Run - Blake Crouch [100]
She watched him. Even with the heavy beard coming in, he looked so thin, and her heart was swelling. She’d lost him, felt the awful vacuum of their separation, and now she had him back, sitting three feet away. For once, she knew what she had, the kind of man he was, even in the face of all this. Knew she didn’t need another thing for the rest of her life except to be with him. There was such a peace that accompanied that knowledge.
Jack must have felt her stare, because he looked down at her, grinning, but then his brow furrowed.
He touched her cheek.
She wiped the tears away and shook her head and climbed up into her seat.
Grassland. Far as she could see. Not a building in sight. Not a road. They were driving across the prairie.
Jack brought the Jeep to a stop in the grass and killed the engine.
The silence was astounding. It threw her into a state of semi-shock, her ears still ringing after last night.
She glanced into the backseat. Naomi and Cole lay curled up in their respective floorboards. She held her hands against their backs, confirmed the rise and the fall.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Her voice sounded muffled inside her head, like it was sourcing from a remote outpost.
Jack’s came back equally distant, “North of Havre. I figure the border’s about ten miles that way.” He pointed through the gaping windshield toward a horizon of grass, everything glazed with frost.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked.
“Engine’s been in the red awhile now. Plus, I have to pee.”
Jack stood pissing the ice off the grass and trying to come to grips with the massive silence. White smoke trickled out of the Jeep’s grille, and he could hear something hissing under the hood. Wondered if he’d toasted the water pump pushing the Jeep as hard as he had. He’d been taking it easy since leaving the paved roads north of Havre and driving onto the prairie, hoping it’d be the slower but safer route.
He walked back to the Jeep, climbed behind the wheel. Dee had set a few bottles of water and a pack of crackers on the center console, and they shared a meager breakfast together and watched the sun lift out of the plains.
It took an hour for the engine to cool, and then Jack cranked the Jeep and they went on. His attention stuck on the temperature gauge, the needle climbing much faster than he would’ve liked, passing the halfway point after only a mile, and edging into the red at two.
Finally shut it down at 2.75 miles. Jack wondered if he’d killed the engine, because smoke was pouring out of the grill now.
Jack got out, raised the hood.
Wafts of smoke and steam billowed out, and it smelled bad, too, like things had cooked that shouldn’t have. He had no idea what he was looking at, didn’t even really know what the fuck a water pump was, or what function it served beyond stopping this from happening.
He left the hood raised and walked around to Dee’s door.
“That doesn’t look good,” she said.
“It’s not. We’re going to have to wait awhile until it cools again.”
Two hours later, the engine had stopped smoking, and when Jack engaged the ignition, the temperature gauge dropped almost back to baseline.
The kids were awake and thrilled to discover the bag of junk food Jack had scored at the ski area. Cole’s smiling mouth was smeared with chocolate.
Jack shifted into drive and studied their progress in tenth-mile increments on the odometer, the landscape scrolling by so slowly.
At one mile, the needle had almost touched the red again, and smoke was coming out of the engine, the wind driving it up the hood and into the car.
Jack stopped, turned off the engine.
So this became the architecture of their day.
Drive one mile.
Overheat.
Wait two hours.
Drive another mile.
Overheat.
Rinse.
Repeat.
In the late afternoon, they were stopped again at the edge of a gentle depression. The hood raised. No wind. White smoke coiling up into the sky. Dee sat in the front