Run

by Blake Crouch

He took long, slow inhalations through his nose, and even in the dark chill of the bank, lines of sweat were running down out of his hair into his eyes.

  The man let out a sharp breath. Couldn’t have been more than four or five feet away.

  His footsteps trailed off into the black, only audible when the boot tread caught on the carpet—an imperceptible scratch.

  Jack’s legs burned. He’d crammed himself up underneath a desk, the wood digging into his backbone.

  Five minutes passed without a sound.

  Ten minutes.

  Twenty.

  Then an hour was gone, maybe longer. Impossible to know.

  He leaned forward, rocking slowly back onto his hands and knees, his feet tingling with an excruciating numbness. Crawled several feet into the dark and stood, knees popping.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, saw the barest thread of light sliding around a corner. Wondering, should I crawl back under the desk and wait a few more hours? Maybe the man with the red bandana had gone to get a flashlight. Maybe he’d left with no intention of returning. Maybe he was waiting out there just around the corner.

  Jack moved forward between the cubicles, back into the light.

  He stepped into the hallway.

  Back down the stairs, through the lobby. He stood in that glassless window frame looking out across the plaza.

  Snowing again. Nothing moving. The minivan riddled with bulletholes. Some of the dead lay beside their weapons, and he felt a subtle charge at the prospect of getting his hands on a gun again.

  Ten steps into the plaza, Jack bent down to unwind the strap of a machinegun that had tangled around the arm of a dead man.

  Froze as his finger touched the strap. An icy prickle down the center of his back. A door to the minivan was creaking open.

  Jack let go and stood up, turning slowly.

  The man in the red bandana sat in the front passenger seat, lighting a cigarette. “Finally.” Took a deep drag. “Didn’t want you to see the smoke.”

  He started toward Jack, motioning him away from the dead man with his automatic pistol.

  “The fountain,” he said.

  Jack crossed the plaza, never taking his eyes off the man, as if that somehow kept the balance of control in his favor.

  The fountain was a circle of old concrete, fifteen feet across, with a stone feature rising out of the middle that had once rained water. Most of it had long since evaporated, and what remained was stagnant and filled with discs of ice.

  The men sat five feet apart.

  Jack saw that the man’s hands were covered in dried blood that was cracking on his skin like old asphalt. He looked out at the plaza—the minivan, the dead, the blood on the melting snow.

  In proximity, the soldier looked nothing like Jack had imagined. A kinder face. Three-day beard. Thoughtful eyes. Curls of black hair that slipped out from under the bandana. His fatigues weren’t black as Jack had first thought, but some pattern of night camouflage comprised of dark blues.

  Might have been Jack’s age, perhaps a year or two younger.

  He stared at Jack while he smoked, handgun resting on his leg, trained on Jack’s stomach.

  “Is Dee alive?”

  Jack didn’t respond.

  “Where’s your family, Jack?”

  A twinge of curiosity cut through the fear.

  “How do you know my name?”

  The man smiled, Jack feeling the eerie prickling of recognition.

  He said, “Kiernan.”

  “I saw her name all over this square, and it didn’t even click with me until I was walking away.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Me and some Guard unit buddies from Albuquerque defected. We’ve been heading north, just like you, killing and fucking and ravaging and just causing all sorts of mayhem. Time of my life. Are you expecting Dee and the family? Because we can wait. I’d be totally up for that.”

  “I haven’t seen them in days.”

  “You got separated?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Where?”

  “Wyoming. Where’s your family, Kiernan? I seem to remember Dee telling me you had children.”

  Kiernan took another drag. “Rotting in our backyard back in New Mexico.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I killed them.”

  Jack could feel, even in the light of everything he’d seen, a new horror at the registration of this.

  Kiernan smiled. “Smoke?”

  “Not in years.”

  He tugged a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds out of an inner pocket, offered it to Jack. “Treat yourself. I don’t think it really matters anymore. Do you, Jack?”

  Jack’s hands shook. He plucked a crooked cigarette from the pack along with the lighter. Four attempts to fire the tobacco sprigs hanging out of the end. Kiernan got another cigarette for himself.

  “So why are you here, Jack?” he asked. “In this square out of all the places in the wild wild west?”

  Jack said nothing, just pulled the smoke into his lungs. It was sweet and it burned.

  “You think Dee’s going to find you here. That it?”

  Jack exhaled, felt the nicotine hit and drag him a few steps deeper into himself, like sliding a filter between this moment and his perception of it. A dulling of the fear.

  “Can I ask you something?” Jack said.

  “As long as your cigarette’s still burning.”

  “When you’re trying to fall asleep at night, do you see the faces of your wife and children?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How do you not kill yourself?”

  “That you could even ask that is a perfect demonstration of why you’re all being slaughtered. Now answer my question. Why are you here?”

  The idea of lunging at Kiernan occurred to Jack, and with it a monster dose of weakness and fear that slashed through his nicotine rush.

  Kiernan smirked. “You’d never pull it off. Not on your best day and my worst. Answer my fucking question.”

  “I’m here because this is where I ran out of gas.”

  “Why do you want to make me angry?”

  Jack smoked.

  “In all my travels north,” Kiernan said, “I was always looking for your green Land Rover. Always chasing you and Dee, even though I never expected to actually find you.”

  “What is it like?” Jack said.

  “What is what like?”

  “To have become. . .whatever you are now.”

  “All our life, Jack, we spend wondering, you know? Now, it’s all about knowing.”

  “You were blind but now you see?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What do you know now that you didn’t before?”

  “You taught philosophy, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you know. . .words just fuck up true meaning. Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You didn’t see the lights. Just so I’m clear. . .you have no way to contact Dee, but you think she’s going to show up here. Why? Was it prearranged in the event you two were—”

  “I’ve been here three days. She’s not coming.”

  “She could be dead.”

  “It’s all I think about. How many children did you have?”

  “Three.”

  Jack flicked off the ash.

  “Did you look in their eyes while you murdered them?”

  “I was crying. They were crying, asking what they’d done. My wife screaming. Horrible day. I need to know why you’re here before your cigarette’s gone. The curiosity will eat at me.”

  “I told you. I ran out of gas.”

  Kiernan shook his head. “You’re going to make me threaten you. Aren’t you?”

  “Fuck your lights and fuck you.”

  Kiernan let his cigarette slip out of his hand, hiss out in the snow. He stood, lifting his shirt so Jack could see the sheathed Ka-Bar combat
knife.

  “When I open you up and start pulling stuff out and feeding it to you, you will talk. You will tell me everything I want to know and more. You’ll curse Naomi and Cole with your last breath and beg me to do the same to them.”

  Still had an inch of tobacco to go, but Jack threw his cigarette into the pool.

  “You can’t touch it, and you know it, and it kills you, doesn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”

  Kiernan unsnapped the sheath, holstered his pistol, and drew the Ka-Bar.

  “One last thing,” Jack said. “You and your batshit-crazy friends have fucked up our world, but you’ve also made me a better father, and you made me love my wife again, and for that I thank you.”

  Jack stared down into the pool.

  The ice melted and the water turned clear and the fountain began to rain. He looked up. The sky now a bright, almost painful blue. Midday in the square. A dozen people eating lunch in the blinding fall sunshine.

  Jack sat with an iced coffee, ten minutes left on his lunch break.

  She sat at that same table fifteen feet away, engrossed in a textbook, a tray of half-eaten salad pushed aside. Third day in a row she’d eaten lunch in the plaza. Third day in a row he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  He’d walked up to strange women before and asked for a date. No big deal. He was good-looking and tall. Confident. But something about this girl put him off his game. She was gorgeous, sure, but it was more than that—maybe the white lab coat fucking with him (already fantasized about that), maybe the intensity with which she read—never moving except to turn the page or brush away a strand of loose, auburn hair that contained honest-to-God strands of gold.

  Yesterday, he’d spent the whole hour building up the nerve. Finally he stood with five minutes left, shaky, his mouth completely dry as he approached, caught a whiff of something—shampoo or body wash—and he knew he’d only make a fool of himself. Walked right on past into the Wells Fargo bank and just stood watching her through the tinted glass until she finally packed her book into a tattered Eastpak and went on her way.

  Now there were five minutes left in this hour. A repeat of yesterday. He’d fucked around and put himself in the same position.

  He stood quickly and started toward her table, trying to get there before he had the chance to talk himself out of it. He was three feet away from her, wholly uncommitted to any of this, when the tip of his sneaker caught on the lip of a concrete slap.

  Jack went down hard and fast, and when he looked up from the ground he was staring at the rivulets of his iced coffee running down her leg and dripping off the hem of her lab coat.

  “Oh my God,” he said, picking himself up. “Oh my God.” As he got back onto his feet, he saw that he’d somehow managed to dump his entire coffee on her book, her white coat, skirt, even in her hair—maximum damage inflicted with half a cup of iced coffee.

  She glared up at him, possibly more shocked than he was, Jack mumbling, trying to string together a coherent sentence that finally came together as, “I’m a total idiot.”

  The anger in her eyes melted away. She wiped the coffee from her face and looked down at her coat, and all Jack could think was that she was even more beautiful at point blank range.

  “Let me pay for the book and the coat and—”

  She waved him off.

  “It’s okay. You all right? That looked bad.”

  “Yeah.” He’d have a black bruise on his elbow by nightfall, but in this moment, he felt no pain. “I’ll live once I get passed the devastating humiliation.”

  She laughed. Like nothing he’d ever heard. “Oh, come on, wasn’t that bad.”

  “Actually, it was.”

  “No, it—”

  “I was coming over to ask you out.”

  Her face went blank.

  Longest moment of his life.

  “Bullshit,” she finally said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re just having fun with me.”

  Jack smiled. “Would you give me a do-over?”

  “A what?”

  “A do-over. Let me have another shot at this.”

  He couldn’t tell for sure in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, but she might have blushed.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I’ll be right back. It’ll go better, I promise.”

  Jack walked to the fountain. His heart beating so fast he could barely breathe. He sat down and looked over at the table. She was watching him now and she’d taken her sunglasses off. He started toward her again, stopping at her table with his back to the sun, so she sat in his shadow.

  “I’m Jack,” he said.

  “Hi, Jack, I’m Deanna. Sorry about this mess. Some asshole spilled his coffee all over me.”

  And she smiled, and he looked into her eyes for the first time. Had never felt anything like it. Up until this moment, he thought he’d experienced pure attraction, but all those other times, other women, had been lust—he saw that now—and this wasn’t that. Not just that. There was an energy present, something combustive between them that hit him in the solar plexus. She had eyes that were dark blue but also luminescent, and later, when he thought about them, their color and clarity would remind him of a lake where he’d often camped with his father in Glacier, so deep but so clear the sunlight shot all the way down to the stones at the bottom and made the water glow.

  But he barely noticed the intensity of her eyes in the moment. It was all electricity, a terrible current, like looking into the future, everything prefigured—a life together, a daughter, a mortgage, a son born two months premature, the death of Jack’s mother, an automobile wreck that would take Deanna’s parents on Thanksgiving night eight years from now, moments of indescribable happiness, long winters of depression, a slow drifting, a betrayal, fear, anger, compromise, stasis, but when it all lay stripped to the bone, whatever mysterious alchemy had been present in this moment, would be present always. Untouched by their failures. Everything changed, and nothing.

  This is what he saw, what he sensed on some primal frequency, when he looked into his wife’s eyes for the first time on a fall day in the American west that was so perfect it would always break his heart to think of it. What he still felt, eighteen years later in the same city square, when his eyes met Dee’s again.

  She looked unreal, moving among the dead like a ghost toward the fountain, emaciated, tears riding down her cheeks.

  Kiernan must have seen the glitch in Jack’s attention, because he glanced back just as Dee raised an old revolver.

  “What are you doing here, Kiernan?” she asked.

  “Waiting for you, love.”

  The gunshot reverberated between the buildings.

  Kiernan stumbled back and sat down beside Jack.

  He was still holding the knife, and Jack grabbed it and stood facing him.

  Blood ran down the man’s face out of a hole through his left eye.

  The blade of the Ka-Bar passed through his chestplate with no effort and Jack buried it to the hilt. Kiernan toppled back into the icy pool, a cloud of murky red surrounding him, the weight of his boots and fatigues pulling him under as the one good eye blinked frantically.

  Jack turned around and Dee was there. He pulled her down into the snow and he was on top of her, kissing her, like drinking water again, like breathing, and they came apart only to breathe, both crying like babies. He held her face in his hands and wouldn’t let go for fear she would vanish or he’d wake up and realize it was him dying in the fountain and these were his last thoughts.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” he said, and he kept saying it, and she kept telling him that she was, and that she was real. He couldn’t take his hands off her, and he couldn’t believe this was happening.

  “You didn’t have any problems getting Cole into the city?” Jack asked. They were walking up 3rd Street North toward the library, each holding t
wo machineguns taken off the dead men in the square like a pair of bad action-flick heroes. “It was on lockdown when I got here several days ago. They weren’t letting any of the affected in, but I told them you might be passing through with a boy who was.”

  “We drove in last night,” Dee said. “The barricade had been destroyed. We almost didn’t make it, Jack. Bombs going off everywhere. Gunfights on almost every block. A couple of really close calls. It’s a full-scale war on the east side of town. Thousands dead. Easily.”

  They passed a law office that had been hit with a mortar shell. Wet pleadings plastered all over the sidewalk.

  “How did you know to come to the square?”

  Dee smiled. “How did you?”

  “I’d gone to the shelter looking for you. Nobody had seen you or the kids. I drove downtown, out of gas, desperate, and then the headlights shone on the Davidson Building. Today was my third in the square. I didn’t know if you’d try to come here or just get the kids across the border. For all I knew, you were dead.”

  “When I saw the mileage sign for Great Falls, I knew if you were alive, if you had any strength left in your body, you’d come to this place.”

  “So you have a car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should’ve tried to cross the border without me.”

  “Don’t say that. You wouldn’t have.”

  Machineguns chattered a dozen blocks away.

  “I came here this morning,” Dee said, “but it was crawling with soldiers.”

  “You saw what I wrote on the side of the car?”

  “I started crying when I saw it. Lost it. I hid until the soldiers left, but then Kiernan came back to kill you. I watched him chase you into the bank. I thought. . . . . .” She shook off the wave of emotion. “You were in there so long.”

  “I can’t believe you came here, Dee.”

  She stopped and kissed him.

  Half a mile away, a bomb exploded.

  “Come on,” she said. “We better run.”

  Jack knelt down beside the sofa in the historical archive room of the Great Falls Public Library. Dee shined a flashlight on the ceiling, and in the refracted light Jack looked down at his children, sleeping head-to-toe. Touched his hand to Cole’s back.

  “Hey, buddy. Daddy’s here.”