Run

by Blake Crouch

  Jack crawled again.

  Another twenty minutes before he passed through the wall of trees, stopping ten feet inside the forest. Retched his guts out though there was nothing left but the sip of water he’d had hours ago in the back of the tractor trailer.

  He crawled to the nearest spruce tree under an overhang of branches.

  On the cusp of pitch-black darkness in the shadow of the forest.

  He touched his right shoulder—painful and hot, though not as bad as the last bullet he’d stopped. Couldn’t see the wound, but running his hand along the back of his shoulder, he thought he could feel the exit hole—a circular flare of burned skin.

  Despite the pain, he felt a detachment from himself so intense it verged on out-of-body, like a filter setting up between what had happened in the field and his emotional connection to it. He felt a beautiful step removed. He watched himself listening to the soldiers. Watched himself lying on his side on the moist ground with his back against the tree trunk. Watched his eyes close as the devastation that was this day sat perched beside his head with the patience of a gargoyle, waiting to crush him.

  At some point in the night, a noise from the field woke him, and it took Jack a moment to connect it with the growl of the dozer. Through the branches of the spruce tree, he could just make out the lights on top of its cab blazing down into the pit, the scoop pushing earth back into the open grave.

  He shut his eyes but another sound wouldn’t let him sleep—a crunching like the snap of trees during an ice storm, and he’d almost let it go, so tired, so tired, when he realized what it was. It could only be the bones of those inside the pit, breaking under the dozer’s weight.

  * * * * *

  JACK woke to stomach cramps and the splintering brightness of the sun coming through the branches. He crawled out from under the spruce tree, lightheaded and sore, wondering how much blood he’d lost during the night.

  The exposed bone of his left ring finger hurt more than his shoulder.

  The meadow was abuzz with soldiers, many of them closer than he would’ve liked, and some of them with dogs.

  He struggled to his feet and started into the woods. It was slow-going. He had no sense of direction. Just a dense pine wood that seemed to go on and on.

  By midday, he hadn’t crossed a road, a water source, or anything resembling civilization, and as the light started to fail the forest began to climb, until in the twilight, he found himself on a steep, wooded hillside. He sat down. Shivering. Nothing left.

  * * * * *

  WOKE colder than he’d ever been in his life and covered in frost, curled up on the mountainside and watching the torturously slow progression of sunlight climbing the hill toward the spot where he lay.

  When the sun finally washed over him two hours later, he shut his eyes and faced its brightness, let the warmth envelop him. He stopped shivering. The frost had burned off his clothing. He sat up and looked up the hillside and started to climb.

  Somehow, he went on. Hands and knees. Mindless hours. Always up. Endless.

  Late afternoon, he lay on a hillside covered in aspen trees. If someone had told him he’d been climbing this mountain for a year, he might’ve believed them. He was losing control of his thoughts. The thirst fracturing his mind. It occurred to him that if he didn’t get up and start walking in the next ten seconds, he wasn’t going to get up again. Could feel himself on the edge of not caring.

  In the middle of the night, he stumbled out of the forest into a clearing that swept another thousand feet up the mountain to his left, and shot down a narrow chute between the spruce trees to his right. The sky was clear, the moon high, everything bright as day. A golf course, he thought. A steep golf course. Then he noticed the tiny lodge halfway up the hill. The metal terminals that went up the mountain and the cables strung between them. He stared downslope, saw a sign with a black diamond next to the word, “Emigrant.”

  Jack’s legs buckled.

  Then he lay with the side of his face in the cold, dead grass, staring down the steep headwall. He could see three mountain ranges from his vantage point, the rock and the pockets of snow above timberline glowing under the moon.

  He closed his eyes, kept telling himself he should get up, keep walking, crawling, roll down this fucking mountain if he had to, because stopping was death, and death meant never seeing them again.

  Saying her name aloud tied a hot wire of pain around his throat, which felt full of glass shards. So dry and swollen. He said the name of his daughter. The name of his son. He pushed himself up. Sat there dry-heaving for a minute. Then he got onto his feet and started down the mountain.

  Jack was a dead man walking two hours later, a thousand feet lower, when he arrived at the foot of the dark lodge. He had to crawl up the steps and pull himself upright again by the wooden door handles. They were locked. He went back down the steps and pried one of the rocks lining the sidewalk out of the ground.

  So weak, it took him four swings to even put a crack through the big square window beside the doors. The fifth swing broke through and the glass fell out of the frame. He scrambled over into a cafeteria, perfectly dark except for where moonlight streamed through the tall windows. So strange to be indoors again. It had been days. The grill in back was still shuttered for the season. He limped over to the drink fountain, mouth beginning to water. Pressed the buttons for Coca-Cola, Sierra Mist, Orange Fanta, Country Time Lemonade, Barq’s Rootbeer, but the machine stood dormant, empty.

  He made his way between the tables toward a common area that accessed a bar and a gift shop, both locked up. He moved out of the long panels of moonlight into darkness.

  Straight ahead, he could just make out a pair of doors. As he moved toward them, they vanished in the black, but he kept on, hands outstretched, until he ran into a wall.

  He pushed and the door swung back.

  Couldn’t see a thing, but he knew he was in a bathroom. Smelled the water in the toilets.

  He ran his hand along the wall, found the switch, hit the lights.

  Nothing.

  Heard the door ease shut. He moved forward to where he thought the sinks might be, and stepped into a wall. Turned around, becoming disoriented as he moved in a different direction. He touched a counter, his hands frantically searching for the faucet. Cranked open the tap, but nothing happened.

  Took him several minutes to get his trembling hands on the stall door. He pulled it open and dropped to his knees, hands grazing the cold porcelain of the toilet. Inside the bowl, his fingers slid into chilly water.

  He didn’t think about where this water had been or all the people who’d sat on this toilet and pissed and shit and vomited here, or the industrial strength chemicals that had been used to clean the bowl. He lowered his face to the surface of the water and drank and thought only of how sweet it tasted running down his swollen throat.

  * * * * *

  A razor line of light. For a long time, Jack just stared at it. His face against a tiled floor. Cold but not freezing. Piecing together where he was, how he’d arrived here, beginning to face the fact that he wasn’t dead. At least he was mostly sure he wasn’t.

  He crawled out of the stall. The raging thirst gone, but the hunger pangs doubled him over when he stood, his feet so badly blistered he was afraid to see the damage.

  He wandered toward the paper towel dispenser.

  Cranked out a length of paper, tore it off.

  Through the dark, and then he pulled open the door, the light like a railroad spike through his temples.

  He limped out into the lobby, which looked almost like civilization in the daylight, sat down and went to work making a bandage for what was left of his ring finger.

  He was already pushing open the front doors when he realized what he’d just walked past. Stepped back inside, half-expecting it to have vanished, like a mirage, but there it stood.

  He rushed back into the cafeteria to the broken window. Lifted the rock off the floor and brought it into the lobby,
where he hurled it through the glass.

  He reached through and pulled out everything he could get his hands on—bags of potato chips, candy bars, crackers, cookies—until the vending machine was emptied and its contents spread across the floor.

  He ripped into a bag of Doritos.

  The chips were stale, leftovers from last season, but the intensity of the flavor made his mouth ache. He sat in the warm sunlight pouring through all the glass around the front entrance. Finished the bag and opened another filled with processed onion rings he would never have ingested in his former life. They were gone in a moment.

  He drank his fill of water from the toilet and urinated for the first time in days.

  Then grabbed the plastic garbage bag from the trashcan under the sink.

  Back in the lobby, he put the two dozen packages of snacks into the bag and slung it over his shoulder.

  There was a giant mirror on the wall across from the vending machine. He’d noticed it a little while ago, and now it called to him. The reflection unlike anybody he knew, his face thin as an ax-blade, beard coming in full. He was the color of rust, covered in dried blood, like a zombie-vagrant.

  Outside the entrance to the resort, he came across a bicycle rack and a single, abandoned mountain bike standing up between the bars. The tires were low and there was bird shit all over the seat, but it looked otherwise in working order. He climbed aboard and tied his bag of food to the handlebars. He coasted down the sidewalk through the empty parking lot, turned out onto a country road, and then he was speeding along at thirty-five miles per hour down the winding, faded pavement and the cool, piney air blasting his face. The hum of the tires so otherworldly in the face of everything that had come before, like he was out for a bike ride on holiday.

  Ten miles on and several thousand feet lower, Jack braked and brought the bike to a stop. Up ahead, a herd of range cattle was crossing the road, and he watched them pass. He’d ridden down out of the alpine forest and now the foothills of the mountains were bare and the air had become warm and redolent of sage.

  He rode on, still cruising east and dropping. The foothills lay a mile behind him now, and the mountains fifteen, and the land was barren and open and the sky immense.

  The riding turned strenuous when the grade of the road leveled out, but nothing compared to walking on blistered feet or crawling up a mountain.

  In the evening he was twenty miles out from the mountains and turning north onto Highway 89, his quads burning and his face glowing with wind- and sunburn.

  A mile and a half up the road, he caught the scent of water on the breeze, thinking he’d grown hypersensitive to the smell as of late, some recent adaptation borne out of nearly dying of thirst.

  He crested a small rise and there lay the reservoir, the water like ink under the evening sky and the sun just a chevron of brilliance on the ridgeline of those mountains he’d ridden out of.

  Abandoned the bike on the grassy shoulder and climbed down the slope to the water’s edge. Fell to his knees. Drank. It was cold and faintly sweet, none of that metallic, sterilized tang of toilet water.

  He ate a supper consisting of a Butterfinger candy bar, two packages of Lays barbeque potato chips, and a Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookie.

  Curled up in the grass by the water, already cold, but at least he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He watched the sun go behind the mountains and the stars begin to burn through the growing dark. Reeking of the dried, rotting gore that covered every square inch of his person.

  He was crying before he realized it, hot tears running down his face. Alive now, and on track to stay that way for the time being. There were choices to make.

  Head south back into Wyoming, maybe meet up with his family on the way. But they’d been separated now almost four days. They might’ve been picked up or found transportation or come upon some fate he couldn’t bring himself to imagine. Would Dee try to find him, or focus on getting Naomi and Cole across the border into Canada?

  He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket. The battery had been dead for weeks.

  He held down the power button and typed in Dee’s number, held the phone to his ear.

  “Hey, baby. I’m at this lake in Montana about thirty miles north of Bozeman. It’s beautiful here. So quiet. I’m watching the stars come out. I hope you and the kids are okay. I’ve had a hard few days.”

  Out in the middle of the lake, a fish jumped.

  “I think I’m going to keep heading north toward Great Falls, our old stomping grounds. I have such sweet memories of that city and you.

  “I don’t know how to find you, baby, so please stay open and make smart choices. I’m not leaving this country without you, Dee.”

  The ripples from the middle of the lake were just beginning to reach the shore.

  He put his BlackBerry back into his pocket.

  The water became still again.

  He let his eyes close when they were ready.

  * * * * *

  THE sound of wind in the grass. Sunshine on his eyelids. It didn’t feel cold enough to be first light. He sat up stiff, so sore. An act of willpower just to stand. Late morning, the sun already high. He walked up the grassy slope into the middle of the highway. The vistas north and south were endless. Nothing going. Nothing coming. Just silence and an overload of open space. The horizons so far, the sky so vast, it seemed right on top of him.

  He stripped out of his clothes and ran naked and gasping into the freezing water. Ducked under and swam until he had to surface, ten yards out from the shore. He went back and grabbed his stinking clothes and carried them out into waist deep water, rinsed the blood and filth out of everything, and then used one of his shirts to scrub himself down.

  Jack rode north up the highway, soaking wet. Rode hours. Until his clothes had dried out and he had nothing left. Stopped in the early evening, no idea how far he’d ridden, but he hadn’t passed a car or a house all day, and the world looked much as it had twenty-four hours prior—empty, big sky country—and he still felt very small in it.

  * * * * *

  TWO miles into his day, coasting down a long, gentle grade in the dawnlight, Jack braked and came to a stop in the road. He squinted, trying to sharpen his nearsightedness into focus. Couldn’t tell how far. A mile. Maybe two. The calculation of distance impossible in this country.

  A vehicle parked in the road. One of its doors open.

  For ten minutes, Jack didn’t move and he didn’t take his eyes off the car.

  He pedaled up the road, stopping every few hundred yards to view things from a closer vantage.

  It was a late model minivan. White. Covered in dust and pockmarked with bulletholes. Some of the windows had been shot out, and there was glass and blood on the pavement. All four tires low but intact. Utah license plate.

  Jack stopped ten feet from the rear bumper and got off the bike.

  Smell of death everywhere.

  Somehow, he had missed the girl in the sagebrush. The sliding door of the minivan was open, and it looked as though she’d been gunned down running, her long blond hair caught up in the branches. He wasn’t going to get close enough to see how old she was, but she looked small from where he stood. Ten years old maybe.

  A woman sat in the front passenger seat and her brains covered the window at her head. Twin teenage boys lay slumped against each other in the backseat. The driver seat was empty.

  Jack climbed in behind the wheel. The keys dangled out of the ignition. Fuel gauge at a quarter.

  He turned the key.

  The engine cranked.

  He pulled the boys out of the back and their mother out of the front and lined them all up in the desert. Didn’t want to, but he couldn’t just leave the girl face up, naked and entangled in the sage.

  He stood for a long time staring down at them.

  Midday and the flies already feasting.

  Jack started to say something. Stopped himself. It would’ve meant nothing, changed nothing, been solely for his bene
fit. No words to put this right.

  He loaded the bicycle into the back.

  He drove north, keeping his speed at a steady fifty. A CD in the stereo had been playing the Beach Boys, and Jack let it go on playing until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  He passed through a small, burned town, and fifteen miles north, on the outskirts of another, had to swerve to miss someone walking alone down the middle of the highway.

  He stopped the car, watched a man staggering toward him in the rearview mirror, his defective gait unfazed, as if he hadn’t even noticed the car that had nearly hit him. He didn’t carry a gun or a backpack, nothing in his hands which he held like arthritic claws, his fingers bent and seemingly frozen that way.

  Jack shifted into park.

  The closer the man got, the more wrecked he looked—sunburned a deep purple, his dirty white oxford shirt streaked in blood and missing one of the arms entirely, his leather clogs disintegrating off his feet.

  He walked right past Jack’s window and kept on going, straight down the double yellow.

  Jack opened the door.

  “Hey.”

  The man didn’t look back.

  Jack got out and walked after him. “Sir, do you need help?”

  No response.