to tint the eastern sky. Naomi and Cole slept. The music had stopped.
“Want me to drive for a bit so you can sleep?”
“No, I was going to stop a few miles ahead anyway. Get us off the road for the daylight hours.”
* * * * *
THE lodge towered like a mountain against the predawn sky. They pulled under the front portico. The kids were stirring, woken by the cessation of movement. Ed turned off the engine and stepped out and opened the back hatch. Took a flashlight from one of the supply boxes.
The red double doors stood ajar and they pushed through them.
Ed flicked on the flashlight.
“Anybody here?” His voice echoed through the immense lobby as the beam of his light passed across the hearth and moved up seven stories of framework supported by a forest of b
urnished tree trunks.
No response.
“Ever been here?” Ed asked.
“Once,” Dee said.
They climbed the stairs to a row of rooms that overlooked the upper porch. Dee and the kids took one with two queen beds. The walls were cedar-paneled. A cast-iron radiator occupied the space beneath the window, and they didn’t need a flashlight anymore with dawn fading up through the dormer.
Ed said, “I sort of feel like one of us should keep watch. Case someone comes.”
“You drove all night,” Dee said. “I’ll do it.”
“Five or six hours, I’ll be good as new. Wake me at noon.”
Dee strolled the corridors in near darkness. The silence of the place imposing. She’d been here before with Jack. Sixteen years ago. A summer day, the lobby bustling and filled with light. They were passing through on a move from Montana to New Mexico, Jack having just been hired by UNM, Dee en route to begin a residency at the university hospital. They’d only stopped for a few hours to have lunch in the dining room, but she still recalled the feel of that day, had never lost it—a lightness in her being and with the two of them married just four months, the sense that they were really beginning a life, that everything lay open and accessible before them.
She walked down to the lobby and went outside, following the paved path to the observation point. The day had dawned clear. Across the basin, a herd of elk grazed the edge of a lodgepole pine forest still recovering from a recent fire and interspersed with dead gray trees.
After a while, a column of water launched out of the earth, steaming in the cold. There had been five hundred tourists here the last time Dee had watched it blow. She listened to the superheated water rain down on the mineralized field, a light wind in her face, the mist lukewarm by the time it reached her.
In the early afternoon, she and Ed made the climb to the widow’s walk, stood on top of the lodge looking out over the basin and the hills, no sound but the flags flapping on the grounds below. Seemed like if she stared hard and long and far enough, she might catch a glimpse of him somewhere out there.
“You’re missing your husband.”
Wiped her eyes. “Did you leave anyone behind when you left Arches?”
Ed shook his head.
“That must make things a little easier. Only having to worry about yourself, I mean.”
“I was married once. I’ve been thinking about her. You know, wondering.”
“Any kids?”
“Haven’t been in touch with them in a long time.” He looked at her as if he might offer some further explanation, then moved on to something else instead. “I’m concerned the Canadian border is going to be tough to cross. I’ve been considering other possibilities.”
“Like what?”
“We’re only a few hours south of Bozeman. That’s the nearest airport. Maybe we get our hands on a plane.”
“You’re a pilot?”
“Used to fly commercial jets.”
“How long since you’ve been in a cockpit?”
“You really want to know?”
“Can you still fly? I mean, doesn’t the technology change?”
“We’d just be looking for a twin-prop. Nothing too complicated. We could be in Canada in under two hours.”
Dee slept through the rest of the afternoon, and in the evening, she took Naomi and Cole down to the observation point. When it finally blew, the sunlight shot horizontally through the scalding mist and turned the water into fire.
Ed gassed up the Jeep and added a few quarts of oil, employed Cole to clean the dust and grime off the windows. They set out with the moon high enough to obviate the need for headlights, speeding north through the park to the blues of Muddy Waters.
An hour and a half brought them to the Montana border. They roared across and up through the isolated, nothing towns of Gardiner, Miner, and Emigrant, all vacated, all long-since and so thoroughly burned there wasn’t even the temptation to stop and search for food.
A little before midnight, Ed pulled over onto the shoulder.
“We’re close to Bozeman,” he said, “but if we stay on this road, we’re going to have to get on the interstate.” He opened the glove compartment, pulled out a map, and unfolded it across the steering wheel.
Dee leaned over and touched a light gray line that branched off from the bold one denoting the highway they’d been driving all night.
“Here?” she said.
“Yeah, that’s the one we need to find. See how it cuts right across? Once we hit it, we’re only twenty miles from the Bozeman airfield.”
Dee spotted it as they raced past and Ed turned around in the empty highway and headed back. It was an unmarked dirt road that exploited the Jeep’s decrepit shocks, rocking them along for several miles on a gentle climb through pine forest. Just dark enough when passing through the corridors of trees to persuade Ed to punch on the headlights.
“Could we actually fly out tonight?” Dee said.
“Assuming we find a plane with sufficient fuel, I’ll probably want to wait until first light. Really don’t want my first flight in over two decades to be by instrumentation.”
“Can I help fly?” Cole asked.
“Absolutely, copilot.”
Dee stared out the window at the open field they moved across, thinking how flying out of all this madness, of finally getting her kids someplace safe, felt so far beyond the realm of possibility she couldn’t even imagine it happening.
Ed slammed the brake.
She shot forward, painfully restrained by the seatbelt.
Looked up when she’d recoiled back into the leather seat, her first thought her children who were picking themselves up out of the backseat floorboards, and her second the numerous points of light that were moving toward the Jeep.
“Back up, Ed. Back up right—”
The windshield splintered and something warm sprayed the side of Dee’s face as Ed fell into the steering wheel, the horn blaring, other rounds piercing the glass, the night filling with gunshots. Dee unbuckled her seatbelt and shoved the gearshift into park and crawled over the console into the backseat. Sprawled herself on top of Naomi and Cole as bullets struck the car.
“Is he dead?” Naomi asked.
“Yes.”
The firing stopped.
“Either of you hit?”
“No.”
“Make it stop,” Cole cried.
“Are you hit, Cole?”
He shook his head.
Footsteps approached the Jeep, and in the illumination of an oncoming flashlight, Dee could see clear liquid sheeting down the glass of the rear passenger window.
“We have to get out of the car,” she whispered.
Already her eyes were burning, the fumes getting stronger.
“They’ll shoot us if we get out,” Naomi said.
“They’ll burn us alive if we stay in. They’ve shot some of the plastic gas cans on top of the Jeep.”
Dee opened the door and tumbled out. The glare of the flashlights maxed her retinas and she could see little of who was there nor determine their number amid the afterimages that pulsed purple in the dark.
“Stop right there.” A man’s voice. Dee stood and raised her hands.
“Please. I have two children with me. Naomi, Cole, get out.” She felt one of them, probably Cole, glom onto her right arm.
“They’re like me,” Cole said.
“What are you talking about?”
“They have light around their head. All of them.”
“Get back in your car,” the man said, close enough now for Dee to get a decent look—three-day beard, dark navy trousers and parka, aiming an automatic weapon at her face.
He motioned toward the car with the machinegun as others emerged out of the dark behind him.
Dee considered the Glock pushed down the back of her pants. Suicide.
“Bill, check the driver.”
A short, stocky soldier put a light through Ed’s window.
“Gone to be with the Lord, boss.”
“Got your Zippo on you, you chain-smoking motherfucker?”
“Yeah.”
“Particularly attached to it?”
“It was my older brother’s.”
“Cough that shit up.”
“Fuck, Max.”
The lightbeam glimmered off the steel as the soldier chucked his lighter to the man who held Dee and her children at gunpoint, Max catching it with his left hand, never letting the AR-15 waver in his right.
“What are you doing with them, little man?”
“Do not speak to my son.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“What do you mean?” Cole asked.
“You know exactly what I mean. Don’t you want to come with us?”
“Why don’t you leave us alone? We aren’t doing anything to you.”
Max looked up at Dee with unfiltered hatred. “Get back in the car.”
“No.”
“Get in the car or I’ll shoot you and your children in the knees and put you in there myself. You can roast healthy or you can roast with shattered kneecaps. It makes not a fucking bit of difference to me so long as I get to watch you burn.”
Dee said, “What did we ever. . .”
Max aimed the AR-15 at her left knee.
Split second choice. Reach for the Glock or speak one last time to your children.
“I love you, Naomi. I love you, Cole. No one and nothing can take that away.”
“I can,” Max said.
She drew her kids into her, Naomi quaking and crying, but she didn’t allow herself to avert her eyes from the man who was going to murder them. She stared Max down, wondering would he think of them years from now on his deathbed in a moment of clarity and regret, wondering if her eyes would always haunt him, but she doubted it as he returned the stare, a malevolent smile curling his lips, Dee’s heart in her throat.
The slug mostly decapitated Bill.
