Run

by Blake Crouch

  “Keep running, guys,” Dee said, “and don’t listen.”

  She could hear the people beating on the inside of the door and pleading to be let out, the soldiers talking back, taunting them. What welled up inside of Dee nearly drove her out into that clearing. Maybe she’d only kill one or two of them before they stopped her, but God, in this moment, nothing would feel so right.

  “Mom, look.”

  Naomi had stopped just ahead at a break in the fence where the soldiers had come through the night before, the razorwire severed and pushed back.

  “Be careful, Na,” Dee said, and she lifted Cole in her arms and followed her daughter between the coils of wire.

  When they were through, she set Cole down and they all jogged away from the screaming in the clearing.

  Naomi was breathless and crying. She stopped, said, “We have to help them.”

  “Baby, if there was even a slim chance, we would, but there isn’t. We’d end up dead, just like them.”

  “Are they hurting?” Cole asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t stand hearing it,” Naomi said.

  “Come on. We have to keep moving.”

  In a little while, they came out of the woods onto the road about a hundred yards up from the checkpoint. Dee took the Glock out of her parka and they moved toward the vehicles up ahead.

  No light. No movement.

  The sound of voices in agony coming through the trees with the distant glow of flames.

  A pair of hummers still sat in the road and the dead soldiers, too.

  They arrived at Ed’s Jeep.

  “Tires are still inflated,” she said.

  Out of the gas cans fastened to the luggage rack, only one had survived the gunfight to hold its contents.

  “We taking the Jeep?” Naomi asked.

  “If the engine isn’t damaged. Why?”

  “Ed’s still in the driver seat, and he doesn’t smell good.”

  Dee went around the back of the Jeep and stood beside Naomi.

  “No, Cole, stay there.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t need to see this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ed’s dead, Cole. It’s nothing good to see. Just stay right there, please.”

  She held her arm over her nose and mouth, could only imagine what the potency might have been in warm temperatures.

  Ed had swollen up against the steering column, his head resting on the wheel. Dee grabbed hold of his left arm. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and it bent easily as she heaved Ed out of the car. Finally got him free and he tumbled out of the driver seat onto the dirt road, his legs still caught up in the floorboard.

  “Give me a hand here, Na, but don’t look at his face.”

  They dragged him the rest of the way out of the car and off the side of the road into the trees. Dee found a couple of extra shirts in the cargo area and she spread them across the driver seat to cover the sticky, rotting blood.

  There was no more screaming in the woods.

  “It still smells bad,” Naomi said.

  “We’ll keep the windows down. This cold air will scour it out.”

  They grabbed a few candy bars and packages of crackers from the banker’s box. Cole sat in the front passenger seat so Naomi could stretch out across the back, and Dee climbed in and worked the driver seat forward until her feet reached the pedals. Right away, she could see that driving was going to be impossible. Five bullets had come through the windshield into Ed, and around the puncture holes, each of them had made a circle of fractured glass that destroyed the translucence.

  Dee got out and climbed up onto the hood and stomped on the windshield. All she managed to do was punch out a hole in front of the steering wheel where the cracks had weakened the glass.

  The engine cranked on the first try. She shifted into gear and turned on the parking lights and eased onto the gas. They crept forward, Dee listening to the engine which rumbled smoothly, no audible sign of damage. The oil and temperature gauges offered no indications of malfunction.

  She steered between the hummers and dead soldiers and accelerated down the dirt road, wind blasting through the windshield in a freezing stream. The car reeked of gasoline and decay and the bits of glass she sat upon cutting through her jeans, but at least they were on their own and moving away from the clearing. In this moment, safe.

  Fifteen miles on, the dirt road intersected with an interstate. All lanes, east- and westbound, empty under the stars. She accelerated down the exit ramp, hit eighty after a half mile. At this speed, the rush of air coming through the windshield dried her eyes to the brink of blindness, so she braked down to forty.

  Her children slept.

  In every direction, no glimmer of habitation.

  The milemarkers streaking past every couple of minutes.

  The long vistas and the straight trajectory of the interstate gave a sense of safety, the security blanket of seeing what was coming long before you reached it, no hairpin turns, but it didn’t last.

  Just shy of midnight, she turned north onto Highway 89.

  Got twenty miles up the road and through a ghost town of charred houses before exhaustion forced her off the highway at a reservoir.

  Killed the engine, left the kids to sleep—Cole curled up in the front passenger seat, Naomi in back. She popped the cargo hatch and dug out Ed’s sleeping bag and the roadmap, leaving the hatch open to air out the interior.

  Dee walked down to the water and unrolled the sleeping bag across the dirt beside the remnants of another camp—candy bar and potato chip wrappers in the grass.

  Kicked off her boots, zipped herself in.

  She studied the map. By highway, they were roughly two hundred and seventy-five miles from the Canadian border, with one major city to deal with—Great Falls—but she could cut around and actually save time.

  She closed the map.

  No trees in this open, arid country. Sagebrush everywhere and she could see forever. A range of mountains to the north, the top thousand feet glazed with snow that glowed under the stars and the moon.

  Soundless. Windless. The water so still she could see the stars in it.

  She eased back into the sleeping bag, said her husband’s name. Tears burned down her face. It had been five days without him. She lay there trying to feel if he was gone. From a purely logical standpoint, it seemed impossible that he wasn’t, and she certainly felt apart from him. But, for whatever it was worth (and she had to acknowledge maybe nothing and the probability of self-delusion), she didn’t feel his absence. She felt that Jack was still alive, somehow, under the same night sky.

  * * * * *

  THE semitrailer reeked of shit, urine, vomit, body odor, blood, and something even more malignant. Jack leaned back against the metal wall, his left hand throbbing with such intensity he prayed to lose consciousness again. With the rear door closed, it was pitch black inside and Jack could feel his shoulders grazing the shoulders of the people he sat between as the rocking of the trailer jostled them together. The noise was bewildering—the distant big-rig growl of the V12 Detroit Diesel, the closer rumble of the tires underneath him, a baby wailing, a woman crying, a half dozen voices in whispered conversation.

  A man sitting across from him against the other side of the trailer, said, “This is for the guy who just got put in here. Where are we?”

  “A mountain pass in Wyoming. Not far from Jackson. Do you know where they’re taking us?”

  “Nobody knows anything.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “They picked me up two days ago in Denver.”

  “Did someone die in here?”

  “Yeah, that’s what the smell is. They’re toward the front.”

  The pressure in Jack’s ears released as they descended the pass. What was left of his ring finger dripped on his pants, and he tucked his hand under his jacket and tried to wrap his undershirt around the open wound, felt a surge of whitehot pain that nearly mad
e him vomit when he touched the jagged phalange of his ring finger.

  The baby went on crying for what he guessed was thirty minutes.

  He said finally, “Is someone holding that baby?”

  “I’m sorry.” A woman’s voice. “I’m trying to calm her—”

  “No, I’m not complaining, I just. . .I can’t see anything, and I wanted to make sure someone’s holding her.”

  “Someone is.”

  No light slipped in anywhere.

  They rolled down what felt like a winding road, and after a while the sharp turns diminished.

  Someone shoved a plastic jug of water into his hands, said, “One sip,” and Jack didn’t even hesitate to lift it to his mouth and take a swallow.

  He passed it on to the person beside him.

  “Thank you.” Voice of an older woman.

  Every passing moment, he was moving farther away from his family, and the thought of them alone out there, every bit as hungry and thirsty and scared as he was, simply made him want to be back with them or die right now. He tried but he couldn’t stop himself from picturing Dee and the kids inside the pipe, beginning to wonder where he was. After a while, when he didn’t return, they’d search the construction site, and soon after, start calling his name, their voices traveling into the forest. Calm at first. He could almost hear them and it broke his heart. He hadn’t told them where he was going. Hadn’t known himself. Maybe they’d walk up to the pass, but there’d be nothing there, certainly not him, and by then, Dee would be getting frantic and Naomi crying. Possibly Cole as well if he grasped the situation. Would they think he’d abandoned them? Wandered into the woods and somehow gotten injured or killed? How long would they keep looking and what would their state of mind be, when finally, they gave up?

  Jack opened his eyes. The diesel engine had gone quiet. The baby had stopped crying. His head rested against the bony shoulder of the old woman to his right and he felt her hand on his face, her whisper in his ear, “This too shall pass. This too shall pass.”

  He lifted his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  “It’s okay, I don’t mind. You were crying in your sleep.”

  Jack wiped his eyes.

  The rear door shot up and the light of a sunset flooded the semitrailer with a blast of freezing air. Two soldiers stood on the ramp with automatic weapons, and one of them said, “On your feet everybody.”

  The prisoners began to haul themselves up all around him, and Jack struggled onto his feet as well.

  He descended the metal ramp into the grass, lightheaded and unstable.

  A soldier at the bottom pointed across the open field, said, “You hungry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Food’s that way.”

  “Why are we being—”

  The solider rammed his AR-15 into Jack’s chest. “Get going.”

  Jack turned and stumbled along with the crowd, everyone moving through an open field and folding into streams of more people filing out of four other semitrailers—two hundred prisoners by Jack’s estimate. They looked haggard and addled and he searched for the old woman whose shoulder he’d used for a pillow, but he didn’t see anyone who met his mind’s imagining of her.

  Over his shoulder, Jack spotted several buildings, and though impossible to be certain in the lowlight, they appeared to be surrounded by small airplanes and a handful of private jets.

  Everywhere, soldiers were directing the prisoners toward a collection of tents a quarter mile away on the far side of the field.

  “Hot food and beds,” someone yelled. “Keep moving.”

  Jack looked for the man who’d cut his finger off, but he didn’t see him.

  They crossed the asphalt of a runway. The tents closer now, and straight ahead, less than fifty yards away, a mountain of dirt and a bulldozer.

  Jack smelled food on the breeze.

  On ahead, people were stopping near the pile of dirt and he could hear soldiers yelling. They were lining the prisoners up shoulder to shoulder.

  A soldier shoved him forward, said, “Stand right there and don’t fucking move.”

  “Why?”

  “We have to inspect you.”

  “For what?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Jack stood in a line of ragged-looking people, some of whom had begun to cry.

  The soldiers were backing away, Jack’s head swimming with the smell of whatever was cooking across the field.

  As he glanced back toward the tents, his eyes caught on the several thousand square feet of raw, freshly-turned earth that he and the other prisoners stood at the edge of.

  He looked at the bulldozer again.

  By the time he understood what was happening, the two dozen soldiers who’d herded them into the middle of the field were raising their AR-15s.

  Someone said, “Oh my God.”

  Several prisoners took off running, and a soldier squeezed off four controlled bursts. They fell and the prisoners were screaming, others trying to flee, and one of the soldiers yelled and they all opened fire at once.

  The noise was tremendous. Slap of bullets into meat. The schizophrenic madness of the machineguns. The screams. All down the line, people were tumbling back into the pit. Maybe two seconds had passed, the muzzleflashes bright in the evening, and the soldiers already edging forward and still firing.

  It felt like someone punched him in the shoulder, and then Jack was staring up at the clouds which were catching sunlight on their underbellies, people falling into the pit all around him. Bloodspray everywhere and the smell of shit, urine, and rust becoming prevalent like the sensory embodiment of terror, warm blood leaking all over him, down into his face, appendages writhing all around him. Then the shooting stopped and there came a moment of silence, Jack’s ear drums in shock, recovering from the noise, before the sound of a hundred dying people faded in. If Jack had believed in hell, he couldn’t have imagined it sounding any worse than this chorus of agony—groans, moaning, weeping, screaming, people dying loudly, quietly, some cursing their murderers, some begging them to do what could not be undone, some just asking why. And the realization slowly dawning on Jack amid the horror—I’m still alive, I’m still alive.

  A voice lifted out of the open grave, “Oh God, please finish me.”

  Jack’s shoulder was burning now.

  He could see the soldiers standing at the edge of the pit, Jack thinking only of his children as he pulled several bodies over him, and then the machineguns erupted again with a blaze of fire, and he could feel the bodies that shielded him shaking with the impact of the bullets. Shit himself waiting to be shot, but it never happened.

  This time, when the guns went quiet, the groans were half what they had been.

  Jack’s entire body trembled.

  He willed himself to be still.

  The soldiers near him were talking.

  “—don’t serve that meatloaf again. Fucking rancid shit.”

  “I love the mac and cheese though. Don’t disrespect.”

  “Oh, hell yeah. You got a crawler over there.”

  Two bursts from the machinegun.

  “All right, boys, who drew cleanup?”

  The light was abandoning the sky, and there was little in the way of groaning now, just desperate breathing all around him.

  “Nathan, Matt, Jones, and Chris.”

  “Well fucking get to it, boys, and before you lose your light. We’re going to party tonight. God, this is going to be a pretty green piece of grass next spring.”

  Jack could hear the soldiers walking away, the sound of distant voices, still some movement in the pit.

  As one of the bodies on top of him began to twitch, a noise rose up at the far end of the pit, followed by another and another, the last one close to where he lay.

  He watched as one of the soldiers climbed down into the pit. They held a chainsaw with a three-foot guide bar, wore a white vinyl apron, a helmet with a plexiglass faceplate. He started across the top laye
r of bodies, slashing at anything that moved.

  Jack tried to lay still, ignoring the burn in his shoulder.

  The body on top of him sat up, and in the low light, Jack could see her long, black hair falling down her back. She was crying and he reached up to try and pull her down, but the soldier with the chainsaw had already seen her and was wading over through the bodies.

  Jack heard her scream just barely and then the soldier swung his giant chainsaw.

  She fell back onto Jack and the blood flowed, blinding him, choking him, and he lay there unmoving as the solider passed by, the noise of the chainsaws growing softer.

  Someone yelled, “Jones, look at this guy. Untouched. Didn’t even catch a bullet. Keep playing dead, motherfucker.”

  The two-stroke wailed and there were seconds of the most horrendous screaming Jack had ever heard, and then the chainsaw motors idled again.

  The soldiers wandered through the pit for another ten minutes, and then the chainsaws went quiet and the voices slipped out of range.

  Jack didn’t move for a long time. The blood that covered him becoming sticky and cold and not another sound daring to lift out of the open grave.

  His shoulder throbbing.

  The clouds overhead gone dark and the sky almost void of light.

  He pushed the headless body off of him and sat up.

  Off in the distance toward the tents, a bonfire raged and there were fifty or sixty men gathered around it, their laughter and voices carrying across the field.

  Jack crawled onto the surface of the pit, a few people still barely hanging on, groaning as he moved across them, one man begging for his help. The pain in Jack’s shoulder making it nearly impossible to set his weight on his right arm, but he finally reached the back edge of the pit and climbed out into the grass.

  He kept moving on his stomach across the field through that strange and fleeting grayness between twilight and night. A hundred yards out from the pit, exhaustion stopped him. Still had a fifth of a mile to go to the trees, but he couldn’t catch his breath. Lay on his side watching the bonfire and the soldiers in camp, the reflection of the fire bright off the shine of their black leather boots.