Run

by Blake Crouch

  He leaned over and puked into the grass.

  Straightened up again, staggered past the trucks toward the Jeep.

  The driver side door had been thrown open, the stench of cordite strong in the air, and he was moving through a haze of smoke, waiting for the gunshots, the attack.

  He stopped again when he saw them, not understanding what it meant, figuring he must be missing something, his brain failing to process information after he’d pushed himself so hard.

  Had to count them twice.

  Seven people sprawled in the grass around the Jeep. Each of them dead from a headshot, their guns lying within reach or still in hand.

  In the light that spilled out of the Jeep, he saw the eighth member of the party crouched down against the right front wheel, tears streaming down his face, the long barrel of a large-caliber revolver jammed between his teeth. He wore a fleece vest and a cowboy hat, a patchy blond beard struggling to cover an acne-ruined face.

  When he saw Jack, he pulled the gun out of his mouth.

  “I can’t do it,” the man said. He offered Jack the gun. “Please.”

  “What?”

  “Kill me.”

  Jack was still gasping for air, his legs burning. He reached forward, slowly, as if sudden movement might cause the young man to rethink his offer, then snatched the revolver out of his hand.

  The man said, “Where are you going?” as Jack walked around the open door and looked into the Jeep.

  “Oh God, baby.”

  The driver seat had been reclined and his wife lay stretched back on it, unmoving, her eyes closed, blood still running out of her leg.

  “Dee.”

  He glanced down at her right leg, saw where the shirt he’d tied around her thigh had been severed.

  He set the gun in the floorboard and reached in, taking up both ends of the bloody shirt sleeve and cinching it down even harder than before, until the blood stopped flowing.

  “Dee.” He touched her face. “Dee, wake up.”

  Outside, the man was crying, begging for Jack to end him.

  Jack moved outside and around the door.

  “Which of those trucks is yours?” he asked.

  “Oh my God,” the man cried. “Oh my God. My daughter. I—”

  Jack held the revolver to the man’s knee. “Look at me.”

  The man looked up at him.

  “My wife needs medical attention. Do you have keys to any of these trucks?”

  The man pointed beyond the Jeep. “The Chevy. Here.” He dug a pair of keys out of his jeans, handed them to Jack.

  “What happened?” the man said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “To me.”

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  “You have to kill me. I can’t stand knowing what I—”

  “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Please—”

  “But I will take your mind off it.”

  Jack pulled the trigger and the man screamed, clutching his knee. Jack stood and walked around the car door. He shoved the revolver down the back of his jeans, leaned in, lifted his wife out of the pool of blood.

  He was drenched in sweat, his legs trembling with exhaustion. Stumbled away from the Jeep with Dee in his arms and the young man pleading to die. It was all he could do to carry her those fifty feet to the pickup truck.

  It was a pristine 1966 Chevy.

  Powder blue.

  He opened the passenger door and laid Dee across the vinyl, then limped around and hauled himself up into the cab.

  The third key he tried started the engine.

  He hit the lights, shifted into gear, floored the accelerator.

  They raced across the prairie. He held her hand which was growing cold, saying her name over and over, an incantation. He had no idea if she even had a pulse, and still promising things he had no business promising—that they were almost over the border, almost to safety, where a city of tents awaited them, a refuge crawling with doctors who could fix her. She’d lost a lot of blood, but she was strong, had made it this far, she could surely hang on just a little farther, live to see the end of this and whatever new life they made, live to forget the worst of this, to see Na and Cole forget the worst of this, see her children grow up strong and happy, because they had so many more years the four of them, so many experiences to share that didn’t involve running and death and fear, and please God darling, if any part of you can hear me, don’t let this be the end.

  * * * * *

  He will wipe every tear from their eyes.

  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.

  Revelations

  * * * * *

  THE team disbands as the light begins to fail. But she lingers in the pit, gently brushing the dirt from the ribcage of a skeleton she’s just uncovered in the last hour, lost in her work. The distant hum of an airplane breaks her concentration, and she looks up into the sky—easy to see the twin-engine turboprop catching sunlight on its descent.

  She climbs out of the pit and walks over to the showers. Pulls the curtain. Strips out of her boots, elbow-length rubber gloves, her clothes, and stands under the heavy spray of water, letting it pound away the reek of decomp.

  In fresh, clean clothes, she starts across the field.

  The airplane is parked in the distance, the cabin door beginning to open.

  She breaks into a run.

  The old man comes down the stairs of the plane already smiling, must have seen her as they taxied up. Drops his bag as she runs into his arms, and they embrace for the first time in six months on the broken pavement of the runway.

  “My angel,” he whispers. “My angel.”

  When they come apart, she stares up at him, thinking, God, was his hair this white last Christmas? But he isn’t looking at her. He’s staring across the field, an intensity coalescing in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks. “Daddy?”

  He can barely speak, eyes shimmering with tears, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  “This is the place.”

  They cross the field, moving toward the pit.

  “They pulled the trucks up to here,” he says. “A half dozen tractor trailers. There were tents set up over there,” he points, “right about where yours are. They told us there was hot food and beds waiting.” He stops. “Is that smell. . .?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right about this time of day, too. Dusk. A beautiful sunset.” He continues walking, the stench growing worse with every step, until they stand at the edge of the grave.

  She watches his face. He’s somewhere else—nineteen years in the past.

  “They lined us up right here,” he says. “They’d already dug the grave.”

  “How many people do you think?”

  “Maybe two hundred of us.” He closes his eyes, and she wonders what he sees, what he hears.

  “Do you remember where you stood?”

  He shakes his head. “I just remember the sounds and what the sky looked like, staring up at it through the bodies that had fallen on top of me.”

  “Did they use chainsaws?”

  He looks down at her, startled by the question.

  “Yeah. How did you—”

  “We were curious about how some of the bones had been bisected.”

  The man eases himself down into the grass and she sits beside him.

  “You’ve been down in the grave?” he asks.

  “I worked in it all day. That’s what I do, Daddy.”

  He chuckles. “You know I’m proud to death of you, angel, but Jesus do you have a fucked-up job.”

  She leans her head against his shoulder, laces her fingers through his, twiddling the platinum band he now wears on the nub of his left ring finger.

  The team builds a bonfire after supper.

  Someone strums a guitar.

  Someone rolls a joint.

  A bottle makes the rounds.

  She sits between the old man an
d Sam, the Australian team leader, feeling contemplative off two swigs of whiskey and staring into the flames. The cold of the night a wonderful contrast to the eddies of heat sliding up her bare legs.

  Usually, those thirty days in hell are as unreachable as if they had happened to another family. But sometimes, like tonight, she feels plugged in to the raw emotion of it all, a closed circuit, and if she doesn’t keep it at arm’s length, it still has the power to break her.

  Her father is a little drunk, Sam more so, and she tunes back in to their conversation as Sam loosens his tie and says, “. . .learning more about the Great Auroral Storm.”

  “Yeah, I’ve read some wild theories,” her father says.

  “You talking about mine?”

  “Entirely possible. You really believe these auroras contributed to the epic massacres and extinctions in history?”

  “I think there’s some compelling solar abnormality data on that. But something of the magnitude that happened here? Keep in mind recorded human history is just the blink of an eye since life crawled out of the oceans. This was a hundred-thousand-year occurrence. Maybe a five-hundred. Natural selection at its darkest.”

  “So who got selected?” her father asks. “Who won? Us?”

  Sam laughs. “No.”

  “The affected?”

  “Most of them selected themselves out when they committed mass suicide.”

  “Then who?”

  “Your son,” Sam says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “People like Cole. Those who witnessed that terrible light show on October Fourth, and either didn’t kill, or did, and resisted the crushing guilt. That’s who won.”

  “I have a close friend back home in Belgium in the humanities department where I teach. A priest. He thinks the aurora was just God testing us.”

  “Those who saw the aurora, or those who ran?”

  “Both, Sam.”

  “Well, it all comes down to purification in the end, right?”

  “You say it like that’s a good thing.”

  “On a human level, no, but in terms of our DNA, it’s a different ball game. Remember, the barbarians finally took Rome. That was horrible, but Rome had become a corrupt, ineffectual, soft culture. Genetically speaking, it was a positive thing.”

  “Or,” the old man says, “maybe we just need to kill each other. Maybe that’s our perfect state of being.”

  Sam pauses to have a smoke, and when he finally exhales, says, “It surprises me that you would want to see this place again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what you saw and experienced here.”

  “You should be examining my bones in that hole,” the old man says.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “This was an awful place, no question, but a miracle happened here. I never want to forget that.”

  She’s buzzed and getting tired. Stretches her bare feet toward the fire, lays her head in her father’s lap. Soon he’s running his fingers through her hair, still debating with Sam. She’s almost asleep when something vibrates against the back of her head.

  “Excuse me, Sam,” her father says.

  The old man reaches into his pocket and retrieves his mobile phone, answers, “I forgot, didn’t I? . . . I’m sorry. . . . Yes, here safe and sound, sitting by a fire. . . . Difficult but good. . . . Yes, I’m glad I came. . . . . . . That’s still the plan. We’ll meet you both in Calgary tomorrow evening. . . . . . . Oh, I know. It’ll be so good to all be together again. . . . Yes, she’s right here, but she’s sleeping. . . . Okay, I’ll tell her. . . . No, I won’t forget. I’ll do it as soon as we get off. . . . Goodnight, darling.”

  The old man slides his phone back into his pocket.

  She’s almost asleep now, in that cushioned bliss between consciousness and all that lies beneath. Feels her father’s hand on her shoulder, and his breath, still after all these years, familiar against her ear.

  “Naomi,” he whispers, “your mother sends her love.”

  * * * * *

  Read on for an interview with Blake Crouch and excerpts from his four novels, Desert Places, Locked Doors, Abandon, and Snowbound…

  * * * * *

  Interview with Blake Crouch by Hank Wagner

  Originally Published in Crimespree, July 2009

  According to his website, Blake Crouch grew up in Statesville, a small town in the piedmont of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, where he studied literature and creative writing. He currently resides in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. Crouch’s first book, Desert Places, was published in 2003. Pat Conroy called it “Harrowing, terrific, a whacked-out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.” Val McDermid described it as “An ingenious, diabolical debut that calls into question all our easy moral assumptions. Desert Places is a genuine thriller that pulses with adrenaline from start to finish.” His second novel, Locked Doors, was published in July 2005. A sequel to Desert Places, it created a similar buzz. His third novel, Abandon, was published on July 7, 2009.

  HANK WAGNER: Your writing career began in college?

  BLAKE CROUCH: I started writing seriously in college. I had tinkered before, but the summer after my freshman year, I decided that I wanted to try to make a living at being a writer. Spring semester of 1999, I was in an intro creative writing class and I wrote the short story (called “Ginsu Tony”) that would grow into Desert Places. Once I started my first novel, it became an obsession.

  HW: Where did the original premise for Desert Places come from?

  BC: The idea for Desert Places arose when two ideas crossed. I had the opening chapter already in my head... suspense writer receives an anonymous letter telling him there’s a body buried on his property, covered in his blood. I didn’t know where my protagonist was going to be taken though. Around the same time, I happened to be glancing through a scrapbook that had photographs of this backpacking trip I took in Wyoming in the mid 90’s. One of those photographs was of a road running off into the horizon in the midst of a vast desert. My brain started working. What if my protagonist is taken to a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, by a psychopath? What if this cabin is in this vast desert, and he has no hope of escape? That photograph broke the whole story open for me.

  HW: Why a sequel for your second book? Affection for the characters?

  BC: It was actually my editor’s idea. I was perfectly happy walking away from the first book. But once she mentioned it during the editing of Desert Places, I really started to think about where the story could go, wondered how Andy might have changed after seven years in hiding, and I got excited about doing it. And I’m very glad I did, because I would’ve missed those characters. Even my psychopaths are family in some strange, twisted way.

  HW: Of all the reviews and comments about your books, what was the strangest? The meanest? The nicest? The most perceptive?

  BC: The strangest: This was a comment about me and the reviewer wrote something to the effect that I was either a super-talented writer with an immense imagination or one sick puppy. I think that’s open to debate. The meanest: From those [expletive deleted] at Kirkus. Now, keep in mind, this is my first taste of reviews and the reviewer absolutely savaged my book. It was so mean it was funny... although I didn’t see the humor for some time. The review ended, “Sadly, a sequel is in the works.” The nicest: That’s hard to choose from. I particularly loved the review for Locked Doors that appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal. The reviewer wrote, and this is my favorite quote thus far, “If you don’t think you’ll enjoy seeing how Crouch makes the torture and disembowelment of innocent women, children and even lax store employees into a thing of poetic beauty, maybe you should go watch Sponge Bob.” The most perceptive: The reviews that recognize that I’m trying to make a serious exploration of the human psyche, the nature of evil, and man’s depravity are the ones that please me the most.

  HW: Do you strive for realism in you
r writing, or do you try more to entertain?

  BC: First and foremost, I want to entertain. I want the reader to close the book thinking, “that was a helluva story.” Beyond that, I do strive for realism. I want the reader to identify with my characters’ emotions, whether it’s fear, sadness, or happiness. The places I write about, from the Yukon to the Outer Banks to the Colorado mountains are rendered accurately, and that’s very important to me, because I want the reader to have the benefit of visiting these beautiful places in my books.

  HW: The villain in Locked Doors seems almost a force of nature, cunning, instinctively brilliant when it comes to creating mayhem. Do you worry that readers might write him off as unrealistic?

  BC: I decided to approach Luther Kite a little differently than my bad guy, Orson Thomas, in Desert Places. In the first book, I tried to humanize Orson, to gin up sympathy by explaining what happened in his childhood to turn him into this monster. With Luther et al., I made a conscious decision not to delve into any of that, and for this reason I think he comes off as almost mythic, larger than life, maybe with even a tinge of the supernatural. I don’t worry that readers will find him unrealistic, because I didn’t try to make him like your typical realistic humdrum villain. What I want is for readers to fear him.

  HW: What’s the most important thing a book has to do to keep YOUR attention?

  BC: It’s actually very simple... a great story told through great writing. I don’t care if it’s western, horror, thriller, historical, romance, or literary. I just want to know that I’m in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing.

  HW: Who are your literary heroes?

  BC: I grew up on southern writers -- Walker Percy, Pat Conroy -- the fantasy of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In college I discovered Thomas Harris, Dennis Lehane, James Lee Burke, Caleb Carr, and my favorite writer, Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy just blows me away. His prose is so rich. He is unlike anyone else out there today. His 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, in my opinion, is the greatest horror novel ever written.