Run - Blake Crouch [105]
“You have to go get Mom. It’s okay now. The bad people won’t hurt you.”
Jack looked at his daughter.
“Go,” she said.
“Really?”
“If there’s even a chance, right?”
“Listen to me,” Jack said. “Do not move from this spot. It might be tomorrow morning before I come back, because I don’t think I’ll be able to find you in the dark.”
“What if you don’t come back?” she said.
“If I’m not back by midmorning, you keep going north until you cross the border and find help. Cole, look at me.”
He held the boy’s hands. “If you’re wrong about this, you might never see me again. Do you understand that?”
The boy nodded. “But I’m not wrong.”
Jack ran across the prairie, tearing through the dark, his crumbling shoes flapping with every footfall, already gasping, no idea if he was headed in the right direction, and nothing to see but gaping blackness.
After five minutes, he stopped and bent over, his heart banging in his chest.
When he looked up again, he saw a cluster of red lights far across the plain. A further set of headlights. Over the rocketing of his pulse, he thought he heard the engines.
He was still gasping, realized he wasn’t going to get his wind back, so he started running again, working up to as much of a sprint as he could manage. He was terrified the taillights would vanish, but they stayed put, didn’t even seem to be moving away from him now.
Sweat ran into his eyes, and when he wiped the sting away, the lights had disappeared.
He stopped.
Didn’t hear the engines anymore.
Just an ocean of soundless dark.
Seven flashes exploded through the black. For a fraction of a second, he saw Dee’s Jeep and the three trucks surrounding it. Much closer than he thought, just a few hundred yards out. He was running again as the seven gunshots reached him and ripped his guts out, the last four hundred yards blazing past in a rush of terror, pain, and self-doubt, thinking he should have stayed with his children. He was going to see his wife dead and get himself killed, never see any of them again. And so close to safety, too.
He stopped twenty yards out from the vehicles, so far beyond the boundary of his endurance.
It sounded like sirens ringing inside his head, the darkness spinning.
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